The Debacle - Emile Zola [58]
‘No, no, come over to us, I’ll explain…’
When she had carefully closed the shop door behind her:
‘So you don’t know, my dear boy, that the Emperor is lodging at the Desroches’s. The house has been commandeered for him and they are not all that pleased with the great honour, I can tell you. When you think that the poor old mother, a woman well past seventy has been forced to give up her own room and go and sleep up in the garret in a maid’s bed!… Look, all you can see out there on the square is to do with the Emperor – his luggage in fact, if you see what I mean!’
Maurice then recalled those carriages and vans, all the grand paraphernalia of the imperial household he had seen at Rheims.
‘Oh my dear boy, if only you knew the things they unpacked from there – silver plate and bottles of wine, hampers of provisions, fine linen and everything! It went on for two whole hours. I wonder where they have managed to stow so many things, for it isn’t a big house… Just look at the fire they’ve lit in the kitchen.’
He glanced over at the little white two-storey house on the corner of the square and the Vouziers road, a serene, respectable-looking house, and the inside, the central passage-hall on the ground floor, the four rooms on each floor, all came back to his mind as though he had been there only yesterday. There was already a light in the first-floor window nearest the corner that looked on to the square, and the chemist’s wife explained that that was the Emperor’s room. But as she had said, the place which blazed most brightly was the kitchen, the windows of which, on the ground floor, looked on to the Vouziers road. Never had the inhabitants of Le Chêne seen such a show. An ever-rolling stream of sightseers blocked the street, gaping at this furnace on which an Emperor’s dinner was roasting and boiling. So as to get some air, the cooks had thrown the windows wide open. There were three chefs in spotless white jackets busy in front of chickens spiked along an immense spit, stirring sauces in enormous saucepans of copper gleaming like gold. Old men couldn’t remember having seen so much fire and so much food cooking at once at the Lion d’Argent, even for the grandest weddings.
Combette the chemist, a bustling little man, came in very excited by all he had seen and heard. He seemed to be in the know, being deputy mayor. It appeared that at about half past three MacMahon had wired Bazaine that the arrival of the Crown Prince of Prussia at Châlons forced him to fall back on the northern fortresses, and another telegram was going off to the Minister of War warning him also about the retreat, explaining the terrible danger the army was in of being cut off and annihilated. The wire to Bazaine could run there if it had good legs, for all communication with Metz seemed to have been cut off for some days. But the other wire was more disturbing, and lowering his voice the chemist said he had heard a high officer say: ‘If anybody tells them in Paris, we’re up the spout!’ Everybody was aware of the pertinacity with which the Empress-Regent and the cabinet were urging an advance. Anyhow the confusion was getting worse every hour, and the most extraordinary tales came in about the approaching German armies. The Crown Prince of Prussia at Châlons – was it possible? Then, what troops had the 7th corps run into in the gorges of the Argonne?
‘At General Headquarters they know nothing,’ the chemist went on with a despairing wave of the arms. ‘Oh, what a mess! But still, it’s all right so long as the army is in retreat by tomorrow.’
Then his real kindness came out:
‘Look here, my young friend, I’m going to put a dressing on that foot of yours, you’ll have a meal with us and sleep up there in my apprentice’s little room. He’s sloped off.’
But being still obsessed with the need to see and know, Maurice wanted above all to carry out his first idea and go and see old Madame Desroches opposite. He was surprised