Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (1037 page)

above the murmur of the gathering citizens.  The second lady

looks out.]

SECOND LADY

A straggler merely he.... But they decide,

At last, to post his news, wild-winged or no.

THIRD LADY
[reading again through her glass]

"The Duke of Brunswick, leading on a charge,

Has met his death-doom.  Schmettau, too, is slain;

Prince William wounded.  But we stand as yet,

Engaging with the last of our reserves."

[The agitation in the street communicates itself to the room.

Some of the ladies weep silently as they wait, much longer this

time.  Another horseman is at length heard clattering into the

Platz, and they lean out again with painful eagerness.]

SECOND LADY

An adjutant of Marshal Moellendorf's

If I define him rightly.  Read—O read!—

Though reading draw them from their socket-holes

Use your eyes now!

THIRD LADY
[glass up]

     As soon as 'tis affixed....

Ah—this means much!  The people's air and gait

Too well betray disaster. 
[Reading.]
  "Berliners,

The King has lost the battle!  Bear it well.

The foremost duty of a citizen

Is to maintain a brave tranquillity.

This is what I, the Governor, demand

Of men and women now.... The King lives still."

[They turn from the window and sit in a silence broken only by

monosyllabic words, hearing abstractedly the dismay without

that has followed the previous excitement and hope.

The stagnation is ended by a cheering outside, of subdued

emotional quality, mixed with sounds of grief.  They again

look forth.  QUEEN LOUISA is leaving the city with a very

small escort, and the populace seem overcome.  They strain

their eyes after her as she disappears.  Enter fourth lady.]

FIRST LADY

How does she bear it?  Whither does she go?

FOURTH LADY

She goes to join the King at Custrin, there

To abide events—as we.  Her heroism

So schools her sense of her calamities

As out of grief to carve new queenliness,

And turn a mobile mien to statuesque,

Save for a sliding tear.

[The ladies leave the window severally.]

SPIRIT IRONIC

So the Will plays at flux and reflux still.

This monarchy, one-half whose pedestal

Is built of Polish bones, has bones home-made!

Let the fair woman bear it.  Poland did.

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Meanwhile the mighty Emperor nears apace,

And soon will glitter at the city gates

With palpitating drums, and breathing brass,

And rampant joyful-jingling retinue.

[An evening mist cloaks the scene.]

SCENE VI

THE SAME

[It is a brilliant morning, with a fresh breeze, and not a cloud.

The open Platz and the adjoining streets are filled with dense

crowds of citizens, in whose upturned faces curiosity has

mastered consternation and grief.

Martial music is heard, at first faint, then louder, followed

by a trampling of innumerable horses and a clanking of arms and

accoutrements.  Through a street on the right hand of the view

from the windows come troops of French dragoons heralding the

arrival of BONAPARTE.

Re-enter the room hurriedly and cross to the windows several

ladies as before, some in tears.]

FIRST LADY

The kingdom late of Prussia, can it be

That thus it disappears?—a patriot-cry,

A battle, bravery, ruin; and no more?

SECOND LADY

Thank God the Queen's gone!

THIRD LADY

     To what sanctuary?

From earthquake shocks there is no sheltering cell!

—Is this what men call conquest?  Must it close

As historied conquests do, or be annulled

By modern reason and the urbaner sense?—

Such issue none would venture to predict,

Yet folly 'twere to nourish foreshaped fears

And suffer in conjecture and in deed.—

If verily our country be dislimbed,

Then at the mercy of his domination

The face of earth will lie, and vassal kings

Stand waiting on himself the Overking,

Who ruling rules all; till desperateness

Sting and excite a bonded last resistance,

And work its own release.

SECOND LADY

     He comes even now

From sacrilege.  I learn that, since the fight,

In marching here by Potsdam yesterday,

Sans-Souci Palace drew his curious feet,

Where even great Frederick's tomb was bared to him.

FOURTH LADY

All objects on the Palace—cared for, kept

Even as they were when our arch-monarch died—

The books, the chair, the inkhorn, and the pen

He quizzed with flippant curiosity;

And entering where our hero's bones are urned

He seized the sword and standards treasured there,

And with a mixed effrontery and regard

Declared they should be all dispatched to Paris

As gifts to the Hotel des Invalides.

THIRD LADY

Such rodomontade is cheap: what matters it!

[A galaxy of marshals, forming Napoleon's staff, now enters the

Platz immediately before the windows.  In the midst rides the

EMPEROR himself.  The ladies are silent.  The procession passes

along the front until it reaches the entrance to the Royal Palace.

At the door NAPOLEON descends from his horse and goes into the

building amid the resonant trumpetings of his soldiers and the

silence of the crowd.]

SECOND LADY
[impressed]

O why does such a man debase himself

By countenancing loud scurrility

Against a queen who cannot make reprise!

A power so ponderous needs no littleness—

The last resort of feeble desperates!

[Enter fifth lady.]

FIFTH LADY
[breathlessly]

Humiliation grows acuter still.

He placards rhetoric to his soldiery

On their distress of us and our allies,

Declaring he'll not stack away his arms

Till he has choked the remaining foes of France

In their own gainful glut.—Whom means he, think you?

FIRST LADY

Us?

THIRD LADY

Russia?  Austria?

FIFTH LADY

     Neither: England.—Yea,

Her he still holds the master mischief-mind,

And marrer of the countries' quietude,

By exercising untold tyranny

Over all the ports and seas.

