Chapter V: In Uniform

"I still have her," said Landri to himself, as he left Rue Monsieur. As before, he walked straight ahead, with the automatic, hurried step which indicates, in certain diseases, the beginning of a disturbance of the nerve-centres. But does not a moral shock, of such violence as the one that he had just received, act upon the organism after the fashion of a genuine stroke? Do not people often die of such shocks? Do they not come out from them paralyzed and mentally unhinged? The young man's reason had been very near giving way during the terrible, nervous paroxysm with which he had been attacked in Valentine's presence, and which resulted in the renewed entreaty that she would bind herself to him forever.

"I still have her," he repeated, "and only her!"

That was the ghastly sensation that he had struggled against during those ten minutes of dumb agony--the sudden, the indescribable crash of everything about him.--His mother? The pious memory of her that he had always retained, tarnished forever!--His father? He had no father from the moment that he could no longer give that name to the only man whom he loved with filial affection, to the noble-hearted, the magnanimous Marquis de Claviers. For the other he had had, from childhood, only antipathetic sentiments which his sinister disclosure had suddenly transformed into abhorrence, mingled with remorse and pity.--His name? He no longer had a name. The name that he bore was not his. It was a living lie.--His home? He no longer had a home. In the mansion on Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, as at Grandchamp, he was an intruder, a usurper. He had no right to be there. A few words uttered by a dying man had sufficed to make his previous existence nothing save a heap of ruins. Of the truth of those words he had no doubt. They had come to him with the tragic sanction of death, against which nothing can prevail. But suppose that it was only the sudden outburst of a madness caused by the fever of the disease? No. Was Jaubourg mad when he sent that message to him at Grandchamp the day before, so that he might embrace him before he died? Was he mad when he followed Landri as a child, and afterward as a young man, with such passionately vigilant watchfulness, carefully concealing his interest? No. Nor was he mad when he pressed him to his heart in that embrace all a-quiver with the grief-stricken fervor of his paternal love. He was not mad in those visions of the past, in that "spoken dream," as the doctor had said, which fitted into their whole life with terrifying exactitude.

All these ideas had rushed at once into the young man's over-excited mind during those very brief moments, as clear and distinct as memories of the past in the mind of a drowning man. He had lost everything, everything, except the sweet, pure woman yonder, who loved him, understood him, pitied him, and did not tell him so--in order to spare him! The unreasoned impulse, by virtue of which, in the throes of that rayless distress, he had asked his only friend to unite their destinies, was also, to follow out a too exact comparison, like the instinctive movement with which the drowning man, whirled away by the current, seizes in a desperate clutch the helping hand extended over the gunwale. How happy Landri would have been to pass that long afternoon with her, at her feet, his head on her knees; to feel descend upon him the only charity that despairing souls welcome--sympathy without words! He had been mortally afraid that he should himself speak if he stayed; and so he had gone away to wrestle anew with the painful going and coming of his thoughts, which tossed him to and fro once more in their resistless surge. One by one the dying man's words repeated themselves in his mind, from the sadly affectionate "You have come" of his first greeting, to the outcries at the end, the imperative "You say that he's my son!"--a supreme confession of the death-agony, followed by a supreme protest which corroborated its truth. It proved the intense determination with which the man had guarded his secret so long as his strength permitted him to do so.

"Jaubourg's son!" Landri exclaimed. "I am Jaubourg's son!" The pitiless revelation regarding his birth was beginning to appear to him in its concrete reality. The social atmosphere in which he had lived nearly thirty years gave to that vision a unique character. He had heard the people of his circle, from the best--a Marquis de Claviers--to the mediocre and the worst,--a Charlus, a Bressieux,--talk so much of "race"; and it was in his race that he found himself suddenly stricken. The blood that flowed in his veins--and he looked tremulously at his hands--was the blood of Jaubourg. The vital force that enabled him to move, to breathe, as he was doing at that moment, came to him from Jaubourg. His very flesh came from that man. In imagination he saw him once more, no longer a pitiable, wasted creature, as he lay stricken with pneumonia on his bed, but young and handsome, as his childish recollections recalled him,--on horseback, following the hunt; in morning costume, walking in the avenues of their park at Grandchamp; in evening dress, seated at their table. These images brought the man before him, physically. The relationship of their faces became, so to speak, visible, palpable, to him, and it gave him a sensation of disgust, of revolt at himself--a detestation of his own body, as it were.

