The Downfall. Emile Zola
in the universal confusion, had been left wide open, without so much as a sentry to guard it. People were going out and coming in incessantly, military men and officers of the household, and the roar from the blazing kitchen seemed to rise and pervade the whole house. There was no light in the passage and on the staircase, however, and he had to grope his way up as best he might. On reaching the first floor he paused for a few seconds, his heart beating violently, before the door of the apartment that he knew contained the Emperor, but not a sound was to be heard in the room; the stillness that reigned there was as of death. Mounting the last flight he presented himself at the door of the servant’s room to which Madame Desvallieres had been consigned; the old lady was at first terrified at sight of him. When she recognized him presently she said:
“Ah, my poor child, what a sad meeting is this! I would cheerfully have surrendered my house to the Emperor, but the people he has about him have no sense of decency. They lay hands on everything, without so much as saying, ‘By your leave,’ and I am afraid they will burn the house down with their great fires! He, poor man, looks like a corpse, and such sadness in his face – ”
And when the young man took leave of her with a few murmured words of comfort she went with him to the door, and leaning over the banister: “Look!” she softly said, “you can see him from where you are. Ah! we are all undone. Adieu, my child!”
Maurice remained planted like a statue on one of the steps of the dark staircase. Craning his neck and directing his glance through the glazed fanlight over the door of the apartment, he beheld a sight that was never to fade from his memory.
In the bare and cheerless room, the conventional bourgeois “parlor,” was the Emperor, seated at a table on which his plate was laid, lighted at either end by wax candles in great silver candelabra. Silent in the background stood two aides-de-camp with folded arms. The wine in the glass was untasted, the bread untouched, a breast of chicken was cooling on the plate. The Emperor did not stir; he sat staring down at the cloth with those dim, lusterless, watery eyes that the young man remembered to have seen before at Rheims; but he appeared more weary than then, and when, evidently at the cost of a great effort, he had raised a couple of mouthfuls to his lips, he impatiently pushed the remainder of the food from him with his hand. That was his dinner. His pale face was blanched with an expression of suffering endured in silence.
As Maurice was passing the dining room on the floor beneath, the door was suddenly thrown open, and through the glow of candles and the steam of smoking joints he caught a glimpse of a table of equerries, chamberlains, and aides-de-camp, engaged in devouring the Emperor’s game and poultry and drinking his champagne, amid a great hubbub of conversation. Now that the marshal’s dispatch had been sent off, all these people were delighted to know that the retreat was assured. In a week they would be at Paris and could sleep between clean sheets.
Then, for the first time, Maurice suddenly became conscious of the terrible fatigue that was oppressing him like a physical burden; there was no longer room for doubt, the whole army was about to fall back, and the best thing for him to do was to get some sleep while waiting for the 7th corps to pass. He made his way back across the square to the house of his friend Combette, where, like one in a dream, he ate some dinner, after which he was mistily conscious of someone dressing his foot and then conducting him upstairs to a bedroom. And then all was blackness and utter annihilation; he slept a dreamless, unstirring sleep. But after an uncertain length of time – hours, days, centuries, he knew not – he gave a start and sat bolt upright in bed in the surrounding darkness. Where was he? What was that continuous rolling sound, like the rattling of thunder, that had aroused him from his slumber? His recollection suddenly returned to him; he ran to the window to see what was going on. In the obscurity of the street beneath, where the night was usually so peaceful, the artillery was passing, horses, men, and guns, in interminable array, with a roar and clatter that made the lifeless houses quake and tremble. The abrupt vision filled him with unreasoning alarm. What time might it be? The great bell in the Hotel de Ville struck four. He was endeavoring to allay his uneasiness by assuring himself that it was simply the initial movement in the retreat that had been ordered the day previous, when, raising his eyes, he beheld a sight that gave him fresh cause for inquietude: there was a light still in the corner window of the notary’s house opposite, and the shadow of the Emperor, drawn in dark profile on the curtain, appeared and disappeared at regularly spaced intervals.
Maurice hastily slipped on his trousers preparatory to going down to the street, but just then Combette appeared at the door with a bed-candle in his hand, gesticulating wildly.
“I saw you from the square as I was coming home from the Mairie, and I came up to tell you the news. They have been keeping me out of my bed all this time; would you believe it, for more than two hours the mayor and I have been busy attending to fresh requisitions. Yes, everything is upset again; there has been another change of plans. Ah! he knew what he was about, that officer did, who wanted to keep the folks in Paris from getting wind of matters!”
He went on for a long time in broken, disjointed phrases, and when he had finished the young man, speechless, brokenhearted, saw it all. About midnight the Emperor had received a dispatch from the Minister of War in reply to the one that had been sent by the marshal. Its exact terms were not known, but an aide-de-camp at the Hotel de Ville had stated openly that the Empress and the Council declared there would be a revolution in Paris should the Emperor retrace his steps and abandon Bazaine. The dispatch, which evinced the utmost ignorance as to the position of the German armies and the resources of the army of Chalons, advised, or rather ordered, an immediate forward movement, regardless of all considerations, in spite of everything, with a heat and fury that seemed incredible.
“The Emperor sent for the marshal,” added the apothecary, “and they were closeted together for near an hour; of course I am not in position to say what passed between them, but I am told by all the officers that there is to be no more retreating, and the advance to the Meuse is to be resumed at once. We have been requisitioning all the ovens in the city for the 1st corps, which will come up to-morrow morning and take the place of the 12th, whose artillery you see at this moment starting for la Besace. The matter is decided for good this time; you will smell powder before you are much older.”
He ceased. He also was gazing at the lighted window over in the notary’s house. Then he went on in a low voice, as if talking to himself, with an expression on his face of reflective curiosity:
“I wonder what they had to say to each other? It strikes one as a rather peculiar proceeding, all the same, to run away from a threatened danger at six in the evening, and at midnight, when nothing has occurred to alter the situation, to rush headlong into the very self-same danger.”
Below them in the street Maurice still heard the gun-carriages rumbling and rattling over the stones of the little sleeping city, that ceaseless tramp of horse and man, that uninterrupted tide of humanity, pouring onward toward the Meuse, toward the unknown, terrible fate that the morrow had in store for them. And still upon the mean, cheap curtains of that bourgeois dwelling he beheld the shadow of the Emperor passing and repassing at regular intervals, the restless activity of the sick man, to whom his cares made sleep impossible, whose sole repose was motion, in whose ears was ever ringing that tramp of horses and men whom he was suffering to be sent forward to their death. A few brief hours, then, had sufficed; the slaughter was decided on; it was to be. What, indeed, could they have found to say to each other, that Emperor and that marshal, conscious, both of them, of the inevitable disaster that lay before them? Assured as they were at night of defeat, from their knowledge of the wretched condition the army would be in when the time should come for it to meet the enemy, how, knowing as they did that the peril was hourly becoming greater, could they have changed their mind in the morning? Certain it was that General de Palikao’s plan of a swift, bold dash on Montmedy, which seemed hazardous on the 23d and was, perhaps, still not impracticable on the 25th, if conducted with veteran troops and a leader of ability, would on the 27th be an act of sheer madness amid the divided counsels of the chiefs and the increasing demoralization of the troops. This they both well knew; why, then, did they obey those merciless drivers who were flogging them onward in their irresolution? why did they hearken to those furious passions that were spurring them forward? The marshal’s, it might be said, was the temperament of the soldier, whose duty is limited to obedience to his instructions, great in its