Part 1

This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler

[Picture: Book cover]

ALPHONSE DAUDET

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Robert Helmont _DIARY OF A RECLUSE_

_1870–1871_

TRANSLATED BY

LAURA ENSOR

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[Picture: Civilians leaving their homes]

_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY PICARD AND MONTÉGUT_

LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, LIMITED BROADWAY, LUDGATE HILL MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK 1892

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[Picture: Country Scene]

LIST OF PLATES

PAGE “Read that, Mr. Robert, said the good man” 18 “Seeing me so thoroughly determined, the Keeper pressed my 35 hand” “Colaquet managed to take us tolerably straight” 56 “Old Guillard brought out a large jug of sparkling wine” 68 “They began drinking out of their caps” 74 “He lay sprawling at full length on the stone bench” 79 “At that instant a man rushed across the moonlit orchard” 111 The Watch 128 “It was a balloon” 140 “I found a pigeon” 148 “We crossed a heavy punt” 160 “I seized hold of the chain with both hands and lowered 171 myself into the river” “They blew out his brains with a revolver” 186 “I heard the clinking of glasses, the uncorking of bottles” 191 “Forgetful of the lost harvest in preparing for that of the 199 future”

[Picture: Invalid lying on a sofa]

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.

[Picture: Meeting with Casaquet again] 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.

[Picture: Abandoned garden chairs]

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[Picture: Rural scene]

THE HERMITAGE, _September_ 3_rd_.

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.”

[Picture: Robert up and about again] Presently I returned and seated myself on the old, worn, green-coloured stone bench, which, with the wall full of gaps and two or three apple-trees covered with moss, date from the time when my house and the orchards surrounding it were part of an old monastery built in the middle of the forest . . . Never had my garden appeared so beautiful to me. The fruit-trees against the wall, rather stripped of their leaves, were laden with ripe peaches and golden bunches. The currant-bushes, spread out in thin clumps, were dotted here and there with sparks of red; and under the autumn sun, that ripens each berry, bursts each pod, and sheds each grain, the sparrows pursued one another with unequal flights, while youthful twitterings among them show how their numbers have been increased by the young broods. From time to time the heavy flight of a pheasant passed over the ruined wall, alighting in a field of buckwheat. At the top of a tall tree a squirrel was playing and cracking nuts. The gentle heat which pervaded the whole scene threw a wonderful feeling of repose over this little rustic corner. I had forgotten the Prussians and the invasion . . . Suddenly the keeper and his wife came in. It was astonishing to see old Guillard at the Hermitage in the daytime—he, the constant rover of the forest! I understood that there must be fresh news.

[Picture: “Read that, Mr. Robert, said the good man”]

—Read that, Mr. Robert . . . said the good man.

And drawing from beneath his thick velveteen waistcoat a copy of the _National_, crumpled and awkwardly folded by hands little accustomed to deal with papers, he held it out to me with an air of dismay. On the first sheet, bordered in black, were the sinister words: “_The French army has capitulated_.” I could not read any farther . . .

. . . Dazed, with closed eyes, for the space of five minutes I seemed to see nothing but those few words, surrounded by flashes of light and colour, as if I had read them on a white wall in the full glare of the sun. Alas! there was therefore no hope. The last barrier had broken down. It was the invasion, the mighty one . . . The keeper thinks that in eight days the Prussians will be here.

—Ah, my dear sir, you should see the block on the roads. Between this and Paris there is a mob of cattle and vehicles. Every one is packing up and flying. Champrosay is empty; Farmer Goudeloup is the only person who will not hear of leaving. He has sent away his wife and children, loaded his two guns, and is ready.

[Picture: Civilians evacuating their homes]

—And you, Guillard, what do you intend doing?

—I, sir? I shall do the same as Goudeloup. Our chiefs have forgotten to leave us any orders. I shall take advantage of that to remain at my post, and watch my woods up to the last moment. When the Prussians come, we will barricade ourselves in the Hermitage; for I suppose, with your bad leg, you will not think of leaving. And then, if we are attacked—well, we will defend ourselves. You will fire through the windows; I shall guard the Pacôme Gate, and Mother Guillard will load the guns . . . Won’t you, mother? . . .

