Le coeur humain est un abime qui trompe tous les calculs.
It is to be presumed that Colonel de Casimir met friends at the reception given by Governor Rapp in the great rooms of the Rathhaus. For there were many Poles present, and not a few officers of other nationalities.
The army indeed that set forth to conquer Russia was not a French-speaking army. Less than half of the regiments were of that nationality, while Italians, Bavarians, Saxons, Wurtembergers, Westphalians, Prussians, Swiss, and Portuguese went gaily forward on the great venture. There were soldiers from the numerous petty states of the German Confederation which acknowledged Napoleon as their protector, for the good reason that they could not protect themselves against him. Finally, there were those Poles who had fought in Spain for Napoleon, hoping that in return he would some day set the ancient kingdom upon its feet among the nations. Already the whisperers pointed to Davoust as the future king of the new Poland.
Many present at the farewell reception of the Governor carried a sword, though they were the merest civilians, plotting, counter-plotting, and whispering a hundred rumours. Perhaps Rapp himself, speaking bluff French with a German accent, was as honest as any man in the room, though he lacked the polish of the Parisian and had not the subtlety of the Pole. Rapp was not a shining light in these brilliant circles. He was a Governor not for peace, but for war. His day was yet to come.
Such men as de Casimir shrugged their supple shoulders at his simple talk. They spoke of him half-contemptuously as of one who had had a thousand chances and had never taken them. He was not even rich, and he had handled great sums of money. He was only a General, and he had slept in the Emperor's tent—had had access to him in every humour. He might do the same again in the coming campaign. He was worth cultivating. De Casimir and his like were full of smiles which in no wise deceived the shrewd Alsatian.
Mathilde Sebastian was among the ladies to whom these brilliant warriors paid their uncouth compliments. Perhaps de Casimir was aware that her measuring eyes followed him wherever he went. He knew, at all events, that he could hold his own amid these adventurers, many of whom had risen from the ranks; while others, from remote northern States, had birth but no manners at all. He was easy and gay, carrying lightly that subtle air of distinction which is vouchsafed to many Poles.
“Here to-day, Mademoiselle, and gone to-morrow,” he said. “All these eager soldiers. And who can tell which of us may return?”
If he had expected Mathilde to flinch at this reminder of his calling, he was disappointed. Her eyes were hard and bright. She had had so few chances of moving amidst this splendour, of seeing close at hand the greatness which Napoleon shed around him as the sun its rays. She was carried away by the spirit of the age. Anything was better, she felt, than obscurity.
“And who can tell,” whispered de Casimir with a careless and confident laugh, “which of us shall come back rich and great?”
This brought the glance from her dark eyes for which his own lay waiting. She was certainly beautiful, and wore the difficult dress of that day with assurance and grace. She possessed something which the German ladies about her lacked; something which many suddenly lack when a Frenchwoman is near.
His manner, half respectful, half triumphant, betrayed an understanding to which he did not refer in words. She had bestowed some favour upon him—had acceded to some request. He hoped for more. He had overstepped some barrier. She, who should have measured the distance, had allowed him to come too close. The barriers of love are one-sided; there is no climbing back.
“A hundred envious eyes are watching me,” he said in an undertone as he passed on; “I dare not stay longer. I am on duty to-night.”
She bowed and watched him go. She was, it would seem, aware of that fallen barrier. She had done nothing, had permitted nothing from weakness. There was no weakness at all perhaps in Mathilde Sebastian. She had the quiet manner of a skilled card-player with folded cards laid face down upon the table, who knows what is in her hand and is waiting for the foe to lead.
De Casimir did not see her again. In such a throng it would have been difficult to find her had he so desired. But, as he had told her, he was on duty to-night. There were to be a hundred arrests before dawn. Many who were laughing and talking with the French officers to-night were already in the grasp of Napoleon's secret police, and would drive straight from the door of the Rathhaus to the town prison or to the old Watch-house in the Portchaisengasse. Others, moving through the great rooms with a high head, were already condemned out of their own bureaux and escritoires now being rifled by the Emperor's spies.
