3 books to know Napoleonic Wars. Leo Tolstoy

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      ‘You need not be afraid of his waking, Monsieur le Cure,’ said the postmaster. ‘The wine we gave them was some of what you prepared yourself.’

      ‘I can find no trace of papers,’ replied the cure. ‘Plenty of linen, oils, pomades and fripperies; he is a young man of the world, occupied with his own pleasures. The envoy will surely be the other, who pretends to speak with an Italian accent.’

      The men came up to Julien to search the pockets of his travelling coat. He was strongly tempted to kill them as robbers. This could involve no dangerous consequences. He longed to do it . . . ‘I should be a mere fool,’ he said to himself, ‘I should be endangering my mission.’ After searching his coat, ‘this is no diplomat,’ said the priest: he moved away, and wisely.

      ‘If he touches me in my bed, it will be the worse for him!’ Julien was saying to himself; ‘he may quite well come and stab me, and that I will not allow.’

      The cure turned his head, Julien half-opened his eyes; what was his astonishment! It was the abbe Castanede! And indeed, although the two men had tried to lower their voices, he had felt, from the first, that he recognised the sound of one of them. He was seized with a passionate desire to rid the world of one of its vilest scoundrels . . .

      ‘But my mission!’ he reminded himself.

      The priest and his acolyte left the room. A quarter of an hour later, Julien pretended to awake. He called for help and roused the whole house.

      ‘I have been poisoned,’ he cried, ‘I am in horrible agony!’ He wanted a pretext for going to Geronimo’s rescue. He found him half asphyxiated by the laudanum that had been in his wine.

      Julien, fearing some pleasantry of this kind, had supped upon chocolate which he had brought with him from Paris. He could not succeed in arousing Geronimo sufficiently to make him agree to leave the place.

      ‘Though you offered me the whole Kingdom of Naples,’ said the singer, ‘I would not forgo the pleasure of sleep at this moment.’

      ‘But the seven Sovereign Princes!’

      ‘They can wait.’

      Julien set off alone and arrived without further incident at the abode of the eminent personage. He spent a whole morning in vainly soliciting an audience. Fortunately, about four o’clock, the Duke decided to take the air. Julien saw him leave the house on foot, and had no hesitation in going up to him and begging for alms. When within a few feet of the eminent personage, he drew out the Marquis de La Mole’s watch, and flourished it ostentatiously. ‘Follow me at distance,’ said the other, without looking at him.

      After walking for a quarter of a league, the Duke turned abruptly in to a little Kaffeehaus. It was in a bedroom of this humblest form of inn that Julien had the honour of reciting his four pages to the Duke. When he had finished: ‘Begin again, and go more slowly,’ he was told.

      The Prince took down notes. ‘Go on foot to the next post. Leave your luggage and your calash here. Make your way to Strasbourg as best you can, and on the twenty-second of the month’— it was now the tenth —‘be in this coffee-house here at half-past twelve. Do not leave here for half an hour. Silence!’

      Such were the only words that Julien heard said. They sufficed to fill him with the deepest admiration. ‘It is thus,’ he thought, ‘that one handles affairs; what would this great statesman say if he had heard those hotheaded chatterboxes three days ago?’

      Julien took two days to reach Strasbourg, he felt that there was nothing for him to do there. He made a wide circuit. ‘If that devil, the abbe Castanede has recognised me, he is not the man to be easily shaken off . . . And what a joy to him to make a fool of me, and to spoil my mission!’

      The abbe Castanede, Chief of Police to the Congregation along the whole of the Northern frontier, had mercifully not recognised him. And the Jesuits of Strasbourg, albeit most zealous, never thought of keeping an eye on Julien, who, with his Cross and his blue greatcoat, had the air of a young soldier greatly concerned with his personal appearance.

      Chapter 24

      STRASBOURG

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      Fascination! Thou sharest with love all its energy, all its capacity for suffering. Its enchanting pleasures, its sweet delights are alone beyond thy sphere. I could not say, as I saw her asleep: She is all mine with her angelic beauty and her sweet frailties! Behold her delivered into my power, as heaven made her in its compassion to enchant a man’s heart.

      Ode by SCHILLER

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      OBLIGED TO SPEND A week in Strasbourg, Julien sought to distract himself with thoughts of martial glory and of devotion to his country. Was he in love, then? He could not say, only he found in his bruised heart Mathilde the absolute mistress of his happiness as of his imagination. He required all his natural energy to keep himself from sinking into despair. To think of anything that bore no relation to Mademoiselle de La Mole was beyond his power. Ambition, the mere triumphs of vanity, had I distracted him in the past from the sentiments that Madame de Renal inspired in him. Mathilde had absorbed all; he found her everywhere in his future.

      On every hand, in this future, Julien foresaw failure. This creature whom we saw at Verrieres so filled with presumption, so arrogant, had fallen into an absurd extreme of modesty.

      Three days earlier he would have killed the abbe Castanede with pleasure, and at Strasbourg, had a boy picked a quarrel with him, he would have offered the boy an apology. In thinking over the adversaries, the enemies whom he had encountered in the course of his life, he found that invariably he, Julien, had been in the wrong.

      The fact was that he had now an implacable enemy in that powerful imagination, which before had been constantly employed in painting such brilliant successes for him in the future.

      The absolute solitude of a traveller’s existence strengthened the power of this dark imagination. What a treasure would a friend have been! ‘But,’ Julien asked himself, ‘is there a heart in the world that beats for me? And if I had a friend, does not honour impose on me an eternal silence?’

      He took a horse and rode sadly about the neighbourhood of Kehl; it is a village on the bank of the Rhine, immortalised by Desaix and Gouvion Saint–Cyr. A German peasant pointed out to him the little streams, the roads, the islands in the Rhine which the valour of those great Generals has made famous. Julien, holding the reins in his left hand, was carrying spread out in his right the superb map which illustrates the Memoirs of Marshal Saint–Cyr. A joyful exclamation made him raise his head.

      It was Prince Korasoff, his London friend, who had expounded to him some months earlier the first principles of high fatuity. Faithful to this great art, Korasoff, who had arrived in Strasbourg the day before, had been an hour at Kehl, and had never in his life read a line about the siege of 1796, began to explain it all to Julien. The German peasant gazed at him in astonishment; for he knew enough French to make out the enormous blunders into which the Prince fell. Julien’s thoughts were a thousand СКАЧАТЬ