by Stendhal
“Did you kill your man?”
“Yes, but I lost my musket.”
“We’re not short of muskets. You’re a good bugger, green as you look. You did well—these men here missed the two who were after you and coming straight for them. I didn’t see them myself. Now we’ve got to get out of here; the regiment must be just over there, but first there’s a field to cross where we can still be surrounded.”
With these words the corporal marched ahead of his ten men. Two hundred yards on, entering the little field he had mentioned, they came upon a wounded general being carried by his aide-de-camp and an orderly.
“Give me four men,” he said to the corporal in a faint voice, “I need to be taken to the ambulance—my leg’s been shattered.”
“Go fuck yourself,” the corporal answered, “you and the other generals. You’ve all betrayed the Emperor today.”
“What!” cried the general in a rage. “Are you disobeying orders? I am Count B——, the general in command of your division,” and so on. He pulled some more rank, and his aide flung himself on the soldiers. The corporal stuck him in the arm with his bayonet, then ran off with his men on the double.
“Let them all get shot like that damn fool,” the corporal kept swearing, “legs shattered and arms too! Pack of cowards! All of them sold to the Bourbons and traitors to the Emperor!”
Fabrizio listened in horror to this terrible accusation.
By ten o’clock the little troop reached the regiment outside a village consisting of several extremely narrow alleys, but Fabrizio noticed that Corporal Aubry avoided speaking to any of the officers.
“We can’t get through!” the corporal exclaimed.
All these alleys were crowded with infantry, cavalry, and worst of all with artillery caissons and wagons. The corporal headed for the intersection of three of these narrow lanes; after about twenty paces he had to stop; everyone was in a rage and swearing.
“Another traitor in command!” the corporal exclaimed. “If the enemy had the wit to surround the village, we’d all be trapped like dogs. Follow me, you men!”
Fabrizio stared: there were no more than six soldiers with the corporal. Through a wide-open gate they entered a huge barnyard; from here they made their way into a stable whose rear door opened into a garden. Here they were lost for a moment, wandering this way and that, but finally, passing through a hedge, they found themselves in a huge field of buckwheat. In less than half an hour, guided by the shouts and confused noise of the regiment, they were back on the high road outside the village. The ditches beside this road were filled with abandoned muskets. Fabrizio chose one, but the road, though quite broad, was so crowded with fleeing men and carts that in another half hour the corporal and Fabrizio had advanced no more than five hundred yards; someone said that the road would take them to Charleroi.
As eleven o’clock was striking in the village steeple, the corporal shouted, “Let’s cut across the fields again.” The little troop now consisted of only three soldiers, the corporal, and Fabrizio. When they were less than a league from the high road, one of the soldiers said, “I can’t go on.”
“Me neither,” said another.
“Nice news! We’re all in this together,” the corporal snapped; “follow my orders and you’ll get through.” He had noticed five or six trees along a little ditch in the center of a huge wheat field. “Get to those trees!” he told his men. “Lie down here,” he ordered once they had reached the trees, “and not a sound. But before you sleep, who’s got bread?”
“I do,” said one of the soldiers.
“Give it here,” the corporal commanded. He cut the bread into five hunks and took the smallest for himself. “Fifteen minutes before daybreak,” he said between mouthfuls, “you’ll have the enemy cavalry on your back. The point is not to get yourself cut down. If there were just one man here, he’d be done for, with the cavalry after him in these open fields, but five of us can get away: keep close to me, don’t shoot except at close range, and tomorrow night I promise to get you to Charleroi.”
The corporal wakened them an hour before dawn and ordered them to reload their muskets. The racket on the high road continued, as it had lasted all night: it sounded like a rushing river in the distance.
“They’re running away like a flock of sheep,” Fabrizio observed to the corporal, innocently enough.
“Shut up, imbecile!” snapped the corporal, furious.
And the three soldiers who constituted his entire army along with Fabrizio stared angrily at the latter, as if he had uttered blasphemy. He had insulted the nation.
“That’s a good one!” mused our hero. “I already saw it back in Milan, with the Viceroy: they never run away, oh no! With these Frenchmen you can’t tell the truth if it offends their vanity. But I don’t give a damn about their dirty looks, and I’d better let them know it.” They kept on their way, five hundred yards from that river of fugitives on the high road. About a league farther, the corporal and his troop crossed a road that ran toward the high road, where a lot of soldiers were lying on the ground. Fabrizio bought a pretty good horse for forty francs, and among all the sabers lying about he carefully selected a huge straight one. “Since they say you have to stab with it,” he decided, “this one’s best.” Thus armed, he galloped on and soon rejoined the corporal, who had marched ahead. He stood up in his stirrups, grasped the scabbard of his straight saber in his left hand, and cried to the four Frenchmen: “Those men running down the road look like a flock of sheep.… They’re running like scared sheep …!”
Though Fabrizio emphasized the word sheep, his comrades no longer remembered having been offended by this word an hour before. Here appeared one of the contrasts between the Italian and French characters; the Frenchman is no doubt the better off of the two: he slides over the surface of events and bears no grudges.