The Emperor himself had given the order, before quitting Dantzig to take command of the maddest and greatest enterprise conceived by the mind of man. There was nothing above the reach of his mind, it seemed, and nothing too low for him to bend down and touch. Every detail had been considered by himself. He was like a man who, having an open wound on his back, attends to it hurriedly before showing an undaunted face to the enemy.
His inexorable finger had come down on the name of Antoine Sebastian, figuring on all the secret reports—first in many.
“Who is this man?” he asked, and none could answer.
He had gone to the frontier without awaiting the solution to the question. Such was his method now. He had so much to do that he could but skim the surface of his task. For the human mind, though it be colossal, can only work within certain limits. The greatest orator in the world can only move his immediate hearers. Those beyond the inner circle catch a word here and there, and imagination supplies the rest or improves upon it. But those in the farthest gallery hear nothing and see a little man gesticulating.
De Casimir was not entrusted with the execution of the Emperor's orders. As a member of General Rapp's staff, resident in Dantzig since the city's occupation by the French, he had been called upon to make exhaustive reports upon the feeling of the burghers. There were many doubtful cases. De Casimir did not pretend to be better than his fellows. To some he had sold the benefit of the doubt. Some had paid willingly enough for their warning. Others had put off the payment; for there were many Jews, then as now, in Dantzig; slow payers requiring something stronger than a threat to make them disburse.
De Casimir therefore quitted the Rathhaus among the first to go, and walked through the busy streets to his rooms in the Langenmarkt, where he not only lived but had a small office to which orderlies and aides-de-camp came by day or night. Two sentries kept guard on the pavement. Since the spring, this office had been one of the busiest military posts in Dantzig. Its doors were open at all hours, and in truth many of de Casimir's assistants preferred to transact their business in the dark.
There might be some recalcitrant debtor driven by stress of circumstance to clear his conscience to-night. It would be as well, de Casimir thought, to be at one's post. Nor was he mistaken. Though it was only ten o'clock, two men were awaiting his return, and, their business despatched, de Casimir deemed it wise to send away his assistants. Immediately after they had gone a woman came. She was half distracted with fear, and the tears ran down her pallid cheeks. But she dried them at the mention of de Casimir's price, and fell to abusing him.
“If your husband is innocent, there is all the more reason why he should be grateful to me for warning him,” he said, with a smile. And at last the lady paid and went away.
The town clocks had struck eleven before another footstep on the pavement made de Casimir raise his head. He did not actually expect any one, but a certain surreptitiousness in the approach of this visitor, and the low knock on the door, made him suspect that this was grist for his mill.
He opened the door and, seeing that it was a woman, stepped back. When she had entered, he closed the door while she stood watching him in the dark passage, beneath the shadow of her hood. Knowing the value of such small details, he locked the door rather ostentatiously and dropped the key into his pocket.
“And now, madame,” he said reassuringly, as he followed his visitor into the room where a shaded lamp lighted his writing-table. She threw back her hood, and it was Mathilde! The surprise on de Casimir's face was genuine enough. Romance could not have brought about this visit, nor love be its motive.
“Something has happened,” he said, looking at her doubtfully.
“Where is my father?” was the reply.
“Unless there has been some mistake,” he answered glibly, “he is at home in bed.”
She smiled contemptuously into his innocent face.
“There has been a mistake,” she said; “they came to arrest him to-night.”
De Casimir made a gesture of anger and seemed to be mentally assigning a punishment to some blunderer.
“And?” he asked, without looking at her.
“And he escaped.”
“For the moment?”
“No; he has left Dantzig.”
Something in her voice—the cold note of warning—made him glance uneasily at her. This was not a woman to be deceived, and yet she was womanly enough to fear deception and to resent her own fears, visiting her anger on any who aroused them. In the flash of an eye he understood her, and forestalled the words that were upon her lips.
“And I promised that he should come to no harm—I know that,” he said quickly. “At first I thought that it must have been a blunder, but on reflection I am sure that it is not. It is the Emperor. He must have given the order for the arrest himself, behind my back. That is his way. He trusts no one. He deceives those nearest to him. I made out the list of those to be arrested to-night, and your father's name was not on it. Do you believe me? Mademoiselle, do you believe me?”
