Colonel Chabert

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COLONEL CHABERT

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC


Translated by

Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell




DEDICATION

To Madame la Comtesse Ida de Bocarme nee du Chasteler.





COLONEL CHABERT



"HULLO! There is that old Box-coat again!"

This exclamation was made by a lawyer's clerk of the class called in
French offices a gutter-jumper--a messenger in fact--who at this
moment was eating a piece of dry bread with a hearty appetite. He
pulled off a morsel of crumb to make into a bullet, and fired it
gleefully through the open pane of the window against which he was
leaning. The pellet, well aimed, rebounded almost as high as the
window, after hitting the hat of a stranger who was crossing the
courtyard of a house in the Rue Vivienne, where dwelt Maitre Derville,
attorney-at-law.

"Come, Simonnin, don't play tricks on people, or I will turn you out
of doors. However poor a client may be, he is still a man, hang it
all!" said the head clerk, pausing in the addition of a bill of costs.

The lawyer's messenger is commonly, as was Simonnin, a lad of thirteen
or fourteen, who, in every office, is under the special jurisdiction
of the managing clerk, whose errands and /billets-doux/ keep him
employed on his way to carry writs to the bailiffs and petitions to
the Courts. He is akin to the street boy in his habits, and to the
pettifogger by fate. The boy is almost always ruthless, unbroken,
unmanageable, a ribald rhymester, impudent, greedy, and idle. And yet,
almost all these clerklings have an old mother lodging on some fifth
floor with whom they share their pittance of thirty or forty francs a
month.

"If he is a man, why do you call him old Box-coat?" asked Simonnin,
with the air of a schoolboy who has caught out his master.

And he went on eating his bread and cheese, leaning his shoulder
against the window jamb; for he rested standing like a cab-horse, one
of his legs raised and propped against the other, on the toe of his
shoe.

"What trick can we play that cove?" said the third clerk, whose name
was Godeschal, in a low voice, pausing in the middle of a discourse he
was extemporizing in an appeal engrossed by the fourth clerk, of which
copies were being made by two neophytes from the provinces.

Then he went on improvising:

"/But, in his noble and beneficent wisdom, his Majesty, Louis the
Eighteenth/--(write it at full length, heh! Desroches the learned
--you, as you engross it!)--/when he resumed the reins of Government,
understood/--(what did that old nincompoop ever understand?)--/the
high mission to which he had been called by Divine Providence!/--(a
note of admiration and six stops. They are pious enough at the Courts
to let us put six)--/and his first thought, as is proved by the date
of the order hereinafter designated, was to repair the misfortunes
caused by the terrible and sad disasters of the revolutionary times,
by restoring to his numerous and faithful adherents/--('numerous' is
flattering, and ought to please the Bench)--/all their unsold estates,
whether within our realm, or in conquered or acquired territory, or in
the endowments of public institutions, for we are, and proclaim
ourselves competent to declare, that this is the spirit and meaning of
the famous, truly loyal order given in/--Stop," said Godeschal to the
three copying clerks, "that rascally sentence brings me to the end of
my page.--Well," he went on, wetting the back fold of the sheet with
his tongue, so as to be able to fold back the page of thick stamped
paper, "well, if you want to play him a trick, tell him that the
master can only see his clients between two and three in the morning;
we shall see if he comes, the old ruffian!"

And Godeschal took up the sentence he was dictating--"/given in/--Are
you ready?"

"Yes," cried the three writers.

It all went all together, the appeal, the gossip, and the conspiracy.

"/Given in/--Here, Daddy Boucard, what is the date of the order? We
must dot our /i/'s and cross our /t/'s, by Jingo! it helps to fill the
pages."

"By Jingo!" repeated one of the copying clerks before Boucard, the
head clerk, could reply.

"What! have you written /by Jingo/?" cried Godeschal, looking at one
of the novices, with an expression at once stern and humorous.

"Why, yes," said Desroches, the fourth clerk, leaning across his
neighbor's copy, "he has written, '/We must dot our i's/' and spelt it
/by Gingo/!"

All the clerks shouted with laughter.

"Why! Monsieur Hure, you take 'By Jingo' for a law term, and you say
you come from Mortagne!" exclaimed Simonnin.

"Scratch it cleanly out," said the head clerk. "If the judge, whose
business it is to tax the bill, were to see such things, he would say
you were laughing at the whole boiling. You would hear of it from the
chief! Come, no more of this nonsense, Monsieur Hure! A Norman ought
not to write out an appeal without thought. It is the 'Shoulder arms!'
of the law."

