The Downfall (La Débâcle). Emile Zola

carriages, amid which men and horses were continually coming and going.

      'And are all those traps for the Emperor?' Maurice jokingly asked the servant, as she spread a clean white cloth on his table.

      'Yes, for the Emperor and no one else,' she answered, with a gay sprightly air, pleased to have an opportunity of showing her fresh white teeth. Then she began to enumerate all there was; having learnt this, no doubt, from the grooms who had been coming to drink at the tavern since the day before. To begin with, there was the staff of twenty-five officers, the sixty Cent-Gardes, the escort-detachment of Guides,[15] the six Gendarmes of the provostship service; then the household, comprising seventy-three persons, chamberlains, valets and footmen, cooks and scullions; next four saddle-horses and two carriages for the Emperor, ten horses for the equerries, and eight for the outriders and grooms, without counting forty-seven posting horses; then a char à bancs and twelve baggage vans, two of which, reserved to the cooks, had excited the girl's admiration by the large quantity of kitchen utensils, plates, and bottles that could be seen inside them, all in beautiful order. 'Ah! sir,' she said to Maurice, 'I never saw such saucepans before! They shine like the sun! And there are all sorts of dishes and vessels, and things I can't even tell the use of! And wine, too—bordeaux, and burgundy, and champagne enough to give a splendid wedding feast.'

      Well pleased at sight of the clean white cloth and the light golden wine sparkling in his glass, Maurice ate a couple of boiled eggs with a gluttonous enjoyment he had never before experienced. Whenever he turned his head to the left he obtained, through one of the entrances to the arbour, a view of the vast tent-covered plain, the swarming city that had just sprung up amid the stubble between Rheims and the canal. Only a few meagre clumps of trees dotted the grey expanse, where three mills upreared their slender arms. Above the confused roofs of Rheims, intermingled with the crests of chestnut trees, the colossal pile of the cathedral stood out in the blue atmosphere, looking, though far away, quite gigantic by the side of the low houses. And, on seeing it, recollections of schoolboy days came back to Maurice. Lessons that he had learnt and hemmed and hawed over returned to his mind: the coronations of the French Kings in Rheims Cathedral, the holy oil, Clovis, Joan of Arc—all the departed glories of ancient France.

      Then, again thinking of the Emperor hidden away in that modest private house so discreetly closed, Maurice turned his eyes once more on the high yellow wall, and was surprised to read on it the inscription, 'Vive Napoléon!' traced in huge letters with a bit of charcoal, beside some clumsy obscene drawings. The rain had washed away the yellow distemper that had previously concealed the writing, and the inscription was evidently an old one. How singular to find upon that wall this acclamation, born of the warlike enthusiasm of long ago, and intended, undoubtedly, for the uncle, the conquering Napoleon, not his nephew! At sight of it, all Maurice's childhood arose before him, carolling in his mind, and again he listened to the tales of his grandfather, a soldier of the Grand Army. His mother was dead, and his father had been obliged to accept a post of tax collector, no opportunities for winning glory being vouchsafed to the sons of the heroes of France after the fall of the First Empire. And the grandfather lived with them on a most meagre pension, fallen to the level of this modest home, and having but one consolation, that of recounting his campaigns to his grandchildren, the twins, boy and girl, each with the same fair hair, and whose mother he, in some measure, was. He would seat Henriette on his left knee, and Maurice on his right, and then, during long hours, there followed Homeric tales of battle.

