‘Silvine,’ she said as she was leaving, ‘take good care of our invalid, give him his broth at twelve and his medicine at four.’
The maid, busy with her usual jobs, was once again the brave and self-effacing woman, running the farm now in the master’s absence, with Chariot laughing and capering round her.
‘Never you fear, Madame, he won’t go short of anything with me here to look after him.’
6
AT the Delaherches’s house in the rue Maqua in Sedan, life had started up again after the terrible upheavals of the battle and capitulation, and for nearly four months day followed day under the dreary yoke of the Prussian occupation.
But one corner of the great factory block remained shut up and looked uninhabited – the room looking on to the road at one end of the proprietor’s quarters, where Colonel de Vineuil was still living. Whereas the other windows were open and revealed quite a lot of activity and bustle of life, the windows of this room seemed dead, with their blinds obstinately closed. The colonel had complained about his eyes and said that strong light made them hurt. Nobody knew whether it was true or not, but a lamp was kept burning in his room night and day to humour him. He had had to stay in bed for two whole months, although all Major Bouroche had diagnosed was a cracked ankle-bone, but the wound would not heal and all sorts of complications had developed. Now he did get up, but he was in such a state of dejection, afflicted by some indefinable ill which was so intractable and all-pervading that he spent his days lying on a couch in front of a big wood fire. He was losing weight and becoming a wraith, and the doctor who attended him was very puzzled because he could find nothing wrong, no reason for this slow death. He was flickering out like a flame.
Old Madame Delaherche had shut herself up with him on the day after the occupation. They had no doubt come to an understanding, in a few words and once and for all, about their definite wish to remain cloistered together in this room so long as there were Prussians billeted in the house. Many had spent only two or three nights there, but one, Captain von Gartlauben, was there permanently. However, neither the colonel nor the old lady had ever referred to these things again. For all her seventy-eight years she rose at dawn and came and took up her position in an armchair opposite her friend on the other side of the fireplace, and in the unchanging light of the lamp she began knitting stockings for poor children, while he, staring into the wood fire, never did anything, and seemed to be living and dying with but one thought, in a growing lethargy. They certainly did not exchange twenty words in a whole day, and if at any time, simply because she came and went about the house, she inadvertently let some item of outside news escape her, he always stopped her with a gesture. So now nothing whatever came in from life outside, nothing about the siege of Paris, the defeats on the Loire, the daily sufferings of the invasion. But however much, in this voluntary entombment, he refused to see the light of day and stuffed up his ears, the whole appalling disaster and mortal grief must have been reaching him through the cracks, in the air he breathed; for hour by hour he was none the less poisoned by these things and brought nearer to death.
All through this period Delaherche, very much in the light of day and anxious to go on living, was busying himself with trying to reopen his mill. So far he had only been able to get a few looms working again, in the disorganization of workers and customers. And to occupy himself during his boring free time he had had the idea of making a complete inventory of his premises and working out certain improvements he had been dreaming of for a long time. It happened that he had on the spot, to help him in this job, a young man who had found shelter in his house after the battle, son of one of his customers. Edmond Lagarde, brought up at Passy in his father’s small drapery business, had been a sergeant in the 5th infantry, was barely twenty-three and looked no more than eighteen, and he had behaved under fire like a hero and with such tenacity that he had come in through the Ménil gate at about five with his left arm broken by one of the last bullets. Ever since the wounded had been moved out from his sheds Delaherche had kept him out of kindness. Thus Edmond was part of the family, eating, sleeping and living there, and now quite recovered and acting as secretary to the mill-owner while waiting to be able to return to Paris. Thanks to Delaherche’s protection, and on his solemn promise not to escape, the Prussian authorities left him alone. He was fair and blue-eyed, as pretty as a woman and moreover so diffident and modest that he blushed at the least thing. His mother had brought him up and deprived herself of everything, devoting the profits of the little business to paying for his years at school. He loved Paris and pined desperately for it in front of Gilberte, a wounded Cherubino whom she looked after with friendly affection.
Finally the family was also enlarged by the new guest, von Gartlauben, a captain in the Landwehr, whose regiment had replaced the regular troops in Sedan. In spite of his modest rank he was an influential figure, for an uncle of his was Governor-General, installed at Rheims, who had absolute power over the whole area. He also was proud of loving Paris, of having lived there and of being well aware of its politeness and refinements, and indeed he affected the impeccable behaviour of the man of breeding, concealing his native uncouthness beneath this polish. He always wore a tight-fitting uniform. He was tall and heavily built, keeping his age dark, for he was very distressed at being forty-five. Given a little more intelligence he could have been terrible, but his inordinate vanity kept him in a continual state of self-satisfaction, for he could never bring himself to believe that anybody could be laughing at him.
