Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse 1870-1871 E-Book

Alphonse Daudet

• Herausgeber: Alphonse Daudet
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

While spending a day in the country on one of those pretty green islets that are dotted about in clusters on the Seine between Champrosay and Soisy, and wrestling with a friend, my foot slipped on the damp grass, and I broke my leg. My unfortunate love for athletic and violent exercise has already played me so many ugly tricks, that I should probably have forgotten this accident, as I have others, but for its precise and memorable date: the 14th of July 1870! . . .

Leseprobe

Robert Helmont

Diary of a Recluse 1870-1871

By

Alphonse Daudet

Translated by Laura Ensor

Illustrated by Picard and Montegut

PREFACE

While spending a day in the country on one of those pretty green islets that are dotted about in clusters on the Seine between Champrosay and Soisy, and wrestling with a friend, my foot slipped on the damp grass, and I broke my leg.  My unfortunate love for athletic and violent exercise has already played me so many ugly tricks, that I should probably have forgotten this accident, as I have others, but for its precise and memorable date: the 14th of July 1870! . . .  I still see myself at the close of that sad day, lying on the sofa in the former studio of Eugène Delacroix, whose small house on the borders of the forest of Sénart we were then occupying.  When my leg was stretched out, I hardly suffered, for already I felt the vague restlessness of increasing fever, exaggerating the sensation and heat of the stormy atmosphere, and enveloping all around me in a misty cloud, as it were, of shimmering gauze.  To the accompaniment of the piano they were singing the choruses of Orphée, and no one, not even I, suspected how serious was my condition.  Through the wide-open bay window in the studio came the sweet breath of the jasmine and roses, the beat of the night-moths, and the quick flashes of lightning showing up, above the low garden walls, the sloping vineyards, the Seine, and the rising ground opposite.  Suddenly the stillness was broken by the sound of a bell; the evening papers are brought in and opened, and voices broken by emotion, anger, or enthusiasm exclaim: “War is declared!”

From this moment nothing remains to me but the feverish recollection of a state of languor lasting six weeks; of six weeks of bed, of splints, of cradle and plaster case, in which my leg seemed imprisoned in company with thousands of tormenting insects. During that hot summer, so exceptionally stormy and scorching, this inaction full of agitation was dreadful, and my anxiety, increased by the accounts of the public disasters which filled the papers that covered my bed, added to my restlessness and sleeplessness.  At night the rumble of the distant trains disturbed me like the tread of endless battalions, and by day, pale and sad faces, scraps of conversations overheard in the road or at the neighbour’s, through my open window: “The Prussians are at Châlons, mother Jean,” and the vans at every moment raising clouds of dust in the quiet little village, lent a mundane and sinister echo to my perusal of “the news of the war.”  Soon we were the only Parisians left at Champrosay, left alone with the peasants, obstinately attached to the land, and still refusing to admit the idea of an invasion.  Directly I could leave my couch and be moved, our departure was decided.

Never shall I forget my first outing in the little old-fashioned garden, filled with the perfume of ripe peaches and fading roses.  Around me, poor invalid that I was, seated on the steps of a ladder laid against the fruited wall, they were hurrying on the departure, loading the vans, gathering the fruit and flowers in the unconscious preoccupation of leaving nothing for the enemy; even the child, with its arms full of toys, picking up a little spade forgotten in the grass.

As for me, I inhaled the fresh air with delight; and with an emotion caused by my weak state and my returning health, I gazed at the grey house, and at the red flowers covering the Virginian jessamine interwoven round the bay window of the studio.  I thought of the happy hours, so soft and tranquil, spent there the last three years, the hearty laughter, the æsthetic discussions so thoroughly in harmony with the little home, full of the memories of a great artist.  Should we ever behold again the sunny path so often slowly paced with short and chatty steps, the verandah where we sat in the fine June evenings, in the brightness of a flowery Spanish broom which, ball-shaped, seemed like an enormous lustre lighted up in the fading twilight, the richness of its golden colour deepening as the light decreased!

