“Ha ha!” replied Sieur Guillaume. “But healths are proposed for peace and not for war. I drink to King Henry Vi’s Regent of France and to the health of Monsignor, Bishop of Troyes, whom we all elected two years ago.”
The canons, raising their goblets, drank to the health of the Bishop and of the Regent Bedford.
Meanwhile there was raised at the bottom of the table a young and as yet piping voice, which cried: “To the health of the Dauphin Louis, the true King of France!”
It was the little Pierrolet, whose Armagnac sympathies, heated by the canon’s wine, were finding expression.
No one took any notice, and Sieur Guillaume having drunk again they all cried in chorus:
“The King drinks! The King drinks!”
The guests, all speaking at once, were noisily discussing matters both sacred and profane.
“Have you heard,” said Thibault de Saulges, “that the Regent has sent ten thousand English to take Orleans?”
“In that case,” said Sieur Guillaume, “the town will fall into their hands, as have already Jargeau and Beaugency, and so many good cities of the kingdom.”
“That remains to be seen!” said the little Pierrolet, growing red.
But, he being at the far end of the table, once again no one heard him.
“Let us drink, monsignors,” said Sieur Guillaume, who was doing the honours of his table lavishly.
And he set the example by raising his great cup of silver gilt.
More loudly than ever the cry resounded:
“The King drinks! The King drinks!”
But after the thunder of the toast had rolled away, Sieur Pierre Corneille, who was seated rather low down at the table, said bitterly:
“Monsignors, I denounce the little Pierrolet. He did not cry ‘The King drinks!’ Thereby he has transgressed our rights and customs, and he must be punished.”
“He must be punished!” repeated in chorus Sieurs Denys Petit and Barnabe Videloup.
“Let chastisement be meted out to him,” said, in his turn, Sieur Guillaume. “His hands and face must be smeared with soot, for such is the custom.”
“It is the custom!” cried all the canons together.
And Sieur Pierre Corneille went to fetch soot from the chimney, while Sieurs Thomas Alépée and Simon Thibouville, laughing unrestrainedly, threw themselves upon the child and held his arms and legs.
But Pierrolet escaped out of their hands, then, standing with his back to the wall, he drew a little dagger from his belt and swore that he would plunge it into the throat of anyone who came near him.
Such violence highly amused the canons, and especially Sieur Guillaume. Rising from his seat, he went up to his little secretary, followed by Pierre Corneille, who held in his hand a shovelful of soot.
“It is I,” he said in unctuous tones, “who for his punishment will make of this naughty child a negro, a servant of that black King Balthazar who came to the manger. Pierre Corneille, hold out the shovel.”
And, with a gesture as deliberate as that with which he would have sprinkled holy water upon the faithful, he threw a pinch of soot into the face of the child who, rushing upon him, plunged his dagger into Sieur Guillaume’s stomach.
The canon uttered a long sigh and fell with his face to the ground. His guests crowded round him. They saw that he was dead.
Pierrolet had disappeared. A search was made for him all over the town, but he could not be found.
Later it became known that he had enlisted in Captain La Hire’s company. At the Battle of Patay, under the Maid’s eyes, he took prisoner an English captain and was dubbed a knight.
LA MUIRON
“And sometimes, during our long evenings, the Commander-in-Chief would tell us ghost stories, a species of story in the telling of which he excelled.” — Mémoires du Comte Lavallette.
FOR more than three months Bonaparte had been without news from Europe, when on his return from Saint-Jean-d’Acre he sent an envoy to the Turkish admiral under the pretext of negotiating an exchange of prisoners, but in reality in the hope that Sir Sidney Smith would stop this officer on the way and enlighten him as to recent events; whether, as might be expected, these had been unfavourable to the Republic. The General calculated rightly. Sir Sidney had the envoy brought to his ship and received him there with honour. Having entered into conversation, the English commander soon learnt that the Syrian army was totally without despatches or information of any kind. He showed the Frenchman the newspapers lying open on the table and, with perfidious courtesy, invited him to take them away with him.