We shall not conceal the fact that Fabrizio was quite pleased with himself after repeating the word sheep. The men marched on, talking of one thing and another. Two leagues farther, the corporal, still amazed at not seeing any sign of enemy cavalry, said to Fabrizio, “You be our cavalry: ride over to the farm up that little hill, ask the farmer if he’ll sell us something to eat—explain that there are only five of us. If he hesitates, give him five francs of your own money in advance, but rest easy, we’ll get it all back after we eat.”
Fabrizio stared at the corporal, seeing an imperturbable gravity in his face, indeed an expression of moral superiority; he obeyed. Everything happened as his commander had foreseen, except that Fabrizio insisted that the five francs he had given the farmer not be recovered by force.
“It’s my money,” he told his comrades, “and I’m not paying for you, I’m paying for the oats he’s given my horse.”
Fabrizio pronounced French so poorly that his comrades imagined they detected a tone of superiority in his words; they were deeply offended, and from that moment a duel began to take shape in their minds for the end of the day. They considered him quite different from themselves, which distressed them all; Fabrizio, on the contrary, was beginning to feel warm friendship toward every man among them.
They had marched without speaking for two hours when the corporal, peering over at the high road, exclaimed in a transport of joy, “There’s the regiment!”
They soon reached the road, but alas! there were less than two hundred men mustered under the eagle. Fabrizio immediately caught sight of the canteen-woman, on foot now, red-eyed and occasionally sobbing. He saw no sign of Cocotte or the little cart.
“Looted! Robbed! Ruined!” the canteen-woman cried, responding to our hero’s anxious glance. Without a word, Fabrizio dismounted, took his horse by the bridle, and told the canteen-woman to mount. She did not wait for a second invitation. “Shorten the stirrups for me, my boy.” Once in the saddle, she began telling Fabrizio all the night’s disasters. After an endless narrative eagerly attended by our hero, who, to tell the truth, didn’t understand a word but felt a tender comradeship f
or the canteen-woman, she ended her story with these words: “And just think, it was the French who beat me and robbed me and ruined me …!”
“You mean it wasn’t the enemy?” Fabrizio asked with the naïve expression that made his pale, serious, handsome face so charming.
“You really are stupid, my poor boy!” The canteen-woman smiled through her tears. “But you’re a sweet lad, all the same.”
“And this same lad took care of his Prussian very nicely,” said Corporal Aubry, who in the midst of the general confusion happened to be on the other side of the horse the canteen-woman was riding. “But he’s stuck up …” Fabrizio gave a start. “By the way, what’s your name?” the corporal continued. “If there’s ever a report filed, I want to cite you in it.”
“My name is Vasi,” Fabrizio answered, making a peculiar face, “I mean, Boulot,” he quickly corrected himself.
Boulot had been the name of the owner of the travel-permit the jailer’s wife in B—— had given him; the night before, he had studied it carefully while on the march, for he was beginning to reflect a little now, and was no longer so surprised by things. Besides Hussar Boulot’s travel-permit, he still possessed the precious Italian passport which entitled him to claim the noble name of Vasi, barometer-dealer. When the corporal had reproached him for his pride, it was on the tip of his tongue to answer: “Stuck up—me! Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, and willing to be known as Vasi, barometer-dealer!”
While he was thinking these thoughts and telling himself: “I must remember my name’s Boulot, or else it’s back to prison for me,” the corporal and the canteen-woman had been exchanging a few words about him.
“Don’t think I’m being nosy, sir,” the canteen-woman suddenly remarked, “it’s for your own good I’m asking you, but who are you, really?”
Fabrizio did not immediately reply; he realized he would never find better friends of whom to ask the advice he so urgently needed: “We’ll soon be in a town under wartime regulations, the governor will want to know who I am, and I’ll be back in prison if my answers reveal I know no one in the Fourth Regiment of Hussars whose uniform I’m wearing!” As an Austrian subject, Fabrizio knew all about the great importance attached to a passport. The members of his family, though noble and devout, though belonging to the winning side, had been harassed twenty times over about their passports; hence he was not in the least offended by the canteen-woman’s question. But since he made no reply, casting about for the simplest French words in which to express himself, the canteen-woman, her curiosity aroused, added: “Corporal Aubry and I are going to give you some good advice on how you should behave.”
“I’m sure you are,” Fabrizio replied. “My name is Vasi and I’m from Genoa; my sister’s a famous beauty who married a captain. Since I’m only seventeen, she sent for me to show me something of France and to teach me a thing or two; since I couldn’t find her in Paris and knowing she was following this army, I came here looking for her everywhere but not finding her.… The soldiers were suspicious of my accent and put me under arrest. I had some money then and gave it to the gendarme, who let me have a travel-permit and a uniform and told me to get lost and never mention his name.”
“What was his name?” asked the canteen-woman.
“I’ve given my word,” Fabrizio said.
