Chapter IV: Preface (4)

[16] A cloak of impervious felt with long hair, rather like bearskin. The burka, the ordinary cloak of the Cossacks, is only made in their country: with it they brave with impunity the rain and mud of the bivouac.

[17] The kibitka is a carriage, the body of which, like that of a roughly-built barouche, is fixed directly on two axle-trees, and in winter on two runners forming a sledge; it is the ordinary travelling-carriage in Russia.

EL VERDUGO
HONORÉ DE BALZAC

Midnight had just sounded from the belfry of the little town of Menda. At that moment a young French officer, who was leaning over the parapet of a long terrace, which ran along the edge of the gardens of the castle of Menda, seemed to be sunk in meditation more profound than was natural to the carelessness of military life; but it must be said at the same time that hour, place, and night were never more propitious to meditation. The clear sky of Spain spread an azure dome overhead. The sparkling of the stars and the soft light of the moon lit up a delightful valley, which unrolled itself invitingly at his feet. By supporting himself upon an orange-tree in blossom, the major could see, a hundred feet below him, the town of Menda, which seemed to have taken shelter from the north winds at the foot of the rock upon which the castle was built. Turning his head, he could observe the sea, its shining waters framing the prospect in a broad sheet of silver. The castle was lit up. The merry tumult of a ball, the strains of the orchestra, the laughter of some officers and their partners reached his ears, blended with the distant murmur of the waves. The coolness of the night imparted a sort of energy to his body, fatigued by the heat of the day. And, finally, the garden was planted with shrubs so odoriferous and flowers so sweet, that the young man felt as if plunged in a bath of perfumes.

The castle of Menda belonged to a grandee of Spain, who, together with his family, was then in residence. All that evening the elder of his daughters had regarded the officer with an interest characterized by such sadness, that the sentiment of compassion expressed by the Spaniard might well have been the cause of the Frenchman’s reverie. Clara was beautiful, and, although she had three brothers and a sister, the Marquis of Leganés’s possessions seemed considerable enough to lead Victor Marchand to believe that the young lady would have a rich dowry. But how presume to think that the daughter of an old man, the vainest in all Spain of his nobility, would be bestowed on the son of a Parisian grocer? Moreover, the French were hated. The Marquis having been suspected by General G..t..r, who was governor of the province, of organizing a movement in favour of Ferdinand VII, the battalion commanded by Victor Marchand had been stationed in the little town of Menda to overawe the neighbouring districts, which owed allegiance to the Marquis of Leganés. A recent dispatch from Marshal Ney had given reason to apprehend that the English might shortly attempt a landing on the coast, and had pointed out the Marquis as a man who kept in communication with the Cabinet in London. So, in spite of the good reception which the Spaniard had given to Victor Marchand and his soldiers, the young officer was constantly on his guard. As he made his way to the terrace, from which he intended to examine the state of the town and the districts committed to his oversight, he had asked himself how he ought to interpret the friendliness which the Marquis had never ceased to display towards him, and how the tranquillity of the country could be reconciled with his general’s disquietude; but for the last minute these thoughts had been driven from the young officer’s head by a sense of prudence, and by a very legitimate curiosity. He had just observed a considerable number of lights in the town. In spite of it being the feast of St. James, he had ordered, only that very morning, that fires were to be put out at the hour prescribed by his regulations. The castle alone had been exempted from this measure. He could see here and there the gleam of the bayonets of his soldiers at their usual posts; but the silence was most solemn, and nothing announced that the Spaniards were overcome by the intoxication of a feast. After trying to discover a reason for this infringement of which the townspeople were guilty, he found their contravention all the more mysterious and incomprehensible that he had left officers in charge of the night police and the rounds. With the impetuosity of youth, he was proceeding to slip through a gap, in order to descend the rocks rapidly, and thus arrive sooner than by the ordinary road at a small post stationed at the entrance to the town on the castle side, when a slight noise arrested him in his course. He thought he heard the gravel of the walk crunch beneath a woman’s light footstep. He turned his head and saw nothing, but his eye was arrested by the extraordinary brightness of the ocean. There, all of a sudden, he perceived a sight so ominous that he stood motionless with surprise, and refused to believe his senses. The silvery rays of the moon enabled him to distinguish some sails at a considerable distance. He trembled, and sought to convince himself that this vision was an optical delusion produced by the fantastic tricks of waves and moon. At that moment a hoarse voice uttered the name of the officer, who looked towards the gap, and there saw the head of the soldier whom he had ordered to accompany him to the castle slowly emerge.

“Is that you, commandant?”

“Yes. What is it?” was the whispered response of the young man, whom a sort of presentiment warned to proceed with secrecy.

“Those rascals down there are as restless as worms, and I hasten, with your leave, to report some little things I have observed.”

