The Debacle - Emile Zola [150]
It was Rose, his employee, whom he had forgotten. Thanks to her all doors would open for him. He went into the lodge and accepted a seat.
‘Just fancy, it’s made Mother ill and she’s gone to bed. As you see, there’s only me because Dad is a National Guard at the citadel. Just now the Emperor wanted to show that he was still brave, and he went out again and managed to get to the end of the street, as far as the bridge. One shell even fell in front of him and the horse of one of his equerries was killed. And then he came back again… Well, what can you expect him to do?’
‘So you know how things are… What are these gentlemen saying?’
She looked at him in amazement. She was still young and fresh and gay, with her pretty hair and childlike eyes, busying herself about the place amid these abominations that she didn’t really understand.
‘No, I don’t know anything… At about twelve I took a letter up for Marshal MacMahon. The Emperor was with him… They were shut up together for an hour, the marshal in bed and the Emperor sitting on a chair close to the bed. That I do know because I saw them when somebody opened the door.’
‘Well, what were they talking about?’
She stared at him again and could not help laughing.
‘I don’t know, how do you expect me to know? Nobody in the world knows what they said to each other.’
Of course it was true, and with a gesture he apologized for his silly question. Yet he was haunted by the thought of this fateful conversation: how important it must have been and what decision had they reached?
‘Now,’ Rose went on, ‘the Emperor has gone back to his private room where he is in conference with two generals who have just come from the battlefield.’
She stopped short and glanced at the steps.
‘Look, that’s one of them… And there’s the other.’
He quickly went out and recognized General Douay and General Ducrot, whose horses were waiting. He watched them mount and gallop away. After the evacuation of the plateau of Illy they had hurried separately to warn the Emperor that the battle was lost. They gave him details of the situation; the army and Sedan were from now on hemmed in on all sides, and the disaster would be appalling.
In his room the Emperor paced up and down in silence for some time, with the faltering step of a sick man. There was only one aide-de-camp there with him, standing silent by a door. He went on walking to and fro between the fireplace and the window, and his haggard face was now drawn up by a nervous tic. His back seemed even more bowed, as though a whole world was collapsing upon it, and his lifeless eyes beneath the heavy lids betokened the resignation of the fatalist who has played his last card against destiny and lost. Yet each time he came back to the open window he paused there and winced.
At one of these momentary pauses he raised a shaky hand and murmured:
‘Oh, those guns, those guns, ever since first thing!’
Indeed the thunder of the batteries at La Marfée and Frénois was extraordinarily loud at that particular place. The rumbling of the thunder shook windowpanes and the very walls themselves with an obstinate, ceaseless, exasperating din. And he must be thinking that from then onwards the struggle was hopeless and any further resistance criminal. What was the point of any more bloodshed, limbs mangled, heads blown off, still more dead added to the other dead throughout the campaign? Since they were beaten and it was finished, why go on with the massacre? Enough abomination and grief was already crying to high heaven.
The Emperor came back to the window and again raised his trembling hands:
‘Oh those guns, those guns, on and on!’
Perhaps the terrible vision of his responsibilities rose before him, of the bleeding corpses his misdeeds had strewn over the fields in thousands; perhaps it was just the sentimental pity of a dreamer’s heart, of a good man haunted by humanitarian ideas. In this dreadful blow of fate that broke off and carried away his own fortune like a wisp of straw he could find tears for others, and was horrified at the continuing useless