by Stendhal
“Back on your horse, I tell you!” screamed the canteen-woman, furious now. And she began to dismount.
Fabrizio drew his saber. “Hold on tight!” he shouted, and smacked the horse’s rump two or three times with the flat of his saber; the horse galloped off after the fleeing men.
Our hero stared down the high road; just now three or four thousand individuals had been crowded here, squeezed together like peasants at the end of a procession. After the word Cossacks he could see no one at all; the fugitives had abandoned shakos, muskets, sabers, and so on. Fabrizio, astounded, climbed up into a field to the right, about twenty or thirty feet above the road. He gazed up and down the high road and over the plain, but saw no trace of Cossacks. “Funny people, these French!” he mused. “Since I’m going to the right anyway, I might as well start walking now; it’s possible all these men had some reason for running away that I don’t know.” He picked up a musket, checked to see that it was loaded, stirred the powder in the priming, cleaned the flint, then selected a well-filled cartridge pouch, and once again stared up and down the high road; he was absolutely alone in the middle of this vast plain so recently crowded with people. In the distance he caught sight of the fugitives, just vanishing behind some trees and still running. “Now, that’s really strange!” he thought, and recalling the corporal’s tactic of the night before, he proceeded to sit down in the middle of a wheatfield. He was not leaving, since he wanted to see his good friends the canteen-woman and Corporal Aubry again.
In this field, he discovered that he had only eighteen napoleons left, instead of thirty as he had thought, but there still remained the little diamonds he had sewn into the lining of the hussar’s boots, that morning in the jailer’s wife’s bedroom, in B——. He concealed his napoleons as best he could, still pondering this sudden disappearance. “Is this a bad omen?” he wondered. His chief disappointment was not to have put one question to Corporal Aubry: “Did I really take part in a battle?” It seemed to him that he had, and he would have been overcome with delight to be sure of the matter. “All the same,” he decided, “I took part in it under a prisoner’s name, I had a prisoner’s travel-permit in my pocket, and worse still, I was wearing his uniform! There’s a sign for the future: what would Abbé Blanès have said? And that wretched Boulot dead in prison! It’s all a grim omen—Fate will be leading me to jail!” Fabrizio would have given the world to know if Hussar Boulot had really been guilty; brooding over his memories, he seemed to recall that the jailer’s wife in B—— had told him that the hussar was arrested for stealing not only silver plate but also a farmer’s cow, and for beating the farmer half to death into the bargain: Fabrizio had no doubt that he would someday be imprisoned for a crime with some connection to Hussar Boulot’s. He thought of his friend Father Blanès; if only he could consult him now! Then he remembered that he had not written to his aunt since leaving Paris. “Poor Gina!” he thought, and tears came to his eyes, when suddenly he heard a faint noise quite close by; it was a soldier allowing his three horses to graze on the wheat—he had taken the bits out of their mouths and was holding them by the snaffles. Fabrizio rose out of the standing grain like a partridge, startling the soldier. Our hero noticed this and yielded to the pleasure of playing the hussar for a moment. “One of those horses is mine, you bastard!” he shouted. “But I don’t mind giving you five francs for the trouble you’ve taken to bring it here.”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?” the soldier asked.
Fabrizio took aim at a range of six paces. “Let go of the horse or I’ll blow your head off!”
The soldier’s musket was slung over one shoulder, which he lowered in order to catch hold of his weapon.
“One more move and you’re a dead man!” cried Fabrizio, rushing at him.
