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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adieu, by Honore de Balzac
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Adieu
+
+Author: Honore de Balzac
+
+Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+Release Date: December, 1998  [Etext #1554]
+Posting Date: February 26, 2010
+Last Updated: November 21, 2016
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ADIEU ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny
+
+
+
+
+
+ADIEU
+
+
+By Honore De Balzac
+
+
+
+Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley
+
+
+
+                             DEDICATION
+
+                  To Prince Frederic Schwartzenburg
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ADIEU
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. AN OLD MONASTERY
+
+
+“Come, deputy of the Centre, forward! Quick step! march! if we want to
+be in time to dine with the others. Jump, marquis! there, that’s right!
+why, you can skip across a stubble-field like a deer!”
+
+These words were said by a huntsman peacefully seated at the edge of the
+forest of Ile-Adam, who was finishing an Havana cigar while waiting for
+his companion, who had lost his way in the tangled underbrush of the
+wood. At his side four panting dogs were watching, as he did, the
+personage he addressed. To understand how sarcastic were these
+exhortations, repeated at intervals, we should state that the
+approaching huntsman was a stout little man whose protuberant stomach
+was the evidence of a truly ministerial “embonpoint.” He was struggling
+painfully across the furrows of a vast wheat-field recently harvested,
+the stubble of which considerably impeded him; while to add to his other
+miseries the sun’s rays, striking obliquely on his face, collected an
+abundance of drops of perspiration. Absorbed in the effort to maintain
+his equilibrium, he leaned, now forward, now back, in close imitation
+of the pitching of a carriage when violently jolted. The weather looked
+threatening. Though several spaces of blue sky still parted the thick
+black clouds toward the horizon, a flock of fleecy vapors were advancing
+with great rapidity and drawing a light gray curtain from east to
+west. As the wind was acting only on the upper region of the air, the
+atmosphere below it pressed down the hot vapors of the earth. Surrounded
+by masses of tall trees, the valley through which the hunter struggled
+felt like a furnace. Parched and silent, the forest seemed thirsty. The
+birds, even the insects, were voiceless; the tree-tops scarcely waved.
+Those persons who may still remember the summer of 1819 can imagine the
+woes of the poor deputy, who was struggling along, drenched in sweat,
+to regain his mocking friend. The latter, while smoking his cigar, had
+calculated from the position of the sun that it must be about five in
+the afternoon.
+
+“Where the devil are we?” said the stout huntsman, mopping his
+forehead and leaning against the trunk of a tree nearly opposite to
+his companion, for he felt unequal to the effort of leaping the ditch
+between them.
+
+“That’s for me to ask you,” said the other, laughing, as he lay among
+the tall brown brake which crowned the bank. Then, throwing the end of
+his cigar into the ditch, he cried out vehemently: “I swear by Saint
+Hubert that never again will I trust myself in unknown territory with a
+statesman, though he be, like you, my dear d’Albon, a college mate.”
+
+“But, Philippe, have you forgotten your French? Or have you left your
+wits in Siberia?” replied the stout man, casting a sorrowfully comic
+look at a sign-post about a hundred feet away.
+
+“True, true,” cried Philippe, seizing his gun and springing with a bound
+into the field and thence to the post. “This way, d’Albon, this way,”
+ he called back to his friend, pointing to a broad paved path and reading
+aloud the sign: “‘From Baillet to Ile-Adam.’ We shall certainly find
+the path to Cassan, which must branch from this one between here and
+Ile-Adam.”
+
+“You are right, colonel,” said Monsieur d’Albon, replacing upon his head
+the cap with which he had been fanning himself.
+
+“Forward then, my respectable privy councillor,” replied Colonel
+Philippe, whistling to the dogs, who seemed more willing to obey him
+than the public functionary to whom they belonged.
+
+“Are you aware, marquis,” said the jeering soldier, “that we still have
+six miles to go? That village over there must be Baillet.”
+
+“Good heavens!” cried the marquis, “go to Cassan if you must, but you’ll
+go alone. I prefer to stay here, in spite of the coming storm, and
+wait for the horse you can send me from the chateau. You’ve played me a
+trick, Sucy. We were to have had a nice little hunt not far from Cassan,
+and beaten the coverts I know. Instead of that, you have kept me running
+like a hare since four o’clock this morning, and all I’ve had for
+breakfast is a cup of milk. Now, if you ever have a petition before the
+Court, I’ll make you lose it, however just your claim.”
+
+The poor discouraged huntsman sat down on a stone that supported the
+signpost, relieved himself of his gun and his gamebag, and heaved a long
+sigh.
+
+“France! such are thy deputies!” exclaimed Colonel de Sucy, laughing.
+“Ah! my poor d’Albon, if you had been like me six years in the wilds of
+Siberia--”
+
+He said no more, but he raised his eyes to heaven as if that anguish
+were between himself and God.
+
+“Come, march on!” he added. “If you sit still you are lost.”
+
+“How can I, Philippe? It is an old magisterial habit to sit still. On my
+honor! I’m tired out--If I had only killed a hare!”
+
+The two men presented a rather rare contrast: the public functionary
+was forty-two years of age and seemed no more than thirty, whereas the
+soldier was thirty, and seemed forty at the least. Both wore the red
+rosette of the officers of the Legion of honor. A few spare locks of
+black hair mixed with white, like the wing of a magpie, escaped from
+the colonel’s cap, while handsome brown curls adorned the brow of the
+statesman. One was tall, gallant, high-strung, and the lines of his
+pallid face showed terrible passions or frightful griefs. The other
+had a face that was brilliant with health, and jovially worth of an
+epicurean. Both were deeply sun-burned, and their high gaiters of tanned
+leather showed signs of the bogs and the thickets they had just come
+through.
+
+“Come,” said Monsieur de Sucy, “let us get on. A short hour’s march, and
+we shall reach Cassan in time for a good dinner.”
+
+“It is easy to see you have never loved,” replied the councillor, with a
+look that was pitifully comic; “you are as relentless as article 304 of
+the penal code.”
+
+Philippe de Sucy quivered; his broad brow contracted; his face became
+as sombre as the skies above them. Some memory of awful bitterness
+distorted for a moment his features, but he said nothing. Like all
+strong men, he drove down his emotions to the depths of his heart;
+thinking perhaps, as simple characters are apt to think, that there was
+something immodest in unveiling griefs when human language cannot
+render their depths and may only rouse the mockery of those who do not
+comprehend them. Monsieur d’Albon had one of those delicate natures
+which divine sorrows, and are instantly sympathetic to the emotion they
+have involuntarily aroused. He respected his friend’s silence, rose,
+forgot his fatigue, and followed him silently, grieved to have touched a
+wound that was evidently not healed.
+
+“Some day, my friend,” said Philippe, pressing his hand, and thanking
+him for his mute repentance by a heart-rending look, “I will relate to
+you my life. To-day I cannot.”
+
+They continued their way in silence. When the colonel’s pain seemed
+soothed, the marquis resumed his fatigue; and with the instinct, or
+rather the will, of a wearied man his eye took in the very depths of the
+forest; he questioned the tree-tops and examined the branching paths,
+hoping to discover some dwelling where he could ask hospitality.
+Arriving at a cross-ways, he thought he noticed a slight smoke rising
+among the trees; he stopped, looked more attentively, and saw, in the
+midst of a vast copse, the dark-green branches of several pine-trees.
+
+“A house! a house!” he cried, with the joy the sailor feels in crying
+“Land!”
+
+Then he sprang quickly into the copse, and the colonel, who had fallen
+into a deep reverie, followed him mechanically.
+
+“I’d rather get an omelet, some cottage bread, and a chair here,” he
+said, “than go to Cassan for sofas, truffles, and Bordeaux.”
+
+These words were an exclamation of enthusiasm, elicited from the
+councillor on catching sight of a wall, the white towers of which
+glimmered in the distance through the brown masses of the tree trunks.
+
+“Ha! ha! this looks to me as if it had once been a priory,” cried the
+marquis, as they reached a very old and blackened gate, through which
+they could see, in the midst of a large park, a building constructed in
+the style of the monasteries of old. “How those rascals the monks knew
+how to choose their sites!”
+
+This last exclamation was an expression of surprise and pleasure at the
+poetical hermitage which met his eyes. The house stood on the slope of
+the mountain, at the summit of which is the village of Nerville. The
+great centennial oaks of the forest which encircled the dwelling made
+the place an absolute solitude. The main building, formerly occupied by
+the monks, faced south. The park seemed to have about forty acres.
+Near the house lay a succession of green meadows, charmingly crossed by
+several clear rivulets, with here and there a piece of water naturally
+placed without the least apparent artifice. Trees of elegant shape and
+varied foliage were distributed about. Grottos, cleverly managed, and
+massive terraces with dilapidated steps and rusty railings, gave
+a peculiar character to this lone retreat. Art had harmonized her
+constructions with the picturesque effects of nature. Human passions
+seemed to die at the feet of those great trees, which guarded this
+asylum from the tumult of the world as they shaded it from the fires of
+the sun.
+
+“How desolate!” thought Monsieur d’Albon, observing the sombre
+expression which the ancient building gave to the landscape, gloomy as
+though a curse were on it. It seemed a fatal spot deserted by man. Ivy
+had stretched its tortuous muscles, covered by its rich green mantle,
+everywhere. Brown or green, red or yellow mosses and lichen spread their
+romantic tints on trees and seats and roofs and stones. The crumbling
+window-casings were hollowed by rain, defaced by time; the balconies
+were broken, the terraces demolished. Some of the outside shutters hung
+from a single hinge. The rotten doors seemed quite unable to resist an
+assailant. Covered with shining tufts of mistletoe, the branches of the
+neglected fruit-trees gave no sign of fruit. Grass grew in the paths.
+Such ruin and desolation cast a weird poesy on the scene, filling the
+souls of the spectators with dreamy thoughts. A poet would have stood
+there long, plunged in a melancholy reverie, admiring this disorder
+so full of harmony, this destruction which was not without its grace.