Bonaparte spent the night in his tent reading them. In the morning he had resolved to return to France in order to assume the government in the place of those who were on the point of being overthrown. Once he had set foot on the soil of the Republic, he would crush the weak and violent government which was rendering the country a prey to fools and rogues, and he alone would occupy the vacant place. Before he could carry out his plan, however, he must cross the Mediterranean in defiance of adverse winds and British squadrons. But Bonaparte could see nothing save his purpose and his star. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck he had received the Directory’s permission to leave the Egyptian army and to appoint his own successor.
He summoned Admiral Gantheaume, who had been at head-quarters since the destruction of the fleet, and instructed him quickly and secretly to arm two Venetian frigates, which were at Alexandria, and to direct them to a certain lonely point upon the coast. In a sealed document he appointed General Kléber Commander-in-Chief. Then, under the pretext of making a tour of inspection, taking with him a squadron of guides, he went to the Marabou inlet. On the evening of the 7th of Fructidor in the year VII, at the junction of two roads, whence the sea was visible, he came face to face with General Menou, who was returning with his escort to Alexandria. Finding it impossible and unnecessary to keep his secret any longer, he took a brusque farewell of these soldiers, urged them to acquit themselves well in Egypt and said:
“If I have the good luck to set foot in France, the reign of the chatterboxes will be over!”
He seemed to say this spontaneously and, so to speak, in spite of himself. Yet such an announcement was well calculated to justify his flight and to suggest future power.
He jumped into the boat, which at nightfall drew alongside of the frigate, La Muiron. Admiral Gantheaume welcomed him beneath his flag with these words:
“I command under your star.”
And he set sail immediately. With the General were Lavallette, his aide-de-camp, Monge and Berthollet. The frigate, La Carrère, which served as a convoy, had on board the wounded generals, Lannes and Murat, and Messieurs Denon, Costaz and Parseval-Grandmaison.
Hardly had they started when the wind dropped. The Admiral proposed to return to Alexandria lest dawn should find them in sight of Aboukir, where the enemy’s fleet lay at anchor. The faithful Lavallette entreated the General to agree. But Bonaparte pointed seawards.
“Have no fear. We shall get through.”
After midnight a fair breeze began to blow. By dawn the flotilla was out of sight of land. As Bonaparte was walking alone on deck, Berthollet came up to him.
“General, you were well advised to tell Lavallette not to be afraid and that we should be able to continue on our course.”
Bonaparte smiled.
“I reassured one who is weak but devoted. Your character, Berthollet, is different, and to you I shall speak differently. The future must not be counted upon. The present alone matters. One must dare and calculate, and leave the rest to luck.”
And, quickening his steps, he muttered:
“Dare... calculate... avoid any cast-iron plan... conform to circumstances, follow where they lead. Take advantage of the slightest as well as of the greatest opportunities. Attempt only the possible, and all that is possible.”
At dinner that day, when the General reproached Lavallette with his timidity on the previous evening, the aide-de-camp replied
that at present his fears were different but not less, and that he was not ashamed to confess them, because they concerned the fate of Bonaparte, consequently the fate of France and of the world.
“I learned from Sir Sidney’s secretary,” he said, “that the commodore believes in keeping out of sight during a blockade. So, knowing his strategy and his character, we must expect to find him in our way. And in that case...”
Bonaparte interrupted him.
“In that case you cannot doubt that our intuition and our skill would rise superior to our danger. But you flatter that young madman when you regard him as capable of any consecutive and methodical action. Smith ought to be captain of a fire-ship.” Bonaparte was not fair to the formidable commander who had been the cause of his misfortune at Saint-Jean-d’Acre; and his injustice arose doubtless from a wish to attribute his failure to a turn of fortune rather than to his adversary’s skill.
The Admiral raised his hand as if to emphasize the resolve which he was about to express.
