When it had passed he felt better. He lay there for nearly an hour without moving, his eyes open but unfocused. He got up and cleaned himself again. He wandered around his room for a few moments, unsure of what he wanted to do. Aimless, always aimless. It was still early, just after midnight. Sleep would not come again, not without the bottle. He looked at it on the dresser and reached for it but then stopped. The thought of more made him nauseous. Extraordinary. Even I have had enough.
He stopped in front of the mantel, where his sword had always hung, the sword with the ivory handle and eagle’s head. The weapon had belonged to his father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather before that. Its long blade had shed the blood of the enemies of France at Waterloo, and in the Crimea. It had shed the blood of the sons of France, during the Great Revolution. He himself had carried it on three continents. For all the flesh and bone the sword had carved, its blade had always gleamed razor-sharp, ready to bring honor to the man who wore it.
Now there was an empty spot where it had hung. He had lost the sword, like so much else, to Delescluze.
He had another sword, one that had been presented to him after the Italian campaign. He took it from its wooden box in the closet, and sat in the chair by the window. He had a view out through the great stand of chestnut trees that ran down the long drive toward the river. A crescent moon gave just enough light that he could see the naked branches stirring in the breeze. The leaves had all fallen and the trees were barren, ready for their white mantle of winter. He pulled open the window. The wind was cold and filled the room with the late autumn night. The papers on the dresser blew off in a flurry. It was quiet outside, peaceful. He sat there for hours without moving, his head aching horribly but clearing with time.
He found himself holding the toy soldier Paul had made him a lifetime ago. From the day Paul gave it to him in the train station he had kept it with him. While it had been in his pocket an empire had fallen and Delescluze had worked his demented scheme. It had been his companion in a cell, and had seen his career die, and his marriage. He turned it over and over, the little soldier with a twig where its arm should have been and a walnut shell for a helmet and buttons painted down the front. The soldier gave him its silly grin. Jules had gotten fond of looking at it, that grin, and over time the face had taken on character, and had its own stories to tell. The piece of wood he had received from his son had become something more with time. Paul had done a wonderful job with it.
The hours passed slowly for the colonel in the chair. He wondered how it had all gone so horribly wrong, what he had done to have made things so desperately bad for so many people. He despaired at ever making it right again. His men dead, all dead. The private Etienne too. His marriage over. His own brother cheated by his wife. His son a stranger to him. The Imperial Guard, to which he had devoted his life, disbanded and discredited. His very identity, his sword, unwanted even as Prussians stood at the gates of the city. His name cleared by a court that had been paid for its verdict. His name reviled by the public, a public that was fickle and cruel and made his life hell. Delescluze had done everything he had set out to do. Somehow the crazed words of the curse had come true.
It is not you I wish to destroy, Colonel. It is your honor.
The hours crawled with his nightmares, and his devils swirled around him and fueled their fires until the flames licked hot at his soul. His eyes and his hands kept coming to rest on the sword. It had been a long and monstrous road, and now, with the steel blade in his hands, he began to allow himself finally to see its end. The thought had come to him more than once during the last few months. He’d always pushed it away, at first with outrage and revulsion and absolute conviction. But over time the thoughts had come more often, and his protests had grown weaker. He grew less frightened of it, and then, he didn’t know exactly when, he stopped protesting altogether. As he sat before the window the thought persisted and wouldn’t leave him. When at last he allowed it in, when it washed around him and through him, he felt its blessed relief, and his sadness almost passed from him. He was so tired of it all, so tired of fighting, so tired of his living death. So easy to end it, so easy except for Paul, and Paul alone. And yet he knew that Henri had always been as much a father to the boy as he had. A better one, in many respects, and Serena spent more time with him than his own mother did. Paul would suffer, yes, but in the end he would be better off.
