The Charterhouse of Parma (10 page)

“But let the boy tell the rest of his story,” the canteen-woman insisted, her curiosity sharper than ever. Fabrizio obeyed. When he had finished: “As it turns out,” she said, addressing the corporal with a serious expression, “this boy is no soldier; we’re going to have a nasty war on our hands, now that we’re betrayed and defeated. Why should he get his bones broken,
gratis pro deo
?”

“Especially,” the corporal added, “since he doesn’t know how to
load his musket, either on command or on his own. I’m the one who put in the bullet that brought down his Prussian.”

“Besides, he shows his money to everyone,” the canteen-woman continued; “he’ll be robbed of everything he has as soon as he leaves us.”

“The first cavalry officer he meets,” said the corporal, “will commandeer it for his brandy, and maybe the boy will even be recruited by the enemy, since everyone’s a traitor now. The first man he meets will order him to follow, and he’ll follow—better for him if he joins our regiment.”

“Not that, if you please, Corporal!” Fabrizio exclaimed. “It’s a lot more comfortable on horseback, and besides I don’t know how to load a musket! You’ve seen that I can manage a horse.”

Fabrizio was quite proud of this little speech. We shall not recount the long argument concerning his future destiny which now ensued between the corporal and the canteen-woman. Fabrizio noticed that in their discussion these two repeated three or four times all the circumstances of his story: the soldiers’ suspicions, the gendarme selling him a travel-permit and a uniform, how he had accidentally become a member, the day before, of the Field-Marshal’s escort, the Emperor galloping past, the horse stolen from under him, and so on.

Her female curiosity aroused, the canteen-woman kept returning to how he had been dispossessed of the good horse she had told him to buy. “You felt someone pulling your feet, you slid over your horse’s tail, and there you were on the ground!”

“Why keep repeating,” Fabrizio mused, “what all three of us know perfectly well?” He hadn’t yet realized that this was how the people of France arrive at their ideas.

“How much money do you have?” the canteen-woman suddenly asked him.

Fabrizio did not hesitate to answer; he was convinced of this woman’s noble soul: such is the good side of France.

“All I have left is thirty gold napoleons and eight or ten five-franc pieces.”

“In that case, you’ve got a clear field!” she exclaimed. “Get yourself away from this defeated army; find some way out—take the first good
road to your right, get your horse moving and keep as far as you can from the army. The first chance you get, buy yourself some civilian clothes. Once you’re eight or ten leagues away and you don’t see any more soldiers, take the mail-coach and rest up for a couple of weeks in some nice town where you can eat beefsteaks. Never tell a soul you were in the army; the gendarmes will arrest you as a deserter; and nice as you are, my boy, you’re not smart enough yet to answer their questions. As soon as you’ve got a gentleman’s clothes on your back, tear up your travel-permit and use your real name—say you’re … Vasi. Where should he say he’s from?” she asked the corporal.

“From Cambrai, on the Scheldt: that’s a nice little town, you know? There’s a cathedral there, and
Fénelon
, and everything.”

“That’s right,” the canteen-woman continued, “never say you were in battle, and don’t breathe a word about B——, nor about the gendarme who sold you the uniform. When you want to go back to Paris, get yourself to Versailles first, then enter Paris from that side, walk right in as if you were out for a stroll. Sew your napoleons into your trousers. And above all, when you have to pay for something, don’t let anyone see more than what you need to pay. The saddest thing of all is that people are going to cheat you and gouge you out of all you have, and what will you do once you have no money, when you don’t even know how to take care of yourself?” and so on.

The good woman went on for a long while; the corporal nodded agreement, unable to get a word in edgewise. Suddenly the crowd of men filling the high road broke into a run; then, in the twinkling of an eye, everyone jumped over the little ditch along the left side of the road and began running as fast as their legs would take them. “Cossacks! The Cossacks are coming!” was shouted on all sides.

“Back on your horse!” exclaimed the canteen-woman.

“God forbid!” said Fabrizio. “Be on your way, the horse is yours. If you need money for another cart, half of all I have is yours.”

“Back on your horse, I tell you!” screamed the canteen-woman, furious now. And she began to dismount.