The secret and hidden resemblances which he suddenly discovered between himself and his mother's lover--he was dismayed to find that he dared utter the words--confounded him. How had he failed to detect them? How happened it that all those about him, and the marquis first of all, had not remarked that similarity of temperament and the striking contrast between the offspring of the Parisian bourgeois, distinguished it is true, but in a mediocre way, and the feudal line of the Claviers? Landri was slender, like Jaubourg, refined like him, but with a superficial, almost stunted refinement, compared with the magnificence of those splendidly robust noblemen. They all had light blue eyes. He had Jaubourg's eyes, brown and dark. After so many years he could hear his mother say: "Landri has my eyes." Why? So that no one might recognize the eyes of the other. But he had those eyes, just as he had the chestnut hair, and the lighter, almost tawny, mustache.

From his mother he inherited other features: the straight nose, the haughty mouth, the dimpled chin. These points of resemblance had justified Madame de Claviers in asserting that he was her living portrait--to those who were not aware! Landri was aware now, and he shuddered at the thought that the intimate guests at Grandchamp had certainly detected in him the unmistakable tokens of his descent. He was humiliated in the most secret depths of his being. He had prided himself, throughout his young manhood, upon not being the prisoner of his caste. He had treated as delusions at least, if not as prejudices, the uncompromising convictions of the head of the house of Grandchamp concerning the nobility; and he had a strange sensation of degradation in facing the alloyage of his origin, the blending of other inherited characteristics with the purely aristocratic maternal inheritance. This feeling was most illogical. Had he not proposed, did he not propose, to marry a woman even less aristocratic than a Charles Jaubourg? But does logic ever govern the spontaneous reactions of our pride?

This indescribable impression of essential degradation was intensified by another, more profound and more generous: the affection and admiration that he had always entertained for M. de Claviers made it almost unendurable to think that the sacred bond of parentage between him and that loving, loyal, superior man was broken. Even while struggling against his father's despotism, he had always been so proud that he was his father! And he was not his father! What a heart-breaking thing! It was as if, the very root of his being having suddenly been laid bare, he were bleeding in every fibre that attaches the soul to the body.

And he walked on and on, aimlessly, forgetting the time, regardless of his surroundings, until, at the end of the afternoon, he found himself a long way from his starting-point, at the far end of the Ménilmontant quarter, beyond the cemetery of Père La Chaise. The approaching twilight warned him at last that the day was passing. He looked at a street sign and saw that he was at the corner of Boulevard Mortier and Rue Saint-Fargeau. He consulted his watch. It was almost five o'clock. The train he was to take started at a quarter past five. His servant was waiting for him at the Gare de l'Est. He had just enough time to make it, in a cab.

What mysterious and discomposing impulse of his perturbed heart did he obey in leaving the station at his right and directing his steps towards the Seine, and, from the river, to Rue de Solferino again? The explanation is that, amid the tumult of his chaotic emotions, one image had incessantly besieged his mind--that of the dying man, whose hands, wet with sweat, he seemed still to feel wandering over his face, whose short breath, tearing cough and spasmodic voice he could hear through space. That man had done him a great wrong, but how large a place he filled all of a sudden among his obsessions! That sinful paternity, so brutally disclosed, agitated him without touching him. And yet it was paternity none the less. His flesh quivered at the memory of those farewell caresses. He felt a pang of remorse to think of leaving the city where the unhappy man was breathing his last, without having inquired for him, without having tried to see him once more.

He crossed Pont Royal, walked the length of Quai d'Orsay, and turned into that ill-omened street. This time, men were engaged in taking away the straw from before the house; it was useless now and would deaden no more the loud rumbling of the carriages. Landri's heart contracted, then beat fast again, when, having entered the lodge to ask for details, he was informed by the concierge, with the stilted manner of a man of the people who announces bad news, feeling that he has a share in its importance:--

"Monsieur Jaubourg died about one o'clock, almost immediately after Monsieur le Comte went away. It seems that he did not suffer. He knew nothing at all afterward. His head had gone. To think of that being possible--such an intelligent gentleman! If Monsieur le Comte cares to go up, he will find Monsieur le Marquis de Claviers there."