He rose from his chair and with a sense of purpose he had not felt for months made his preparations. He sat at his desk and drew out writing paper and a pen. He wrote a letter to his brother in which he explained what had happened with his property, in as much detail as he could remember from what Elisabeth had told him. He apologized for the burdens he had placed upon them all, and was placing upon them yet again. He asked that Henri continue, as always, to watch out for Paul. When he was finished he wrote another letter, to Paul, and sealed them in separate envelopes.
He went to his wardrobe and carefully laid out his dress uniform. It was pressed and clean, the jacket bright white next to the crimson pants, the gleaming belt and red sash, the ribbons and decorations colorful markers of his life. He dressed with precise movements and careful attention to each detail, making certain that everything was exactly as it was supposed to be.
When he had finished he looked critically at himself in the mirror. Everything was perfect. He took his pistols from their cases and strapped on his sword. He shut the window to his room, so that the rest of the château would not be chilled. He closed his door quietly and went down the hall. He set the letters on a stand in the entry where he knew they would be seen, and then he went upstairs.
He walked softly down the long dark hall. He needed no light for he knew it well, this hall that passed by rooms so full of memories. He and Henri had played there as boys. They had grown up and sons had been born and mothers and fathers had died. He found the doorknob and turned it silently and went inside.
Moussa was asleep, snoring lightly. Paul was in the other bed. The curtains were open, and the moon cast its pale light into the room. Jules went to stand beside Paul’s bed. He stared at his son, at the tousled hair so bright against the pillow, at the face that could be so expressive, that had so much innocence. He felt himself losing control, his throat constricting with anguish. He wanted to wake Paul, to talk to him, but he knew the words would not come, that it was better this way. He leaned down and gently brushed back the hair from Paul’s forehead. He started to kiss him, but drew back. For long moments he stood there, fighting with himself. And then he turned and walked silently to the door. With his hand on the knob he hesitated for just an instant, as if he was going to turn around. But then his shoulders straightened, and he walked out and pulled the door closed behind him.
In the stable he saddled one of the horses. It was an old stallion that had once been full of temper and pride, but whose fires had dimmed with time. Like my own, he thought. He went through the motions automatically, without thinking. Blanket, saddle, cinches – everything checked and double-checked, everything just so, the way that he had taught a thousand men to do. When he was ready he took the reins and led the horse outside and closed the doors. Effortlessly he mounted, adjusting the sword at his side. Horse and rider moved slowly past the château. Jules knew the trees, the roof, every inch of the grounds. He had always loved it. It didn’t matter that it had not been his on paper. It had always been his anyway.
The eastern sky was streaked with the first glow of dawn as Jules passed through the Bois de Boulogne. He rode quickly, wanting to reach his destination while night was still on his side. He passed camps of soldiers whose sentries were barely awake, and who watched him pass in silence. At a trot he passed Neuilly, and Villiers, and St.-Ouen, and around the base of the great Fort de l’Est near St.-Denis. When he arrived at the outer limits of the French lines, a lone sentry stood at an outpost to block his way, uncertain why this man would be about at this hour of the morning, and, more particularly, why he would b
e going in that direction.
“You cannot pass here, sir,” the boy said nervously. “This road is closed to all traffic. Orders of the commandant, sir.”
“Get out of my way, Private,” the colonel responded, and the boy, hearing the unmistakable voice of authority, did as he was told. Jules rode by without breaking stride. He left the road and passed earthworks and old artillery encampments and through empty fields. It was all deserted, eerily quiet. No one ventured between the lines, not here, not anymore.
The sun was almost up when Jules stopped and pulled out his spy-glass. Slowly he scanned the horizon until he found what he sought. There was a peasant’s cottage, with low fortifications to each side. He could see a sentry wearing the distinctive helmet, sitting with his back propped against a wall of the cottage. For long moments the sentry didn’t move. He was sound asleep. The pride of the Prussians, Jules thought. He placed the spyglass back in its sheath. He gauged the angle of the sun, calculating exactly where it would rise, wishing to use it to best advantage. He drew his sword and leaned over to pat his horse on the neck. It was something he always did before a battle, to calm the animal’s nerves, to let him know it would be all right. “We’re a small regiment, you and I,” Jules said. “We’ll have to do this alone, and well.” He sat silently, erect and motionless. He closed his eyes and smelled the morning air. He smiled. The first rays of the rising sun struck wispy light clouds along the horizon and shot them through with pink. He felt the welcome warmth on his back. The sun would be behind him, square in the eyes of the enemy. He watched as its light found the roof of the cottage, then crept downward until it gleamed off the sentry’s helmet.
