traveler, in fact, came down piecemeal. No omelette all this time! The
old hemp-seller grew very hungry indeed.
" 'By my salvation!' said he, 'when once my omelette is made we will
see about satisfying that man yonder.'
" 'So you admit, now, that it was a man?' said the hunchback wife.
'What made you say that it was not a head a minute ago, you great
worry?'
"The woman breaks the eggs, fries the omelette, and dishes it up
without any more grumbling; somehow this squabble began to make her
feel very
uncomfortable. Her husband sits down and begins to eat. The
hunchback was frightened, and said that she was not hungry.
" 'Tap! tap!' There was a stranger rapping at the door.
" 'Who is there?'
" 'The man that died yesterday!'
" 'Come in,' answers the hemp-grower.
"So the traveler comes in, sits himself down on a three-legged stool,
and says: 'Are you mindful of God, who gives
eternal peace to those
who
confess His Name? Woman! You saw me done to death, and you have
said nothing! I have been eaten by the pigs! The pigs do not enter
Paradise, and
therefore I, a Christian man, shall go down into hell,
all because a woman forsooth will not speak, a thing that has never
been known before. You must deliver me,' and so on, and so on.
"The woman, who was more and more frightened every minute, cleaned her
frying-pan, put on her Sunday clothes, went to the justice, and told
him about the crime, which was brought to light, and the robbers were
broken on the wheel in proper style on the Market Place. This good
work
accomplished, the woman and her husband always had the finest
hemp you ever set eyes on. Then, which pleased them still better, they
had something that they had wished for for a long time, to-wit, a man-
child, who in course of time became a great lord of the king's.
"That is the true story of The Courageous Hunchback Woman.
"I do not like stories of that sort; they make me dream at night,"
said La Fosseuse. "Napoleon's adventures are much nicer, I think."
"Quite true," said the
keeper. "Come now, M. Goguelat, tell us about
the Emperor."
"The evening is too far gone," said the postman, "and I do not care
about cutting short the story of a
victory."
"Never mind, let us hear about it all the same! We know the stories,
for we have heard you tell them many a time; but it is always a
pleasure to hear them."
"Tell us about the Emperor!" cried several voices at once.
"You will have it?" answered Goguelat. "Very good, but you will see
that there is no sense in the story when it is gone through at a
gallop. I would rather tell you all about a single battle. Shall it be
Champ-Aubert, where we ran out of cartridges, and furbished them just
the same with the bayonet?"
"No, the Emperor! the Emperor!"
The old
infantry man got up from his truss of hay and glanced round
about on those assembled, with the
peculiar sombre expression in which
may be read all the miseries, adventures, and hardships of an old
soldier's
career. He took his coat by the two skirts in front, and
raised them, as if it were a question of once more packing up the
knapsack in which his kit, his shoes, and all he had in the world used
to be stowed; for a moment he stood leaning all his weight on his left
foot, then he swung the right foot forward, and yielded with a good
grace to the wishes of his
audience. He swept his gray hair to one
side, so as to leave his
forehead bare, and flung back his head and
gazed
upwards, as if to raise himself to the lofty
height of the
gigantic story that he was about to tell.
"Napoleon, you see, my friends, was born in Corsica, which is a French
island warmed by the Italian sun; it is like a
furnace there,
everything is scorched up, and they keep on killing each other from
father to son for generations all about nothing at all--'tis a notion
they have. To begin at the
beginning, there was something
extraordinary about the thing from the first; it occurred to his
mother, who was the handsomest woman of her time, and a
shrewd soul,
to
dedicate him to God, so that he should escape all the dangers of
infancy and of his after life; for she had dreamed that the world was
on fire on the day he was born. It was a
prophecy! So she asked God to
protect him, on condition that Napoleon should re-establish His holy
religion, which had been thrown to the ground just then. That was the
agreement; we shall see what came of it.
"Now, do you follow me carefully, and tell me whether what you are
about to hear is natural.
"It is certain sure that only a man who had had
imagination enough to
make a
mysteriouscompact would be
capable of going further than
anybody else, and of passing through volleys of grape-shot and showers
of bullets which carried us off like flies, but which had a respect
for his head. I myself had particular proof of that at Eylau. I see
him yet; he climbs a hillock, takes his field-glass, looks along our
lines, and says, 'That is going on all right.' One of the deep
fellows, with a bunch of
feathers in his cap, used to
plague him a
good deal from all accounts, following him about everywhere, even when
he was getting his meals. This fellow wants to do something clever, so
as soon as the Emperor goes away he takes his place. Oh! swept away in
a moment! And this is the last of the bunch of
feathers! You
understand quite clearly that Napoleon had undertaken to keep his
secret to himself. That is why those who accompanied him, and even his
especial friends, used to drop like nuts: Duroc, Bessieres, Lannes--
men as strong as bars of steel, which he cast into shape for his own
ends. And here is a final proof that he was the child of God, created
to be the soldier's father; for no one ever saw him as a
lieutenant or
a captain. He is a commandant straight off! Ah! yes, indeed! He did
not look more than four-and-twenty, but he was an old general ever
since the
taking of Toulon, when he made a
beginning by showing the
rest that they knew nothing about handling
cannon. Next thing he does,
he tumbles upon us. A little slip of a general-in-chief of the army of
Italy, which had neither bread nor
ammunition nor shoes nor clothes--a
wretched army as naked as a worm.
" ' Friends,' he said, 'here we all are together. Now, get it well
into your pates that in a fortnight's time from now you will be the
victors, and dressed in new clothes; you shall all have greatcoats,
strong gaiters, and famous pairs of shoes; but, my children, you will
have to march on Milan to take them, where all these things are.'