It was only natural in such a man to look for disbelief. The air he breathed was infected by suspicion. No deception was too small for the great man whom he served. Mathilde made no answer.
“You came here to accuse me of having deceived you,” he said rather anxiously. “Is that it?”
She nodded without meeting his eyes. It was not the truth. She had come to hear his defence, hoping against hope that she might be able to believe him.
“Mathilde,” he asked slowly, “do you believe me?”
He came a step nearer, looking down at her averted face, which was oddly white. Then suddenly she turned, without a sound, without lifting her eyes—and was in his arms. It seemed that she had done it against her will, and it took him by surprise. He had thought that she was trying to attract his love because she believed in his capability to make his fortune like so many soldiers of France; that she was only playing a woman's subtle game. And, after all, she was like the rest—a little cleverer, a little colder—but, like the rest.
While his arms were still round her, his quick mind leapt forward to the future, wondering already to what end this would lead them. For a moment he was taken aback. He was over the last of those barriers which are so easy from the outside and unclimbable from within. She had thrust into his hands a power greater than, for the moment, he knew how to wield. It was characteristic of him to think first whither it would lead him, and next how he could turn it to good account.
Some instinct told him that this was a different love from any that he had met before. The same instinct made him understand that it was crying aloud to be convinced; and, oddly enough, he had told her the truth.
“See,” he said, “here is a copy of the list, and your father's name is not on it. See, here is Napoleon's letter, expressing satisfaction with my work here and in Konigsberg, where I have been served by an agent of my own choosing. Many have climbed to a throne with less than that letter for their first step. See...!” he opened another drawer. It was full of money.
“See, again!” he said with a low laugh, and from an iron chest he took two or three bags which fell upon the table with the discreet unmistakable chink of gold. “That is the Emperor's. He trusts me, you see. These bags are mine. They are to be sent back to France before I follow the army to Russia. What I have told you is true, you see.”
It was an odd way of wooing, but this man rarely made a mistake. There are many women who, like Mathilde Sebastian, are readier to love success than console failure.
“See,” he said, after a moment's hesitation, opening another drawer in his writing-table, “before I went away I had intended to ask you to remember me.”
As he spoke he drew a jewel-case from under some papers, and slowly opened it. He had others like it in the drawer; for emergencies.
“But I never hoped,” he went on, “to have an opportunity of seeing you thus alone—to ask you never to forget me. You permit me?”
He clasped the diamonds round her throat, and they glittered on the poor, cheap dress, which was the best she had. She looked down at them with a catching breath, and for an instant the glitter was reflected in her eyes.
She had come asking for reassurance, and he gave her diamonds; which is an old tale told over and over again. For in human love we have to accept not what we want, but what is given to us.
“No one in Dantzig,” he said, “is so glad to hear that your father has escaped as I am.”
And, with the glitter still lurking in her dark-grey eyes, she believed him. He drew her cloak round her, and gently brought her hood over her hair.
“I must take you home,” he said tenderly, “without delay. And as we go through the streets you must tell me how it happened, and how you were able to come to me.”
“Desiree was not asleep,” she answered; “she was waiting for me to return, and told me at once. Then she went to bed, and I waited until she was asleep. It was she who managed the escape.”
De Casimir, who was locking the drawers of his writing-table, glanced up sharply.
“Ah! but not alone?”
“No—not alone. I will tell you as we go through the streets.”
La meme fermete qui sert a resister a l'amour sert aussi a lerendre violent et durable.
It is only in war that the unexpected admittedly happens. In love and other domestic calamities there is always a relative who knew it all the time.
The news that Napoleon was in Vilna, hastily evacuated by the Russians in full retreat, came as a surprise and not to all as a pleasant one, in Dantzig.
It was Papa Barlasch who brought the tidings to the Frauengasse, one hot afternoon in July. He returned before his usual hour, and sent Lisa upstairs, with a message given in dumb show and interpreted by her into matter-of-fact German, that he must see the young ladies without delay. Far back in the great days of the monarchy, Papa Barlasch must have been a little child in a peasant's hut on those Cotes du Nord where they breed a race of Frenchmen startlingly similar to the hereditary foe across the Channel, where to this day the men kick off their sabots at the door and hold that an honest labourer has no business under a roof except in stocking-feet and shirt-sleeves.