“If we meet the English cruisers, I will go on board La Carrère, and, you may depend upon it, I will keep them so well occupied that they will give La Muiron time to escape.”
Lavallette opened his mouth. He was about to observe that La Muiron was not a fast sailer and that consequently such an opportunity would be lost upon her. But he feared to displease the General, and swallowed: his words. Bonaparte, however, read his thoughts; and, taking him by the coat button, said:
“Lavallette, you are a good fellow, but you will never be a good soldier. You never think enough of your advantages, and you are for ever concerned with irreparable disadvantages. We cannot make this frigate a fast sailer. But you must think of the crew, animated with the brightest enthusiasm and capable of working miracles, if need be. You forget that our boat is La Muiron. I myself gave her that name. I was at Venice. Invited to christen the frigate which had just been armed, I seized the opportunity of honouring the memory of one who was dear to me, of my aide-de-camp, who fell on the bridge of Arcola while protecting his General with his own body under a hail of shot and shell. In this ship we sail to-day. Can you doubt that its name augurs well for us?”
For a while longer he continued to hearten them with his glowing words. He then remarked that he would retire to rest. It was known on the morrow that he had decided to endeavour to avoid the British squadrons by some four or five weeks’ sailing along the African coast.
Henceforth day followed day in uneventful monotony. La Muiron kept in sight of the low, unfrequented coast, which was not likely to be reconnoitred by the enemy’s ships, and every half league she tacked without venturing out to sea. Bonaparte passed his days in conversation and in reverie. Sometimes he was heard to murmur the names of Ossian and Fingal. Sometimes he asked his aide-decamp to read aloud Vertot’s Revolutions or Plutarch’s Lives. He appeared neither anxious nor impatient, nor preoccupied, more, probably, through a natural disposition to live in the present than as the result of self-control. He seemed to take a melancholy pleasure in contemplating that sea which, whether angry or serene, threatened his destiny and divided him from his object. On rising from table, when the weather was fine, he would go on deck and half recline on a gun-carriage in the same somewhat unsociable and forlorn attitude that was his when, as a child, he would lie propped up by his elbows on the rocks of his native isle. The two scientists, the Admiral, the Captain of the frigate and the aide-de-camp, Lavallette, would stand round him. And the conversation, which he carried on by fits and starts, most frequently turned on some new scientific discovery. Monge was not a brilliant talker; but his conversation revealed him as a clear, logical thinker. Inclined to consider utility even in physics, he was always a patriot and a good citizen. Berthollet was a better philosopher and more given to evolving general theories.
“It will not do,” he said, “to represent chemistry as the mysterious science of metamorphoses, a new Circe, waving her magic wand over nature. Such ideas may flatter vivid imaginations; but they will not satisfy thoughtful minds, who are striving to prove that the transformations of bodies are subject to the general laws of physics.”
He had a presentiment that the reactions, which the chemist provokes and observes, occur under precise mechanical conditions which some day may be the subject of exact calculation. And, constantly recurring to this idea, he would apply it to a variety of data, known or surmised. One evening Bonaparte, who had no sympathy with pure speculation, brusquely interrupted him:
“Your theories...! Mere soap-bubbles born of a breath and dissipated by a breath. Chemistry, Berthollet, is no more than a game when not applied to the requirements of war or industry. In all his researches the man of science should set before him some definite great and useful object, like Monge, who, in order to manufacture gunpowder, sought nitre in cellars and stables.”
But Monge himself, as well as Berthollet, insisted on representing to the General the necessity of understanding phenomena and submitting them to general laws, before attempting practical applications, and they argued that any other procedure would lead to the dangerous obscurity of empiricism.
Bonaparte agreed. But he feared empiricism more than ideology. And suddenly he inquired of Berthollet:
“Do you, with your explanations, hope to penetrate into the infinite mystery of nature, to enter on the unknown?”