"/Given in--in/?" asked Godeschal.--"Tell me when, Boucard."

"June 1814," replied the head clerk, without looking up from his work.

A knock at the office door interrupted the circumlocutions of the
prolix document. Five clerks with rows of hungry teeth, bright,
mocking eyes, and curly heads, lifted their noses towards the door,
after crying all together in a singing tone, "Come in!"

Boucard kept his face buried in a pile of papers--/broutilles/ (odds
and ends) in French law jargon--and went on drawing out the bill of
costs on which he was busy.

The office was a large room furnished with the traditional stool which
is to be seen in all these dens of law-quibbling. The stove-pipe
crossed the room diagonally to the chimney of a bricked-up fireplace;
on the marble chimney-piece were several chunks of bread, triangles of
Brie cheese, pork cutlets, glasses, bottles, and the head clerk's cup
of chocolate. The smell of these dainties blended so completely with
that of the immoderately overheated stove and the odor peculiar to
offices and old papers, that the trail of a fox would not have been
perceptible. The floor was covered with mud and snow, brought in by
the clerks. Near the window stood the desk with a revolving lid, where
the head clerk worked, and against the back of it was the second
clerk's table. The second clerk was at this moment in Court. It was
between eight and nine in the morning.

The only decoration of the office consisted in huge yellow posters,
announcing seizures of real estate, sales, settlements under trust,
final or interim judgments,--all the glory of a lawyer's office.
Behind the head clerk was an enormous room, of which each division was
crammed with bundles of papers with an infinite number of tickets
hanging from them at the ends of red tape, which give a peculiar
physiognomy to law papers. The lower rows were filled with cardboard
boxes, yellow with use, on which might be read the names of the more
important clients whose cases were juicily stewing at this present
time. The dirty window-panes admitted but little daylight. Indeed,
there are very few offices in Paris where it is possible to write
without lamplight before ten in the morning in the month of February,
for they are all left to very natural neglect; every one comes and no
one stays; no one has any personal interest in a scene of mere routine
--neither the attorney, nor the counsel, nor the clerks, trouble
themselves about the appearance of a place which, to the youths, is a
schoolroom; to the clients, a passage; to the chief, a laboratory. The
greasy furniture is handed down to successive owners with such
scrupulous care, that in some offices may still be seen boxes of
/remainders/, machines for twisting parchment gut, and bags left by
the prosecuting parties of the Chatelet (abbreviated to /Chlet/)--a
Court which, under the old order of things, represented the present
Court of First Instance (or County Court).

So in this dark office, thick with dust, there was, as in all its
fellows, something repulsive to the clients--something which made it
one of the most hideous monstrosities of Paris. Nay, were it not for
the mouldy sacristies where prayers are weighed out and paid for like
groceries, and for the old-clothes shops, where flutter the rags that
blight all the illusions of life by showing us the last end of all our
festivities--an attorney's office would be, of all social marts, the
most loathsome. But we might say the same of the gambling-hell, of the
Law Court, of the lottery office, of the brothel.

But why? In these places, perhaps, the drama being played in a man's
soul makes him indifferent to accessories, which would also account
for the single-mindedness of great thinkers and men of great
ambitions.

"Where is my penknife?"

"I am eating my breakfast."

"You go and be hanged! here is a blot on the copy."

"Silence, gentlemen!"

These various exclamations were uttered simultaneously at the moment
when the old client shut the door with the sort of humility which
disfigures the movements of a man down on his luck. The stranger tried
to smile, but the muscles of his face relaxed as he vainly looked for
some symptoms of amenity on the inexorably indifferent faces of the
six clerks. Accustomed, no doubt, to gauge men, he very politely
addressed the gutter-jumper, hoping to get a civil answer from this
boy of all work.

"Monsieur, is your master at home?"

The pert messenger made no reply, but patted his ear with the fingers
of his left hand, as much as to say, "I am deaf."

"What do you want, sir?" asked Godeschal, swallowing as he spoke a
mouthful of bread big enough to charge a four-pounder, flourishing his
knife and crossing his legs, throwing up one foot in the air to the
level of his eyes.

"This is the fifth time I have called," replied the victim. "I wish to
speak to M. Derville."

"On business?"