With a furious kick Jules spurred his horse. The old animal stumbled but then found its footing. First a trot, then a full gallop as they raced across the plain, gathering speed. Arms at order, Jules told himself in the litany of a cavalryman’s preparation as he flew into battle. The horse’s hooves were muffled in the soft soil. Ranks tight, all together. Jules became oddly detached from himself, as though he were an observer, not a participant. He felt a floating sensation, the lightness of a bird in flight. Knees close, find the next boot. The wall was before them. Set your mark. His sword came up, and they took to the air.
The Prussian sentry never knew what hit him as Jules and his horse soared over the fortifications. His head had been severed before he could raise the alarm. His helmet clanked to the ground, the sound lost in the roar of thundering hooves. Some of the men inside the cottage stumbled out, astonished looks on their faces aswere cut down, one after another, by the mad colonel of the Imperial Guard whose sword swung repeatedly through the air. He fired at them with a pistol and hacked at them with his blade, no sound coming from his lips, his eyes set in savage determination beneath his helmet as he waded through their surprise and confusion, a fearful dervish raining terror and death in the dawn. Four had fallen by the time one got off a shot. It struck Jules in his arm and he dropped his sword. With his other arm he raised his pistol and fired back, and a fifth infantryman died. Then there were other shots from the cottage and the Prussian rifles began to find their marks as horse and rider whirled through the camp. Jules took a bullet in the chest, and another in his thigh. His heart pounded and he fired and fired. He was hit again and felt numb. The world swirled around him and his horse staggered to its knees, and they both crashed to the ground, Jules hearing nothing as he floated downward through the dust, a strange silence settling over him, a heaviness overtaking his arms and legs as men shouted and he came to rest on his back. He tried to move and couldn’t. Nothing worked anymore. He stopped firing, stopped hacking. His fingers twitched and his eyes settled on something in the sky. There was peace now. He was warm and calm. A Prussian stood over him, pointing a pistol at his face. Jules tried to move his lips, to say something, but then the gun roared.
Later, going through the pockets of the madman, one of the Prussians found a toy soldier. He looked at it and thought what common craftsmen the French were. No wonder they’d lost the war. A toy. It was pathetic, not worth keeping. He tossed it away. It fell into the trench, the trench being dug to bury the men killed by the lunatic who had shattered the breaking dawn with such fury.
CHAPTER 14
Winter came early to Paris, raw and gray and depressing. Streetlights winked out as coal gas was rationed for balloons, and the night streets became so dark and boring that people complained they looked as bad as London. Plans for a counteroffensive had been in the making for weeks. The Second Army of Paris under General Ducrot was to break through the Prussian lines and rendezvous with Gambetta’s Army of the Loire, which had been raised in the provinces and was battling to the aid of the capital. Enormous hope was pinned on the success of the sortie. Ducrot issued a stirring proclamation to his troops as they readied for battle.
“As for myself,” the general said, “I have made up my mind, and I swear before you and the entire nation: I shall only re-enter Paris dead or victorious. You may see me fall, but you will not see me yield ground!” The campaign did not go as well as the proclamation. Inexperience was led by incompetence. The element of surprise was lost completely as the eager troops massed inside the city, their movements as visible to the Prussians as to the Parisians themselves, who gathered on the ramparts to watch. The city’s gates were shut and ambulances ordered to stand by, further clear signs for the Prussians to read. A massive bombardment began from the forts that shook Paris to her core. Not a Prussian on the perimeter was unaware that an offensive was coming. A balloon was launched with information for Gambetta, to let him know the army’s strategy. Unkind winds kept it aloft for nine hours. It landed in Norway, and Gambetta remained ignorant of the city’s plans. Then, just as the sortie was to begin, nature intervened a second time as the level of the Marne rose, preventing the laying of pontoons, which were necessary to allow the troops and their supporting guns and supplies to cross the river. The pontoons were too short. There was no choice but to wait for the water level to fall. The resulting delay allowed von Moltke to position his Saxon troops exactly where they needed to be, while French forces mounting feints to the south were not informed of the delay, and fought and died for nothing.