Barlasch had never yet been upstairs in the Sebastians' house, and deemed it only respectful to the ladies to take off his boots on the mat, and prowl to the kitchen in coarse blue woollen stockings, carefully darned by himself, under the scornful immediate eye of Lisa.
He was in the kitchen when Mathilde and Desiree, in obedience to his command, came downstairs. The floor in one corner of the room was littered with his belongings; for he never used the table. “He takes up no more room than a cat,” Lisa once said of him. “I never fall over him.”
“She leaves her greasy plates here and there,” explained Barlasch in return. “One must think of one's self and one's uniform.”
He was in his stocking-feet with unbuttoned tunic when the two girls came to him.
“Ai, ai, ai,” he said, imitating with his two hands the galloping of a horse. “The Russians,” he explained confidentially.
“Has there been a battle?” asked Desiree.
And Barlasch answered “Pooh!” not without contempt for the female understanding.
“Then what is it?” she inquired. “You must remember we are not soldiers—we do not understand those manoeuvres—ai, ai, like that.”
And she copied his gesture beneath his scowling contempt.
“It is Vilna,” he said. “That is what it is. Then it will be Smolensk, and then Moscow. Ah, ah! That little man!”
He turned and took up his haversack.
“And I—I have my route. It is good-bye to the Frauengasse. We have been friends. I told you we should be. It is good-bye to these ladies—and to that Lisa. Look at her!”
He pointed with his curved and derisive finger into Lisa's eyes. And in truth the tears were there. Lisa was in heart and person that which is comprehensively called motherly. She saw perhaps some pathos in the sight of this rugged man—worn by travel, bent with hardship and many wounds, past his work—shouldering his haversack and trudging off to the war.
“The wave moves on,” he said, making a gesture, and a sound illustrating that watery progress. “And Dantzig will soon be forgotten. You will be left in peace—but we go on to—” He paused and shrugged his shoulders while attending to a strap. “India or the devil,” he concluded.
“Colonel Casimir has gone,” he added in what he took to be an aside to Mathilde. Which made her wonder for a moment. “I saw him depart with his staff soon after daybreak. And the Emperor has forgotten Dantzig. It is safe enough for the patron now. You can write him a letter to tell him so. Tell him that I said it was safe for him to return quietly here, and live in the Frauengasse—I, Barlasch.”
He was ready now, and, buttoning his tunic, he fixed the straps across his chest, looking from one to the other of the three women watching him, not without some appreciation of an audience. Then he turned to Desiree, who had always been his friend, with whom he now considered that he had the soldier's bond of a peril passed through together.
“The Emperor has forgotten Dantzig,” he repeated, “and those against whom he had a grudge. But he has also forgotten those who are in prison. It is not good to be forgotten in prison. Tell the patron that—to put it in his pipe and smoke it. Some day he may remember an old soldier. Ah, one thinks of one's self.”
And beneath his bushy brows he looked at her with a gleam of cunning. He went to the door and, turning there, pointed the finger of scorn at Lisa, stout and tearful. He gave a short laugh of a low-born contempt, and departed without further parley.
On the doorstep he paused to put on his boots and button his gaiters, stooping clumsily with a groan beneath his burden of haversack and kit. Desiree, who had had time to go upstairs to her bedroom, ran after him as he descended the steps. She had her purse in her hand, and she thrust it into his, quickly and breathlessly.
“If you take it,” she said, “I shall know that we are friends.”
He took it ungraciously enough. It was a silken thing with two small rings to keep the money in place, and he looked at it with a grimace, weighing it in his hand. It was very light.
“Money,” he said. “No, thank you. To get drink with, and be degraded and sent to prison. Not for me, madame. No, thank you. One thinks of one's career.”
And with a gruff laugh of worldly wisdom he continued his way down the worn steps, never looking back at her as she stood in the sunlight watching him, with the purse in her hand.
So in his old age Papa Barlasch was borne forward to the war on that human tide which flooded all Lithuania, and never ebbed again, but sank into the barren ground, and was no more seen.