"Yes, but I can explain it to no one but--"

"M. Derville is in bed; if you wish to consult him on some difficulty,
he does no serious work till midnight. But if you will lay the case
before us, we could help you just as well as he can to----"

The stranger was unmoved; he looked timidly about him, like a dog who
has got into a strange kitchen and expects a kick. By grace of their
profession, lawyers' clerks have no fear of thieves; they did not
suspect the owner of the box-coat, and left him to study the place,
where he looked in vain for a chair to sit on, for he was evidently
tired. Attorneys, on principle, do not have many chairs in their
offices. The inferior client, being kept waiting on his feet, goes
away grumbling, but then he does not waste time, which, as an old
lawyer once said, is not allowed for when the bill is taxed.

"Monsieur," said the old man, "as I have already told you, I cannot
explain my business to any one but M. Derville. I will wait till he is
up."

Boucard had finished his bill. He smelt the fragrance of his
chocolate, rose from his cane armchair, went to the chimney-piece,
looked the old man from head to foot, stared at his coat, and made an
indescribable grimace. He probably reflected that whichever way his
client might be wrung, it would be impossible to squeeze out a
centime, so he put in a few brief words to rid the office of a bad
customer.

"It is the truth, monsieur. The chief only works at night. If your
business is important, I recommend you to return at one in the
morning." The stranger looked at the head clerk with a bewildered
expression, and remained motionless for a moment. The clerks,
accustomed to every change of countenance, and the odd whimsicalities
to which indecision or absence of mind gives rise in "parties," went
on eating, making as much noise with their jaws as horses over a
manger, and paying no further heed to the old man.

"I will come again to-night," said the stranger at length, with the
tenacious desire, peculiar to the unfortunate, to catch humanity at
fault.

The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence
to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of
falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy of God.

"What do you think of that for a cracked pot?" said Simonnin, without
waiting till the old man had shut the door.

"He looks as if he had been buried and dug up again," said a clerk.

"He is some colonel who wants his arrears of pay," said the head
clerk.

"No, he is a retired concierge," said Godeschal.

"I bet you he is a nobleman," cried Boucard.

"I bet you he has been a porter," retorted Godeschal. "Only porters
are gifted by nature with shabby box-coats, as worn and greasy and
frayed as that old body's. And did you see his trodden-down boots that
let the water in, and his stock which serves for a shirt? He has slept
in a dry arch."

"He may be of noble birth, and yet have pulled the doorlatch," cried
Desroches. "It has been known!"

"No," Boucard insisted, in the midst of laughter, "I maintain that he
was a brewer in 1789, and a colonel in the time of the Republic."

"I bet theatre tickets round that he never was a soldier," said
Godeschal.

"Done with you," answered Boucard.

"Monsieur! Monsieur!" shouted the little messenger, opening the
window.

"What are you at now, Simonnin?" asked Boucard.

"I am calling him that you may ask him whether he is a colonel or a
porter; he must know."

All the clerks laughed. As to the old man, he was already coming
upstairs again.

"What can we say to him?" cried Godeschal.

"Leave it to me," replied Boucard.

The poor man came in nervously, his eyes cast down, perhaps not to
betray how hungry he was by looking too greedily at the eatables.

"Monsieur," said Boucard, "will you have the kindness to leave your
name, so that M. Derville may know----"

"Chabert."

"The Colonel who was killed at Eylau?" asked Hure, who, having so far
said nothing, was jealous of adding a jest to all the others.

"The same, monsieur," replied the good man, with antique simplicity.
And he went away.

"Whew!"

"Done brown!"

"Poof!"

"Oh!"

"Ah!"

"Boum!"

"The old rogue!"

"Ting-a-ring-ting!"

"Sold again!"

"Monsieur Desroches, you are going to the play without paying," said
Hure to the fourth clerk, giving him a slap on the shoulder that might
have killed a rhinoceros.

There was a storm of cat-calls, cries, and exclamations, which all the
onomatopeia of the language would fail to represent.

"Which theatre shall we go to?"

"To the opera," cried the head clerk.

"In the first place," said Godeschal, "I never mentioned which
theatre. I might, if I chose, take you to see Madame Saqui."

"Madame Saqui is not the play."

"What is a play?" replied Godeschal. "First, we must define the point
of fact. What did I bet, gentlemen? A play. What is a play? A
spectacle. What is a spectacle? Something to be seen--"

"But on that principle you would pay your bet by taking us to see the
water run under the Pont Neuf!" cried Simonnin, interrupting him.