The family omnibus was filled up and loaded, all our cherished ones tightly pressed against each other, the child’s toys side by side with the parrokeet’s cage, the bird scared by the sharp-pointed ears of a favourite greyhound: we started, passing first through the little village with its closed and silent villas. The peasants still held out, although disturbed at the departures, watching them from their doorways with tears rising in their eyes, and a certain uneasiness depicted in the stolid cupidity of their countenances.  What a return to Paris!  The highway crowded with men and beasts, the sheep running loose between the wheels, the green of the market-gardeners’ carts mingling with the piled-up furniture in the vans.  On the railway embankment, which lay on one side of our road, trucks upon trucks extending in interminable rows, halting and whistling calls, which were answered and re-echoed on the distant line.  And then at last the octroi, where the belated droves of cattle and people and vehicles are accumulated before the too narrow gateway, and—for me a novel sight—men of the National Guard mixed with the customs officers—a Parisian militia, full of zeal and good nature, whose bayonets shine amidst the crowd and in the sunshine on the slopes of the fortifications, now heightened by gabions and bristling with guns.

A few days later I again journeyed to Champrosay, but the road no longer presented the same aspect.  The approach of the enemy, so long threatened and now imminent, could be felt by the deserted state of the suburbs, and the care displayed by our main-guards.  Endless formalities were required in order to pass through.  Amongst the loitering peasants might be seen the prowling figures of suspicious-looking spies, recalling the sinister plunderers of the battlefields; and the solitude, the agonised expectation of the districts I passed through—Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, Draveil—abandoned and silent, imparted a mystery to the very windings of the road, where one almost expected to see the shadow of an Uhlan vidette on the watch.  Champrosay, with its solitary street bordered on each side by villas, seemed to grow larger in the death-like stillness: “Vasta silentio,” as Tacitus says.  Glimpses of parks, caught sight of through the iron gates, a background of dark shrubberies in the distance, flower-beds glowing in the brightness of a September day, here and there a circle of garden chairs on a terrace, forgotten like the idle talk that has melted into thin air, garden tools leaning against the palings, all spoke of a rural existence hastily interrupted, a precipitate flight, the sudden surprise, in the midst of its life, of a small Pompeï, whose last hour has struck.  But Nature, ever the same, was nevertheless undergoing a change; the broken bridge at Ris, that had been blown up, and whose loosened chains dipped into the water, transformed the landscape, isolating on each side of the river the two little districts hitherto united by the traffic to and fro over the toll-bridge.  From all these scenes uprose the agonising sensation of a great catastrophe, rendered more striking by the magnificent sun of an exceptionally fine season.

At the same moment, as I closed behind me the door of our now deserted dwelling, an aged peasant, old Casaquet, came out of a neighbouring house.  When all the others had taken flight and run away, he alone obstinately refused to take refuge in Paris, where his family had settled themselves as best they could.  “I’m much too old!” he said; and he had some potatoes, a little wine, a few hens, not to speak of the grunting porker he kept under his roof.  I proposed bringing him away to rejoin his people.  But he stubbornly stuck to his words: “I’m much too old!”

The recollection of this old Robinson Crusoe, the last living being I had seen at Champrosay, often crossed my mind during the terrible cold and famine of the siege.  What had become of him, and of the whole village, which I pictured to myself burning and blazing; our house, our books, the piano, everything tarnished, broken, and laid waste by the invasion, like the suburban regions of Nogent, Champigny, Petit-Bry, and Courneuve, among whose sad ruins, villas with broken stairways and half-hanging shutters, I wandered every day? . . .

But no!  When the war was over, and when, towards the end of the Commune, Paris becoming untenable, we came and took refuge at Champrosay, I had the pleasant surprise of finding almost everything in its habitually peaceful condition, with the exception of a few country-houses that the marauders had searched, and where they had, from pure love of destruction, destroyed the wainscoting and broken all the windows.  The German army had passed through, but never made any lengthened stay.  Hidden behind a clump of acacias, Delacroix’s house had been even more protected than others, and in the garden awakening in beauty to the smile of spring, I could breathe freely for the twofold deliverance from the siege and from the winter.  I was walking along the flower borders, when old Casaquet’s face peered over the garden wall, and he beamed upon me with his old wrinkled visage.  Over him, too, the invasion had passed without leaving a trace.  “I didn’t suffer too much . . . ” he said, twinkling his eyes, and standing on a ladder with his elbows resting on the trellis; and then he related how he had borne this period of exile and solitude.  It had been a real time of feasting.  There were no keepers in the forest, he cut as much wood as he liked (a treasure much coveted by the peasant); with a few poachers who had taken refuge at the Hermitage he snared roedeer and pheasants; and whenever an isolated Prussian, an orderly or straggler, was found in the vicinity of the quarries, he was quietly and quickly despatched.  During four months he lived without any other news from Paris but the sound of the distant cannonading, and the occasional sight of an inflated balloon floating beneath the dark sky.