As the slow autumn approached, it became apparent that Dantzig no longer interested the watchers. Vilna became the base of operations. Smolensk fell, and, most wonderful of all, the Russians were retiring on Moscow. Dantzig was no longer on the route. For a time it was of the world forgotten, while, as Barlasch had predicted, free men continued at liberty, though their names had an evil savour, while innocent persons in prison were left to rot there.
Desiree continued to receive letters from her husband, full of love and war. For a long time he lingered at Konigsberg, hoping every day to be sent forward. Then he followed Murat across the Niemen, and wrote of weary journeys over the rolling plains of Lithuania.
Towards the end of July he mentioned curtly the arrival of de Casimir at head-quarters.
“With him came a courier,” wrote Charles, “bringing your dead letter. I don't believe you love me as I love you. At all events, you do not seem to tell me that you do so often as I want to tell you. Tell me what you do and think every moment of the day....” And so on. Charles seemed to write as easily as he talked, and had no difficulty in setting forth his feelings. “The courier is in the saddle,” he concluded. “De Casimir tells me that I must finish. Write and tell me everything. How is Mathilde? And your father? Is he in good health? How does he pass his day? Does he still go out in the evening to his cafe?”
This seemed to be an afterthought, suggested perhaps by conversation passing in the room in which he sat.
The other exile, writing from Stockholm, was briefer in his communications.
“I am well,” wrote Antoine Sebastian, “and hope to arrive soon after you receive this. Felix Meyer, the notary, has instructions to furnish you with money for household expenses.”
It would appear that Sebastian possessed other friends in Dantzig, who had kept him advised of all that passed in the city.
For neither Mathilde nor Desiree had obeyed Barlasch's blunt order to write to their father. They did not know whither he had fled, neither had they received any communication giving an address or a hint as to his future movements. It would appear that the same direct and laconic mind which had carried out his escape deemed it wiser that those left behind should be in no position to furnish information.
In fairness to Barlasch, Desiree had made little of that soldier's part in Sebastian's evasion, and Mathilde displayed small interest in such details. She rather fastened, however, upon the assistance rendered by Louis d'Arragon.
“Why did he do it?” she asked.
“Oh, because I asked him,” was the reply.
“And why did you ask him?”
“Who else was there to ask?” returned Desiree, which was indeed unanswerable.
Perhaps the question had been suggested to her by de Casimir, who, on learning that Louis d'Arragon had helped her father to slip through the Emperor's fingers, had asked the same in his own characteristic way.
“What could he hope to gain by doing it?” he had inquired as he walked by Mathilde's side, along the Pfaffengasse. And he made other interrogations respecting D'Arragon which Mathilde was no more able to satisfy, as he accompanied her to the Frauengasse.
Since that time the dancing-lessons had been resumed to the music of a hired fiddler, and Desiree had once more taken up her household task of making both ends meet. She approached the difficulties as impetuously as ever, and danced the stout pupils round the room with undiminished energy.
“It seems no good at all, your being married,” said one of these breathlessly, while Desiree laughingly attended to her dishevelled hair.
“Why not?”
“Because you still make your own dresses and teach dancing,” replied the pupil, with a quick sigh at the thought of some smart bursch in the Prussian contingent.
“Ah, but Charles will return a colonel, and I shall bow to you in a silk dress from a chaise and pair—come, left foot first. You are not so tired as you think you are.”
For those that are busy, time flies quickly enough. And there is nothing more absorbing than keeping the wolf from the door, else assuredly the hungry thousands would find time to arise and rend the overfed few.
August succeeded a hot July and brought with it Sebastian's curt letter. Sebastian himself—that shadowy father—returned to his home a few hours later. He was not alone, for a heavier step followed his into the passage, and Desiree, always quick to hear and see and act, coming to the head of the stairs, perceived her father looking upwards towards her, while his companion in rough sailor's clothes turned to lay aside the valise he had carried on his shoulder.
Mathilde was close behind Desiree, and Sebastian kissed his daughters with that cold repression of manner which always suggested a strenuous past in which the emotions had been relinquished for ever as an indulgence unfit for a stern and hard-bitten age.