"To be seen for money," Godeschal added.

"But a great many things are to be seen for money that are not plays.
The definition is defective," said Desroches.

"But do listen to me!"

"You are talking nonsense, my dear boy," said Boucard.

"Is Curtius' a play?" said Godeschal.

"No," said the head clerk, "it is a collection of figures--but it is a
spectacle."

"I bet you a hundred francs to a sou," Godeschal resumed, "that
Curtius' Waxworks forms such a show as might be called a play or
theatre. It contains a thing to be seen at various prices, according
to the place you choose to occupy."

"And so on, and so forth!" said Simonnin.

"You mind I don't box your ears!" said Godeschal.

The clerk shrugged their shoulders.

"Besides, it is not proved that that old ape was not making game of
us," he said, dropping his argument, which was drowned in the laughter
of the other clerks. "On my honor, Colonel Chabert is really and truly
dead. His wife is married again to Comte Ferraud, Councillor of State.
Madame Ferraud is one of our clients."

"Come, the case is remanded till to-morrow," said Boucard. "To work,
gentlemen. The deuce is in it; we get nothing done here. Finish
copying that appeal; it must be handed in before the sitting of the
Fourth Chamber, judgment is to be given to-day. Come, on you go!"

"If he really were Colonel Chabert, would not that impudent rascal
Simonnin have felt the leather of his boot in the right place when he
pretended to be deaf?" said Desroches, regarding this remark as more
conclusive than Godeschal's.

"Since nothing is settled," said Boucard, "let us all agree to go to
the upper boxes of the Francais and see Talma in 'Nero.' Simonnin may
go to the pit."

And thereupon the head clerk sat down at his table, and the others
followed his example.

"/Given in June eighteen hundred and fourteen/ (in words)," said
Godeschal. "Ready?"

"Yes," replied the two copying-clerks and the engrosser, whose pens
forthwith began to creak over the stamped paper, making as much noise
in the office as a hundred cockchafers imprisoned by schoolboys in
paper cages.

"/And we hope that my lords on the Bench/," the extemporizing clerk
went on. "Stop! I must read my sentence through again. I do not
understand it myself."

"Forty-six (that must often happen) and three forty-nines," said
Boucard.

"/We hope/," Godeschal began again, after reading all through the
document, "/that my lords on the Bench will not be less magnanimous
than the august author of the decree, and that they will do justice
against the miserable claims of the acting committee of the chief
Board of the Legion of Honor by interpreting the law in the wide sense
we have here set forth/----"

"Monsieur Godeschal, wouldn't you like a glass of water?" said the
little messenger.

"That imp of a boy!" said Boucard. "Here, get on your double-soled
shanks-mare, take this packet, and spin off to the Invalides."

"/Here set forth/," Godeschal went on. "Add /in the interest of Madame
la Vicomtesse/ (at full length) /de Grandlieu/."

"What!" cried the chief, "are you thinking of drawing up an appeal in
the case of Vicomtesse de Grandlieu against the Legion of Honor--a
case for the office to stand or fall by? You are something like an
ass! Have the goodness to put aside your copies and your notes; you
may keep all that for the case of Navarreins against the Hospitals. It
is late. I will draw up a little petition myself, with a due allowance
of 'inasmuch,' and go to the Courts myself."

This scene is typical of the thousand delights which, when we look
back on our youth, make us say, "Those were good times."



At about one in the morning Colonel Chabert, self-styled, knocked at
the door of Maitre Derville, attorney to the Court of First Instance
in the Department of the Seine. The porter told him that Monsieur
Derville had not yet come in. The old man said he had an appointment,
and was shown upstairs to the rooms occupied by the famous lawyer,
who, notwithstanding his youth, was considered to have one of the
longest heads in Paris.

Having rung, the distrustful applicant was not a little astonished at
finding the head clerk busily arranging in a convenient order on his
master's dining-room table the papers relating to the cases to be
tried on the morrow. The clerk, not less astonished, bowed to the
Colonel and begged him to take a seat, which the client did.

"On my word, monsieur, I thought you were joking yesterday when you
named such an hour for an interview," said the old man, with the
forced mirth of a ruined man, who does his best to smile.