+Suddenly, the brown tiles shone, the mosses glittered, fantastic shadows
+danced upon the meadows and beneath the trees; fading colors revived;
+striking contrasts developed, the foliage of the trees and shrubs
+defined itself more clearly in the light. Then--the light went out. The
+landscape seemed to have spoken, and now was silent, returning to its
+gloom, or rather to the soft sad tones of an autumnal twilight.
+
+“It is the palace of the Sleeping Beauty,” said the marquis, beginning
+to view the house with the eyes of a land owner. “I wonder to whom it
+belongs! He must be a stupid fellow not to live in such an exquisite
+spot.”
+
+At that instant a woman sprang from beneath a chestnut-tree standing to
+the right of the gate, and, without making any noise, passed before the
+marquis as rapidly as the shadow of a cloud. This vision made him mute
+with surprise.
+
+“Why, Albon, what’s the matter?” asked the colonel.
+
+“I am rubbing my eyes to know if I am asleep or awake,” replied the
+marquis, with his face close to the iron rails as he tried to get
+another sight of the phantom.
+
+“She must be beneath that fig-tree,” he said, pointing to the foliage of
+a tree which rose above the wall to the left of the gate.
+
+“She! who?”
+
+“How can I tell?” replied Monsieur d’Albon. “A strange woman rose up
+there, just before me,” he said in a low voice; “she seemed to come from
+the world of shades rather than from the land of the living. She is so
+slender, so light, so filmy, she must be diaphanous. Her face was as
+white as milk; her eyes, her clothes, her hair jet black. She looked
+at me as she flitted by, and though I may say I’m no coward, that cold
+immovable look froze the blood in my veins.”
+
+“Is she pretty?” asked Philippe.
+
+“I don’t know. I could see nothing but the eyes in that face.”
+
+“Well, let the dinner at Cassan go to the devil!” cried the colonel.
+“Suppose we stay here. I have a sudden childish desire to enter that
+singular house. Do you see those window-frames painted red, and the red
+lines on the doors and shutters? Doesn’t the place look to you as if it
+belonged to the devil?--perhaps he inherited it from the monks. Come,
+let us pursue the black and white lady--forward, march!” cried Philippe,
+with forced gaiety.
+
+At that instant the two huntsmen heard a cry that was something like
+that of a mouse caught in a trap. They listened. The rustle of a few
+shrubs sounded in the silence like the murmur of a breaking wave. In
+vain they listened for other sounds; the earth was dumb, and kept the
+secret of those light steps, if, indeed, the unknown woman moved at all.
+
+“It is very singular!” said Philippe, as they skirted the park wall.
+
+The two friends presently reached a path in the forest which led to the
+village of Chauvry. After following this path some way toward the main
+road to Paris, they came to another iron gate which led to the principal
+facade of the mysterious dwelling. On this side the dilapidation and
+disorder of the premises had reached their height. Immense cracks
+furrowed the walls of the house, which was built on three sides of
+a square. Fragments of tiles and slates lying on the ground, and the
+dilapidated condition of the roofs, were evidence of a total want of
+care on the part of the owners. The fruit had fallen from the trees and
+lay rotting on the ground; a cow was feeding on the lawn and treading
+down the flowers in the borders, while a goat browsed on the shoots of
+the vines and munched the unripe grapes.
+
+“Here all is harmony; the devastation seems organized,” said the
+colonel, pulling the chain of a bell; but the bell was without a
+clapper.
+
+The huntsmen heard nothing but the curiously sharp noise of a rusty
+spring. Though very dilapidated, a little door made in the wall beside
+the iron gates resisted all their efforts to open it.
+
+“Well, well, this is getting to be exciting,” said de Sucy to his
+companion.
+
+“If I were not a magistrate,” replied Monsieur d’Albon, “I should think
+that woman was a witch.”
+
+As he said the words, the cow came to the iron gate and pushed her warm
+muzzle towards them, as if she felt the need of seeing human beings.
+Then a woman, if that name could be applied to the indefinable being who
+suddenly issued from a clump of bushes, pulled away the cow by its rope.
+This woman wore on her head a red handkerchief, beneath which trailed
+long locks of hair in color and shape like the flax on a distaff. She
+wore no fichu. A coarse woollen petticoat in black and gray stripes, too
+short by several inches, exposed her legs. She might have belonged to
+some tribe of Red-Skins described by Cooper, for her legs, neck, and
+arms were the color of brick. No ray of intelligence enlivened her
+vacant face. A few whitish hairs served her for eyebrows; the eyes
+themselves, of a dull blue, were cold and wan; and her mouth was so
+formed as to show the teeth, which were crooked, but as white as those
+of a dog.
+
+“Here, my good woman!” called Monsieur de Sucy.
+
+She came very slowly to the gate, looking with a silly expression at the
+two huntsmen, the sight of whom brought a forced and painful smile to
+her face.
+
+“Where are we? Whose house is this? Who are you? Do you belong here?”
+
+To these questions and several others which the two friends alternately
+addressed to her, she answered only with guttural sounds that seemed
+more like the growl of an animal than the voice of a human being.
+
+“She must be deaf and dumb,” said the marquis.
+
+“Bons-Hommes!” cried the peasant woman.
+
+“Ah! I see. This is, no doubt, the old monastery of the Bons-Hommes,”
+ said the marquis.
+
+He renewed his questions. But, like a capricious child, the peasant
+woman colored, played with her wooden shoe, twisted the rope of the
+cow, which was now feeding peaceably, and looked at the two hunters,
+examining every part of their clothing; then she yelped, growled, and
+clucked, but did not speak.
+
+“What is your name?” said Philippe, looking at her fixedly, as if he
+meant to mesmerize her.
+
+“Genevieve,” she said, laughing with a silly air.
+
+“The cow is the most intelligent being we have seen so far,” said the
+marquis. “I shall fire my gun and see if that will being some one.”
+
+Just as d’Albon raised his gun, the colonel stopped him with a gesture,
+and pointed to the form of a woman, probably the one who had so keenly
+piqued his curiosity. At this moment she seemed lost in the deepest
+meditation, and was coming with slow steps along a distant pathway, so
+that the two friends had ample time to examine her.
+
+She was dressed in a ragged gown of black satin. Her long hair fell in
+masses of curls over her forehead, around her shoulders, and below her
+waist, serving her for a shawl. Accustomed no doubt to this disorder,
+she seldom pushed her hair from her forehead; and when she did so, it
+was with a sudden toss of her head which only for a moment cleared her
+forehead and eyes from the thick veil. Her gesture, like that of an
+animal, had a remarkable mechanical precision, the quickness of which
+seemed wonderful in a woman. The huntsmen were amazed to see her
+suddenly leap up on the branch of an apple-tree, and sit there with the
+ease of a bird. She gathered an apple and ate it; then she dropped to
+the ground with the graceful ease we admire in a squirrel. Her limbs
+possessed an elasticity which took from every movement the slightest
+appearance of effort or constraint. She played upon the turf, rolling
+herself about like a child; then, suddenly, she flung her feet and hands
+forward, and lay at full length on the grass, with the grace and natural
+ease of a young cat asleep in the sun. Thunder sounded in the distance,
+and she turned suddenly, rising on her hands and knees with the rapidity
+of a dog which hears a coming footstep.
+
+The effects of this singular attitude was to separate into two heavy
+masses the volume of her black hair, which now fell on either side of
+her head, and allowed the two spectators to admire the white shoulders
+glistening like daisies in a field, and the throat, the perfection of
+which allowed them to judge of the other beauties of her figure.
+
+Suddenly she uttered a distressful cry and rose to her feet. Her
+movements succeeded each other with such airiness and grace that she
+seemed not a creature of this world but a daughter of the atmosphere, as
+sung in the poems of Ossian. She ran toward a piece of water, shook one
+of her legs lightly to cast off her shoe, and began to dabble her foot,
+white as alabaster, in the current, admiring, perhaps, the undulations
+she thus produced upon the surface of the water. Then she knelt down at
+the edge of the stream and amused herself, like a child, in casting in
+her long tresses and pulling them abruptly out, to watch the shower of
+drops that glittered down, looking, as the sunlight struck athwart them,
+like a chaplet of pearls.
+
+“That woman is mad!” cried the marquis.
+
+A hoarse cry, uttered by Genevieve, seemed uttered as a warning to the
+unknown woman, who turned suddenly, throwing back her hair from either
+side of her face. At this instant the colonel and Monsieur d’Albon could
+distinctly see her features; she, herself, perceiving the two friends,
+sprang to the iron railing with the lightness and rapidity of a deer.
+
+“Adieu!” she said, in a soft, harmonious voice, the melody of which did
+not convey the slightest feeling or the slightest thought.
+
+Monsieur d’Albon admired the long lashes of her eyelids, the blackness
+of her eyebrows, and the dazzling whiteness of a skin devoid of even the
+faintest tinge of color. Tiny blue veins alone broke the uniformity of
+its pure white tones. When the marquis turned to his friend as if to
+share with him his amazement at the sight of this singular creature, he
+found him stretched on the ground as if dead. D’Albon fired his gun
+in the air to summon assistance, crying out “Help! help!” and then
+endeavored to revive the colonel. At the sound of the shot, the unknown
+woman, who had hitherto stood motionless, fled away with the rapidity
+of an arrow, uttering cries of fear like a wounded animal, and running
+hither and thither about the meadow with every sign of the greatest
+terror.
+
+Monsieur d’Albon, hearing the rumbling of a carriage on the high-road
+to Ile-Adam, waved his handkerchief and shouted to its occupants for
+assistance. The carriage was immediately driven up to the old monastery,
+and the marquis recognized his neighbors, Monsieur and Madame de
+Granville, who at once gave up their carriage to the service of the
+two gentlemen. Madame de Granville had with her, by chance, a bottle of
+salts, which revived the colonel for a moment. When he opened his eyes
+he turned them to the meadow, where the unknown woman was still running
+and uttering her distressing cries. A smothered exclamation escaped
+him, which seemed to express a sense of horror; then he closed his eyes
+again, and made a gesture as if to implore his friend to remove him from
+that sight.