“Speak,” answered Victor Marchand.

“I have just been following a man from the castle, who came this way with a lantern in his hand. A lantern is terribly suspicious! I don’t think that there Christian requires to light candles at this time of night.--‛They mean to do for us,’ says I to myself, and I set about examining his heels. And so, commandant, I discovered a pretty heap of faggots on a rock two or three steps away.”

A terrible cry which all at once resounded from the town interrupted the soldier. A sudden gleam lit up the commandant. The poor grenadier received a bullet in his head and fell. A fire of straw and dry wood blazed up like a conflagration some ten paces from the young man. The instruments and laughter were no longer to be heard in the ball-room. A deathly silence, broken by occasional groans, had suddenly taken the place of the hum and music of the feast. A cannon-shot boomed across the silvery plain of the ocean. A cold sweat ran down the young officer’s forehead. He was without his sword. He understood that his soldiers had perished, and that the English were about to land. He saw himself dishonoured if he lived, he saw himself brought before a court-martial; then with his eye he measured the depth of the valley, and was about to dash himself down, when at that moment Clara’s hand seized his.

“Flee!” she said. “My brothers are coming behind me to kill you. At the foot of the rock yonder, you will find Juanito’s Andalusian. Go!”

She pushed him away; the young man gazed at her in stupefaction for one moment; but, soon obeying the instinct of self-preservation, which never forsakes any man, even the bravest, he dashed into the park in the direction indicated, and ran over rocks which only the goats had trodden hitherto. He heard Clara calling to her brothers to pursue him; he heard the steps of his assassins; he heard the bullets from several discharges whistle past his ears; but he reached the valley, found the horse, mounted it, and disappeared with the rapidity of lightning.

Some hours later, the young officer arrived at the quarters of General G..t..r, whom he found at dinner with his staff.

“I bring you my head!” exclaimed the major, as he made his appearance, pale and disordered.

He sat down and related the horrible adventure. His recital was received with appalling silence.

“I consider you more to be pitied than blamed,” the terrible general at length replied. “You are not answerable for the Spaniards’ crime; and provided the marshal does not decide otherwise I acquit you.”

These words afforded but very slight consolation to the unfortunate officer.

“When the emperor hears about it!” he exclaimed.

“He’ll want to have you shot,” said the general, “but we shall see. Now, let us say no more about it,” he added sternly, “except to exact a vengeance that will strike salutary terror into this country where they make war like savages.”

An hour later, a whole regiment of infantry, a detachment of cavalry and a train of artillery were on the march. The general and Victor marched at the head of the column. The soldiers, aware of the massacre of their comrades, were possessed with a fury without bounds. The distance which separated the town of Menda from the general headquarters was covered with miraculous rapidity. On the line of march, the general found whole villages under arms. Each of these miserable places was surrounded, and its inhabitants decimated.

By some inexplicable fatality, the English ships had remained hove to without advancing; but it was learned subsequently that these vessels had nothing on board but artillery, and had outsailed the other transports. Thus the town of Menda, deprived of its expected defenders, whom the appearance of the English sails had seemed to promise, was surrounded by the French troops almost without a blow being struck. The inhabitants, seized with terror, offered to surrender at discretion. With that devotion, instances of which have been not uncommon in the Peninsula, the assassins of the French, foreseeing from the notorious cruelty of the general that Menda would perhaps be committed to the flames and the inhabitants put to the sword, proposed to denounce themselves to the general. He accepted their offer, on condition that the inmates of the castle, from the humblest serving-man to the Marquis, should be delivered into his hands. This capitulation having been agreed to, the general promised to show mercy to the rest of the inhabitants, and to prevent his soldiers from pillaging or setting fire to the town. An enormous fine was imposed, and the richest inhabitants gave themselves up as prisoners to guarantee its payment, which had to be effected within twenty-four hours.

The general took all precautions necessary for the safety of his troops, saw to the defence of the district, and refused to billet his soldiers. After seeing them encamped, he went up to the castle, and took it into military occupation. The members of the Leganés family and the domestics were kept carefully under observation, bound, and shut up in the hall where the dance had taken place. From the windows of this apartment the terrace, which commanded the town, could easily be seen. The staff took up its quarters in an adjoining gallery, where the general at once held a council upon the measures to be taken to oppose the disembarkation. After having dispatched an aide-de-camp to Marshal Ney, and ordered batteries to be established on the coast, the general and his staff proceeded to deal with the prisoners. Two hundred Spaniards whom the inhabitants had surrendered were shot out of hand on the terrace. After this military execution, the general ordered as many gallows to be erected as there were persons in the hall of the castle, and the town executioner to be sent for. Victor Marchand took advantage of the time until dinner to visit the prisoners. He was not long in returning to the general.