SECOND LADY

     Then England's doomed!

When he has overturned the Russian rule,

England comes next for wrack.  They say that know!...

Look—he has entered by the Royal doors

And makes the Palace his.—Now let us go!—

Our course, alas! is—whither?

[Exeunt ladies.  The curtain drops temporarily.]

SEMICHORUS I OF IRONIC SPIRITS
[aerial music]

Deeming himself omnipotent

With the Kings of the Christian continent,

To warden the waves was his further bent.

SEMICHORUS II

But the weaving Will from eternity,

[Hemming them in by a circling sea]

Evolved the fleet of the Englishry.

SEMICHORUS I

The wane of his armaments ill-advised,

At Trafalgar, to a force despised,

Was a wound which never has cicatrized.

SEMICHORUS II

This, O this is the cramp that grips!

And freezes the Emperor's finger-tips

From signing a peace with the Land of Ships.

CHORUS

The Universal-empire plot

Demands the rule of that wave-walled spot;

And peace with England cometh not!

THE SCENE REOPENS

[A lurid gloom now envelops the Platz and city; and Bonaparte

is heard as from the Palace:

VOICE OF NAPOLEON

These monstrous violations being in train

Of law and national integrities

By English arrogance in things marine,

[Which dares to capture simple merchant-craft,

In honest quest of harmless merchandize,

For crime of kinship to a hostile power]

Our vast, effectual, and majestic strokes

In this unmatched campaign, enable me

To bar from commerce with the Continent

All keels of English frame.  Hence I decree:—

SPIRIT OF RUMOUR

This outlines his renowned "Berlin Decree."

Maybe he meditates its scheme in sleep,

Or hints it to his suite, or syllables it

While shaping, to his scribes.

VOICE OF NAPOLEON

All England's ports to suffer strict blockade;

All traffic with that land to cease forthwith;

All natives of her isles, wherever met,

To be detained as windfalls of the war.

All chattels of her make, material, mould,

To be good prize wherever pounced upon:

And never a bottom hailing from her shores

But shall be barred from every haven here.

This for her monstrous harms to human rights,

And shameless sauciness to neighbour powers!

SPIRIT SINISTER

I spell herein that our excellently high-coloured drama is not

played out yet!

SPIRIT OF THE YEARS

Nor will it be for many a month of moans,

And summer shocks, and winter-whitened bones.

[The night gets darker, and the Palace outlines are lost.]

SCENE VII

TILSIT AND THE RIVER NIEMEN

[The scene is viewed from the windows of BONAPARTE'S temporary

quarters.  Some sub-officers of his suite are looking out upon

it.

It is the day after midsummer, about one o'clock.  A multitude

of soldiery and spectators lines each bank of the broad river

which, stealing slowly north-west, bears almost exactly in its

midst a moored raft of bonded timber.  On this as a floor stands

a gorgeous pavilion of draped woodwork, having at each side,

facing the respective banks of the stream, a round-headed doorway

richly festooned.  The cumbersome erection acquires from the

current a rhythmical movement, as if it were breathing, and the

breeze now and then produces a shiver on the face of the stream.]

DUMB SHOW

On the south-west or Prussian side rides the EMPEROR NAPOLEON

in uniform, attended by the GRAND DUKE OF BERG, the PRINCE OF

NEUFCHATEL, MARSHAL BESSIERES, DUROC Marshal of the Palace, and

CAULAINCOURT Master of the Horse.  The EMPEROR looks well, but is

growing fat.  They embark on an ornamental barge in front of them,

which immediately puts off.  It is now apparent to the watchers

that a precisely similar enactment has simultaneously taken place

on the opposite or Russian bank, the chief figure being the

EMPEROR ALEXANDER—a graceful, flexible man of thirty, with a

courteous manner and good-natured face.  He has come out from

an inn on that side accompanied by the GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE,

GENERAL BENNIGSEN, GENERAL OUWAROFF, PRINCE LABANOFF, and ADJUTANT-

GENERAL COUNT LIEVEN.

The two barges draw towards the raft, reaching the opposite sides

of it about the same time, amidst discharges of cannon.  Each

Emperor enters the door that faces him, and meeting in the centre

of the pavilion they formally embrace each other.  They retire

together to the screened interior, the suite of each remaining in

the outer half of the pavilion.

More than an hour passes while they are thus invisible.  The French

officers who have observed the scene from the lodging of NAPOLEON

walk about idly, and ever and anon go curiously to the windows,

again to watch the raft.

CHORUS OF THE YEARS
[aerial music]

The prelude to this smooth scene—mark well!—were the shocks

whereof the times gave token

Vaguely to us ere last year's snows shut over Lithuanian pine

and pool,

Which we told at the fall of the faded leaf, when the pride of

Prussia was bruised and broken,

And the Man of Adventure sat in the seat of the Man of Method

and rigid Rule.

SEMICHORUS I OF THE PITIES

Snows incarnadined were thine, O Eylau, field of the wide white

spaces,

And frozen lakes, and frozen limbs, and blood iced hard as it left

the veins:

Steel-cased squadrons swathed in cloud-drift, plunging to doom

through pathless places,

And forty thousand dead and near dead, strewing the early-lighted

plains.

Friedland to these adds its tale of victims, its midnight marches

and hot collisions,

Its plunge, at his word, on the enemy hooped by the bended river

and famed Mill stream,

As he shatters the moves of the loose-knit nations to curb his