+
+Monsieur and Madame de Granville placed their carriage entirely at the
+disposal of the marquis, assuring him courteously that they would like
+to continue their way on foot.
+
+“Who is that lady?” asked the marquis, signing toward the unknown woman.
+
+“I believe she comes from Moulins,” replied Monsieur de Granville. “She
+is the Comtesse de Vandieres, and they say she is mad; but as she
+has only been here two months I will not vouch for the truth of these
+hearsays.”
+
+Monsieur d’Albon thanked his friends, and placing the colonel in the
+carriage, started with him for Cassan.
+
+“It is she!” cried Philippe, recovering his senses.
+
+“Who is she?” asked d’Albon.
+
+“Stephanie. Ah, dead and living, living and mad! I fancied I was dying.”
+
+The prudent marquis, appreciating the gravity of the crisis through
+which his friend was passing, was careful not to question or excite him;
+he was only anxious to reach the chateau, for the change which had taken
+place in the colonel’s features, in fact in his whole person, made him
+fear for his friend’s reason. As soon, therefore, as the carriage had
+reached the main street of Ile-Adam, he dispatched the footman to the
+village doctor, so that the colonel was no sooner fairly in his bed at
+the chateau than the physician was beside him.
+
+“If monsieur had not been many hours without food the shock would have
+killed him,” said the doctor.
+
+After naming the first precautions, the doctor left the room, to
+prepare, himself, a calming potion. The next day, Monsieur de Sucy was
+better, but the doctor still watched him carefully.
+
+“I will admit to you, monsieur le marquis,” he said, “that I have feared
+some affection of the brain. Monsieur de Sucy has received a violent
+shock; his passions are strong; but, in him, the first blow decides all.
+To-morrow he may be entirely out of danger.”
+
+The doctor was not mistaken; and the following day he allowed the
+marquis to see his friend.
+
+“My dear d’Albon,” said Philippe, pressing his hand, “I am going to ask
+a kindness of you. Go to the Bons-Hommes, and find out all you can of
+the lady we saw there; and return to me as quickly as you can; I shall
+count the minutes.”
+
+Monsieur d’Albon mounted his horse at once, and galloped to the old
+abbey. When he arrived there, he saw before the iron gate a tall, spare
+man with a very kindly face, who answered in the affirmative when asked
+if he lived there. Monsieur d’Albon then informed him of the reasons for
+his visit.
+
+“What! monsieur,” said the other, “was it you who fired that fatal shot?
+You very nearly killed my poor patient.”
+
+“But, monsieur, I fired in the air.”
+
+“You would have done the countess less harm had you fired at her.”
+
+“Then we must not reproach each other, monsieur, for the sight of the
+countess has almost killed my friend, Monsieur de Sucy.”
+
+“Heavens! can you mean Baron Philippe de Sucy?” cried the doctor,
+clasping his hands. “Did he go to Russia; was he at the passage of the
+Beresina?”
+
+“Yes,” replied d’Albon, “he was captured by the Cossacks and kept for
+five years in Siberia; he recovered his liberty a few months ago.”
+
+“Come in, monsieur,” said the master of the house, leading the marquis
+into a room on the lower floor where everything bore the marks of
+capricious destruction. The silken curtains beside the windows were
+torn, while those of muslin remained intact.
+
+“You see,” said the tall old man, as they entered, “the ravages
+committed by that dear creature, to whom I devote myself. She is my
+niece; in spite of the impotence of my art, I hope some day to
+restore her reason by attempting a method which can only be employed,
+unfortunately, by very rich people.”
+
+Then, like all persons living in solitude who are afflicted with an ever
+present and ever renewed grief, he related to the marquis at length the
+following narrative, which is here condensed, and relieved of the many
+digressions made by both the narrator and the listener.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. THE PASSAGE OF THE BERESINA
+
+
+Marechal Victor, when he started, about nine at night, from the
+heights of Studzianka, which he had defended, as the rear-guard of the
+retreating army, during the whole day of November 28th, 1812, left a
+thousand men behind him, with orders to protect to the last possible
+moment whichever of the two bridges across the Beresina might still
+exist. This rear-guard had devoted itself to the task of saving a
+frightful multitude of stragglers overcome by the cold, who obstinately
+refused to leave the bivouacs of the army. The heroism of this generous
+troop proved useless. The stragglers who flocked in masses to the banks
+of the Beresina found there, unhappily, an immense number of carriages,
+caissons, and articles of all kinds which the army had been forced to
+abandon when effecting its passage of the river on the 27th and 28th of
+November. Heirs to such unlooked-for riches, the unfortunate men, stupid
+with cold, took up their abode in the deserted bivouacs, broke up the
+material which they found there to build themselves cabins, made fuel of
+everything that came to hand, cut up the frozen carcasses of the
+horses for food, tore the cloth and the curtains from the carriages
+for coverlets, and went to sleep, instead of continuing their way
+and crossing quietly during the night that cruel Beresina, which an
+incredible fatality had already made so destructive to the army.
+
+The apathy of these poor soldiers can only be conceived by those who
+remember to have crossed vast deserts of snow without other perspective
+than a snow horizon, without other drink than snow, without other bed
+than snow, without other food than snow or a few frozen beet-roots, a
+few handfuls of flour, or a little horseflesh. Dying of hunger, thirst,
+fatigue, and want of sleep, these unfortunates reached a shore where
+they saw before them wood, provisions, innumerable camp equipages,
+and carriages,--in short a whole town at their service. The village of
+Studzianka had been wholly taken to pieces and conveyed from the heights
+on which it stood to the plain. However forlorn and dangerous that
+refuge might be, its miseries and its perils only courted men who had
+lately seen nothing before them but the awful deserts of Russia. It was,
+in fact, a vast asylum which had an existence of twenty-four hours only.
+
+Utter lassitude, and the sense of unexpected comfort, made that mass of
+men inaccessible to every thought but that of rest. Though the
+artillery of the left wing of the Russians kept up a steady fire on this
+mass,--visible like a stain now black, now flaming, in the midst of the
+trackless snow,--this shot and shell seemed to the torpid creatures only
+one inconvenience the more. It was like a thunderstorm, despised by all
+because the lightning strikes so few; the balls struck only here and
+there, the dying, the sick, the dead sometimes! Stragglers arrived in
+groups continually; but once here those perambulating corpses separated;
+each begged for himself a place near a fire; repulsed repeatedly, they
+met again, to obtain by force the hospitality already refused to them.
+Deaf to the voice of some of their officers, who warned them of probable
+destruction on the morrow, they spent the amount of courage necessary to
+cross the river in building that asylum of a night, in making one meal
+that they themselves doomed to be their last. The death that awaited
+them they considered no evil, provided they could have that one night’s
+sleep. They thought nothing evil but hunger, thirst, and cold. When
+there was no more wood or food or fire, horrible struggles took place
+between fresh-comers and the rich who possessed a shelter. The weakest
+succumbed.
+
+At last there came a moment when a number, pursued by the Russians,
+found only snow on which to bivouac, and these lay down to rise no more.
+Insensibly this mass of almost annihilated beings became so compact, so
+deaf, so torpid, so happy perhaps, that Marechal Victor, who had
+been their heroic defender by holding twenty thousand Russians under
+Wittgenstein at bay, was forced to open a passage by main force through
+this forest of men in order to cross the Beresina with five thousand
+gallant fellows whom he was taking to the emperor. The unfortunate
+malingerers allowed themselves to be crushed rather than stir; they
+perished in silence, smiling at their extinguished fires, without a
+thought of France.
+
+It was not until ten o’clock that night that Marechal Victor reached the
+bank of the river. Before crossing the bridge which led to Zembin, he
+confided the fate of his own rear-guard now left in Studzianka to Eble,
+the savior of all those who survived the calamities of the Beresina.
+It was towards midnight when this great general, followed by one brave
+officer, left the cabin he occupied near the bridge, and studied the
+spectacle of that improvised camp placed between the bank of the river
+and Studzianka. The Russian cannon had ceased to thunder. Innumerable
+fires, which, amid that trackless waste of snow, burned pale and
+scarcely sent out any gleams, illumined here and there by sudden flashes
+forms and faces that were barely human. Thirty thousand poor wretches,
+belonging to all nations, from whom Napoleon had recruited his Russian
+army, were trifling away their lives with brutish indifference.
+
+“Let us save them!” said General Eble to the officer who accompanied
+him. “To-morrow morning the Russians will be masters of Studzianka. We
+must burn the bridge the moment they appear. Therefore, my friend, take
+your courage in your hand! Go to the heights. Tell General Fournier
+he has barely time to evacuate his position, force a way through this
+crowd, and cross the bridge. When you have seen him in motion follow
+him. Find men you can trust, and the moment Fournier had crossed
+the bridge, burn, without pity, huts, equipages, caissons,
+carriages,--EVERYTHING! Drive that mass of men to the bridge. Compel all
+that has two legs to get to the other side of the river. The burning of
+everything--EVERYTHING--is now our last resource. If Berthier had let
+me destroy those damned camp equipages, this river would swallow only
+my poor pontoniers, those fifty heroes who will save the army, but who
+themselves will be forgotten.”
+
+The general laid his hand on his forehead and was silent. He felt that
+Poland would be his grave, and that no voice would rise to do justice
+to those noble men who stood in the water, the icy water of Beresina, to
+destroy the buttresses of the bridges. One alone of those heroes still
+lives--or, to speak more correctly, suffers--in a village, totally
+ignored.
+
+The aide-de-camp started. Hardly had this generous officer gone a
+hundred yards towards Studzianka than General Eble wakened a number
+of his weary pontoniers, and began the work,--the charitable work of
+burning the bivouacs set up about the bridge, and forcing the sleepers,
+thus dislodged, to cross the river.
