The Debacle - Emile Zola [88]
At that moment a door was gaily thrown open and Gilberte came in with outstretched hand. Delaherche must have warned her, for as a rule she never got up before ten. She was tall, looked lithe but well built, with beautiful black hair and lovely dark eyes, and yet a very fair skin, a laughing face, a bit harum-scarum and without a trace of malice. Her beige dressing-gown with red silk embroidery had come from Paris.
‘Oh, captain,’ she gushed, as she shook the young man’s hand, ‘how kind of you to have come to see us in our dead-and-alive part of the world!’
But she was the first to laugh at her own scatterbrained talk.
‘Oh aren’t I silly? You could certainly do without being in Sedan in these circumstances. But I’m so glad to see you again!’
Her fine eyes shone with delight. Madame Delaherche, who must have been aware of the tittle-tattle of the Charleville gossips, sat bolt upright, watching them both closely. The captain, on his side, was being very discreet, behaving like a man who had simply kept happy memories of a hospitable home where he had been made welcome.
They had breakfast, and at once Delaherche came back to his excursion of the day before, unable to resist the itch to tell the story once again.
‘Do you know, I saw the Emperor at Baybel.’
He was off, and nothing could stop him after that. First there was a description of the farmhouse, a large, square building with an inner courtyard, shut off by railings, and standing on a little hill overlooking Mouzon to the left of the Carignan road. Then he came back to the 12th corps that he had gone right through as they were camping among the vines on the slopes – superb troops, gleaming in the sunshine, the sight of whom had filled him with great patriotic joy.
‘And there I was, sir, when the Emperor suddenly came out of the farmhouse where he had gone for a break to rest and eat. He was wearing a cloak thrown over his general’s uniform, although the sun was very hot. Behind him a manservant was carrying a folding seat. I didn’t think he looked at all well, oh no! stooping and walking with difficulty, his face yellow, in fact a sick man… And that didn’t surprise me because the chemist at Mouzon who had advised me to go on as far as Baybel had just told me that an aide-de-camp had been to him for medicine… yes, you know, remedies for…’
The presence of his mother and his wife prevented him from describing more clearly the diarrhoea from which the Emperor had been suffering since Le Chêne, and which had compelled him to stop like this at farmhouses along the route.
‘So, in a word, the servant set up the folding seat on the edge of a cornfield, at the point of a wood, and the Emperor sat down… He stayed there motionless, all huddled up, looking like some old pensioner warming his aches and pains in the sun. He scanned with his dull eyes the vast horizon, the Meuse below him flowing along the valley and opposite him the wooded slopes with summits going away into the distance, the peaks of the Dieulet woods on the left, the green hilltops of Sommauthe on the right… He was surrounded by aides-de-camp and high ranking officers, and a colonel of dragoons who had already asked me for directions had just signed to me not to go away, when suddenly…’
Delaherche rose to his feet for he was approaching the gripping climax of the narrative, and he wanted to add action to the words.
‘Suddenly there are shattering explosions, and lo and behold, right opposite, this side of Dieulet woods, shells describe parabolas in the sky… Upon my soul, it looked to me like a firework display let off in broad daylight… Naturally in the Emperor’s entourage there are exclamations, expressions of anxiety. My colonel of dragoons rushes back and asks me if I can say exactly where the fighting is. Without any hesitation I say: ‘At Beaumont, no doubt whatever.’ He returns to the Emperor, across whose knees an aide-de-camp was unfolding a map. The Emperor refused to believe they could be fighting at Beaumont. Well, I couldn’t insist, could I? Especially as the shells were careering through the