[Picture: Robert, after hearing the bad news]

Good fellow! It warmed my heart to hear him. In spite of his sixty years, the Indian, as they call him about here, with his high stature, wide shoulders, and bright eyes full of mischief and life, is still a fine-looking soldier. I thought, as I looked at him, that with such a companion there might indeed be something to do. By lying in ambush on the outskirts of the forest he knows so thoroughly, we could demolish a few passing Prussians. But then the sensation of my weakness, of my useless condition, suddenly came back to me and overwhelmed me.

After the keeper and his wife had taken leave of me, I remained all alone, seated on my bench, buried in thought. What a state of misery is mine! To feel that craving for action and vital energy that comes on at the approach of danger, and not to be able to take ten steps in my garden. How much longer will this last? The doctor says I must expect at least two months of it. Two months! Ah! how dreadful . . . The air was getting chilly, my leg was hurting me. I went in and dined sadly. After dinner the keeper came—as he has done every evening since my accident—to smoke a pipe with me. He is more than ever determined to remain at the Hermitage. While he was telling me all his plans and schemes of defence, I heard in the distance, through the open window, the usual sounds of twilight; the wheels creaking in the ruts, the rumbling of the train, the rustling of the leaves in the thickets; and at moments another sound, as of all these blended together and increasing in volume, seemed to rise from the ground, following the course of the river and little hills on the horizon, to grow gradually louder and louder. It was like the tramp of an army on the march, hurrying on in the fading light to find their halting-place, while the first rays of moonlight fall on the barrels of the guns and the gilded spikes of the helmets . . .

Suddenly a dull report on a level with the earth made us start. Mother Guillard, who was clearing away my modest repast, felt the pile of plates she was carrying shake in her hands.

—They have blown up the bridge at Corbeil! . . . said the keeper.

The pretty country village, where I had so often breakfasted before a day’s shooting, seemed to be sixty miles farther away . . . For a moment we all three looked blankly at each other. At last old Guillard rose from his seat, took up his gun and his lantern, muttering between his teeth:

—I am going to close the Pacôme gate, he said, with an heroic gesture.

Close the Pacôme gate! It seemed easy to say; and yet I fancy the good fellow will find some difficulty in doing it. For the last century the old door of the cloister has been ajar; the forest has taken advantage of the aperture to slip through, and the indiscreet brambles have climbed in by all the cracks of its disjointed planks. If we have to undergo a siege, I do not rely much on that gate.

[Picture: The Corbeil bridge]

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[Picture: The Hermitage]

_September_ 5_th_.

. . . Long had I sought a solitary corner, not too far away from Paris, and yet not much frequented by Parisians. One day, while crossing the forest of Sénart, I discovered the Hermitage, and for the last ten years I have spent all my summers there. It was a monastery of “Cordeliers,” burnt down in ‘93. The four principal walls remain standing, but mouldering and crumbling at intervals, making on the turf, heaps of red stone quickly re-clothed by a rich and luxuriant vegetation: poppies, barley, stiff-growing plants with regular and pointed leaves, are divided by the stones like inlaid metal-work. One gateway looks on the road; the other, that famous Pacôme gate, opens on to the wooded thickets and the little hidden paths, full of balsam and wild mint, where, on a misty morning, I have often fancied I saw disappear, the hood of some old monk gathering wild herbs. Here and there along the wall, low postern gates, disused for many a century, send through the darkness of the forest long rays of light, as if the cloister contained all the sunlight of the woods.

[Picture: Gateway to the Hermitage]

Inside is waste land, with burnt-up grass, little gardens belonging to the peasants, some orchards divided by trellis-work, and two or three houses built of that red stone that is found in the quarries of the wood.

[Picture: Robert’s workroom in the Hermitage]