In due course he became a real saviour to Delaherche. But in the early days after the capitulation, what dreadful times they were! Sedan was overrun with German soldiers and in terror of being looted. In time the victorious troops moved off towards the valley of the Seine and only a garrison remained, and the town fell into the deathly peace of a cemetery – houses permanently shuttered, shops closed, streets empty by dusk, with the heavy tread and harsh cries of patrols. No papers came, or letters. It was like a sealed dungeon, a sudden amputation, with ignorance and foreboding about fresh disasters everybody felt were on the way. The crowning misery was the threat of famine. One morning people woke up to no bread, no meat and general ruin, as though the land had been eaten up by a swarm of locusts, following a week in which hundreds of thousands of men had poured through like a river in flood. The town had only two or three days’ provisions left, and appeals had had to be made to Belgium, and everything now came from the neighbouring country across an open frontier, the customs having been swept away in the catastrophe. And of course there were continual annoyances, a struggle that began again every morning between the Prussian administration, set up in the Sub-Prefecture, and the town council in permanent session at the Hôtel de Ville. The latter was heroic in its non-cooperation, but however much it argued and only yielded inch by inch, the inhabitants were being crushed beneath the weight of ever increasing demands and arbitrary and too frequent commandeerings.
At first Delaherche had a great deal to put up with from the soldiers and officers billeted on him. Men of all sorts of nationalities tramped through his home, with pipes in their mouths. Every night there suddenly fell upon the town, without warning, two thousand men, three thousand men – infantry, cavalry, artillery – and although these men only had a right to shelter and fire, you often had to run about and find them food. The rooms where they slept were left in a revoltingly filthy state. Often the officers came in drunk and were more unbearable than the men. Yet discipline was so strict that acts of violence or pillage were rare. In the whole of Sedan there were only two women known to have been raped. It was only later, when Paris resisted, that they made their domination brutally felt, for they were exasperated that the struggle looked like going on for ever, and were always afraid of a mass uprising and the savage warfare declared on them by the guerrillas.
Delaherche had just had to have a commanding officer in the cavalry who slept in his boots and left behind filth even on the mantelpiece,
when Captain von Gartlauben arrived in his house one pouring wet night in the second half of September. The first hour was pretty rough. He talked at the top of his voice, demanded the best room, clanking his sword as he came up the stairs. But once he saw Gilberte he went very formal, shut himself up in his room, passed people stiffly and bowed politely. He lived in constant adulation because everyone knew that a word from him to the colonel in command at Sedan would be enough to get a requisition mitigated or a man released. Recently his uncle, the Governor-General at Rheims, had issued a coldly ferocious proclamation declaring a state of siege and punishing with the death penalty any person helping the enemy, whether as a spy or by causing German troops to take the wrong route when they were responsible for transporting them, or by destroying bridges and cannon or damaging telegraph wires and railways. The enemy meant the French, and the hearts of the people were outraged when they read the big white poster on the door of the headquarters which made a crime out of their anguish and hopes. It was so hard to learn about fresh victories of the Germans through hurrahs from the garrison! Every day brought its own grief, soldiers lit big bonfires, sang and caroused all through the night, while the population, now forced to be indoors by nine, listened in their darkened houses, beside themselves with uncertainty and guessing it meant yet another disaster. It was in one of these situations, towards mid October, that Captain von Gartlauben showed the first sign of some delicacy of mind. Since that morning a new hope had been born in Sedan, for there was a rumour of a great success for the army of the Loire on its way to relieve Paris. But so many times already the best news had turned into tidings of disaster! And indeed by that evening it was known that the Bavarian army had taken Orleans. In the rue Maqua, in a house opposite the mill, some soldiers were bellowing so loud that the captain, seeing Gilberte looking very upset, went and stopped them, for he himself thought that all this row was uncalled for. The month went by and von Gartlauben found occasion to render a few little services. The Prussian authorities had reorganized the administration, and a German sub-prefect had been appointed, which did not, however, prevent various annoyances from going on, although he was relatively reasonable. One of the most frequent difficulties always cropping up between the administration and the town council was the commandeering of vehicles, and a major fuss broke out one morning when Delaherche had been unable to send his carriage and two horses to the Sub-Prefecture. The mayor was put under arrest for a short time, and Delaherche would have gone to join him in the citadel had not Captain von Gartlauben taken simple steps to calm the storm. On another day, thanks to his intervention, the town was granted an extension of time when it was condemned to pay a fine of thirty thousand francs for alleged delays in the reconstruction of the Villette bridge, which had been demolished by the Prussians – a deplorable affair which ruined Sedan and filled it with consternation. But above all it was after the surrender of Metz that Delaherche was really indebted to his guest. The dreadful news had been like the trump of doom to the inhabitants, and the end of their last hopes, and by the following week overwhelming numbers of troops had appeared once again, the flood of men from Metz, the army of Prince Friedrich Karl heading for the Loire, that of General Manteuffel marching towards Amiens and Rouen, and other corps on their way to reinforce the armies besieging Paris. For some days the houses were crammed with soldiery, bakers and butchers were cleaned out to the last crumb and bone, and the streets reeked of sweat as though a huge migrating herd had passed through. The factory in the rue Maqua alone did not have to suffer from this flow of human cattle, for it was preserved by a friendly hand and classified only for lodging a few officers of good breeding.