“He’s right,” the corporal added, “the gendarme’s a crook, but our friend here can’t tell us his name. But what’s the name of this captain, your sister’s husband? If we knew who he was we could look for him.”
“Teulier, Captain Teulier in the Fourth Regiment of Hussars,” our hero answered.
“And it was because of you foreign accent,” the corporal continued with considerable cunning, “that the soldiers took you for a spy?”
“That’s the horrible word!” Fabrizio exclaimed, his eyes shining. “And that’s what they called me, despite my love of the Emperor and the French! That’s the insult which offended me most.”
“It’s no insult, you’re wrong about that: the soldiers’ mistake was quite natural,” Corporal Aubry added gravely. He then explained, pedantically enough, that in the army one must belong to a corps and wear a uniform, otherwise it is quite natural to be taken for a spy. The enemy sends out any number: in this war, everyone betrays everyone else. The scales fell from Fabrizio’s eyes; for the first time he understood how wrong he had been about everything that had happened to him for the last two months.
“But let the boy tell the rest of his story,” the canteen-woman insisted, her curiosity sharper than ever. Fabrizio obeyed. When he had finished: “As it turns out,” she said, addressing the corporal with a serious expression, “this boy is no soldier; we’re going to have a nasty war on our hands, now that we’re betrayed and defeated. Why should he get his bones broken, gratis pro deo?”
“Especially,” the corporal added, “since he doesn’t know how to load his musket, either on command or on his own. I’m the one who put in the bullet that brought down his Prussian.”
“Besides, he shows his money to everyone,” the canteen-woman continued; “he’ll be robbed of everything he has as soon as he leaves us.”
“The first cavalry officer he meets,” said the corporal, “will commandeer it for his brandy, and maybe the boy will even be recruited by the enemy, since everyone’s a traitor now. The first man he meets will order him to follow, and he’ll follow—better for him if he joins our regiment.”
“Not that, if you please, Corporal!” Fabrizio exclaimed. “It’s a lot more comfortable on horseback, and besides I don’t know how to load a musket! You’ve seen that I can manage a horse.”
Fabrizio was quite proud of this little speech. We shall not recount the long argument concerning his future destiny which now ensued between the corporal and the canteen-woman. Fabrizio noticed that in their discussion these two repeated three or four times all the circumstances of his story: the soldiers’ suspicions, the gendarme selling him a travel-permit and a uniform, how he had accidentally become a member, the day before, of the Field-Marshal’s escort, the Emperor galloping past, the horse stolen from under him, and so on.
Her female curiosity aroused, the canteen-woman kept returning to how he had been dispossessed of the good horse she had told him to buy. “You felt someone pulling your feet, you slid over your horse’s tail, and there you were on the ground!”
“Why keep repeating,” Fabrizio mused, “what all three of us know perfectly well?” He hadn’t yet realized that this was how the people of France arrive at their ideas.
“How much money do you have?” the canteen-woman suddenly asked him.
Fabrizio did not hesitate to answer; he was convinced of this woman’s noble soul: such is the good side of France.
“All I have left is thirty gold napoleons and eight or ten five-franc pieces.”
“In that case, you’ve got a clear field!” she exclaimed. “Get yourself away from this defeated army; find some way out—take the first good road to your right, get your horse moving and keep as far as you can from the army. The first chance you get, buy yourself some civilian clothes. Once you’re eight or ten leagues away and you don’t see any more soldiers, take the mail-coach and rest up for a couple of weeks in some nice town where you can eat beefsteaks. Never tell a soul you were in the army; the gendarmes will arrest you as a deserter; and nice as you are, my boy, you’re not smart enough yet to answer their questions. As soon as you’ve got a gentleman’s clothes on your back, tear up your travel-permit and use your real name—say you’re … Vasi. Where should he say he’s from?” she asked the corporal.
“From Cambrai, on the Scheldt: that’s a nice little town, you know? There’s a cathedral there, and Fénelon, and everything.”
“That’s right,” the canteen-woman continued, “never say you were in battle, and don’t breathe a word about B——, nor about the gendarme who sold you the uniform. When you want to go back to Paris, get yourself to Versailles first, then enter Paris fro
m that side, walk right in as if you were out for a stroll. Sew your napoleons into your trousers. And above all, when you have to pay for something, don’t let anyone see more than what you need to pay. The saddest thing of all is that people are going to cheat you and gouge you out of all you have, and what will you do once you have no money, when you don’t even know how to take care of yourself?” and so on.
The good woman went on for a long while; the corporal nodded agreement, unable to get a word in edgewise. Suddenly the crowd of men filling the high road broke into a run; then, in the twinkling of an eye, everyone jumped over the little ditch along the left side of the road and began running as fast as their legs would take them. “Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!” was shouted on all sides.
“Back on your horse!” exclaimed the canteen-woman.
“God forbid!” said Fabrizio. “Be on your way, the horse is yours. If you need money for another cart, half of all I have is yours.”