“I come,” he said with emotion, “to ask you some favours.”

“You!” retorted the general in a tone of bitter irony.

“Alas!” Victor responded, “They are sad favours I ask. When the Marquis saw you plant the gallows, he hoped that you would change the punishment to be inflicted on his family, and begs you to cause the nobles to be beheaded.”

“Very well!” said the general.

“They ask also to be allowed the consolations of religion, and to be set free from their bonds; they promise not to attempt to escape.”

“I agree to that,” said the general; “but you are responsible to me for them.”

“The old man also offers you all his fortune, if you will pardon his youngest son.”

“Indeed!” replied the general. “His estate already belongs to King Joseph.” He stopped. A look of contempt wrinkled his brow, and he added: “I’ll do more than he desires. I understand the importance of his last request. Well, he shall purchase the eternity of his name, but Spain shall always remember his treachery and its punishment! I grant his fortune and life to whichever of his sons will take the place of the executioner. Go, and say no more about it.”

Dinner was served. The officers at table satisfied an appetite which fatigue had sharpened. Only one of them, Victor Marchand, was absent from the feast. After long hesitation, he entered the apartment where the haughty family of Leganés was languishing, and cast a sorrowful look on the spectacle now presented by the hall, where only the other evening he had seen the heads of the two young women and the three young men whirling round as they were borne along in the waltz: he shuddered as he reflected that in a little they must roll severed by the executioner’s sabre. Bound to their gilded chairs, the father and mother, the three sons and the two daughters, remained in a state of complete immobility. Eight servants were standing, their hands bound behind their backs. These fifteen persons looked at one another gravely, and their eyes hardly betrayed the sentiments by which they were animated. On some brows profound resignation and regret at the failure of their enterprise might be read. Some motionless soldiers guarded them, and respected the grief of those cruel enemies. An expression of curiosity animated their visages when Victor made his appearance. He gave the order to unbind the prisoners, and himself proceeded to unfasten the cords which held Clara a prisoner in her chair. She smiled sadly. The officer could not help coming in contact with the young woman’s arms, while he admired her black hair and her supple form. She was a true Spaniard: she had the Spanish complexion, the Spanish eyes, with long curved lashes and a pupil blacker than the raven’s wing.

“Have you succeeded?” she asked, addressing him with one of those mournful smiles in which there is still some vestige of the young girl.

Victor could not restrain himself from groaning. He looked at the three brothers and Clara one by one. The first, and he was the eldest, was thirty years old. Short, rather badly built, with a proud and disdainful expression, he was not without a certain nobility of manner, and seemed no stranger to that delicacy of sentiment which once rendered Spanish gallantry so celebrated. He was called Juanito. The second, Philip, was aged about twenty. He resembled Clara. The youngest was eight years old. In Manuel’s features, a painter would have found something of that Roman constancy which David has bestowed upon the children in his republican scenes. The old Marquis had a head covered with white hair, which looked as if it had come out of one of Murillo’s pictures. At the sight, the young officer shook his head in despair of seeing the general’s bargain accepted by any one of those personages; nevertheless he ventured to confide it to Clara. At first the Spaniard shivered, but in an instant she recovered calmness, and went and knelt before her father.

“Oh!” she said to him. “Make Juanito swear that he will obey faithfully the orders which you will give him, and we shall be content.”

The Marchioness trembled with expectation; but, when she bent over to her husband and heard Clara’s horrible confidence, the mother fainted. Juanito understood all, he sprang up like a caged lion. Victor took upon himself to dismiss the soldiers, after having obtained an assurance of perfect submission from the Marquis. The domestics were led out and delivered to the executioner, who hanged them. When the family were observed by none but Victor, the old father rose.

“Juanito!” he said.

Juanito made no response but an inclination of the head which was equal to a refusal, fell back in his chair, and regarded his parents with a dry and terrible eye. Clara came and sat on his knee, and began gaily: “My dear Juanito,” she said, putting her arm round his neck and kissing him on his eyelids, “if you only knew how easy death will be to me if given by you! I shall not have to submit to the hateful touch of an executioner’s hands. You will cure me of the ills which awaited me, and--my good Juanito, you did not wish to see me belong to anybody, did you--?”

Her velvety eyes darted a glance of fire upon Victor, as if to rekindle in Juanito’s heart his horror of the French.

“Be brave,” his brother Philip said, “or else our race, which is almost royal, will be extinguished.”

Suddenly Clara rose, the group which had formed about Juanito broke up; and the son, justifiably mutinous, saw erect before him his old father, who exclaimed solemnly: “Juanito, I command you!”