Fabrizio drew his saber. “Hold on tight!” he shouted, and smacked the horse’s rump two or three times with the flat of his saber; the horse galloped off after the fleeing men.

Our hero stared down the high road; just now three or four thousand individuals had been crowded here, squeezed together like peasants at the end of a procession. After the word
Cossacks
he could see no one at all; the fugitives had abandoned shakos, muskets, sabers, and so on. Fabrizio, astounded, climbed up into a field to the right, about twenty or thirty feet above the road. He gazed up and down the high road and over the plain, but saw no trace of Cossacks. “Funny people, these French!” he mused. “Since I’m going to the right anyway, I might as well start walking now; it’s possible all these men had some reason for running away that I don’t know.” He picked up a musket, checked to see that it was loaded, stirred the powder in the priming, cleaned the flint, then selected a well-filled cartridge pouch, and once again stared up and down the high road; he was absolutely alone in the middle of this vast plain so recently crowded with people. In the distance he caught sight of the fugitives, just vanishing behind some trees and still running. “Now, that’s really strange!” he thought, and recalling the corporal’s tactic of the night before, he proceeded to sit down in the middle of a wheatfield. He was not leaving, since he wanted to see his good friends the canteen-woman and Corporal Aubry again.

In this field, he discovered that he had only eighteen napoleons left, instead of thirty as he had thought, but there still remained the little diamonds he had sewn into the lining of the hussar’s boots, that morning in the jailer’s wife’s bedroom, in B——. He concealed his napoleons as best he could, still pondering this sudden disappearance. “Is this a bad omen?” he wondered. His chief disappointment was not to have put one question to Corporal Aubry: “Did I really take part in a battle?” It seemed to him that he had, and he would have been overcome with delight to be sure of the matter. “All the same,” he decided, “I took part in it under a prisoner’s name, I had a prisoner’s travel-permit in my pocket, and worse still, I was wearing his uniform! There’s a sign for the future: what would Abbé Blanès have said? And that wretched Boulot dead in prison! It’s all a grim omen—Fate will be leading me to jail!” Fabrizio would have given the world to know if Hussar Boulot had really been guilty; brooding over his memories, he seemed to recall that the jailer’s wife in B—— had told him that the hussar was arrested for stealing not only silver plate but also a farmer’s
cow, and for beating the farmer half to death into the bargain: Fabrizio had no doubt that he would someday be imprisoned for a crime with some connection to Hussar Boulot’s. He thought of his friend Father Blanès; if only he could consult him now! Then he remembered that he had not written to his aunt since leaving Paris. “Poor Gina!” he thought, and tears came to his eyes, when suddenly he heard a faint noise quite close by; it was a soldier allowing his three horses to graze on the wheat—he had taken the bits out of their mouths and was holding them by the snaffles. Fabrizio rose out of the standing grain like a partridge, startling the soldier. Our hero noticed this and yielded to the pleasure of playing the hussar for a moment. “One of those horses is mine, you bastard!” he shouted. “But I don’t mind giving you five francs for the trouble you’ve taken to bring it here.”

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” the soldier asked.

Fabrizio took aim at a range of six paces. “Let go of the horse or I’ll blow your head off!”

The soldier’s musket was slung over one shoulder, which he lowered in order to catch hold of his weapon.

“One more move and you’re a dead man!” cried Fabrizio, rushing at him.