“All right, give me the five francs and take one of the horses,” the soldier said, bewildered after a longing glance at the high road, where there was no one in sight. Fabrizio, keeping his musket raised in his left hand, tossed him three five-franc coins with his right. “Dismount or you’re a dead man.… Saddle the black, and take the other two away.… I’ll fire, the first move you make.” The soldier sullenly obeyed. Fabrizio went over to the black horse and slid the reins onto his left arm without losing sight of the soldier, who was slowly walking away; when Fabrizio saw that he was some fifty paces off he quickly vaulted onto the horse. No sooner had he mounted, groping for the right stirrup with his right foot, than he heard a bullet whistling past his ear: the soldier was firing his musket. In a rage Fabrizio rushed toward him, but the soldier turned and ran, and soon Fabrizio saw him galloping off on one of his two remaining horses. “Good, now he’s out of range,” he decided. The horse he had just bought was a fine one but seemed nearly starved to death. Fabrizio returned to the high road, where there was still no one in sight, crossed it, and trotted his horse to a little fold in the terrain to the left, where he hoped to meet up with the canteen-woman; but when he reached the top of the little hill, all he could see, for more than a league, were a few scattered troops. “I’m fated never to see her again,” he said to himself with a sigh, “what a good creature!” He soon reached a farm he had noticed in the distance, to the right of the high road. Without dismounting, and after paying in advance, he had the farmer give some oats to his poor horse, so famished that it was gnawing the manger. An hour afterward, Fabrizio was trotting down the high road, still hoping to meet the canteen-woman or at least Corporal Aubry. Riding on and peering in all directions, he reached a marshy stream crossed by a narrow wooden bridge. At the bridge, to the right of the high road, was a solitary house with a sign saying THE WHITE HORSE. “At least I’ll get something to eat there,” Fabrizio decided. A mounted cavalry officer with his arm in a sling stood at the bridgehead, looking extremely downcast; ten paces away, three more cavalrymen without horses were filling their pipes.
“Now those men,” Fabrizio mused, “look to me as if they wanted to buy this horse for even less than it cost me.” The wounded officer and the three men on foot watched him approach and seemed to be waiting for him. “I’d better not cross the stream by this bridge, I’ll follow along to the right, that will be the road the canteen-woman told me to take in order to get away from here.… Yes,” our hero decided, “but if I seem to be running away, I’ll be ashamed of myself tomorrow; besides, my horse has good legs, and the officer’s is probably worn out; if he tries to make me dismount, I’ll gallop off.” In the course of this reasoning Fabrizio reined in his horse, advancing as slowly as possible.
“Come on then, hussar!” the mounted officer shouted in a commanding tone of voice.
Fabrizio advanced a few steps and stopped. “You’re after my horse?” he cried.
“No, of course not. Forward!”
Fabrizio stared at the officer: he had a white moustache and an honorable expression; the sling supporting his left arm was covered with blood, and his right hand, too, was wrapped in a bloody cloth. “It’s the other two who will leap for my horse’s bridle,” Fabrizio speculated, but looking closely he saw that these men were wounded as well.
“In the name of honor,” said the officer, who was wearing a colonel’s epaulettes, “stay on guard here and tell every dragoon, cavalryman, and hussar who comes in sight that Colonel Le Baron is in that inn over there, and that I order them to join me there.”
The old colonel seemed overcome with pain; by his first words he had made a conquest of our hero, who answered quite sensibly: “I’m too young, sir, for anyone to pay much attention to me; I should have an order written in your own hand.”
“Right,” the colonel said, observing Fabrizio closely; “write the order, La Rose, you’ve still got a right hand.”
Without a word, La Rose took a tiny vellum notebook out of his pocket, scribbled a few lines, and, tearing off a sheet, handed it to Fabrizio; the colonel repeated his order, adding that after two hours on guard Fabrizio would be relieved, as was proper, by one of the three wounded cavalrymen
who were with him. He and his men then went into the inn. Fabrizio watched them walk away and sat motionless at his end of the wooden bridge, struck by the grim and silent suffering of the three figures. “Like spirits under a spell,” he mused. Finally he unfolded the sheet of paper and read the order, which ran as follows:
Colonel Le Baron of the Sixth Dragoons, commanding the Second Brigade of the First Division of Cavalry of the Fourteenth Corps, orders all dragoons and cavalrymen to join him at the White Horse Inn beside the La Sainte Bridge, at his headquarters.
June 19, 1815
For Colonel Le Baron, wounded in the right arm, and on his orders, Sergeant La Rose.
Fabrizio had been on guard duty no more than a quarter of an hour when he saw approaching six mounted men and three on foot; he showed them the colonel’s order.
“We’ll be back,” said four of the riders, and they cantered across the bridge. Fabrizio then remonstrated with the other two. During the lively discussion which ensued, the three men on foot crossed the bridge. One of the remaining men on horseback ended by asking to see the order and took it with him, saying: “I’ll bring this to my friends, they’ll be sure to come back; you wait for them here.” And he galloped off, his comrades following. All this happened in the wink of an eye.