+
+Meanwhile the young aide-de-camp reached, not without difficulty, the
+only wooden house still left standing in Studzianka.
+
+“This barrack seems pretty full, comrade,” he said to a man whom he saw
+by the doorway.
+
+“If you can get in you’ll be a clever trooper,” replied the officer,
+without turning his head or ceasing to slice off with his sabre the bark
+of the logs of which the house was built.
+
+“Is that you, Philippe?” said the aide-de-camp, recognizing a friend by
+the tones of his voice.
+
+“Yes. Ha, ha! is it you, old fellow?” replied Monsieur de Sucy, looking
+at the aide-de-camp, who, like himself, was only twenty-three years of
+age. “I thought you were the other side of that cursed river. What are
+you here for? Have you brought cakes and wine for our dessert? You’ll be
+welcome,” and he went on slicing off the bark, which he gave as a sort
+of provender to his horse.
+
+“I am looking for your commander to tell him, from General Eble, to make
+for Zembin. You’ll have barely enough time to get through that crowd of
+men below. I am going presently to set fire to their camp and force them
+to march.”
+
+“You warm me up--almost! That news makes me perspire. I have two friends
+I MUST save. Ah! without those two to cling to me, I should be dead
+already. It is for them that I feed my horse and don’t eat myself. Have
+you any food,--a mere crust? It is thirty hours since anything has gone
+into my stomach, and yet I have fought like a madman--just to keep a
+little warmth and courage in me.”
+
+“Poor Philippe, I have nothing--nothing! But where’s your general,--in
+this house?”
+
+“No, don’t go there; the place is full of wounded. Go up the street;
+you’ll find on your left a sort of pig-pen; the general is there.
+Good-bye, old fellow. If we ever dance a trenis on a Paris floor--”
+
+He did not end his sentence; the north wind blew at that moment with
+such ferocity that the aide-de-camp hurried on to escape being frozen,
+and the lips of Major de Sucy stiffened. Silence reigned, broken only
+by the moans which came from the house, and the dull sound made by the
+major’s horse as it chewed in a fury of hunger the icy bark of the trees
+with which the house was built. Monsieur de Sucy replaced his sabre in
+its scabbard, took the bridle of the precious horse he had hitherto been
+able to preserve, and led it, in spite of the animal’s resistance, from
+the wretched fodder it appeared to think excellent.
+
+“We’ll start, Bichette, we’ll start! There’s none but you, my beauty,
+who can save Stephanie. Ha! by and bye you and I may be able to
+rest--and die,” he added.
+
+Philippe, wrapped in a fur pelisse, to which he owed his preservation
+and his energy, began to run, striking his feet hard upon the frozen
+snow to keep them warm. Scarcely had he gone a few hundred yards from
+the village than he saw a blaze in the direction of the place where,
+since morning, he had left his carriage in charge of his former orderly,
+an old soldier. Horrible anxiety laid hold of him. Like all others who
+were controlled during this fatal retreat by some powerful sentiment, he
+found a strength to save his friends which he could not have put forth
+to save himself.
+
+Presently he reached a slight declivity at the foot of which, in a
+spot sheltered from the enemy’s balls, he had stationed the carriage,
+containing a young woman, the companion of his childhood, the being most
+dear to him on earth. At a few steps distant from the vehicle he now
+found a company of some thirty stragglers collected around an immense
+fire, which they were feeding with planks, caisson covers, wheels, and
+broken carriages. These soldiers were, no doubt, the last comers of that
+crowd who, from the base of the hill of Studzianka to the fatal river,
+formed an ocean of heads intermingled with fires and huts,--a living
+sea, swayed by motions that were almost imperceptible, and giving forth
+a murmuring sound that rose at times to frightful outbursts. Driven by
+famine and despair, these poor wretches must have rifled the carriage
+before de Sucy reached it. The old general and his young wife, whom he
+had left lying in piles of clothes and wrapped in mantles and pelisses,
+were now on the snow, crouching before the fire. One door of the
+carriage was already torn off.
+
+No sooner did the men about the fire hear the tread of the major’s horse
+than a hoarse cry, the cry of famine, arose,--
+
+“A horse! a horse!”
+
+Those voices formed but one voice.
+
+“Back! back! look out for yourself!” cried two or three soldiers, aiming
+at the mare. Philippe threw himself before his animal, crying out,--
+
+“You villains! I’ll throw you into your own fire. There are plenty of
+dead horses up there. Go and fetch them.”
+
+“Isn’t he a joker, that officer! One, two--get out of the way,” cried a
+colossal grenadier. “No, you won’t, hey! Well, as you please, then.”
+
+A woman’s cry rose higher than the report of the musket. Philippe
+fortunately was not touched, but Bichette, mortally wounded, was
+struggling in the throes of death. Three men darted forward and
+dispatched her with their bayonets.
+
+“Cannibals!” cried Philippe, “let me at any rate take the horse-cloth
+and my pistols.”
+
+“Pistols, yes,” replied the grenadier. “But as for that horse-cloth, no!
+here’s a poor fellow afoot, with nothing in his stomach for two days,
+and shivering in his rags. It is our general.”
+
+Philippe kept silence as he looked at the man, whose boots were worn
+out, his trousers torn in a dozen places, while nothing but a ragged
+fatigue-cap covered with ice was on his head. He hastened, however, to
+take his pistols. Five men dragged the mare to the fire, and cut her
+up with the dexterity of a Parisian butcher. The pieces were instantly
+seized and flung upon the embers.
+
+The major went up to the young woman, who had uttered a cry on
+recognizing him. He found her motionless, seated on a cushion beside the
+fire. She looked at him silently, without smiling. Philippe then saw
+the soldier to whom he had confided the carriage; the man was wounded.
+Overcome by numbers, he had been forced to yield to the malingerers who
+attacked him; and, like the dog who defended to the last possible moment
+his master’s dinner, he had taken his share of the booty, and was now
+sitting beside the fire, wrapped in a white sheet by way of cloak, and
+turning carefully on the embers a slice of the mare. Philippe saw upon
+his face the joy these preparations gave him. The Comte de Vandieres,
+who, for the last few days, had fallen into a state of second childhood,
+was seated on a cushion beside his wife, looking fixedly at the fire,
+which was beginning to thaw his torpid limbs. He had shown no emotion
+of any kind, either at Philippe’s danger, or at the fight which ended in
+the pillage of the carriage and their expulsion from it.
+
+At first de Sucy took the hand of the young countess, as if to show her
+his affection, and the grief he felt at seeing her reduced to such utter
+misery; then he grew silent; seated beside her on a heap of snow which
+was turning into a rivulet as it melted, he yielded himself up to the
+happiness of being warm, forgetting their peril, forgetting all things.
+His face assumed, in spite of himself, an expression of almost stupid
+joy, and he waited with impatience until the fragment of the mare given
+to his orderly was cooked. The smell of the roasting flesh increased his
+hunger, and his hunger silenced his heart, his courage, and his love.
+He looked, without anger, at the results of the pillage of his carriage.
+All the men seated around the fire had shared his blankets, cushions,
+pelisses, robes, also the clothing of the Comte and Comtesse de
+Vandieres and his own. Philippe looked about him to see if there was
+anything left in or near the vehicle that was worth saving. By the light
+of the flames he saw gold and diamonds and plate scattered everywhere,
+no one having thought it worth his while to take any.
+
+Each of the individuals collected by chance around this fire maintained
+a silence that was almost horrible, and did nothing but what he judged
+necessary for his own welfare. Their misery was even grotesque. Faces,
+discolored by cold, were covered with a layer of mud, on which tears had
+made a furrow from the eyes to the beard, showing the thickness of that
+miry mask. The filth of their long beards made these men still more
+repulsive. Some were wrapped in the countess’s shawls, others wore the
+trappings of horses and muddy saddlecloths, or masses of rags from which
+the hoar-frost hung; some had a boot on one leg and a shoe on the other;
+in fact, there were none whose costume did not present some laughable
+singularity. But in presence of such amusing sights the men themselves
+were grave and gloomy. The silence was broken only by the snapping of
+the wood, the crackling of the flames, the distant murmur of the camps,
+and the blows of the sabre given to what remained of Bichette in search
+of her tenderest morsels. A few miserable creatures, perhaps more weary
+than the rest, were sleeping; when one of their number rolled into the
+fire no one attempted to help him out. These stern logicians argued that
+if he were not dead his burns would warn him to find a safer place. If
+the poor wretch waked in the flames and perished, no one cared. Two or
+three soldiers looked at each other to justify their own indifference by
+that of others. Twice this scene had taken place before the eyes of the
+countess, who said nothing. When the various pieces of Bichette, placed
+here and there upon the embers, were sufficiently broiled, each man
+satisfied his hunger with the gluttony that disgusts us when we see it
+in animals.
+
+“This is the first time I ever saw thirty infantrymen on one horse,”
+ cried the grenadier who had shot the mare.
+
+It was the only jest made that night which proved the national
+character.
+
+Soon the great number of these poor soldiers wrapped themselves in what
+they could find and lay down on planks, or whatever would keep them from
+contact with the snow, and slept, heedless of the morrow. When the major
+was warm, and his hunger appeased, an invincible desire to sleep weighed
+down his eyelids. During the short moment of his struggle against that
+desire he looked at the young woman, who had turned her face to the
+fire and was now asleep, leaving her closed eyes and a portion of her
+forehead exposed to sight. She was wrapped in a furred pelisse and a
+heavy dragoon’s cloak; her head rested on a pillow stained with blood;
+an astrakhan hood, kept in place by a handkerchief knotted round her
+neck, preserved her face from the cold as much as possible. Her feet
+were wrapped in the cloak. Thus rolled into a bundle, as it were, she
+looked like nothing at all. Was she the last of the “vivandieres”?
+Was she a charming woman, the glory of a lover, the queen of Parisian
+salons? Alas! even the eye of her most devoted friend could trace no
+sign of anything feminine in that mass of rags and tatters. Love had
+succumbed to cold in the heart of a woman!
