II
WHEN THE ALLIES WERE AT THE GATES OF PARIS
TWENTY days after his marriage, although he had drawn one of the first numbers when the drawing for lots for the army took place, Doctor Seron received orders to leave for the imperial army as surgeon. He was obliged to find a surgeon to take his place, and this cost a very large sum.
At the end of the year Madame Pierre Seron became the mother of twin daughters. The young couple were perfectly happy. The poor, abandoned child had become a tender, glad father, who would return often to the house to rock his daughters and to amuse them by singing to them.
The children were not eight months old when the poor young surgeon received new orders to join the Imperial army in Germany. Pierre Seron did not look for a substitute this time. His wife’s dot was diminishing too fast, and he was obliged to think of future dots for his daughters. He left them with a breaking heart.
Pélagie’s grandmother went to live with her, because it was impossible to leave the young woman alone, especially as her father, stepmother, and sisters, to whom Doctor Seron had turned a cold shoulder, often making them ridiculous by his witty remarks, and whose lives he had made quite unpleasant, would seize the young surgeon’s departure as an occasion to revenge themselves; but Pélagie and her grandmother were upheld by Pierre’s numerous friends, and all the town took sides with the half-widowed young woman, and blamed and annoyed Monsieur Raincourt to such a degree that he finally left Chauny to go and settle in the department of Soissons, from whence his second wife had come.
Pélagie breathed freely, for her father had never ceased to annoy her. But, alas! misfortune came to overwhelm her. She lost her grandmother and was left alone as head of the family, and obliged, before she was eighteen, to look after her fortune, and the intervals between the times when she received news from her husband became more and more lengthened.
One morning Chauny awoke threatened with war. The Allies were at the town’s gates, and it was said they plundered everything on their way, and, what was worse, the first eight Prussians who had appeared on the canal bridge had been slain. Two hours after, the inhabitants of Chauny were apprised that if they did not pay within twenty-four hours an enormous war indemnity they would all be put to the sword.
Madame Seron, alone, without protection, was one of the most heavily taxed, and in order to pay the share exacted from her, she was obliged to make ruinous engagements.
She passed a night digging a hole in her cellar under a large cask which she removed with difficulty, and which the wet-nurse of one of her young daughters—she nursed the other one herself—aided her in replacing. In this hole she hid her jewels, her silver, and a box containing her most valuable papers. This done, she decided, like many others, to abandon her house, very prominent on the square, where the invaders were to come and be lodged.
The inhabitants lost their heads, they fled and hid themselves in the woods, where the enemy, they said, would not venture.
Madame Seron took a few clothes with her and a little linen, which she put in a bag and carried on her back like a poor woman. The wet-nurse carried the two babies, and they set forth on the road to Viry.
On the way Madame Seron saw a convoy of mules returning unladen from the town whither they had carried wood. Each mule had two baskets attached to his pack-saddle. She put the nurse on one of them and one of the little twins in each basket. The nurse was a peasant and knew how to ride a mule, but the young mother was now afraid of everything, and, instead of mounting another, she walked by the side of the one carrying her little ones, resting her hand on one of the baskets.
She met the Messrs. de Sainte-Aldegonde on horseback, wearing white gloves, who, the mule-driver said, had been writing for their “good friends the enemies” for several days and were now going to meet them.
The Messrs, de Sainte-Aldegonde were galloping, and the brisk pace of their horses roused the mules, which started off in a mad race. The nurse was thrown off. The little children screamed with pain; their mother running, frightened, cried and supplicated for help.
“Never,” said she afterward, “did I suffer such torture.”
The mule-driver jumped on one of the hindermost mules and galloped towards the one whose baskets held the twins. He stopped it, and their mother and the nurse, who was only slightly wounded on the forehead and cheek, ran and rescued the babies from the baskets, who, with their hands and faces covered with blood, had fainted. The wretched women held them in their arms, looking at them overcome with grief, and, as if dumb-stricken, uttering not a word, they wept.