Berthollet replied that, without pretending to explain the universe, the scientist rendered humanity the greatest service by substituting a rational view of natural phenomena for the terrors of ignorance and superstition.
“Is he not man’s true benefactor,” added Berthollet, “who delivers him from the phantoms introduced into the soul by the fear of an imaginary hell, who rescues him from the yoke imposed by priests and soothsayers, who expels from his mind the terrors of dreams and omens?”
Night rested like a vast shadow on the great expanse of sea. In a moonless and cloudless sky, multitudes of stars glittered like a suspended shower. For a moment the General remained lost in meditation. Then, lifting up his head and half rising, he pointed to the dome of heaven, and with the uncultured voice of the young herdsman and the hero of antiquity he pierced the silence:
“Mine is a soul of marble which nothing can perturb, a heart inaccessible to common weaknesses. But you, Berthollet, do you understand sufficiently what life and death are? Have you explored their confines so far as to be able to affirm that they are without mystery? Are you sure that all apparitions are no more than the phantoms of a diseased brain? Can you explain all presentiments? General La Harpe had the stature and the heart of a Grenadier. His intelligence was in its element in battle. There it shone. At Fombio, for the first time, on the evening before his death, he was struck dumb, as one who is stunned, frozen by a strange and sudden fear. You deny apparitions. Monge, did you not meet Captain Aubelet in Italy?”
At this question, Monge tried to remember, then shook his head. No, he did not recollect Captain Aubelet.
Bonaparte resumed:
“I had observed him at Toulon, where he won his epaulettes, like a hero of ancient Greece. He was as young, as handsome, as courageous as a soldier from Platea. Struck by his serious air, his clear-cut features and the look of wisdom on his young countenance, his superior officers had nicknamed him Minerva, and the Grenadiers also called him by that name, though they were ignorant of its significance.
“Captain Minerva!” cried Monge. “Why did you not call him that at first? Captain Minerva was killed beneath the walls of Mantua a few weeks before I arrived in that city. His death had made a great impression, because it was associated with marvellous happenings which were related to me, though I do not remember them exactly. All I recollect is that General Miollis ordered Captain Minerva’s sword and gorget, crowned with laurels, to be carried at the head of the column which one feast day defiled in front of Virgil’s grotto, as a tribute to the memory of the poet of heroes.”
“Aubelet’s,” resumed Bonaparte, “was that perfectly calm co
urage which I have never observed in anyone save Bessières. His passions were of the noblest. And in everything he sacrificed himself. He had a brother in arms, Captain Demarteau, a few years his senior, whom he loved with all the affection of a great heart. Demarteau did not resemble his friend. Impulsive, passionate, equally eager for pleasure and for danger, he was always the life and soul of the camp. Aubelet was the proud devotee of duty, Demarteau the joyous lover of glory. The latter returned his comrade’s affection. In those two friends the story of Nisus and Euryalus was re-enacted beneath our flag. The end, both of one and the other, was surrounded with extraordinary circumstances. They were told to me, Monge, as to you, but I paid better heed, although at that time my mind was occupied with greater affairs. I desired to take Mantua without delay and before a new Austrian army had time to enter Italy. Nevertheless I found time to read a report of the incidents which had preceded and followed Captain Aubelet’s death. Certain of these incidents border on the miraculous. Their cause must either be assigned to unknown faculties, which man may acquire in unique moments, or to the intervention of an intelligence superior to ours.”
“General, you must exclude the second hypothesis,” said Berthollet. “An observer of nature never perceives the intervention of a superior intelligence.”
“I know that you deny the existence of Providence,” replied Bonaparte. “That may be permissible for a scientist shut up in his study, but not for a leader of peoples who can only control the ordinary mind through a community of ideas. If you would govern men, you must think with them on all great subjects. You must move with public opinion.”
And, raising his eyes to the light flaming in the darkness on the pinnacle of the mainmast, he said, with hardly a pause:
“The wind blows from the north.”
Complete Works of Anatole France Page 345