บทที่ บทที่ 170 · ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH

Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at

this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental

bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron

cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the

parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and

trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something

yellow which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots,

tanned by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a

large scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,

prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,

in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the

bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,

charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they

much larger: “these are gardens,” and were they a little smaller:

“these are bouquets.” All these enclosures abut upon the river at one

end, and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the

wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of

these enclosures and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He

lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who

was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant

nor a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of earth which he called his

garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which

he cultivated there. These flowers were his occupation.

By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of

water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had

invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been

forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange

Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for

the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He

was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,

hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,

sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful

for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of

a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip

of a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was

very plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him

give way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed

shy, he rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who

tapped at his pane and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man.

Nevertheless, if the inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any

chance comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage,

he opened his door with a smile. He was the “brigand of the Loire.”

Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,

the _Moniteur_, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been

struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name

of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been

a soldier in Saintonge’s regiment. The revolution broke out.

Saintonge’s regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the

old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even

after the fall of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in

1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at

Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed

Houchard’s rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the

corps of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and

only rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy’s cannon had

opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis.

He was under Kléber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel,

where a ball from a biscaïen broke his arm. Then he passed to the

frontier of Italy, and was one of the thirty grenadiers who defended

the Col de Tende with Joubert. Joubert was appointed its

adjutant-general, and Pontmercy sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by

Berthier’s side in the midst of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi

which caused Bonaparte to say: “Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier,

and grenadier.” He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at

the moment when, with uplifted sabre, he was shouting: “Forward!”

Having been embarked with his company in the exigencies of the

campaign, on board a pinnace which was proceeding from Genoa to some

obscure port on the coast, he fell into a wasps’-nest of seven or eight

English vessels. The Genoese commander wanted to throw his cannon into

the sea, to hide the soldiers between decks, and to slip along in the

dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had the colors hoisted to the

peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns of the British frigates.

Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having increased, he attacked

with his pinnace, and captured a large English transport which was

carrying troops to Sicily, and which was so loaded down with men and

horses that the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was

in that Malher division which took Günzberg from the Archduke

Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a storm of

bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the 9th

Dragoons. He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable

march in echelons effected under the enemy’s fire. When the cavalry of

the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line,

Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the

Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,

Mélas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession. He

formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which Mortier

commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the

55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At Eylau he

was in the cemetery where, for the space of two hours, the heroic

Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author of this book, sustained

alone with his company of eighty-three men every effort of the hostile

army. Pontmercy was one of the three who emerged alive from that

cemetery. He was at Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Bérésina,

then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles of

Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Château-Thierry, Craon, the banks of the

Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the redoubtable position of Laon. At

Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword,

and saved, not his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on

this occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his left

arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just

exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was

called under the old regime, _the double hand_, that is to say, an

equal aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or a

squadron or a battalion as an officer. It is from this aptitude,

perfected by a military education, which certain special branches of

the service arise, the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men

and infantry at one and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the

Island of Elba. At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers,

in Dubois’ brigade. It was he who captured the standard of the

Lunenburg battalion. He came and cast the flag at the Emperor’s feet.

He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he had

received a sword-cut across his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased,

shouted to him: “You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer

of the Legion of Honor!” Pontmercy replied: “Sire, I thank you for my

widow.” An hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was

this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same “brigand of the Loire.”

We have already seen something of his history. After Waterloo,

Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow road of Ohain, as it

will be remembered, had succeeded in joining the army, and had dragged

himself from ambulance to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the

Loire.

The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent him into

residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon. King Louis

XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during the Hundred

Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize his quality as an

officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title

of baron. He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself

“Colonel Baron Pontmercy.” He had only an old blue coat, and he never

went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer of the

Legion of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had him warned that the

authorities would prosecute him for “illegal” wearing of this

decoration. When this notice was conveyed to him through an officious

intermediary, Pontmercy retorted with a bitter smile: “I do not know

whether I no longer understand French, or whether you no longer speak

it; but the fact is that I do not understand.” Then he went out for

eight successive days with his rosette. They dared not interfere with

him. Two or three times the Minister of War and the general in command

of the department wrote to him with the following address: _“A Monsieur

le Commandant Pontmercy.” _ He sent back the letters with the seals

unbroken. At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating in

the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed to _General

Bonaparte_. Pontmercy had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by

having in his mouth the same saliva as his Emperor.

In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners who refused

to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal’s spirit.

One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the streets of

Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: “Mr. Crown Attorney, am I

permitted to wear my scar?”

He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron. He had

hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon. He lived there

alone, we have just seen how. Under the Empire, between two wars, he

had found time to marry Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois,

thoroughly indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh,

saying: “The greatest families are forced into it.” In 1815, Madame

Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way, lofty in

sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died, leaving a child.

This child had been the colonel’s joy in his solitude; but the

grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring that if

the child were not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had

yielded in the little one’s interest, and had transferred his love to

flowers.

Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred up mischief

nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which

he was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed his

time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.

M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law. The colonel

was “a bandit” to him. M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel,

except when he occasionally made mocking allusions to “his Baronship.”

It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see

his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed

over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands, Pontmercy

was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to bring up the

child in their own way. Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these

conditions, but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right

and sacrificing no one but himself.

The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much; but the

inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was considerable.

This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very rich on the maternal

side, and her sister’s son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name

was Marius, knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened

his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into which his

grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually

enlightened the little boy’s mind; he had finally understood something

of the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which

were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and

slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father only with

shame and with a pain at his heart.

While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped away every

two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like a criminal breaking

his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when

Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the

aunt should turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not

daring to breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was

afraid of that old spinster.

From this had arisen his connection with the curé of Vernon, M. l’Abbé

Mabeuf.

That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice, who

had often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar on his

cheek, and the large tears in his eyes. That man, who had so manly an

air, yet who was weeping like a woman, had struck the warden. That face

had clung to his mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his

brother, he had encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had

recognized the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the

circumstance to the curé, and both had paid the colonel a visit, on

some pretext or other. This visit led to others. The colonel, who had

been extremely reserved at first, ended by opening his heart, and the

curé and the warden finally came to know the whole history, and how

Pontmercy was sacrificing his happiness to his child’s future. This

caused the curé to regard him with veneration and tenderness, and the

colonel, on his side, became fond of the curé. And moreover, when both

are sincere and good, no men so penetrate each other, and so amalgamate

with each other, as an old priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the

man is the same. The one has devoted his life to his country here

below, the other to his country on high; that is the only difference.

Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George’s day, Marius

wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated by his aunt, and

which one would have pronounced to be copied from some formula; this

was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated; and the father answered them

with very tender letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket

unread.