The Chartreuse of Parma. Stendhal
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seize your feet, you were drawn gently over your horse’s tail, and were left sitting on the ground.”
“Why is it,” wondered Fabrizio, “that they keep going over things which we all know perfectly well!” He had not yet learned that this is the method whereby the humbler folk in France think a matter out.
“How much money have you?” inquired the cantinière of him. Fabrizio answered unhesitatingly; he was sure of this woman’s noble-heartedness—that is the finest side of the French character.
“I may have about thirty napoleons in gold, and eight or ten five-franc pieces, altogether.”
“In that case your course is clear,” cried the cantinière. “Get yourself out of this routed army, turn off to one side, take the first tolerable road you can find on the right, ride steadily forward, away from the army always. Buy yourself civilian clothes at the first opportunity. When you are eight or ten leagues off, and you see no more soldiers about you, take post-horses, get to some good town, and rest there for a week, and eat good beefsteaks. Never tell any one that you have been with the army; the gendarmes would take you up at once as a deserter, and, nice fellow as you are, my boy, you are not sharp enough yet to take in the gendarmes. Once you have civilian clothes upon your back, tear your route papers into little bits, and take back your real name. Say you’re Vasi—and where should he say he comes from?” she added, appealing to the corporal.
“From Cambray, on the Scheldt—it’s a good old town, very small, do you hear? with a cathedral—and Fénelon.”
“That’s it,” said the cantinière, “and never let out that you’ve been in the battle, never breathe a word about B⸺ nor the gendarme who sold you the papers. When you want to get back to Paris, go first of all to Versailles, and get into the city from that side, just dawdling along on your feet as if you were out for a walk. Sew your money into your trousers, and when you have to pay for anything, mind you only show just the money you need for that. What worries me is that you’ll be made a fool of, and you’ll be stripped of everything you have. And what is to become of you without money, seeing you don’t even know how to behave?”
The good woman talked on and on, the corporal backing her opinions by nodding his head, for she gave him no chance of getting in a word. Suddenly the crowd upon the high-road quickened its pace, and then, like a flash, it crossed the little ditch on the left-hand side and fled at full speed.
“The Cossacks, the Cossacks!” rang out on every side.
“Take back your horse,” cried the cantinière.
“God forbid!” said Fabrizio. “Gallop! be off! I give him to you. Do you want money to buy another little cart? Half of what I have is yours.”
“Take back your horse, I say,” said the good woman in a rage, and she tried to get off. Fabrizio drew his sword. “Hold on tight!” he cried, and he struck the horse two or three times with the flat of the blade. It broke into a gallop and followed the fugitives.
Our hero looked at the high-road. Only a few minutes before it had been crowded with some two or three thousand people, packed like peasants in a religious procession.
Since that cry of “Cossacks” there was not a soul upon it. The fugitives had thrown away their shakos, their muskets, and their swords.
Fabrizio, thoroughly astonished, climbed about twenty or thirty feet into a field on the right of the road; thence he looked up and down the high-road and across the plain. There was not a sign of any Cossack. “Queer people, these Frenchmen,” said he to himself. Then he went on: “As I am to go to the right, I may as well start at once. These people may have had some reason for bolting which I don’t know.” He picked up a musket, made sure it was loaded, shook the powder in the priming, cleaned the flint, then chose himself a well-filled cartridge pouch and looked all round him again. He stood literally alone in the middle of the plain, which had lately been so packed with people. In the far distance he saw the fugitives still running along and beginning to disappear behind the trees. “This really is very odd,” he said. And remembering the corporal’s manœuvre on the preceding night, he went and sat down in the middle of a cornfield. He would not go far away, because he hoped to rejoin his friends the corporal and the cantinière.
Sitting in the corn, he discovered he had only eighteen napoleons left, instead of thirty, but he had a few little diamonds which he had hidden in the lining of his hussar boots on the morning of his parting with the jailer’s wife. He concealed his gold pieces as best he could, and pondered deeply the while over this sudden disappearance of his fellow-travellers.
“Is it a bad omen for me?” he wondered. His chief vexation was that he had not asked Corporal Aubry the following question: “Have I really been in a battle?” He thought he had, and he would have been perfectly happy if he could have been quite certain of it.
“In any case,” he said, “I was present at it under a prisoner’s name, and I had the prisoner’s route papers in my pocket, and even his coat upon my back. All that is fatal for my future. What would Father Blanès have said of it? And that unlucky Boulot died in prison, too. It all looks very ominous. My destiny will lead me to a prison!” Fabrizio would have given anything in the world to know whether Boulot had really been guilty. He had a recollection that the jailer’s wife had told him the hussar had been locked up, not only for stealing spoons and forks, but for having robbed a peasant of his cow, and further beaten the said peasant unmercifully. He had no doubt that he himself would some day find himself in prison for misdoings of the same nature as those of the hussar. He thought of his friend the priest. What would he not have given to be able to consult him! Then he recollected that he had not written to his aunt since he left Paris. “Poor Gina!” he said, and the tears rose to his eyes. All at once he heard a slight noise close to him. It was a soldier feeding three horses, whose bridles he had removed and who seemed half dead with hunger, on the growing corn.
He was holding them by the snaffle. Fabrizio flew up like a partridge, and the soldier was startled. Our hero, perceiving it, could not resist the pleasure of playing the hussar for a moment. “Fellow,” he shouted, “one of those horses is mine, but I will give you five francs for the trouble you’ve taken to bring it to me!” “I wish you may get it,” said the soldier. Fabrizio, who was within six paces, levelled his musket at him. “Give up the horse, or I’ll blow your brains out!” The soldier had his musket slung behind him; he twisted his shoulder back to get at it. “If you stir a step you’re a dead man!” shouted Fabrizio, rushing at him. “Well, well! hand over the five francs, and take one of the horses,” said the soldier, rather crestfallen, after glancing regretfully up and down the road, on which not a soul was to be seen. Fabrizio, with his gun still raised in his left hand, threw him three five-franc pieces with the right. “Get down, or you’re a dead man! Put the bit on the black horse, and move off with the others. I’ll blow your brains out if you shuffle!” With an evil glance the man obeyed. Fabrizio came close to the horse and slipped the bridle over his left arm without taking his eyes off the soldier, who was slinking slowly away. When he saw he was about fifty paces off our hero sprang upon the horse’s back. He had hardly got into the saddle, and his foot was still searching for the right stirrup, when a bullet whistled close beside his head; it was the soldier who had fired his musket at him. Fabrizio, in a fury, galloped toward him. He took to his heels, and was soon galloping away on one of his horses. “Well, he’s out of range now,” said Fabrizio to himself. The horse he had just bought was a splendid animal, but it seemed to be almost starving. Fabrizio went back to the high-road, which was still quite deserted; he crossed it, and trotted on toward a little undulation in the ground on the left, where he hoped he might find the cantinière, but when he reached the top of the tiny eminence he could only see a few scattered soldiers more than a league away. He sighed. “It is written,” he said, “that I am never to see that good kind woman again!” He went to a farm which he had noticed in the distance, on the right of the road. Without dismounting he fed his poor horse with oats, which he paid for beforehand. It was so starving that it actually bit at the manger. An hour later he was trotting along the high-road, still in the vague hope that he might find the cantinière,