“I took him away and now return him,” said the sailor coming forward. Desiree had always known that it was Louis, but Mathilde gave a little start at the sound of the neat clipping French in the mouth of an educated Frenchman so rarely heard in Dantzig—so rarely heard in all broad France to-day.
“Yes—that is true,” answered Sebastian, turning to him with a sudden change of manner. There was that in voice and attitude which his hearers had never noted before, although Charles had often evoked something approaching it. It seemed to indicate that, of all the people with whom they had seen their father hold intercourse, Louis d'Arragon was the only man who stood upon equality with him.
“That is true—and at great risk to yourself,” he said, not assigning, however, so great an importance to personal danger as men do in these careful days. As he spoke, he took Louis by the arm and by a gesture invited him to precede him upstairs with a suggestion of camaraderie somewhat startling in one usually so cold and formal as Antoine Sebastian, the dancing-master of the Frauengasse.
“I was writing to Charles,” said Desiree to D'Arragon, when they reached the drawing-room, and, crossing to her own table, she set the papers in order there. These consisted of a number of letters from her husband, read and re-read, it would appear. And the answer to them, a clean sheet of paper bearing only the date and address, lay beneath her hand.
“The courier leaves this evening,” she said, with a queer ring of anxiety in her voice, as if she feared that for some reason or another she ran the risk of failing to despatch her letter. She glanced at the clock, and stood, pen in hand, thinking of what she should write.
“May I enclose a line?” asked Louis. “It is not wise, perhaps, for me to address to him a letter—since I am on the other side. It is a small matter of a heritage which he and I divide. I have placed some money in a Dantzig bank for him. He may require it when he returns.”
“Then you do not correspond with Charles?” said Mathilde, clearing a space for him on the larger table, and setting before him ink and pens and paper.
“Thank you, Mademoiselle,” he said, glancing at her with that light of interest in his dark eyes which she had ignited once before by a question on the only occasion that they had met. He seemed to detect that she was more interested in him than her indifferent manner would appear to indicate. “No, I am a bad correspondent. If Charles and I, in our present circumstances, were to write to each other it could only lead to intrigue, for which I have no taste and Charles no capacity.”
“You seem to hint that Charles might have such a taste then,” she said, with her quiet smile, as she moved away leaving him to write.
“Charles has probably found out by this time,” he answered with the bluntness which he claimed as a prerogative of his calling and nation, “that a soldier of Napoleon's who intrigues will make a better career than one who merely fights.”
He took up his pen and wrote with the absorption of one who has but little time and knows exactly what to say. By chance he glanced towards Desiree, who sat at her own table near the window. She was stroking her cheek with the feather of her pen, looking with puzzled eyes at the blank paper before her. Each time D'Arragon dipped his pen he glanced at her, watching her. And Mathilde, with her needlework, watched them both.
However we brave it out, we men are a little breed.
War is the gambling of kings. Napoleon, the arch-gambler, from that Southern sea where men, lacking cards or dice and the money to buy either, will yet play a game of chance with the ten fingers that God gave them for another purpose—Napoleon had dealt a hand with every monarch in Europe before he met for the second time that Northern adversary of cool blood who knew the waiting game.
It is only where the stakes are small that the leisurely players, idly fingering the fallen cards, return in fancy to certain points—to this trick trumped or that chance missed, playing the game over again. But when the result is great it overshadows the game, and all men's thoughts fly to speculation on the future. How will the loser meet his loss? What use will the winner make of his gain?
The results of the Russian campaign were so stupendous to history that the historians of the day, in their bewilderment, sought rather to preserve these than the details of the war. Thus the student of to-day, in piecing together an impression of bygone times, will inevitably find portions of his picture missing. As a matter of fact, no one can say for certain whether Alexander gently led Napoleon onward to Moscow or was himself driven thither in confusion by the conqueror.
Perhaps each merely pushed on from day to day, as men who are not Emperors must needs do in the stress of life. It is only in calm weather that the eye is able to discern things afar off and make ready; but in a storm the horizon is dimmed by cloud and spray. All Europe was so obscured at this time. And even Emperors, being only men, could look no farther than the immediate and urgent danger of the moment.
