2.M.3.2. ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH
ANY one who had chanced to pass through the little town of
Vernon at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across
that fine monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded,
let us hope, by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have
observed, had he dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man
about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and trousers
and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something
yellow which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with
wooden sabots, tanned by the sun, his face nearly black and
his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead which ran
down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely aged, who
walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand, in one of
those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of
terraces, charming enclosures full of flowers of which one
could say, were they much larger: "these are gardens," and
were they a little smaller: "these are bouquets." All these
enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and on a house at
the other. The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes of
whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these
enclosures and the most humble of these houses about 1817.
He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a
woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely nor
pretty, neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who served him.
The plot of earth which he called his garden was celebrated in
the town for the beautv of the flowers which he cultivated
there. These flowers were his occupation.
By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of
buckets of water, he had succeeded in creating after the
Creator, and he had invented certain tulips and certain
dahlias which seemed to have been forgotten by nature. He
was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange Bodin in the formation
of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the
cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and
China. He was in his alleys from the break of day, in
summer, planting, cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid
his flowers with an air of kindness, sadness, and sweetness,
sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful for hours,
listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of a
child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at
the tip of a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle.
His table was very plain, and he drank more milk than wine.
A child could make him give way, and his servant scolded him.
He was so timid that be seemed shy, he rarely went out, and
he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his pane and
his cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless,
if the inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any chance
comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he
opened his door with a smile. He was the "brigand of the
Loire."
Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs,
biographies, the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the
grand
army, would have been struck by a name which occurs there
with tolerable frequency, the name of Georges Pontmercy.
When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been a soldier
in Saintonge's regiment. The revolution broke out. Saintonge's
regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine;
for the old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names
of provinces even after the fall of the monarchy, and were
only divided into brigades in 1794. Pontmercy fought at
Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at
Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed
Houchard's rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground
against the corps of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old
rampart of Andernach, and only rejoined the main body of
the army when the enemy's cannon had opened a breach from
the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was
under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel,
where a ball from a biscaien broke his arm. Then
he passed to the frontier of Italy, and was one of the thirty
grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende with Joubert.
Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and Pontmercy
sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the
midst of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused
Bonaparte to say: "Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and
grenadier." He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi,
at the moment when, with uplifted sabre, he was shouting:
"Forward!" Having been embarked with his company in the
exigencies of the campaign, on board a pinnace which was
proceeding
from Genoa to some obscure port on the coast, he
fell into a wasps'-nest of seven or eight English vessels. The
Genoese commander wanted to throw his cannon into the
sea, to hide the soldiers between decks, and to slip along in the
dark as a merchant vessel. Pontmercy had the colors hoisted
to the peak, and sailed proudly past under the guns of the
British frigates. Twenty leagues further on, his audacity having
increased, he attacked with his pinnace, and captured a
large English transport which was carrying troops to Sicily,
and which was so loaded down with men and horses that the
vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was in that
Malher division which took Gunzberg from the Archduke
Ferdinand. At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath
a storm of bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the
head of the 9th Dragoons. He distinguished himself at
Austerlitz in that admirable march in echelons effected under
the enemy's fire. When the cavalry of the Imperial Russian
Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of the line, Pontmercy
was one of those who took their revenge and overthrew the
Guard. The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw
Wurmser at Mantua, Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm,
made prisoners in succession. He formed a part of the eighth
corps of the grand army which Mortier commanded, and
which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred to the
55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders. At
Eylau he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two
hours, the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author
of this book, sustained alone with his company of eighty-three
men every effort of the hostile army. Pontmercy was one of
the three who emerged alive from that cemetery. He was at
Friedland. Then he saw Moscow. Then La Beresina, then
Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig, and the defiles
of Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry, Craon,
the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the
redoubtable position of Laon. At Arnay-Le-Duc, being then
a captain, he put ten Cossacks to the sword, and saved, not
his general, but his corporal. He was well slashed up on this
occasion, and twenty-seven splinters were extracted from his
left arm alone. Eight days before the capitulation of Paris
he had just exchanged with a comrade and entered the cavalry.
He had what was called under the old regime,
the double
hand, that is to say, an equal aptitude for handling the
sabre
or the musket as a soldier, or a squadron or a battalion as an
officer. It is from this aptitude, perfected by a military
education, which certain special branches of the service arise,
the dragoons, for example, who are both cavalry-men and
infantry at one and the same time. He accompanied Napoleon
to the Island of Elba. At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron
of cuirassiers, in Dubois' brigade. It was he who captured
the standard of the Lunenburg battalion. He came and
cast the flag at the Emperor's feet. He was covered with
blood. While tearing down the banner he had received a
sword-cut across his face. The Emperor, greatly pleased,
shouted to him: "You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are
an officer of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy replied:
"Sire, I thank you for my widow." An hour later, he fell
in the ravine of Ohain. Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy?