This quiet, ant-like existence on the surface of the earth amidst the overthrow of a world was most extraordinary.  I too could have lived there like the old peasant, reduced to the same expedients of primitive life; and this different view of war appeared to me an appropriate setting for a melancholy picture of the invasion.  That very evening I began in the large studio taking notes for “Robert Helmont’s Diary of a Recluse;” while the passing to and fro under my windows of the German cavalry patrols, still encamped on the edge of the country, the clashing of swords and jingling of curb-chains, the rough Saxon voices harshly raised in command, mingled with the thunder of the cannons.  All this indeed formed part of “my diary.”  My feelings were still more excited on the following day by all the sad details of the military occupation—the roads dark with troops, the halting and the bivouacking by the side of the ditches.  To escape from the humiliating sensations of the vanquished, I wandered into the woods, lovely in this month of April: a tender green clothed the branches of the trees, the grass was gemmed with the bloom of wild hyacinths, and the warbling of the birds and the song of the nightingale were interrupted by the distant tearing sound of the mitrailleuse.  Sometimes, at the turn of a quiet path, I saw coming toward me under the arching boughs, a sentimental Saxon colonel, slowly pacing on his charger the lanes and trysting-places cherished by Louis XV. and Madame de Pompadour.  Then I plunged into the recesses of the deepest thickets, for these encounters gave me a revulsion of feeling which I can hardly explain.  It was thus that I lived the diary of Robert Helmont at the same time that I wrote it.

This little book was published by Dentu in the Musée Universal of 1873; but it met with little success.  It told no story, and contained no interesting or continued narrative; it was merely a succession of landscapes, portraying the melancholy of our invaded summer haunts.  In the new edition of my complete works published by Dentu-Charpentier, “Robert Helmont” is placed at the end of the second volume of “Jack,” and it finds there its proper place, describing as it does the same forest of Sénart, the Hermitage, and the Pacôme Gate, where I knew the hero of my novel “Jack,” and recalling to life a few of the same characters.

The Hermitage, September 3rd.

It is six weeks yesterday since I broke my leg.  It happened on the very day war was declared.  While M. de Grammont was exciting so much tumult and enthusiasm in the Senate, I myself, on returning from net-fishing in the Seine, stumbled over a stake hidden in the grass at the edge of the river, and was brought home to my Hermitage in the forest of Snart in a woodcutter’s cart . . .

I went out this morning for the first time after fifty days of fever and suffering, increased by the news of the war.  I had nightmares of distant battles, and the sinister despatches from Forbach and Reischhoffen remain mixed up in my mind with the pain of my wound, the heat of the plaster casing, and that restless inactivity which is the most cruel of all tortures.  At last it is over!  After having seen nothing for so long but the tops of the trees, and those great stretches of blue sky of which the monotony is only broken by passing wings, I felt quite happy at putting my feet to the ground and getting down my stairs with faltering steps.  But how weak I was!  My head swam round.  From having remained so long in the same position, my leg had forgotten its proper balance and functions.  It seemed no longer part of myself, as if I were no longer master of it.  However, with slow steps, and the extreme nervousness which augments one’s weakness, I was able to get to the poultry-yard and push open its little latticed door, half buried in the tall grass.  Even this gave me a thrill of pleasure!  During my absence, my neighbour, the keeper’s wife, has taken good care of all this little family, who watch me with an astonished, bright, and familiar gaze.  The rabbits come tumbling over each other to the edge of their hutches, with their ears pricked up and quivering.  The hens go on with their ceaseless pecking in the grass, making sharp sounds like those of little pickaxes.  The cock, more demonstrative, flaps his large wings with a resounding “cock-a-doodle-do.”