Napoleon's generals were scarcely social lights. Ney, the hero of the retreat, the bravest of the brave, was a rough man who ate horseflesh without troubling to cook it. Rapp, whose dogged defence of an abandoned city is without compare in the story of war, had the manners and the mind of a peasant. These gentlemen dealt more in deeds than in words. They had not much to say for themselves.
As for the Russians, Russia remains at this time the one European country unhampered and unharassed by a cheap press—the one country where prominent men have a quiet tongue. A hundred years ago Russians did great deeds, and the rest was silence. Neither Kutusoff nor Alexander ever stated clearly whether the retreat to Moscow was intentional or unavoidable; and these are the only men who knew. Perhaps Napoleon knew; at all events, he thought he did, or pretended to think it long afterwards at St. Helena, for Napoleon the Great was a consummate liar.
Be that as it may, the Russians retreated, and the French advanced farther and farther from their base. It was a great army—the greatest ever seen. For Napoleon had eight monarchs serving with the eagles; generals innumerable, many of them immortal—Davoust, the greatest strategist; Prince Eugene, the incomparable lieutenant; Ney, the fearless; four hundred thousand men. And they carried with them only twenty days' provision.
They had marched from the Vistula, full of shipping, across the Pregel, loaded with stores, to the Niemen, where there was no navigation. Dantzig, behind them—that Gibraltar of the North—was stored with provision enough for the whole army. But there was no transport; for the roads of Lithuania were unsuitable for the heavy carts provided.
The country across the Niemen could scarce sustain its own sparse population, and had nothing to spare for an invading army. This had once been Poland, and was now inimical to Russia; but Russia did not care, and the friendship of Lithuania was like many human friendships which we make sacrifices to preserve—not worth having.
All the while the Russians retreated, and, stranger still, the French followed them, eking out their twenty days' provision.
“I will make them fight a big battle, and beat them,” said Napoleon; “and then the Emperor will sue for peace.”
But Barclay de Tolly continued to run away from that great battle. Then came the news that Barclay had been deposed; that Kutusoff was coming from the South to take command. It was true enough; and Barclay cheerfully served in a subordinate position to the new chief. September brought great hopes of a battle, for Kutusoff seemed to retreat with less despatch, like a man choosing his ground—Kutusoff, that master of the waiting game.
Early in September Murat, the impetuous leader of the pursuit, complained to Nansouty that a cavalry charge had not been pushed home.
“The horses have no patriotism,” replied Nansouty. “The men will fight on empty stomachs, but not the horses.”
An ominous reply at the beginning of a campaign, while communications were still open.
At last, within a few days' march of Moscow, Kutusoff made a stand. At last the great battle was imminent, after a hundred false alarms, after many disappointed hopes. The country had been flat hitherto. The Borodino, running in a wider valley than many of these rivers, which are merely great ditches, seemed to offer possibilities of defence. It was the only hope for Moscow.
“At last,” wrote Charles to Desiree on September 6, “we are to have a great battle. There has been much fighting the last few days, but I have seen none of it. We are only eighty miles from Moscow. If there is a great battle to-morrow we shall see Moscow in less than a week. For we shall win. I have now found out from one who is near him that the Emperor saw and remembered me the day he passed us in the Frauengasse—our wedding-day, dearest. Nobody is too insignificant for him to know. He thought that my marriage to you (for he knows that you are French) would militate against the work I had been given to do in Dantzig, so he gave orders for me to be sent at once to Konigsberg and to continue the work there. De Casimir tells me that the Emperor is pleased with me. De Casimir is the best friend I have; I am sure of that. It is said that under the walls of Moscow the Emperor will dictate his terms to Alexander. Every one wonders that Alexander of Russia did not make proposals of peace when Vilna and Smolensk fell. In a week we may be at Moscow. In a month I may be back at Dantzig, Desiree....”
And the rest would have been for Desiree's eyes alone, had it ever been penned. For next in sacredness to heaven-inspired words are mere human love letters; and those who read the love-letters of another commit a sacrilege. But Charles never finished the letter, for the dawn surprised him where he wrote in a shed by the miserable Kalugha, a streamlet running to the Moskwa. And it was the dawn of September 7, 1812.