+
+Through the thick veils of irresistible sleep, the major soon saw the
+husband and wife as mere points or formless objects. The flames of the
+fire, those outstretched figures, the relentless cold, waiting, not
+three feet distant from that fugitive heat, became all a dream. One
+importunate thought terrified Philippe:
+
+“If I sleep, we shall all die; I will not sleep,” he said to himself.
+
+And yet he slept.
+
+A terrible clamor and an explosion awoke him an hour later. The sense
+of his duty, the peril of his friend, fell suddenly on his heart. He
+uttered a cry that was like a roar. He and his orderly were alone afoot.
+A sea of fire lay before them in the darkness of the night, licking up
+the cabins and the bivouacs; cries of despair, howls, and imprecations
+reached their ears; they saw against the flames thousands of human
+beings with agonized or furious faces. In the midst of that hell, a
+column of soldiers was forcing its way to the bridge, between two hedges
+of dead bodies.
+
+“It is the retreat of the rear-guard!” cried the major. “All hope is
+gone!”
+
+“I have saved your carriage, Philippe,” said a friendly voice.
+
+Turning round, de Sucy recognized the young aide-de-camp in the flaring
+of the flames.
+
+“Ah! all is lost!” replied the major, “they have eaten my horse; and how
+can I make this stupid general and his wife walk?”
+
+“Take a brand from the fire and threaten them.”
+
+“Threaten the countess!”
+
+“Good-bye,” said the aide-de-camp, “I have scarcely time to get across
+that fatal river--and I MUST; I have a mother in France. What a night!
+These poor wretches prefer to lie here in the snow; half will allow
+themselves to perish in those flames rather than rise and move on. It is
+four o’clock, Philippe! In two hours the Russians will begin to move.
+I assure you you will again see the Beresina choked with corpses.
+Philippe! think of yourself! You have no horses, you cannot carry the
+countess in your arms. Come--come with me!” he said urgently, pulling de
+Sucy by the arm.
+
+“My friend! abandon Stephanie!”
+
+De Sucy seized the countess, made her stand upright, shook her with the
+roughness of a despairing man, and compelled her to wake up. She looked
+at him with fixed, dead eyes.
+
+“You must walk, Stephanie, or we shall all die here.”
+
+For all answer the countess tried to drop again upon the snow and sleep.
+The aide-de-camp seized a brand from the fire and waved it in her face.
+
+“We will save her in spite of herself!” cried Philippe, lifting the
+countess and placing her in the carriage.
+
+He returned to implore the help of his friend. Together they lifted the
+old general, without knowing whether he were dead or alive, and put him
+beside his wife. The major then rolled over the men who were sleeping
+on his blankets, which he tossed into the carriage, together with some
+roasted fragments of his mare.
+
+“What do you mean to do?” asked the aide-de-camp.
+
+“Drag them.”
+
+“You are crazy.”
+
+“True,” said Philippe, crossing his arms in despair.
+
+Suddenly, he was seized by a last despairing thought.
+
+“To you,” he said, grasping the sound arm of his orderly, “I confide
+her for one hour. Remember that you must die sooner than let any one
+approach her.”
+
+The major then snatched up the countess’s diamonds, held them in one
+hand, drew his sabre with the other, and began to strike with the flat
+of its blade such of the sleepers as he thought the most intrepid. He
+succeeded in awaking the colossal grenadier, and two other men whose
+rank it was impossible to tell.
+
+“We are done for!” he said.
+
+“I know it,” said the grenadier, “but I don’t care.”
+
+“Well, death for death, wouldn’t you rather sell your life for a pretty
+woman, and take your chances of seeing France?”
+
+“I’d rather sleep,” said a man, rolling over on the snow, “and if you
+trouble me again, I’ll stick my bayonet into your stomach.”
+
+“What is the business, my colonel?” said the grenadier. “That man is
+drunk; he’s a Parisian; he likes his ease.”
+
+“That is yours, my brave grenadier,” cried the major, offering him a
+string of diamonds, “if you will follow me and fight like a madman.
+The Russians are ten minutes’ march from here; they have horses; we are
+going up to their first battery for a pair.”
+
+“But the sentinels?”
+
+“One of us three--” he interrupted himself, and turned to the
+aide-de-camp. “You will come, Hippolyte, won’t you?”
+
+Hippolyte nodded.
+
+“One of us,” continued the major, “will take care of the sentinel.
+Besides, perhaps they are asleep too, those cursed Russians.”
+
+“Forward! major, you’re a brave one! But you’ll give me a lift on your
+carriage?” said the grenadier.
+
+“Yes, if you don’t leave your skin up there--If I fall, Hippolyte, and
+you, grenadier, promise me to do your utmost to save the countess.”
+
+“Agreed!” cried the grenadier.
+
+They started for the Russian lines, toward one of the batteries which
+had so decimated the hapless wretches lying on the banks of the river.
+A few moments later, the gallop of two horses echoed over the snow, and
+the wakened artillery men poured out a volley which ranged above the
+heads of the sleeping men. The pace of the horses was so fleet that
+their steps resounded like the blows of a blacksmith on his anvil. The
+generous aide-de-camp was killed. The athletic grenadier was safe and
+sound. Philippe in defending Hippolyte had received a bayonet in his
+shoulder; but he clung to his horse’s mane, and clasped him so tightly
+with his knees that the animal was held as in a vice.
+
+“God be praised!” cried the major, finding his orderly untouched, and
+the carriage in its place.
+
+“If you are just, my officer, you will get me the cross for this,” said
+the man. “We’ve played a fine game of guns and sabres here, I can tell
+you.”
+
+“We have done nothing yet--Harness the horses. Take these ropes.”
+
+“They are not long enough.”
+
+“Grenadier, turn over those sleepers, and take their shawls and linen,
+to eke out.”
+
+“Tiens! that’s one dead,” said the grenadier, stripping the first man he
+came to. “Bless me! what a joke, they are all dead!”
+
+“All?”
+
+“Yes, all; seems as if horse-meat must be indigestible if eaten with
+snow.”
+
+The words made Philippe tremble. The cold was increasing.
+
+“My God! to lose the woman I have saved a dozen times!”
+
+The major shook the countess.
+
+“Stephanie! Stephanie!”
+
+The young woman opened her eyes.
+
+“Madame! we are saved.”
+
+“Saved!” she repeated, sinking down again.
+
+The horses were harnessed as best they could. The major, holding his
+sabre in his well hand, with his pistols in his belt, gathered up the
+reins with the other hand and mounted one horse while the grenadier
+mounted the other. The orderly, whose feet were frozen, was thrown
+inside the carriage, across the general and the countess. Excited by
+pricks from a sabre, the horses drew the carriage rapidly, with a sort
+of fury, to the plain, where innumerable obstacles awaited it. It was
+impossible to force a way without danger of crushing the sleeping men,
+women, and even children, who refused to move when the grenadier awoke
+them. In vain did Monsieur de Sucy endeavor to find the swathe cut
+by the rear-guard through the mass of human beings; it was already
+obliterated, like the wake of a vessel through the sea. They could only
+creep along, being often stopped by soldiers who threatened to kill
+their horses.
+
+“Do you want to reach the bridge?” said the grenadier.
+
+“At the cost of my life--at the cost of the whole world!”
+
+“Then forward, march! you can’t make omelets without breaking eggs.”
+
+And the grenadier of the guard urged the horses over men and bivouacs
+with bloody wheels and a double line of corpses on either side of them.
+We must do him the justice to say that he never spared his breath in
+shouting in stentorian tones,--
+
+“Look out there, carrion!”
+
+“Poor wretches!” cried the major.
+
+“Pooh! that or the cold, that or the cannon,” said the grenadier,
+prodding the horses, and urging them on.
+
+A catastrophe, which might well have happened to them much sooner, put a
+stop to their advance. The carriage was overturned.
+
+“I expected it,” cried the imperturbable grenadier. “Ho! ho! your man is
+dead.”
+
+“Poor Laurent!” said the major.
+
+“Laurent? Was he in the 5th chasseurs?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then he was my cousin. Oh, well, this dog’s life isn’t happy enough to
+waste any joy in grieving for him.”
+
+The carriage could not be raised; the horses were taken out with serious
+and, as it proved, irreparable loss of time. The shock of the overturn
+was so violent that the young countess, roused from her lethargy, threw
+off her coverings and rose.
+
+“Philippe, where are we?” she cried in a gentle voice, looking about
+her.
+
+“Only five hundred feet from the bridge. We are now going to cross the
+Beresina, Stephanie, and once across I will not torment you any more;
+you shall sleep; we shall be in safety, and can reach Wilna easily.--God
+grant that she may never know what her life has cost!” he thought.
+
+“Philippe! you are wounded!”
+
+“That is nothing.”
+
+Too late! the fatal hour had come. The Russian cannon sounded the
+reveille. Masters of Studzianka, they could sweep the plain, and by
+daylight the major could see two of their columns moving and forming
+on the heights. A cry of alarm arose from the multitude, who started
+to their feet in an instant. Every man now understood his danger
+instinctively, and the whole mass rushed to gain the bridge with the
+motion of a wave.
+
+The Russians came down with the rapidity of a conflagration. Men, women,
+children, horses,--all rushed tumultuously to the bridge. Fortunately
+the major, who was carrying the countess, was still some distance from
+it. General Eble had just set fire to the supports on the other bank. In
+spite of the warnings shouted to those who were rushing upon the bridge,
+not a soul went back. Not only did the bridge go down crowded with human
+beings, but the impetuosity of that flood of men toward the fatal bank
+was so furious that a mass of humanity poured itself violently into the
+river like an avalanche. Not a cry was heard; the only sound was like
+the dropping of monstrous stones into the water. Then the Beresina was a
+mass of floating corpses.
+
+The retrograde movement of those who now fell back into the plain
+to escape the death before them was so violent, and their concussion
+against those who were advancing from the rear so terrible, that numbers
+were smothered or trampled to death. The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres
+owed their lives to their carriage, behind which Philippe forced them,
+using it as a breastwork. As for the major and the grenadier, they found
+their safety in their strength. They killed to escape being killed.