      These tales did not seem to belong to history; different periods were blended, and all the nations of the earth met together in one great, fearful collision. The English, the Austrians, the Prussians, the Russians passed by—now in turn, now all at the same time—just as alliances willed it, and without it being possible to say why some were beaten rather than others. But beaten they were, inevitably beaten in advance by a great dash of heroism and genius which swept armies away as if they had been merely chaff. There was Marengo, the classical engagement on level ground, with the long lines of troops skilfully deployed, and the faultless retreat in échelon order of the battalions so silent and impassive under fire. This was the legendary battle lost at three o'clock, won at six; the battle when eight hundred grenadiers of the Consular Guard arrested the onslaught of the entire Austrian cavalry; when Desaix came up to meet his death and to change an impending rout into an immortal victory. Then there was Austerlitz, with its beautiful sun of glory shining through the wintry mist; Austerlitz, commencing with the capture of the plateau of Pritzen and ending with the terrifying disruption of the ice on the frozen lakes, when an entire Russian army corps, men and horses, sank into the water amid a frightful crash; whilst the god-like Napoleon, who had naturally foreseen everything, completed the disaster with his round shot. Next there was Jena, where Prussia's power was entombed; at first, the skirmishers firing through the October fog, and Ney, by his impatience, almost compromising everything; then Augereau's advance that extricated Ney, the great onslaught, so violent that it swept away the enemy's entire centre; and finally the panic, the sauve-qui-peut of an over-vaunted cavalry, whom the French Hussars mowed down like ripe oats, strewing the romantic valley with men and horses. Then there was Eylau—Eylau, the abominable—the most bloody of battles, when such was the slaughter that the hideously disfigured bodies lay on the ground in heaps; Eylau, blood red under its snow storm, with its mournful cemetery of heroes; Eylau still loudly re-echoing the thunderous charge of Murat's eighty squadrons, which cut right through the Russian army and strewed the field with such a depth of corpses that even Napoleon himself wept at the sight.

      Then there was Friedland, the fearful trap into which the Russians, like a flight of careless sparrows, again fell; Friedland, the strategical masterpiece of that Emperor who knew everything and could do everything. At first the French left wing remained motionless and imperturbable, whilst Ney, having captured the town, was destroying the bridges; then the French left wing rushed upon the enemy's right, throwing it into the river, overwhelming it in the inextricable position into which it had been forced; and so much slaughter had to be accomplished that the French were still killing the foe at ten o'clock at night. Next there was Wagram—the Austrians wishing to cut the French off from the Danube, and repeatedly reinforcing their left wing so that they might overcome Masséna, who, being wounded, reclined in a carriage whilst commanding his troops; and meantime the artful, Titanic Napoleon allowed the Austrians to pursue this course till all at once the terrible fire of a hundred guns rained upon their weakened centre, sweeping it more than a league away; whereupon their left wing, terrified at its isolation, and already falling back before Masséna, who had retrieved his earlier reverses, carried off with it the remainder of the Austrian army with devastation akin to that caused by a breaking dyke. And at last there was the Moskowa, when the bright sun of Austerlitz shone out again for the last time, a terrible mêlée of men, with all the confusion born of vast numbers of antagonists and of stubborn courage, hillocks carried under an incessant fusillade, redoubts captured by assault at the bayonet's point, repeated offensive returns of the enemy, who disputed the ground inch by inch, and such desperate bravery on the part of the Russian Guards that the furious charges of Murat, the simultaneous thunder of three hundred guns, and all the valour of Ney, the triumphant prince of the day, were needed to secure victory. But whatever the battle was, the flags were stirred by the same glorious fluttering in the evening air; the same shouts of 'Vive Napoléon!' resounded when the bivouac fires were being lighted on the conquered positions; France was everywhere at home—a conqueress who marched her invincible eagles from one end of Europe to the other, and who needed but to set her foot on the soil of foreign kingdoms for the humbled nations to sink into the ground!

      Less intoxicated by the white wine that sparkled in his glass than by the glorious memories carolling in his mind, Maurice was finishing his chop when his glance fell upon two ragged, mud-stained soldiers, who looked like bandits weary of roaming the highways; and on hearing them question the servant girl respecting the precise positions of the regiments encamped alongside the canal, he called out to them, 'Eh, comrades, here! You belong to the Seventh Corps, don't you?'

      'Of course—to the first division,' replied one of the men; 'there's no mistake about it I warrant you. The best proof is, I was at Frœschweiler, where it wasn't cold by any means. And the comrade here belongs to the First Corps—he was at Weissenburg, another filthy hole!'

      Then they told their