"My father?" exclaimed the young man. One does not unlearn in a few moments a habit contracted at the awakening of one's earliest affections. He heard himself utter that exclamation, and shuddered, while the other continued:--

"Monsieur le Marquis arrived half an hour ago. He knew nothing. It was I who informed him of the unfortunate event. He was like one thunderstruck. He could not believe it. 'If I had come this morning,' he said, 'I should have seen him. I could have bade him adieu.'--Oh! he was terribly grieved. It will do him good to see Monsieur le Comte."

This perfunctory mourner's chatter might have gone on for a long while. Landri was not listening. He was looking at the foot of the monumental staircase, and at the broad stone stairs which he could no more avoid ascending than a condemned man those of the scaffold. This man who informed him of M. Jaubourg's death knew M. de Claviers and himself too well. The half-familiarity of his speech proved it. To fail to join the marquis at once, under such circumstances and under the watchful eyes of that liveried witness, would be cowardly. It would have been less cowardly to pour his distress into Valentine's ear! On the other hand, would he have the courage to meet M. de Claviers at that moment and in that place, especially if any suspicion had shaken his long-abused confidence? It was a most improbable supposition, but had not Landri himself had his eyes opened by an overwhelming and absolutely unexpected revelation? What was the meaning of this sudden appearance of the châtelain of Grandchamp, after the telegram announcing an improvement in the invalid's condition?

The young man asked himself that question, another source of anxiety added to all the rest, as he climbed the stairs. How he wished that there were more of them!--He was on the landing. He rang. He passed through the reception room and the library. He entered that bedroom where, a few hours earlier, the terrible scene was enacted. On the bed where he had left Jaubourg writhing in pain and uttering unforgettable words, lay a motionless form, prepared for the coffin. The dead man, in evening dress, with white cravat, silk socks, and low shoes, had resumed the conventional mask which the paroxysms of the death-agony had torn from his face in his last moments--and before whom! Mademoiselle de Charlus's epigram was justified by the presence of the crucifix between those hands, joined even then by no prayer, no repentance. The delicate, sad face, with its closed eyes and lips, its yellow forehead, and its cheeks of a waxy pallor, as if smoothed of their wrinkles, no longer told aught of the mystery so many years hidden.

Nor did the impassive countenance of Joseph, the maître-d'hôtel, who was walking about the room on tip-toe, betray any of the secrets that he might have surprised. He was engaged in overlooking the final arrangement of the sick-room, which was to be transformed into a salon for the last visits to be paid to Jaubourg-Saint-Germain, by his "fine friends," before he was laid in the ground.

Pierre Chaffin, whose glance would have been so painful to Landri, was no longer there. The son might have believed that he had dreamed it all, that an hallucination had deceived his eyes and his ears, that he had never seen what he had seen, never heard what he had heard, had it not been for his trembling when he saw another human figure, kneeling at the bedside, and alive. It was the Marquis de Claviers, a truly touching figure in his sincere grief and his childlike faith. He was praying, with all the strength of his old Christian heart, for his friend--for him whom he deemed his friend! His absorption was so complete that he knelt there several minutes without observing the presence of his son--of him whom he deemed his son. And he, one of the two beneficiaries of that magnanimous delusion, stood as if paralyzed by an embarrassment bordering closely on remorse, as if, by keeping silent, he made himself an accomplice in the insult inflicted on that proud man.

At last the marquis raised his head. He showed his imposing face, whereon the tears had left their trace. He rose to his feet, to his full great height, and enveloped in a last glance the dead man, over whom his hand drew the sign of the Cross.--What a gesture from him to that other! When his loyal fingers touched that brow, Landri could have cried out. M. de Claviers espied the young man, and, with another movement no less pathetic, put his arm about his neck, as if to lean upon him in that bitter hour. They passed thus into the study, where the betrayed friend began to speak in an undertone, with the respect which even the most indifferent assume in the presence of death. In his case it was not a pose. He reproached himself for having, on the previous day and again that morning, postponed a last visit to the dying man in favor of his passionate fondness for hunting.