"So they marched. The French, crushed as flat as a pancake, held up
their heads again. There were thirty thousand of us tatterdemalions
against eighty thousand swaggerers of Germans--fine tall men and well
equipped; I can see them yet. Then Napoleon, who was only Bonaparte in
those days, breathed
goodness knows what into us, and on we marched
night and day. We rap their knuckles at Montenotte; we hurry on to
thrash them at Rivoli, Lodi, Arcola, and Millesimo, and we never let
them go. The army came to have a
liking for
winning battles. Then
Napoleon hems them in on all sides, these German generals did not know
where to hide themselves so as to have a little peace and comfort; he
drubs them soundly, cribs ten thousand of their men at a time by
surrounding them with fifteen hundred Frenchmen, whom he makes to
spring up after his fashion, and at last he takes their
cannon,
victuals, money,
ammunition, and everything they have that is worth
taking; he pitches them into the water, beats them on the mountains,
snaps at them in the air, gobbles them up on the earth, and thrashes
them everywhere.
"There are the troops in full
feather again! For, look you, the
Emperor (who, for that matter, was a wit) soon sent for the
inhabitant, and told him that he had come there to deliver him.
Whereupon the
civilian finds us free quarters and makes much of us, so
do the women, who showed great discernment. To come to a final end; in
Ventose '96, which was at that time what the month of March is now, we
had been
driven up into a corner of the Pays des Marmottes; but after
the
campaign, lo and behold! we were the masters of Italy, just as
Napoleon had prophesied. And in the month of March following, in one
year and in two
campaigns, he brings us within sight of Vienna; we had
made a clean sweep of them. We had gobbled down three armies one after
another, and taken the
conceit out of four Austrian generals; one of
them, an old man who had white hair, had been roasted like a rat in
the straw before Mantua. The kings were suing for mercy on their
knees. Peace had been won. Could a mere
mortal have done that? No. God
helped him, that is certain. He distributed himself about like the
five loaves in the Gospel, commanded on the
battlefield all day, and
drew up his plans at night. The sentries always saw him coming; he
neither ate nor slept. Therefore, recognizing these prodigies, the
soldier adopts him for his father. But, forward!
"The other folk there in Paris,
seeing all this, say among themselves:
" 'Here is a
pilgrim who appears to take his instructions from Heaven
above; he is uncommonly likely to lay a hand on France. We must let
him loose on Asia or America, and that, perhaps, will keep him quiet.
"The same thing was decreed for him as for Jesus Christ; for, as a
matter of fact, they give him orders to go on duty down in Egypt. See
his
resemblance to the Son of God! That is not all, though. He calls
all his fire-eaters about him, all those into whom he had more
particularly put the devil, and talks to them in this way:
" 'My friends, for the time being they are giving us Egypt to stop our
mouths. But we will
swallow down Egypt in a brace of shakes, just as
we
swallowed Italy, and private soldiers shall be princes, and shall
have broad lands of their own. Forward!'
" 'Forward, lads!' cry the sergeants.
"So we come to Toulon on the way to Egypt. Whereupon the English put
to sea with all their fleet. But when we are on board, Napoleon says
to us:
" 'They will not see us: and it is right and proper that you should
know henceforward that your general has a star in the sky that guides
us and watches over us!'
"So said, so done. As we sailed over the sea we took Malta, by way of
an orange to
quench his
thirst for
victory, for he was a man who must
always be doing something. There we are in Egypt. Well and good.
Different orders. The Egyptians, look you, are men who, ever since the
world has been the world, have been in the habit of having giants to
reign over them, and armies like swarms of ants; because it is a
country full of genii and crocodiles, where they have built up
pyramids as big as our mountains, the fancy took them to stow their
kings under the pyramids, so as to keep them fresh, a thing which
mightily pleases them all round out there. Whereupon, as we landed,
the Little Corporal said to us:
" 'My children, the country which you are about to
conquer worships a
lot of idols which you must respect, because the Frenchman ought to be
on good terms with all the world, and fight people without giving
annoyance. Get it well into your heads to let everything alone at
first; for we shall have it all by and by! and forward!'
"So far so good. But all those people had heard a
prophecy of
Napoleon, under the name of Kebir Bonaberdis; a word which in our
lingo means, 'The Sultan fires a shot,' and they feared him like the
devil. So the Grand Turk, Asia, and Africa have
recourse to magic, and
they send a demon against us, named the Mahdi, who it was thought had
come down from heaven on a white
charger which, like its master was
bullet-proof, and the pair of them lived on the air of that part of
the world. There are people who have seen them, but for my part I
cannot give you any certain informations about them. They were the
divinities of Arabia and of the Mamelukes who wished their troopers to
believe that the Mahdi had the power of preventing them from dying in
battle. They gave out that he was an angel sent down to wage war on
Napoleon, and to get back Solomon's seal, part of their paraphernalia
which they pretended our general had
stolen. You will readily
understand that we made them cry peccavi all the same.
"Ah, just tell me now how they came to know about that
compact of
Napoleon's? Was that natural?
"They took it into their heads for certain that he commanded the
genii, and that he went from place to place like a bird in the
twinkling of an eye; and it is a fact that he was everywhere. At
length it came about that he carried off a queen of
theirs. She was
the private property of a Mameluke, who, although he had several more
of them,
flatly refused to strike a
bargain, though 'the other'
offered all his treasures for her and diamonds as big as pigeon's