“All right, give me the five francs and take one of the horses,” the soldier said, bewildered after a longing glance at the high road, where there was no one in sight. Fabrizio, keeping his musket raised in his left hand, tossed him three five-franc coins with his right. “Dismount or you’re a dead man.… Saddle the black, and take the other two away.… I’ll fire, the first move you make.” The soldier sullenly obeyed. Fabrizio went over to the black horse and slid the reins onto his left arm without losing sight of the soldier, who was slowly walking away; when Fabrizio saw that he was some fifty paces off he quickly vaulted onto the horse. No sooner had he mounted, groping for the right stirrup with his right foot, than he heard a bullet whistling past his ear: the soldier was firing his musket. In a rage Fabrizio rushed toward him, but the soldier turned and ran, and soon Fabrizio saw him galloping off on one of his two remaining horses. “Good, now he’s out of range,” he decided. The horse he had just bought was a fine one but seemed nearly starved to death. Fabrizio returned to the high road, where there was
still no one in sight, crossed it, and trotted his horse to a little fold in the terrain to the left, where he hoped to meet up with the canteen-woman; but when he reached the top of the little hill, all he could see, for more than a league, were a few scattered troops. “I’m fated never to see her again,” he said to himself with a sigh, “what a good creature!” He soon reached a farm he had noticed in the distance, to the right of the high road. Without dismounting, and after paying in advance, he had the farmer give some oats to his poor horse, so famished that it was gnawing the manger. An hour afterward, Fabrizio was trotting down the high road, still hoping to meet the canteen-woman or at least Corporal Aubry. Riding on and peering in all directions, he reached a marshy stream crossed by a narrow wooden bridge. At the bridge, to the right of the high road, was a solitary house with a sign saying
THE WHITE HORSE.
“At least I’ll get something to eat there,” Fabrizio decided. A mounted cavalry officer with his arm in a sling stood at the bridgehead, looking extremely downcast; ten paces away, three more cavalrymen without horses were filling their pipes.

“Now those men,” Fabrizio mused, “look to me as if they wanted to buy this horse for even less than it cost me.” The wounded officer and the three men on foot watched him approach and seemed to be waiting for him. “I’d better not cross the stream by this bridge, I’ll follow along to the right, that will be the road the canteen-woman told me to take in order to get away from here.… Yes,” our hero decided, “but if I seem to be running away, I’ll be ashamed of myself tomorrow; besides, my horse has good legs, and the officer’s is probably worn out; if he tries to make me dismount, I’ll gallop off.” In the course of this reasoning Fabrizio reined in his horse, advancing as slowly as possible.

“Come on then, hussar!” the mounted officer shouted in a commanding tone of voice.

Fabrizio advanced a few steps and stopped. “You’re after my horse?” he cried.

“No, of course not. Forward!”

Fabrizio stared at the officer: he had a white moustache and an honorable expression; the sling supporting his left arm was covered with blood, and his right hand, too, was wrapped in a bloody cloth. “It’s the
other two who will leap for my horse’s bridle,” Fabrizio speculated, but looking closely he saw that these men were wounded as well.

“In the name of honor,” said the officer, who was wearing a colonel’s epaulettes, “stay on guard here and tell every dragoon, cavalryman, and hussar who comes in sight that Colonel Le Baron is in that inn over there, and that I order them to join me there.”

The old colonel seemed overcome with pain; by his first words he had made a conquest of our hero, who answered quite sensibly: “I’m too young, sir, for anyone to pay much attention to me; I should have an order written in your own hand.”

“Right,” the colonel said, observing Fabrizio closely; “write the order, La Rose, you’ve still got a right hand.”

Without a word, La Rose took a tiny vellum notebook out of his pocket, scribbled a few lines, and, tearing off a sheet, handed it to Fabrizio; the colonel repeated his order, adding that after two hours on guard Fabrizio would be relieved, as was proper, by one of the three wounded cavalrymen who were with him. He and his men then went into the inn. Fabrizio watched them walk away and sat motionless at his end of the wooden bridge, struck by the grim and silent suffering of the three figures. “Like spirits under a spell,” he mused. Finally he unfolded the sheet of paper and read the order, which ran as follows:

Fabrizio had been on guard duty no more than a quarter of an hour when he saw approaching six mounted men and three on foot; he showed them the colonel’s order.

“We’ll be back,” said four of the riders, and they cantered across the bridge. Fabrizio then remonstrated with the other two. During the
lively discussion which ensued, the three men on foot crossed the bridge. One of the remaining men on horseback ended by asking to see the order and took it with him, saying: “I’ll bring this to my friends, they’ll be sure to come back; you wait for them here.” And he galloped off, his comrades following. All this happened in the wink of an eye.

Fabrizio, furious, called to one of the wounded soldiers, who appeared at a window of the White Horse Inn. This soldier, who was wearing a sergeant’s stripes, came out of the inn and shouted to Fabrizio as he approached: “Draw your sword, soldier! You’re on duty here.”