"It was your despatch that made me come," he said. "I divined that you didn't telegraph the truth--from what? From one little detail. It began: 'Don't be alarmed.' I thought: 'My poor Landri is disturbed. He thinks of his old father's grief first of all. Jaubourg is worse.'--And then I wasn't content with myself. I was angry with myself for having enjoyed myself too much yesterday, and again this morning, riding that fine horse and shooting partridges. It is almost criminal, at my age, to love life so dearly!--However, Charlus and Bressieux took the train at Clermont at three o'clock. I had taken them to the station. I jumped into the carriage with them. It was too late.--I should have been so happy to speak to him again!--But you saw him. Did he know you? What did he say?"

"He had already lost his reason," Landri replied, averting his eyes. He had believed that afternoon that he had touched the bottom of the deepest depths of suffering. He had not foreseen this tête-à-tête, nor these confidences, fraught with such heart-rending significance to him now. Each of them was destined to add a new chapter to the shocking tale of deceit. The lover's son recognized therein everything--the heedless, but lofty-minded security of the nobleman; the loyalty which, having placed his honor in the hands of his wife and his friend, had distrusted neither; the wiles of the wife, and the seductive charm of the friend; and, too, the explanation, if not the excuse of their sin. That life of parade and magnificence, in which the "Émigré" had swallowed up his fortune that the glory of the name of Claviers-Grandchamp might not fade, he had not been able to lead without an accompaniment of idle associates. Love is the engrossing occupation of such coteries of luxury and pomp and pleasure. Madame de Claviers was very pretty. She was romantic, too. The stern and manly poesy of the marquis's nature did not satisfy a sentimentalism to which a nature more complex, more subtle, more corrupt perhaps, had appealed more strongly. And Landri was born of that sin, inevitable and deplorable. But what a crying shame that a man of so noble and rare a soul should have been made a mock of at his own fireside!

"So it is true," he continued, "that he did not know that he was dying? Ah! Landri, may the good Lord preserve us from ending so, without being able to make our last sacrifice! I dread but one form of death--that is, sudden death. Jaubourg did not deserve it. But Charlus was quite right--he was not religious. Still, if I had been here, I would have sent for a priest; but Joseph did not dare to go beyond his orders. I should have paid no heed to that, and who can say if God would not have granted him the privilege of recovering consciousness for a moment! But God is the nobleman of heaven, as somebody said, I don't know who. I imagine that the amplitude of his indulgence surpasses our poor feeble judgments. He pardons much to one who has always been sincere and kind; and Jaubourg was so kind! How many times your mother has told me of secret charitable deeds of his, and of his considerate words! And she was rather prejudiced against him.--My dear Landri, it does me good to have you here! I understand, you came back on my account. You wanted to be posted, so that you could prepare me for the worst at need. I know that you and Charles didn't always understand each other. However, I assure you that he was very fond of you. But he was of another generation, and he didn't enjoy himself much with the newcomers. 'It makes me feel too old,' he used to say to me.--'It makes me younger,' I always said.--He was never reconciled to being more than thirty years old. You see, he had been such a pretty fellow, such a dandy, and so fashionable! And it didn't spoil him. I can see him now, in '73, when I made his acquaintance. It was at the Élysée, in the poor Marshal's day. That was yesterday, and it was the time of promise. We hoped for so many things that have never come to pass, and we hoped for them joyously, too joyously perhaps.--Too joyously," he repeated, and added: "And now look."

He pointed to the bedroom door, then put his hand over his eyes. But in a moment, manfully shaking his head as if determined not to abandon himself to these melancholy recollections, he continued:--

"I return to Grandchamp by the ten o'clock train. You take the nine o'clock. Our stations are not far apart, and I'll see you on board. We will dine on the way.--Let us walk a little, to recover our equilibrium,--what do you say? How many times I have called for Charles at this time in the afternoon, when chance brought me to this quarter! Why, only last Wednesday he spoke to me about this project of marriage with the Charlus girl. It was in this room that he said to me: 'I am entrusted with a message to you. It's about Landri.'--But let us go. Joseph will let me know the precise hour of the funeral ceremony. It will depend on the distant cousins he has left. You must ask for leave of absence. I must have you with me."