“There is the sun of Austerlitz,” said Napoleon to those who were near him when it arose. But it was not. It was the sun of Borodino. And before it set the great battle desired by the French had been fought, and eight French generals lay dead, while thirty more were wounded. Murat, Davoust, Ney, Junot, Prince Eugene, Napoleon himself—all were there; and all fought to finish a war which from the first had been disliked. The French claimed it as a victory; but they gained nothing by it, and they lost forty thousand killed and wounded.
During the night the Russians evacuated the position which they had held, and lost, and retaken. They retreated towards Moscow, but Napoleon was hardly ready to pursue.
These things, however, are history, and those who wish to know of them may read them in another volume. While to the many orderly persons who would wish to see everything in its place and the history-books on the top shelf to be taken down and read on a future day (which will never come), to such the explanation is due that this battle of Borodino is here touched upon because it changed the current of some lives with which we have to deal.
For battles and revolutions and historical events of any sort are the jagged instruments with which Fate rough-hews our lives, leaving us to shape them as we will. In other days, no doubt, men rough-hewed, while Fate shaped. But as civilization advances men will wax so tender, so careful of the individual, that they will never cut and slash, but move softly, very tolerant, very easy-going, seeking the compromise that brings peace and breeds a small and timid race of men.
Into such lives Fate comes crashing like a woodman with his axe, leaving us to smooth the edges of the gaping wound and smile, and say that we are not hurt; to pare away the knots and broken stumps; and hope that our neighbour, concealing such himself, will have the decency to pretend not to see.
Thus the battle of Borodino crashed into the lives of Desiree and Mathilde, and their father, living quietly on the sunny side of the Frauengasse in Dantzig. Antoine Sebastian was the first to hear the news. He had, it seemed, special facilities for learning news at the Weissen Ross'l, whither he went again now in the evening.
“There has been a great battle,” he said, with so much more than his usual self-restraint that Desiree and Mathilde exchanged a glance of anxiety. “A man coming this evening from Dirschau saw and spoke with the Imperial couriers on their way to Berlin and Paris. It was a great victory, quite near to Moscow. But the loss on both sides has been terrible.”
He paused and glanced at Desiree. It was his creed that good blood should show an example of self-restraint and a certain steadfast, indifferent courage.
“Not so much among the French,” he said, “as among the Bavarians and Italians. It is an odd way of showing patriotism, to gain victories for the conqueror. One hoped—” he paused and made a gesture with his right hand, scarcely indicative of a staunch hope, “that the man's star might be setting, but it would appear to be still in the ascendant. Charles,” he added, as an afterthought, “would be on the staff. No doubt he only saw the fighting from a distance.”
Desiree, from whose face the colour had faded, nodded cheerfully enough.
“Oh yes,” she answered, “I have no doubt he is safe. He has good fortune.”
For she was an apt pupil, and had already learnt that the world only wishes to leave us in undisputed possession of our anxieties or sorrows, however ready it may be to come forward and take a hand in good fortune.
“But there is no definite news,” said Mathilde, hardly looking up from the needlework at which her fingers were so deft and industrious.
“No.”
“No news of Charles, I mean,” she continued, “or of any of our friends. Of Monsieur de Casimir, for instance?”
“No. As for Colonel de Casimir,” returned Sebastian thoughtfully, “he, like Charles, holds some staff appointment of which one does not understand the scope. He is without doubt uninjured.”
Mathilde glanced at her father not without suspicion. His grand manner might easily be at times a screen. One never knows how much is perceived by those who look down from a high place.
The town was quiet enough all that night. Sebastian must have heard the news from some unofficial source, for none other seemed to know it. But at daybreak the church bells, so rarely used in Dantzig for rejoicing, awoke the burghers to the fact that the Emperor bade them make merry. Napoleon gave great heed to such matters. In the churches of Lithuania and farther on in Russia he had commanded the popes to pray for him at their altars instead of for the Czar.
When Desiree came downstairs, she found a packet awaiting her. The courier had come in during the night. This was more than a letter. A number of papers had been folded in a handkerchief and bound with string. The address was written on a piece of white leather cut from the uniform of one who had fallen at Borodino, and had no more need of sabretasche or trapping.