He was this same "brigand of the Loire."
We have already seen something of his history. After
Waterloo, Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the hollow
road of Ohain, as it will be remembered, had succeeded in
joining the army, and had dragged himself from ambulance
to ambulance as far as the cantonments of the Loire.
The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent
him into residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at
Vernon.
King Louis XVIII., regarding all that which had taken
place during the Hundred Days as not having occurred at all,
did not recognize his quality as an officer of the Legion of
Honor, nor his grade of colonel, nor his title of baron. He, on
his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself "Colonel
Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat, and he
never went out without fastening to it his rosette as an officer
of the Legion of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had
him warned that the authorities would prosecute him for
"illegal" wearing of this decoration. When this notice was
conveyed to him through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy
retorted with a bitter smile: "I do not know whether I no
longer understand French, or whether you no longer speak
it; but the fact is that I do not understand." Then he went
out for eight successive days with his rosette. They dared not
interfere with him. Two or three times the Minister of War
and the general in command of the department wrote to him
with the following address: A Monsieur le Commandant
Pontmercy." He sent back the letters with the seals
unbroken.
At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was
treating in the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe
addressed to General Bonaparte. Pontmercy had ended,
may
we be pardoned the expression, by having in his mouth the
same saliva as his Emperor.
In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners
who refused to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of
Hannibal's spirit.
One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the
streets of Vernon, stepped up to him, and said: "Mr. Crown
Attorney, am I permitted to wear my scar?"
He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of
squadron.
He had hired the smallest house which he could find at
Vernon. He lived there alone, we have just seen how. Under
the Empire, between two wars, he had found time to marry
Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, thoroughly
indignant at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh, saying:
"The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815,
Madame Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by
the way, lofty in sentiment and rare, and worthy of her
husband, died, leaving a child. This child had been the
colonel's joy in his solitude; but the grandfather had
imperatively
claimed his grandson, declaring that if the child were
not given to him he would disinherit him. The father had
yielded in the little one's interest, and had transferred his
love to flowers.
Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred
up mischief nor conspired. He shared his thoughts between
the innocent things which he was then doing and the great
things which he had done. He passed his time in expecting a
pink or in recalling Austerlitz.
M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law.
The colonel was "a bandit" to him. M. Gillenormand never
mentioned the colonel, except when he occasionally made
mocking allusions to "his Baronship." It had been expressly
agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt to see his son nor
to speak to him, under penalty of having the latter handed
over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands,
Pontmercy was a man afflicted with the plague. They
intended to bring up the child in their own way. Perhaps
the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions, but he
submitted
to them, thinking that he was doing right and sacrificing
no one but himself.
The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to
much; but the inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the
elder was considerable. This aunt, who had remained unmarried,
was very rich on the maternal side, and her sister's
son was her natural heir. The boy, whose name was Marius,
knew that he had a father, but nothing more. No one opened
his mouth to him about it. Nevertheless, in the society into
which his grandfather took him, whispers, innuendoes, and
winks, had eventually enlightened the little boy's mind; he had
finally understood something of the case, and as he naturally
took in the ideas and opinions which were, so to speak, the air
he breathed, by a sort of infiltration and slow penetration, he
gradually came to think of his father only with shame and
with a pain at his heart.
While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel
slipped
away every two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like
a criminal breaking his ban, and went and posted himself at
Saint-Sulpice, at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand led
Marius to the mass. There, trembling lest the aunt should
turn round, concealed behind a pillar, motionless, not daring
to breathe, he gazed at his child. The scarred veteran was
afraid of that old spinster.
From this had arisen his connection with the cure of
Vernon, M. l'Abbe Mabeuf.
That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice,
who had often observed this man gazing at his child,
and the scar on his cheek, and the large tears in his eyes.
That man, who had so manly an air, yet who was weeping like
a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung to his
mind. One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he
had encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had
recognized the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned
the circumstance to the cure, and both had paid the
colonel a visit, on some pretext or other. This visit led to
others. The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at first,
ended by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden
finally came to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy
was sacrificing his happiness to his child's future. This
caused the cure to regard him with veneration and tenderness,
and the colonel, on his side, became fond of the cure. And
moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so penetrate
each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an
old priest and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same.
The one has devoted his life to his country here below, the
other to his country on high; that is the only difference.
Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's
day, Marius wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated
by his aunt, and which one would have pronounced to be
copied from some formula; this was all that M. Gillenormand
tolerated; and the father answered them with very tender
letters which the grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.