+
+This hurricane of human beings, the flux and reflux of living bodies,
+had the effect of leaving for a few short moments the whole bank of the
+Beresina deserted. The multitude were surging to the plain. If a few men
+rushed to the river, it was less in the hope of reaching the other bank,
+which to them was France, than to rush from the horrors of Siberia.
+Despair proved an aegis to some bold hearts. One officer sprang
+from ice-cake to ice-cake, and reached the opposite shore. A soldier
+clambered miraculously over mounds of dead bodies and heaps of ice. The
+multitude finally comprehended that the Russians would not put to death
+a body of twenty thousand men, without arms, torpid, stupid, unable
+to defend themselves; and each man awaited his fate with horrible
+resignation. Then the major and the grenadier, the general and his wife,
+remained almost alone on the river bank, a few steps from the spot where
+the bridge had been. They stood there, with dry eyes, silent, surrounded
+by heaps of dead. A few sound soldiers, a few officers to whom the
+emergency had restored their natural energy, were near them. This group
+consisted of some fifty men in all. The major noticed at a distance
+of some two hundred yards the remains of another bridge intended for
+carriages and destroyed the day before.
+
+“Let us make a raft!” he cried.
+
+He had hardly uttered the words before the whole group rushed to the
+ruins, and began to pick up iron bolts, and screws, and pieces of wood
+and ropes, whatever materials they could find that were suitable for
+the construction of a raft. A score of soldiers and officers, who were
+armed, formed a guard, commanded by the major, to protect the workers
+against the desperate attacks which might be expected from the crowd,
+if their scheme was discovered. The instinct of freedom, strong in all
+prisoners, inspiring them to miraculous acts, can only be compared with
+that which now drove to action these unfortunate Frenchmen.
+
+“The Russians! the Russians are coming!” cried the defenders to the
+workers; and the work went on, the raft increased in length and breadth
+and depth. Generals, soldiers, colonel, all put their shoulders to the
+wheel; it was a true image of the building of Noah’s ark. The young
+countess, seated beside her husband, watched the progress of the work
+with regret that she could not help it; and yet she did assist in making
+knots to secure the cordage.
+
+At last the raft was finished. Forty men launched it on the river, a
+dozen others holding the cords which moored it to the shore. But no
+sooner had the builders seen their handiwork afloat, than they sprang
+from the bank with odious selfishness. The major, fearing the fury of
+this first rush, held back the countess and the general, but too late
+he saw the whole raft covered, men pressing together like crowds at a
+theatre.
+
+“Savages!” he cried, “it was I who gave you the idea of that raft. I
+have saved you, and you deny me a place.”
+
+A confused murmur answered him. The men at the edge of the raft, armed
+with long sticks, pressed with violence against the shore to send off
+the frail construction with sufficient impetus to force its way through
+corpses and ice-floes to the other shore.
+
+“Thunder of heaven! I’ll sweep you into the water if you don’t take the
+major and his two companions,” cried the stalwart grenadier, who swung
+his sabre, stopped the departure, and forced the men to stand closer in
+spite of furious outcries.
+
+“I shall fall,”--“I am falling,”--“Push off! push off!--Forward!”
+ resounded on all sides.
+
+The major looked with haggard eyes at Stephanie, who lifted hers to
+heaven with a feeling of sublime resignation.
+
+“To die with thee!” she said.
+
+There was something even comical in the position of the men in
+possession of the raft. Though they were uttering awful groans and
+imprecations, they dared not resist the grenadier, for in truth they
+were so closely packed together, that a push to one man might send half
+of them overboard. This danger was so pressing that a cavalry captain
+endeavored to get rid of the grenadier; but the latter, seeing the
+hostile movement of the officer, seized him round the waist and flung
+him into the water, crying out,--
+
+“Ha! ha! my duck, do you want to drink? Well, then, drink!--Here are
+two places,” he cried. “Come, major, toss me the little woman and follow
+yourself. Leave that old fossil, who’ll be dead by to-morrow.”
+
+“Make haste!” cried the voice of all, as one man.
+
+“Come, major, they are grumbling, and they have a right to do so.”
+
+The Comte de Vandieres threw off his wrappings and showed himself in his
+general’s uniform.
+
+“Let us save the count,” said Philippe.
+
+Stephanie pressed his hand, and throwing herself on his breast, she
+clasped him tightly.
+
+“Adieu!” she said.
+
+They had understood each other.
+
+The Comte de Vandieres recovered sufficient strength and presence of
+mind to spring upon the raft, whither Stephanie followed him, after
+turning a last look to Philippe.
+
+“Major! will you take my place? I don’t care a fig for life,” cried the
+grenadier. “I’ve neither wife nor child nor mother.”
+
+“I confide them to your care,” said the major, pointing to the count and
+his wife.
+
+“Then be easy; I’ll care for them, as though they were my very eyes.”
+
+The raft was now sent off with so much violence toward the opposite side
+of the river, that as it touched ground, the shock was felt by all. The
+count, who was at the edge of it, lost his balance and fell into the
+river; as he fell, a cake of sharp ice caught him, and cut off his head,
+flinging it to a great distance.
+
+“See there! major!” cried the grenadier.
+
+“Adieu!” said a woman’s voice.
+
+Philippe de Sucy fell to the ground, overcome with horror and fatigue.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE CURE
+
+
+“My poor niece became insane,” continued the physician, after a few
+moment’s silence. “Ah! monsieur,” he said, seizing the marquis’s hand,
+“life has been awful indeed for that poor little woman, so young,
+so delicate! After being, by dreadful fatality, separated from the
+grenadier, whose name was Fleuriot, she was dragged about for two years
+at the heels of the army, the plaything of a crowd of wretches. She
+was often, they tell me, barefooted, and scarcely clothed; for months
+together, she had no care, no food but what she could pick up; sometimes
+kept in hospitals, sometimes driven away like an animal, God alone knows
+the horrors that poor unfortunate creature has survived. She was
+locked up in a madhouse, in a little town in Germany, at the time
+her relatives, thinking her dead, divided her property. In 1816, the
+grenadier Fleuriot was at an inn in Strasburg, where she went after
+making her escape from the madhouse. Several peasants told the grenadier
+that she had lived for a whole month in the forest, where they had
+tracked her in vain, trying to catch her, but she had always escaped
+them. I was then staying a few miles from Strasburg. Hearing much talk
+of a wild woman caught in the woods, I felt a desire to ascertain the
+truth of the ridiculous stories which were current about her. What were
+my feelings on beholding my own niece! Fleuriot told me all he knew of
+her dreadful history. I took the poor man with my niece back to my home
+in Auvergne, where, unfortunately, I lost him some months later. He had
+some slight control over Madame de Vandieres; he alone could induce her
+to wear clothing. ‘Adieu,’ that word, which is her only language, she
+seldom uttered at that time. Fleuriot had endeavored to awaken in her a
+few ideas, a few memories of the past; but he failed; all that he gained
+was to make her say that melancholy word a little oftener. Still, the
+grenadier knew how to amuse her and play with her; my hope was in him,
+but--”
+
+He was silent for a moment.
+
+“Here,” he continued, “she has found another creature, with whom
+she seems to have some strange understanding. It is a poor idiotic
+peasant-girl, who, in spite of her ugliness and stupidity, loved a man,
+a mason. The mason was willing to marry her, as she had some property.
+Poor Genevieve was happy for a year; she dressed in her best to dance
+with her lover on Sunday; she comprehended love; in her heart and soul
+there was room for that one sentiment. But the mason, Dallot, reflected.
+He found a girl with all her senses, and more land than Genevieve,
+and he deserted the poor creature. Since then she has lost the little
+intellect that love developed in her; she can do nothing but watch the
+cows, or help at harvesting. My niece and this poor girl are friends,
+apparently by some invisible chain of their common destiny, by
+the sentiment in each which has caused their madness. See!” added
+Stephanie’s uncle, leading the marquis to a window.
+
+The latter then saw the countess seated on the ground between
+Genevieve’s legs. The peasant-girl, armed with a huge horn comb, was
+giving her whole attention to the work of disentangling the long black
+hair of the poor countess, who was uttering little stifled cries,
+expressive of some instinctive sense of pleasure. Monsieur d’Albon
+shuddered as he saw the utter abandonment of the body, the careless
+animal ease which revealed in the hapless woman a total absence of soul.
+
+“Philippe, Philippe!” he muttered, “the past horrors are nothing!--Is
+there no hope?” he asked.
+
+The old physician raised his eyes to heaven.
+
+“Adieu, monsieur,” said the marquis, pressing his hand. “My friend is
+expecting me. He will soon come to you.”
+
+“Then it was really she!” cried de Sucy at d’Albon’s first words. “Ah!
+I still doubted it,” he added, a few tears falling from his eyes, which
+were habitually stern.
+
+“Yes, it is the Comtesse de Vandieres,” replied the marquis.
+
+The colonel rose abruptly from his bed and began to dress.
+
+“Philippe!” cried his friend, “are you mad?”
+
+“I am no longer ill,” replied the colonel, simply. “This news has
+quieted my suffering. What pain can I feel when I think of Stephanie? I
+am going to the Bons-Hommes, to see her, speak to her, cure her. She is
+free. Well, happiness will smile upon us--or Providence is not in
+this world. Think you that that poor woman could hear my voice and not
+recover reason?”
+
+“She has already seen you and not recognized you,” said his friend,
+gently, for he felt the danger of Philippe’s excited hopes, and tried to
+cast a salutary doubt upon them.
+
+The colonel quivered; then he smiled, and made a motion of incredulity.
+No one dared to oppose his wish, and within a very short time he reached
+the old priory.
+
+“Where is she?” he cried, on arriving.
+
+“Hush!” said her uncle, “she is sleeping. See, here she is.”
+
+Philippe then saw the poor insane creature lying on a bench in the sun.