Mechanically they turned back on the road to Chauny, not knowing where they went, nor what they were doing, with eyes fixed on the motionless and bleeding little faces. They entered a house, where they asked for water and washed the wounds. The poor mother had kept the knapsack and bag of linen. They undressed the little ones, changed their blood-stained frocks, rubbed them with vinegar and brandy, and almost at the same moment they opened their eyes and began to sob and cry.
Their wounds continued to bleed and they were pitiful to behold. When Madame Seron reached her house some Cossacks were about to blow open the closed door; the nurse approached with the key and opened it. She also had her forehead and cheek tied up with a bloody cloth. The child she was carrying was groaning, the other in the mother’s arms was crying.
The Cossacks spoke a little French and were touched with pity at the sight. There were four of them, two of whom took the babies and held them in their arms while the mother and nurse washed their poor little faces and applied court-plaster to the wounds.
Madame Seron, after a few hours, felt a little reassured about her children and was completely at rest regarding the Cossacks, whom she treated as kindly as she could. The following days they assisted in doing the housework, the cook having fled to the woods. They walked with the children, amused them, and took devoted care of them, for the little ones had not recovered from the shock they had suffered; their nurses’ milk, disturbed by fright, gave them fever. The children grew weaker and, in spite of the energetic care that a doctor, a friend of their father’s, took of them, he could not save them; they were taken with convulsions and both died on the same day. The Cossacks wept over them with their mother.
Quite alone now, suffering from her country’s misfortunes, for she was very patriotic, in despair at her beloved little children’s death and that of her grandmother, at her husband’s absence and the dangers he was incurring, cheated by the men of business with whom she was struggling, life became so horribly hard to the young woman that she attempted to kill herself. A Cossack saved her, and his comrades and he tried to console her in such a simple, touching manner that she sadly took up life again.
Madame Seron repeated all her life, and in later years she profoundly engrafted in me, her grandchild, this axiom: “One must hate the English, fear Prussian brutality, and love the Russians.”
My grandfather returned from the army followed by a German woman, who would not leave him, and who refused to believe in his marriage. He had great trouble in getting rid of her, and succeeded in so doing only because his wife took up arms against her. Wounded to the quick, Pélagie found courage to counteract this influence only in her passion for the romantic. She was enacting a romance and her struggles with her rival were full of incident. Finally she succeeded, after having been assailed in her own house by the German, in having the woman taken to the frontier.
Doctor Seron had been present at many battles, among which those of Lützen and of Bautzen were the principal. He talked much about them, as he also did of the arms and legs he had amputated with his master, Larrey, surgeon-in-chief of the Imperial armies, the number of which increased every year.
Pierre’s conjugal fidelity, lost during his campaigns, never returned. He became a sort of Don Juan, about whose conquests the ill-natured tongues of the town were always wagging. When I grew up, how many great-uncles were pointed out to me!
Having been deprived of wine in Germany, he loved it all the more on his return to France. Very sober in the morning until breakfast hour, at which time he returned home after having performed his operations at the hospital or in the town, he drank regularly every day a dozen bottles of a light Mâcon wine, always the same. To say that this great, portly man got drunk would be an exaggeration, but in the afternoon he was talkative, full of jokes and braggings to such a degree that all the white lies, all the jests that were told at Chauny and its environs were called “seronades.”
My grandmother’s passion for her husband faded away, illusion after illusion, in spite of the prodigious effort she made not to condemn my grandfather on the first proofs he gave of his sensual appetites, of his brutal way of enjoying life. Pierre’s strength was so great that in all physical exercises, hunting, and fishing he wore out the most intrepid; his love for excitement was so artless, his gaiety so exuberant that people overlooked the sensual self-indulgence of his temperament, his excesses even, when they would not have pardoned them in others.
But little by little they wearied of all this at his home, while his friends could not have enough of him. His wife saw him depart at dawn and not return until far into the night without regret. He was never late for meals, about which great care had to be taken for him.
“It is elementary politeness,” he would say, drawing out his lisping accent on the word “elementary,” “not to leave the companion of one’s home, if not of one’s life, alone at table.”