The young man remained motionless, his father fell on his knees. Involuntarily, Clara, Manuel and Philip followed his example. All stretched out their hands to him who should save their family from oblivion, and seemed to repeat these words of their father: “My son, will you prove lacking in Spanish energy and right feeling? Do you wish me to remain long on my knees, and ought you to consider your own life and your own sufferings?... Is this my son, madam?” added the old man, turning to the Marchioness.

“He consents!” exclaimed his mother in despair, observing Juanito move his eyebrows in a fashion of which only she understood the significance.

Mariquita, the second daughter, knelt and clasped her mother in her feeble arms; and, as she wept scalding tears, her little brother Manuel came to scold her. At that moment the almoner of the castle entered; he was at once surrounded by the whole family, they led him to Juanito. Unable to endure the scene any longer, Victor made a sign to Clara, and hastened to go and try a last effort with the general. He found him in good humour, in the middle of the feast, and drinking with his officers, who were beginning to exchange merry remarks.

An hour later, a hundred of the most notable inhabitants of Menda came up to the terrace, according to the general’s orders, to be witnesses of the execution of the family of Leganés. A detachment of soldiers was posted to keep back the Spaniards, who were drawn up beneath the gallows on which the Marquis’s domestics had been hanged. The heads of the townsmen almost touched the feet of those martyrs. Thirty paces distant from them, a block rose, and a scimitar gleamed. The executioner was there in case of a refusal on the part of Juanito. Soon, amid the most profound silence, the Spaniards heard the footsteps of several persons, the measured sound of the march of a picket of soldiers, and the slight rattle of their muskets. These different sounds were blended with the merry accents from the officers’ mess, as the dance-music of the ball had disguised the preparations for the sanguinary treachery of the other night. All eyes were turned towards the Castle, and they saw the noble family advancing with incredible firmness. Every brow was calm and serene. One man only, pale and in disorder, leaned on the priest, who expended all the consolations of religion on this man, the only one who was to live. The executioner understood, as did every one else, that Juanito had taken his place for a day. The old Marquis and his wife, Clara, Mariquita, and their two brothers, came and knelt a few paces from the fatal spot. Juanito was led by the priest. When he arrived at the block, the executioner, taking him by the sleeve, drew him aside, and gave him, probably, some instructions. The confessor placed the victims in such a position that they could not see the executions. But they were true Spaniards, and held themselves erect and unfaltering.

Clara darted first to her brother. “Juanito,” she said to him, “have pity on my want of courage, and begin with me!”

At that moment, the precipitate steps of a man resounded. Victor arrived on the place of this scene. Clara had already knelt down, her white neck invited the scimitar. The officer turned pale, but he found strength to hasten up to her.

“The General grants you your life, if you will marry me,” he said to her in an undertone.

The Spaniard darted a look of contempt and pride at the officer. “Go on, Juanito!” she said in deep accents.

Her head rolled at Victor’s feet. The Marchioness of Leganés let a convulsive movement escape her when she heard the sound; it was the only sign of her grief.

“Am I right like this, my good Juanito?” was the demand which little Manuel made of his brother.

“Ah, you weep, Mariquita!” said Juanito to his sister.

“Oh, yes!” responded the young girl. “I am thinking of you, my poor Juanito: you will be very unhappy without us!”

Soon the tall figure of the Marquis appeared. He gazed upon the blood of his children, turned towards the hushed and motionless spectators, stretched out his hands towards Juanito, and said in a loud voice: “Spaniards, I give my son his father’s blessing! Now _Marquis_, strike without fear, you are without reproach.”

But when Juanito saw his mother approach supported by the confessor, he exclaimed: “She nursed me!”

His voice drew a cry of horror from the assemblage. The din of the feast and the merry laughter of the officers were hushed at the terrible clamour. The Marchioness understood that Juanito’s courage was exhausted, with one bound, she leaped over the balustrade, to dash her brains out on the rocks below. A cry of admiration arose. Juanito had fallen unconscious.

“General,” said a half-drunken officer, “Marchand has just been telling me something of this execution. I bet you did not order it....”

“Do you forget, gentlemen,” exclaimed General G..t..r, “that, in a month, five hundred French families will be in tears, and that we are in Spain? Do you wish us to leave our bones here?”

After that address there was no one, not even a sub-lieutenant, who dared to empty his glass.

In spite of the respect with which he is everywhere regarded, in spite of the title of _El Verdugo_ (The Executioner) which the King of Spain has granted as a title of honour to the Marquis of Leganés, he is consumed by regrets, he lives in retirement and shows himself rarely. Bowed down by the burden of his splendid crime, he seems to be waiting impatiently until the birth of a second son gives him the right to rejoin the shades who accompany him incessantly.

LAURETTE, OR, THE RED SEAL
COUNT ALFRED DE VIGNY