+Her head was protected from the heat by a forest of hair which fell in
+tangled locks over her face. Her arms hung gracefully to the ground; her
+body lay easily posed like that of a doe; her feet were folded under her
+without effort; her bosom rose and fell at regular intervals; her skin,
+her complexion, had that porcelain whiteness, which we admire so much in
+the clear transparent faces of children. Standing motionless beside
+her, Genevieve held in her hand a branch which Stephanie had doubtless
+climbed a tall poplar to obtain, and the poor idiot was gently waving
+it above her sleeping companion, to chase away the flies and cool the
+atmosphere.
+
+The peasant-woman gazed at Monsieur Fanjat and the colonel; then, like
+an animal which recognizes its master, she turned her head slowly to
+the countess, and continued to watch her, without giving any sign
+of surprise or intelligence. The air was stifling; the stone bench
+glittered in the sunlight; the meadow exhaled to heaven those impish
+vapors which dance and dart above the herbage like silvery dust; but
+Genevieve seemed not to feel this all-consuming heat.
+
+The colonel pressed the hand of the doctor violently in his own. Tears
+rolled from his eyes along his manly cheeks, and fell to the earth at
+the feet of his Stephanie.
+
+“Monsieur,” said the uncle, “for two years past, my heart is broken day
+by day. Soon you will be like me. You may not always weep, but you will
+always feel your sorrow.”
+
+The two men understood each other; and again, pressing each other’s
+hands, they remained motionless, contemplating the exquisite calmness
+which sleep had cast upon that graceful creature. From time to time
+she gave a sigh, and that sigh, which had all the semblance of
+sensibilities, made the unhappy colonel tremble with hope.
+
+“Alas!” said Monsieur Fanjat, “do not deceive yourself, monsieur; there
+is no meaning in her sigh.”
+
+Those who have ever watched for hours with delight the sleep of one
+who is tenderly beloved, whose eyes will smile to them at waking, can
+understand the sweet yet terrible emotion that shook the colonel’s soul.
+To him, this sleep was an illusion; the waking might be death, death in
+its most awful form. Suddenly, a little goat jumped in three bounds to
+the bench, and smelt at Stephanie, who waked at the sound. She sprang to
+her feet, but so lightly that the movement did not frighten the freakish
+animal; then she caught sight of Philippe, and darted away, followed by
+her four-footed friend, to a hedge of elders; there she uttered the same
+little cry like a frightened bird, which the two men had heard near the
+other gate. Then she climbed an acacia, and nestling into its tufted
+top, she watched the stranger with the inquisitive attention of the
+forest birds.
+
+“Adieu, adieu, adieu,” she said, without the soul communicating one
+single intelligent inflexion to the word.
+
+It was uttered impassively, as the bird sings his note.
+
+“She does not recognize me!” cried the colonel, in despair. “Stephanie!
+it is Philippe, thy Philippe, PHILIPPE!”
+
+And the poor soldier went to the acacia; but when he was a few steps
+from it, the countess looked at him, as if defying him, although a
+slight expression of fear seemed to flicker in her eye; then, with a
+single bound she sprang from the acacia to a laburnum, and thence to a
+Norway fir, where she darted from branch to branch with extraordinary
+agility.
+
+“Do not pursue her,” said Monsieur Fanjat to the colonel, “or you will
+arouse an aversion which might become insurmountable. I will help you to
+tame her and make her come to you. Let us sit on this bench. If you pay
+no attention to her, she will come of her own accord to examine you.”
+
+“SHE! not to know me! to flee me!” repeated the colonel, seating himself
+on a bench with his back to a tree that shaded it, and letting his head
+fall upon his breast.
+
+The doctor said nothing. Presently, the countess came gently down the
+fir-tree, letting herself swing easily on the branches, as the wind
+swayed them. At each branch she stopped to examine the stranger; but
+seeing him motionless, she at last sprang to the ground and came slowly
+towards him across the grass. When she reached a tree about ten feet
+distant, against which she leaned, Monsieur Fanjat said to the colonel
+in a low voice,--
+
+“Take out, adroitly, from my right hand pocket some lumps of sugar
+you will feel there. Show them to her, and she will come to us. I will
+renounce in your favor my sole means of giving her pleasure. With sugar,
+which she passionately loves, you will accustom her to approach you, and
+to know you again.”
+
+“When she was a woman,” said Philippe, sadly, “she had no taste for
+sweet things.”
+
+When the colonel showed her the lump of sugar, holding it between the
+thumb and forefinger of his right hand, she again uttered her little
+wild cry, and sprang toward him; then she stopped, struggling against
+the instinctive fear he caused her; she looked at the sugar and turned
+away her head alternately, precisely like a dog whose master forbids him
+to touch his food until he has said a letter of the alphabet which he
+slowly repeats. At last the animal desire triumphed over fear. Stephanie
+darted to Philippe, cautiously putting out her little brown hand to
+seize the prize, touched the fingers of her poor lover as she snatched
+the sugar, and fled away among the trees. This dreadful scene overcame
+the colonel; he burst into tears and rushed into the house.
+
+“Has love less courage than friendship?” Monsieur Fanjat said to him.
+“I have some hope, Monsieur le baron. My poor niece was in a far worse
+state than that in which you now find her.”
+
+“How was that possible?” cried Philippe.
+
+“She went naked,” replied the doctor.
+
+The colonel made a gesture of horror and turned pale. The doctor saw in
+that sudden pallor alarming symptoms; he felt the colonel’s pulse, found
+him in a violent fever, and half persuaded, half compelled him to go to
+bed. Then he gave him a dose of opium to ensure a calm sleep.
+
+Eight days elapsed, during which Colonel de Sucy struggled against
+mortal agony; tears no longer came to his eyes. His soul, often
+lacerated, could not harden itself to the sight of Stephanie’s insanity;
+but he covenanted, so to speak, with his cruel situation, and found some
+assuaging of his sorrow. He had the courage to slowly tame the countess
+by bringing her sweetmeats; he took such pains in choosing them, and he
+learned so well how to keep the little conquests he sought to make upon
+her instincts--that last shred of her intellect--that he ended by making
+her much TAMER than she had ever been.
+
+Every morning he went into the park, and if, after searching for her
+long, he could not discover on what tree she was swaying, nor the covert
+in which she crouched to play with a bird, nor the roof on which she
+might have clambered, he would whistle the well-known air of “Partant
+pour la Syrie,” to which some tender memory of their love attached.
+Instantly, Stephanie would run to him with the lightness of a fawn. She
+was now so accustomed to see him, that he frightened her no longer. Soon
+she was willing to sit upon his knee, and clasp him closely with her
+thin and agile arm. In that attitude--so dear to lovers!--Philippe would
+feed her with sugarplums. Then, having eaten those that he gave her, she
+would often search his pockets with gestures that had all the mechanical
+velocity of a monkey’s motions. When she was very sure there was nothing
+more, she looked at Philippe with clear eyes, without ideas, with
+recognition. Then she would play with him, trying at times to take off
+his boots to see his feet, tearing his gloves, putting on his hat; she
+would even let him pass his hands through her hair, and take her in his
+arms; she accepted, but without pleasure, his ardent kisses. She would
+look at him silently, without emotion, when his tears flowed; but she
+always understood his “Partant pour la Syrie,” when he whistled it,
+though he never succeeded in teaching her to say her own name Stephanie.
+
+Philippe was sustained in his agonizing enterprise by hope, which never
+abandoned him. When, on fine autumn mornings, he found the countess
+sitting peacefully on a bench, beneath a poplar now yellowing, the poor
+lover would sit at her feet, looking into her eyes as long as she
+would let him, hoping ever that the light that was in them would become
+intelligent. Sometimes the thought deluded him that he saw those hard
+immovable rays softening, vibrating, living, and he cried out,--
+
+“Stephanie! Stephanie! thou hearest me, thou seest me!”
+
+But she listened to that cry as to a noise, the soughing of the wind
+in the tree-tops, or the lowing of the cow on the back of which she
+climbed. Then the colonel would wring his hands in despair,--despair
+that was new each day.
+
+One evening, under a calm sky, amid the silence and peace of that rural
+haven, the doctor saw, from a distance, that the colonel was loading his
+pistols. The old man felt then that the young man had ceased to hope;
+he felt the blood rushing to his heart, and if he conquered the vertigo
+that threatened him, it was because he would rather see his niece living
+and mad than dead. He hastened up.
+
+“What are you doing?” he said.
+
+“That is for me,” replied the colonel, pointing to a pistol already
+loaded, which was lying on the bench; “and this is for her,” he added,
+as he forced the wad into the weapon he held.
+
+The countess was lying on the ground beside him, playing with the balls.
+
+“Then you do not know,” said the doctor, coldly, concealing his terror,
+“that in her sleep last night she called you: Philippe!”
+
+“She called me!” cried the baron, dropping his pistol, which Stephanie
+picked up. He took it from her hastily, caught up the one that was on
+the bench, and rushed away.
+
+“Poor darling!” said the doctor, happy in the success of his lie. He
+pressed the poor creature to his breast, and continued speaking to
+himself: “He would have killed thee, selfish man! because he suffers. He
+does not love thee for thyself, my child! But we forgive, do we not? He
+is mad, out of his senses, but thou art only senseless. No, God alone
+should call thee to Him. We think thee unhappy, we pity thee because
+thou canst not share our sorrows, fools that we are!--But,” he said,
+sitting down and taking her on his knee, “nothing troubles thee; thy
+life is like that of a bird, of a fawn--”
+
+As he spoke she darted upon a young blackbird which was hopping near
+them, caught it with a little note of satisfaction, strangled it, looked
+at it, dead in her hand, and flung it down at the foot of a tree without
+a thought.
+
+The next day, as soon as it was light, the colonel came down into the
+gardens, and looked about for Stephanie,--he believed in the coming
+happiness. Not finding her he whistled. When his darling came to him, he
+took her on his arm; they walked together thus for the first time, and
+he led her within a group of trees, the autumn foliage of which
+was dropping to the breeze. The colonel sat down. Of her own accord
+Stephanie placed herself on his knee. Philippe trembled with joy.