"The clerks were joking, but they were speaking the truth too,"
replied the man, going on with his work. "M. Derville chooses this
hour for studying his cases, taking stock of their possibilities,
arranging how to conduct them, deciding on the line of defence. His
prodigious intellect is freer at this hour--the only time when he can
have the silence and quiet needed for the conception of good ideas.
Since he entered the profession, you are the third person to come to
him for a consultation at this midnight hour. After coming in the
chief will discuss each case, read everything, spend four or five
hours perhaps over the business, then he will ring for me and explain
to me his intentions. In the morning from ten to two he hears what his
clients have to say, then he spends the rest of his day in
appointments. In the evening he goes into society to keep up his
connections. So he has only the night for undermining his cases,
ransacking the arsenal of the code, and laying his plan of battle. He
is determined never to lose a case; he loves his art. He will not
undertake every case, as his brethren do. That is his life, an
exceptionally active one. And he makes a great deal of money."

As he listened to this explanation, the old man sat silent, and his
strange face assumed an expression so bereft of intelligence, that the
clerk, after looking at him, thought no more about him.

A few minutes later Derville came in, in evening dress; his head clerk
opened the door to him, and went back to finish arranging the papers.
The young lawyer paused for a moment in amazement on seeing in the dim
light the strange client who awaited him. Colonel Chabert was as
absolutely immovable as one of the wax figures in Curtius' collection
to which Godeschal had proposed to treat his fellow-clerks. This
quiescence would not have been a subject for astonishment if it had
not completed the supernatural aspect of the man's whole person. The
old soldier was dry and lean. His forehead, intentionally hidden under
a smoothly combed wig, gave him a look of mystery. His eyes seemed
shrouded in a transparent film; you would have compared them to dingy
mother-of-pearl with a blue iridescence changing in the gleam of the
wax lights. His face, pale, livid, and as thin as a knife, if I may
use such a vulgar expression, was as the face of the dead. Round his
neck was a tight black silk stock.

Below the dark line of this rag the body was so completely hidden in
shadow that a man of imagination might have supposed the old head was
due to some chance play of light and shade, or have taken it for a
portrait by Rembrandt, without a frame. The brim of the hat which
covered the old man's brow cast a black line of shadow on the upper
part of the face. This grotesque effect, though natural, threw into
relief by contrast the white furrows, the cold wrinkles, the colorless
tone of the corpse-like countenance. And the absence of all movement
in the figure, of all fire in the eye, were in harmony with a certain
look of melancholy madness, and the deteriorating symptoms
characteristic of senility, giving the face an indescribably
ill-starred look which no human words could render.

But an observer, especially a lawyer, could also have read in this
stricken man the signs of deep sorrow, the traces of grief which had
worn into this face, as drops of water from the sky falling on fine
marble at last destroy its beauty. A physician, an author, or a judge
might have discerned a whole drama at the sight of its sublime horror,
while the least charm was its resemblance to the grotesques which
artists amuse themselves by sketching on a corner of the lithographic
stone while chatting with a friend.

On seeing the attorney, the stranger started, with the convulsive
thrill that comes over a poet when a sudden noise rouses him from a
fruitful reverie in silence and at night. The old man hastily removed
his hat and rose to bow to the young man; the leather lining of his
hat was doubtless very greasy; his wig stuck to it without his
noticing it, and left his head bare, showing his skull horribly
disfigured by a scar beginning at the nape of the neck and ending over
the right eye, a prominent seam all across his head. The sudden
removal of the dirty wig which the poor man wore to hide this gash
gave the two lawyers no inclination to laugh, so horrible to behold
was this riven skull. The first idea suggested by the sight of this
old wound was, "His intelligence must have escaped through that cut."

"If this is not Colonel Chabert, he is some thorough-going trooper!"
thought Boucard.

"Monsieur," said Derville, "to whom have I the honor of speaking?"

"To Colonel Chabert."

"Which?"

"He who was killed at Eylau," replied the old man.

On hearing this strange speech, the lawyer and his clerk glanced at
each other, as much as to say, "He is mad."

"Monsieur," the Colonel went on, "I wish to confide to you the secret
of my position."

A thing worthy of note is the natural intrepidity of lawyers. Whether
from the habit of receiving a great many persons, or from the deep
sense of the protection conferred on them by the law, or from
confidence in their missions, they enter everywhere, fearing nothing,
like priests and physicians. Derville signed to Boucard, who vanished.

"During the day, sir," said the attorney, "I am not so miserly of my
time, but at night every minute is precious. So be brief and concise.
Go to the facts without digression. I will ask for any explanations I
may consider necessary. Speak."