"I don't know whether I can get it," Landri replied. The prospect of that fresh trial, of following that funeral procession under the eyes of so many people who would surely know the truth, made his flesh creep. At all events he had a pretext for avoiding it. "Our new colonel isn't very obliging in that respect. And then, you know, he's of the Left, very strong, and not very well disposed to us."

"When shall you make up your mind to shut the door in the face of those rascals?" asked M. de Claviers. They were going downstairs, he first, so that he could not see the intensity of distress depicted on his companion's face while he persisted: "I am not disturbed; they'll drive you to it, and, it may be, before very long. On the train Bressieux showed me a newspaper in which something was said about resuming the taking of inventories in the Saint-Mihiel region.--'What will Landri do, if he gets into that?' he asked me.--'What you would do,' I replied.--I confess that I should be happy to see you take your leave with a fine gesture. Besides it's high time that a gentleman should say something that hasn't yet been said. Among the officers who have resigned as a protest against shameful orders there have been several of noble birth. They have all talked about their consciences, their religious principles.--Conscience? I don't care much for that word. It has served too often as a solemn label for anarchy.--Religious principles? That's better. That's an appeal to a discipline that does not adapt itself to people's whims. But for the noble there's still another duty, that of not disregarding the call of honor. And one does disregard it when one acts in opposition to the will of the ancestors from whom he is descended, of those deceased ancestors who in their lifetime served a Catholic France. We, their progeny, owe it to them to serve the same France. France without the Church is not the France of which our houses are a part. For a noble to serve this France is to renounce his nobility. Such renunciations are the suicide of honor, of that honor which a great bishop called the safeguard of justice, the glorious supplement of the laws. That is what I would like to hear proclaimed to the faces of those curs, by a Claviers-Grandchamp."

They were in the street now. The marquis gazed at his supposititious son with those piercing blue eyes which were no longer dimmed by a tear. It was the very climax of tragedy,--of the internal tragedy which life evolves simply by the interplay of its secret contrasts,--this quasi-feudal profession of faith, enounced upon that threshold, before the child born of treachery, by the bitterly outraged nobleman who knew nothing of the outrage.

The arrival of one of their club friends, who came to inscribe his name at Jaubourg's, and who stopped a moment on the sidewalk to exchange a few words of condolence with them, enabled Landri to avoid replying. When, three hours later, he at last found himself alone in his compartment of the Saint-Mihiel train, he was sorely exhausted, terribly broken by that murderous day, the hardest of his whole life. Before, during and after the dinner, which they ate tête-à-tête, M. de Claviers had said many other things the unconscious cruelty of which had kept the young man on the rack. But as he lay back in the carriage, lulled by the monotonous clamor of the train, which translated itself into distinct syllables, it was those declarations on the stairway, those words concerning the inventories, which recurred to his mind, endlessly. In them were combined his melancholy premonitions of the hours preceding the terrible crisis and the drama which was already resulting from that crisis itself.

"But wherein has anything changed in my situation, so far as that possibility is concerned?" he asked himself. "Didn't I know how he felt on that point, and that he would be immovable? But yes, there is a difference. Before I learned what I have learned, his theory of the duty of the noble had some meaning to me. It has none now. I am not a Claviers-Grandchamp, I am not a noble. The things that are valuable to them have no value to the son of a Jaubourg! He talked to me about honor! Honor! To me! But what I ought most of all to long for, is to be mixed up in one of these affairs, to have to execute an order contrary to all his ideas, and to act as I had made up my mind to act--before. He will curse me? So much the better! So much the better! We shall never meet again? So much the better! I could not stand such conversations as that of this evening. I should betray myself. Indeed, this one went beyond my strength. I love him too dearly! And who wouldn't love him? He is so worthy of being loved!"