When at last the French crossed the river, they attacked Brie and Champigny in an effort to capture the heights of Villiers. The fire of the guns in the French forts was murderous as it softened the way for the advance, but the shells were indiscriminate and killed as many French as Prussian troops. Ducrot’s forces were successful at capturing their objectives, but then an attack by the Prussians along the length of the front caught the French, who were having breakfast, by surprise. During the long and bloody day that followed, the ebb and flow of battle turned in favor of the Prussians, then the French, then the Prussians once again. During the night men froze to death, and flesh stuck to iron. Finally it was the bitter cold as much as Prussian guns that drove the French back toward the city, for the Second Army had brought no blankets. The only thing that slowed their retreat was the search for food. When horses were shot dead on the field of battle, soldiers stopped to carve the meat from their bones. They stuffed it in their sacks or chewed it raw, and retreated in the heavy fog. Behind them, twelve thousand officers and men lay dead.
The wounded were loaded onto boats and unloaded at the Pont d’Austerlitz, where they were carted off to surgeries or, nearly as often, straight to the Père la Chaise cemetery. Morose crowds lined the boulevards and watched the immense tide of carnage flood back into the city, the broken and shredded bodies like bloody flotsam on the river of ambulances and wagons and carriages. The stench of death mingled with the smell of smoke from the cannons that had fallen silent in the forts.
The magnitude of the defeat was felt in every quarter. Neither victorious nor dead, General Ducrot reentered Paris at the head of his dispirited army. Paris looked for scapegoats and hoped for a miracle from Gambetta. But at that moment the Army of the Loire was being defeated at Orleans. Word came later, by pige
on. Gambetta was not coming. Orleans was lost, Rouen about to be. General Bourbaki and his Army of the North were retreating, and the government had been forced to move from Tours to Bordeaux. On every front, disaster.
The food situation grew worse. Stocks of grain were dwindling. Prostitution spread to pay for hunger. Hooves and horns and bones were ground into osseine for soup. Animals from the zoo were sold for slaughter. The chefs of Paris cooked buffaloes and zebras, yaks and reindeer, wapitis and Bengal stags, wolves and kangaroos, and – when there was nothing left – Castor and Pollux, the elephants.
The arctic cold led to the burning of doors and furniture. Women and children scavenged bushes and tree limbs and roots and bark. Smallpox and typhus began to kill, along with respiratory ailments that filled small coffins with the children of the poor. Clothing was scarce and peasants made shirts of newspaper.
Yet all was not lost. France had a seemingly limitless ability to find new men for new armies to raise against the Prussians. So Paris waited. It was a source of great pride that no one in the world had expected the city to hold out so long, and the spirit within the gates remained high. Her citizens were determined to hold out against the hard winter, and to fight the harder Hun.
At the Château deVries no one knew what had become of Jules. The night he left the two letters in the entry hall, Elisabeth had returned home to collect some clothing. Wishing to avoid a confrontation, she came just before dawn, expecting to find Jules passed out and the rest of the house asleep. She saw the letters on the stand and recognized Jules’s handwriting. She opened the one addressed to Henri and sat in a chair to read it. For a long time she sat there without moving, without tears. She told herself it was for the best, that Jules had finally chosen death over dishonor. It was a pity that he had done so without anyone noticing. She put both letters in her reticule, collected the papers from the diocese, and left the house.
Empires of Sand Page 32