So it came about that Delaherche eventually gave up his unfriendly attitude. The better class families had shut themselves up in their apartments and avoided any contact with the officers they had billeted on them. But he, with his continual urge to talk, please people and enjoy life, found this role of sulking victim very irksome. His big, cold, silent house in which each one kept to himself in the stiffness of resentment, got terribly on his nerves. So one day he began by stopping von Gartlauben on the staircase and thanking him for his kind services. Gradually the habit grew
and the two men exchanged a few words when they met, and thus one evening the Prussian captain found himself sitting in the manufacturer’s study, by the fire on which enormous oak logs were blazing, smoking a cigar and discussing recent events in a friendly way. For the first two weeks Gilberte did not appear and he pretended to be unaware of her existence, although at the slightest sound he glanced quickly at the door of the next room. He seemed to want everybody to forget his position as one of the conquerors, displayed a fair and broad-minded attitude, and often joked about some of the more laughable requisitions. For instance one day a coffin and a bandage had been requisitioned and that bandage and coffin struck him as very funny. For the rest, coal, oil, milk, sugar, butter, bread, meat, to say nothing of clothes, stoves, lamps, in fact anything that can be eaten or used in daily life, he just shrugged his shoulders about it. After all, what can you expect? It was annoying,
no doubt, and he even admitted that they were asking for too much, but it was war, and you had to live in an enemy country. Delaherche, who was irritated by these incessant requisitionings, spoke out plainly and went over them in detail every evening as though he were going through his kitchen accounts. There was, however, just one fierce argument between them about the levy of a million francs which the Prussian prefect in Rethel had imposed upon the department of the Ardennes on the pretext that Germany needed compensation for losses caused by French warships and through the expulsion of Germans resident in France. The share to be paid by Sedan was forty-two thousand. Delaherche wore himself out trying to make his guest understand that that was iniquitous, that the situation of the town was exceptional because it had already suffered too much to be struck again in this way. As a matter of fact they both emerged from these explanations on more intimate terms, for he was delighted at having made himself drunk with his own verbosity, and the Prussian was pleased with himself for having displayed a quite Parisian urbanity.
One evening Gilberte entered in her gay, fly-away manner. She stopped dead, pretending to be surprised. Captain von Gartlauben rose to his feet and was tactful enough to retire almost at once. But the next day he found Gilberte already there, and he took his usual place on one side of the fireplace. That was the first of some delightful evenings spent in the study, and not in the drawing-room, which established a subtle distinction. Even later, when she consented to give her guest musical selections, which he loved, she went alone into the adjoining drawing-room, merely leaving the door open. Through this hard winter the ancient oaks of the Ardennes sent flames leaping high in the lofty fireplace, and at about ten they had a cup of tea and talked in the cosy warmth of the big room. Captain von Gartlauben had obviously fallen madly in love with this young woman with the merry laugh, who flirted with him as in the old days at Charleville she used to do with Captain Beaudoin’s friends. He took even more care of his appearance, displayed the most exaggerated gallantry and gratefully accepted the tiniest favour, tortured by his one anxiety not to be taken for a barbarian, a brutal soldier who raped women.
Thus there were, so to speak, two parallel existences in the huge dark house in the rue Maqua. Whereas at meal times Edmond, with his pretty face like a wounded cherub, answered Delaherche’s ceaseless prattle in monosyllables and blushed if Gilberte asked him to pass the salt, and in the evenings Captain von Gartlauben sat in the study listening with swimming eyes to a Mozart sonata she was playing for him in the drawing-room, the adjoining room in which Colonel de Vineuil and Madame Delaherche lived was always silent, with closed shutters, lamp eternally burning as though it were a tomb lit by a candle. December had buried the town in snow, and the dreadful news took second place in the intense cold. After the defeat of General Ducrot at Champigny and the loss of Orleans there was only one grim hope left, that the land of France itself
would become the avenging land, the exterminating land devouring its own conquerors. Let the snow fall in ever thicker flakes, let the earth split open under blocks of ice and all Germany find its grave therein! Then a new anguish twisted old Madame Delaherche’s heart. One night when her son was called away into Belgium on business she had heard, as she passed Gilberte’s door, the sound of soft voices, stifled kisses and laughter. She went back to her own room horrified by the abomination she suspected. It could only be the Prussian in there; she had as a matter of fact thought she had noticed a certain understanding in the way they looked at each other, and she was stunned by this ultimate shame. Oh, this woman her son had brought into the home against her advice, this harlot whom she had already forgiven once, by holding her peace after Captain Beaudoin’s death! And it was all beginning again, and this time it was the lowest infamy! What should she do? Such a monstrous thing could not go on under her roof. The agony of the cloistered life she lived was made worse, and she had days of fearful struggle. On the days when she came into the colonel’s room sadder than ever and silent for hours, with tears in her eyes, he looked at her and imagined that France had suffered yet another defeat.
It was at this juncture that Henriette appeared one morning in the rue Maqua to try to interest the Delaherches in the fate of her uncle Fouchard. She had heard sniggering gossip about the all-powerful influence Gilberte had on Captain von Gartlauben, and so she was a little embarrassed when she met old Madame Delaherche first, on the stairs, going up to the colonel’s room, for she felt she ought to explain the object of her visit to her.