Fabrizio, furious, called to one of the wounded soldiers, who appeared at a window of the White Horse Inn. This soldier, who was wearing a sergeant’s stripes, came out of the inn and shouted to Fabrizio as he approached: “Draw your sword, soldier! You’re on duty here.”
Fabrizio obeyed, then told him: “They’ve taken the order.”
“They’re in a nasty mood after yesterday’s business,” the sergeant replied gloomily. “I’ll give you one of my pistols; if anyone tries to get past you again, fire into the air. I’ll come, or the colonel himself …”
Fabrizio had noticed the sergeant’s gesture of surprise when he had informed him of the stolen order; he realized that this was a personal insult, and promised himself not to let such a trick be played on him again.
Armed with the sergeant’s horse-pistol, Fabrizio had proudly returned to guard duty when he saw seven mounted hussars approaching: he took up a position barring access to the bridge and communicated the colonel’s order, which seemed to annoy them a good deal, and the boldest sought to pass. Fabrizio, following the sage precept of his friend the canteen-woman, who only that morning had told him to stab and not to slash, lowered the point of his straight saber and prepared to thrust at the man who sought to force his way past him.
“So the young fool wants to kill us!” exclaimed one of the hussars. “As if we hadn’t been killed enough yesterday!” At once all of them drew their sabers and fell on Fabrizio, who thought he was a dead man; but he remembered the sergeant’s surprise, and did not want to be shamed again. As he retreated down the bridge, he tried to give a few thrusts with his saber. He presented such an absurd spectacle wielding this huge straight cavalry saber which was much too heavy for him, that the hussars soon realized whom they were dealing with, and now attempted no longer to wound him but to cut his uniform off his body. Thus Fabrizio received three or four tiny saber wounds on his arms. For his part, still faithful to the canteen-woman’s precept, he thrust and stabbed with all his might. Unfortunately, one of these thrusts wounded a hussar on the hand; furious at being touched by such a green soldier, he riposted by a deep thrust that wounded Fabrizio high on the thigh. What made the blow more telling was that our hero’s horse, far from fleeing the engagement, seemed to delight in flinging itself upon the assailants. These, seeing Fabrizio’s blood flow down his right leg, thought they had carried the game a little too far and, pushing him toward the left parapet of the bridge, went past at a gallop. As soon as he could, Fabrizio fired his pistol into the air to warn the colonel.
Four mounted hussars and two on foot, of the same regiment as the others, were approaching the bridge and were still two hundred paces off when the pistol was fired: they watched attentively what was happening on the bridge, and supposing that Fabrizio had fired on their comrades, the four mounted men galloped toward him, sabers high; it was a veritable charge.
Colonel Le Baron, warned by the pistol shot, opened the inn door and rushed out onto the bridge just as the galloping hussars reached it, and himself repeated the order to stop. “There is no longer any colonel here,” exclaimed one of the hussars as he spurred his horse.
The colonel in exasperation interrupted the reprimand he was making, and with his wounded right hand grasped the bridle on the off-side of the horse. “Halt, you bad soldier!” he said to the hussar. “I know you, you’re in Captain Henriet’s company.”
“And if I am, let the captain himself give me orders! Captain Henriet was killed yesterday,” he added with a sneer, “so go fuck yourself!”
And with these words, he tried to force a passage and pushed the old colonel, who fell into a sitting position on the bridge pavement. Fabrizio, who was two steps farther along on the bridge, but facing the inn, spurred his horse, and while the breastplate on the hussar’s horse knocked over the colonel, who had not released the off-side rein, Fabrizio, outraged, made a deep thrust at his assailant. Fortunately, the hussar’s horse, feeling itself pulled downward by the bridle the colonel was still holding, made a sidelong movement, so that the long blade of Fabrizio’s heavy-cavalry saber slid along the hussar’s vest and its whole length passed in front of his face. Enraged, the hussar turned around and delivered a blow with all his strength, which cut through Fabrizio’s sleeve and entered deep into his arm: our hero fell.
One of the dismounted hussars, seeing the two defenders of the bridge on the ground, seized the opportunity, leaped onto Fabrizio’s horse, and tried to make away with it by spurring it to gallop across the bridge.