+
+“Love,” he said, kissing her hands passionately, “I am Philippe.”
+
+She looked at him with curiosity.
+
+“Come,” he said, pressing her to him, “dost thou feel my heart? It has
+beaten for thee alone. I love thee ever. Philippe is not dead; he is
+not dead, thou art on him, in his arms. Thou art MY Stephanie; I am thy
+Philippe.”
+
+“Adieu,” she said, “adieu.”
+
+The colonel quivered, for he fancied he saw his own excitement
+communicated to his mistress. His heart-rending cry, drawn from him by
+despair, that last effort of an eternal love, of a delirious passion,
+was successful, the mind of his darling was awaking.
+
+“Ah! Stephanie! Stephanie! we shall yet be happy.”
+
+She gave a cry of satisfaction, and her eyes brightened with a flash of
+vague intelligence.
+
+“She knows me!--Stephanie!”
+
+His heart swelled; his eyelids were wet with tears. Then, suddenly, the
+countess showed him a bit of sugar she had found in his pocket while
+he was speaking to her. He had mistaken for human thought the amount
+of reason required for a monkey’s trick. Philippe dropped to the ground
+unconscious. Monsieur Fanjat found the countess sitting on the colonel’s
+body. She was biting her sugar, and testifying her pleasure by pretty
+gestures and affectations with which, had she her reason, she might have
+imitated her parrot or her cat.
+
+“Ah! my friend,” said Philippe, when he came to his senses, “I die every
+day, every moment! I love too well! I could still bear all, if, in
+her madness, she had kept her woman’s nature. But to see her always a
+savage, devoid even of modesty, to see her--”
+
+“You want opera madness, do you? something picturesque and pleasing,”
+ said the doctor, bitterly. “Your love and your devotion yield before
+a prejudice. Monsieur, I have deprived myself for your sake of the sad
+happiness of watching over my niece; I have left to you the pleasure of
+playing with her; I have kept for myself the heaviest cares. While you
+have slept, I have watched, I have--Go, monsieur, go! abandon her! leave
+this sad refuge. I know how to live with that dear darling creature; I
+comprehend her madness, I watch her gestures, I know her secrets. Some
+day you will thank me for thus sending you away.”
+
+The colonel left the old monastery, never to return but once. The doctor
+was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his guest,
+whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if either of the
+two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he not bear alone
+the burden of their dreadful sorrow?
+
+After the colonel’s departure the doctor kept himself informed about
+him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
+Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had formed
+a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his darling.
+Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in preparing for
+his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park and inundated
+during the winter the marshes on either side of it, giving it some
+resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the heights
+above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror. The colonel
+collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of his memory, he
+copied in his park the shore where General Eble destroyed the bridge.
+He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned them, leaving their
+charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water from shore to shore.
+Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like those of which the raft
+was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and clothing of every grade,
+and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them; he erected huts and cabins
+for the purpose of burning them. In short, he forgot nothing that might
+recall that most awful of all scenes, and he succeeded.
+
+Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
+white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the Beresina.
+This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his army
+comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur
+de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation,
+which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity.
+
+Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
+counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse de
+Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like those he
+had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian outposts.
+He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same weapons, as on
+the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow, also his hair,
+which was tangled and matted, and his face was neglected, so that
+nothing might be wanting to represent the awful truth.
+
+“I can guess your purpose,” cried Monsieur Fanjat, when he saw the
+colonel getting out of the carriage. “If you want to succeed, do not
+let my niece see you in that equipage. To-night I will give her opium.
+During her sleep, we will dress her as she was at Studzianka, and place
+her in the carriage. I will follow you in another vehicle.”
+
+About two in the morning, the sleeping countess was placed in the
+carriage and wrapped in heavy coverings. A few peasants with torches
+lighted up this strange abduction. Suddenly, a piercing cry broke the
+silence of the night. Philippe and the doctor turned, and saw Genevieve
+coming half-naked from the ground-floor room in which she slept.
+
+“Adieu, adieu! all is over, adieu!” she cried, weeping hot tears.
+
+“Genevieve, what troubles you?” asked the doctor.
+
+Genevieve shook her head with a motion of despair, raised her arm to
+heaven, looked at the carriage, uttering a long-drawn moan with every
+sign of the utmost terror; then she returned to her room silently.
+
+“That is a good omen!” cried the colonel. “She feels she is to lose her
+companion. Perhaps she SEES that Stephanie will recover her reason.”
+
+“God grant it!” said Monsieur Fanjat, who himself was affected by the
+incident.
+
+Ever since he had made a close study of insanity, the good man had
+met with many examples of the prophetic faculty and the gift of second
+sight, proofs of which are frequently given by alienated minds, and
+which may also be found, so travellers say, among certain tribes of
+savages.
+
+As the colonel had calculated, Stephanie crossed the fictitious plain of
+the Beresina at nine o’clock in the morning, when she was awakened by a
+cannon shot not a hundred yards from the spot where the experiment was
+to be tried. This was a signal. Hundreds of peasants made a frightful
+clamor like that on the shore of the river that memorable night, when
+twenty thousand stragglers were doomed to death or slavery by their own
+folly.
+
+At the cry, at the shot, the countess sprang from the carriage, and ran,
+with delirious emotion, over the snow to the banks of the river; she saw
+the burned bivouacs and the charred remains of the bridge, and the fatal
+raft, which the men were launching into the icy waters of the Beresina.
+The major, Philippe, was there, striking back the crowd with his sabre.
+Madame de Vandieres gave a cry, which went to all hearts, and threw
+herself before the colonel, whose heart beat wildly. She seemed to
+gather herself together, and, at first, looked vaguely at the singular
+scene. For an instant, as rapid as the lightning’s flash, her eyes had
+that lucidity, devoid of mind, which we admire in the eye of birds; then
+passing her hand across her brow with the keen expression of one who
+meditates, she contemplated the living memory of a past scene spread
+before her, and, turning quickly to Philippe, she SAW HIM. An awful
+silence reigned in the crowd. The colonel gasped, but dared not speak;
+the doctor wept. Stephanie’s sweet face colored faintly; then, from tint
+to tint, it returned to the brightness of youth, till it glowed with
+a beautiful crimson. Life and happiness, lighted by intelligence, came
+nearer and nearer like a conflagration. Convulsive trembling rose from
+her feet to her heart. Then these phenomena seemed to blend in one as
+Stephanie’s eyes cast forth a celestial ray, the flame of a living
+soul. She lived, she thought! She shuddered, with fear perhaps, for God
+himself unloosed that silent tongue, and cast anew His fires into that
+long-extinguished soul. Human will came with its full electric torrent,
+and vivified the body from which it had been driven.
+
+“Stephanie!” cried the colonel.
+
+“Oh! it is Philippe,” said the poor countess.
+
+She threw herself into the trembling arms that the colonel held out to
+her, and the clasp of the lovers frightened the spectators. Stephanie
+burst into tears. Suddenly her tears stopped, she stiffened as though
+the lightning had touched her, and said in a feeble voice,--
+
+“Adieu, Philippe; I love thee, adieu!”
+
+“Oh! she is dead,” cried the colonel, opening his arms.
+
+The old doctor received the inanimate body of his niece, kissed it as
+though he were a young man, and carrying it aside, sat down with it
+still in his arms on a pile of wood. He looked at the countess and
+placed his feeble trembling hand upon her heart. That heart no longer
+beat.
+
+“It is true,” he said, looking up at the colonel, who stood motionless,
+and then at Stephanie, on whom death was placing that resplendent
+beauty, that fugitive halo, which is, perhaps, a pledge of the glorious
+future--“Yes, she is dead.”
+
+“Ah! that smile,” cried Philippe, “do you see that smile? Can it be
+true?”
+
+“She is turning cold,” replied Monsieur Fanjat.
+
+Monsieur de Sucy made a few steps to tear himself away from the sight;
+but he stopped, whistled the air that Stephanie had known, and when she
+did not come to him, went on with staggering steps like a drunken man,
+still whistling, but never turning back.
+
+General Philippe de Sucy was thought in the social world to be a very
+agreeable man, and above all a very gay one. A few days ago, a lady
+complimented him on his good humor, and the charming equability of his
+nature.
+
+“Ah! madame,” he said, “I pay dear for my liveliness in my lonely
+evenings.”
+
+“Are you ever alone?” she said.
+
+“No,” he replied smiling.
+
+If a judicious observer of human nature could have seen at that moment
+the expression on the Comte de Sucy’s face, he would perhaps have
+shuddered.
+
+“Why don’t you marry?” said the lady, who had several daughters at
+school. “You are rich, titled, and of ancient lineage; you have talents,
+and a great future before you; all things smile upon you.”
+
+“Yes,” he said, “but a smile kills me.”
+
+The next day the lady heard with great astonishment that Monsieur de
+Sucy had blown his brains out during the night. The upper ranks of
+society talked in various ways over this extraordinary event, and each
+person looked for the cause of it. According to the proclivities of each
+reasoner, play, love, ambition, hidden disorders, and vices, explained
+the catastrophe, the last scene of a drama begun in 1812. Two men alone,
+a marquis and former deputy, and an aged physician, knew that Philippe
+de Sucy was one of those strong men to whom God has given the unhappy
+power of issuing daily in triumph from awful combats which they fight
+with an unseen monster. If, for a moment, God withdraws from such men
+His all-powerful hand, they succumb.
+
+
+
+
+ADDENDUM
+
+The following personage appears in other stories of the Human Comedy.
+
+Note: Adieu is also entitled Farewell.
+
+     Granville, Vicomte de
+       The Gondreville Mystery
+       A Second Home
+       Farewell (Adieu)
+       Cesar Birotteau
+       Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life
+       A Daughter of Eve
+       Cousin Pons
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Adieu, by Honore de Balzac
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