The sergeant, running out of the inn, had seen his colonel fall and supposed him to be seriously wounded. He ran after Fabrizio’s horse and thrust the point of his saber into the thief’s back: the man fell. The hussars, seeing only the sergeant standing on the bridge, galloped past and rode quickly away. The one who was on foot ran off into the fields.
The sergeant approached the wounded men. Fabrizio had already gotten to his feet; he was suffering little, but losing a great deal of blood. The colonel recovered more slowly; he was quite dazed by his fall, but had received no wound.
“I’m not hurt,” he said to the sergeant, “except from the old wound in my hand.”
The hussar stabbed by the sergeant was dying.
“To hell with him!” the colonel exclaimed. “But,” he said to the sergeant and the two other cavalrymen who had run up, “look after this young fellow whom I have exposed to such unfair risks. I’ll stay on the bridge myself and try to stop these madmen. Take the young fellow to the inn and dress his arm; use one of my shirts.”
CHAPTER FIVE
This entire adventure had not lasted a minute; Fabrizio’s wounds were nothing; his arm was bandaged with strips cut from the colonel’s shirt. They wanted to arrange a bed for him upstairs in the inn.
“But while I’m being cared for upstairs,” Fabrizio said to the sergeant, “my horse down in the stable will be lost without me and run off with some other master.”
“Not bad for a conscript!” said the sergeant. And they installed Fabrizio on clean straw in the very manger to which his horse was tethered.
Then, as Fabrizio was feeling very weak, the sergeant brought him a bowl of mulled wine and stayed to chat awhile. A few compliments included in this conversation raised our hero to the seventh heaven.
Fabrizio did not awake till dawn the next day; the horses were neighing long and loud and making a fearful racket; the stable was filled with smoke. At first Fabrizio could make nothing of all this noise, and did not even realize where he was; finally, half-suffocated by the smoke, it occurred to him that the place was on fire; in the twinkling of an eye he was out of the stable and on his horse. He looked up; smoke was pouring out of the two windows above the stable
, and the roof was covered with a layer of black smoke spiraling into the sky. A hundred fugitives had arrived during the night at the White Horse Inn; every man was shouting and swearing. The five or six whom Fabrizio could see at close range appeared to be completely drunk; one of them tried to stop him, shouting: “Where are you going with my horse?”
When Fabrizio was a quarter of a league away, he turned around to look; no one was following him, the inn was in flames. Fabrizio glimpsed the bridge and remembered his wound—his arm felt very hot in its tight bandages. “And the old colonel, what’s happened to him? He gave up his shirt to bandage my arm.” Our hero, that morning, was the coolest man in the world; the amount of blood he had lost had freed him from the whole romantic side of his character.
“To the right!” he said to himself. “And be quick about it.” He began, quite calmly, to follow the course of a stream which, after passing under the bridge, flowed along the right side of the road. He recalled the canteen-woman’s advice. “What a friend!” he mused. “What a generous character!”
After riding an hour, he felt quite weak. “And now am I going to faint?” he wondered. “If I faint, someone will steal my horse and maybe my clothes, and with my clothes all the money I have.” He was no longer strong enough to manage his horse, and was trying to keep his balance, when a farmer digging in a field beside the road noticed his weakness and approached to offer him some bread and a glass of beer.
“When I saw you looking so pale, I thought you were one of the men wounded in the great battle!” the farmer told him. Never had help come more opportunely: just as Fabrizio took his first bite of black bread, his eyes were beginning to hurt when he looked straight ahead. When he felt a little stronger, he thanked the man.
“And where am I?” he asked. The farmer told him that three-quarters of a league farther he would find the town of Zonders, where he would be properly cared for. Fabrizio reached this town in the shakiest condition, his chief concern, at every step, being not to fall off his horse. He saw a doorway standing wide open; he went inside: this was the Currycomb Inn, and immediately the innkeeper’s good wife appeared, an enormously fat woman who called for help in a voice resonant with pity. Two girls assisted Fabrizio off his horse; no sooner had his feet touched ground than he fainted dead away. A surgeon was fetched, and Fabrizio was bled. That day and those that followed, Fabrizio was uncertain what was being done to him; he slept almost continually.