The physical and moral personality of the marquis was reproduced before his mind with the accuracy and distinctness which long-continued familiar intercourse produces. Handsome, intellectual, generous, affectionate, entertaining, so kindly-natured and so perfect a type of the _grand seigneur_, the "Émigré" had prestige, he had charm, and he had been subjected to the atrocious outrage! That infamous deed provoked an outburst of revolt from the son of the culprit.

"How could any one betray such a man? And prefer to him--whom? O mother! mother!"

Landri was alone now. He could give free vent to the emotion that was suffocating him. Lying prone on the cushions of the carriage, he wept at last, and for a long, long while. All the tears that he had not shed during the day he shed now,--those that he had forced back in Valentine's presence, by an heroic effort of his will; those that he had forbade himself to display to the indifferent curiosity of the passers-by during his mad rush across Paris, and those that he had not let fall when he was talking with M. de Claviers, within two yards of the death-bed and later at the restaurant. And at the same time that his heart found relief in tears a reaction took place in his mind. For the first time since the dying man had begun to speak to him, he tried to doubt.

"But she is my mother!" he sobbed. "And I believed that of her instantly! Instantly, without inquiry, without proof!"

Inquiry! Alas! is there need of inquiry to make one believe what is visible, what is before one's eyes?--Proof?--But a fact is itself a proof, and the dying man was that evidence, that proof, that fact. His face, his movements, his voice returned to Landri's memory. As plainly as he saw the cushions of that commonplace compartment in their gray coverings, the lamp in the ceiling, and the nocturnal landscape flitting past the windows, he had seen a father die, bidding his son a despairing farewell. He had seen a woman's lover haunted, possessed, deluded by the memory of that woman. The dying man's outcries were not evidence: they were reality, unquestionable, undeniable,--the fact, the indestructible fact.--Doubt? No, Landri could not doubt. One by one he reviewed the details of that scene, which had been so short--as short as the time required to swallow a glass of poison, which, once it has passed into the veins, freezes the very well-spring of life.

Among these details there was one, the threatening nature of which had not made itself manifest to him until that moment, adding a new terror to his agony. "The child shall have everything, everything," the sick man had groaned; and, addressing his imaginary enemies: "You sha'n't prevent that. I have found a way." Did these words mean that Jaubourg had left Landri his whole fortune by his will? It was not possible that that man, prudent as he was, and so intent upon concealing his paternity that he had forbidden himself ever to embrace his son, should have contradicted the whole tenor of his life, in cold blood, by such a step! Was the way that he had found, a gift through a third person?

"Whatever it may be," said the young man to himself, "I shall refuse it, that's all. I, too, shall know how to find a way to avoid touching that money. It's quite enough that I am obliged to share in their falsehood, in spite of myself, quite enough to inflict on a man I love and admire and revere this daily affront. I take his name, his affection, when I am not entitled to either. It is this sort of rebound that makes certain forms of treachery so culpable. They fall too heavily on the innocent. For, after all, I am innocent of this sin, and now it strikes at me after thirty years. And I must deceive as they did, renew and prolong their perfidy, conceal the truth from their victim, even at the price of my blood!"

And as the names of the stations succeeded one another in the darkness, interrupting with their unfeeling summons this inward lamentation--Châlons--Vitry--Bar-le-Duc:--"How unfortunate I deemed myself when I travelled over this road day before yesterday!" he reflected. "And I should be so happy to go back to that night! One would say that I had a presentiment of the catastrophe toward which I was going, when I tried so hard to concentrate all my thoughts, all my reasons for living, upon those two ideas: Valentine and the Army, the Army and Valentine. I did not foresee, however, that I should so very soon have nothing else, really, to live for. Now is the time when I could honestly say to her: 'You and my profession, my profession and you.'--To her, at least, I am bound, from this day, forever. We have exchanged promises. We should be no more firmly bound to each other if we were married.--The Army is my refuge. If I should leave it now, where should I go?"

His refuge! That word, which represented the only succor that he could expect from life at that moment, returned to the poor fellow's lips, when, at the end of that sorrowful night, he saw through the carriage windows about five o'clock the dark and mist-enfolded mass of the houses of Saint-Mihiel against a sky in which the stars shone feebly. They were crowded about the ancient abbey church, where, in the baptismal chapel, may be seen the two children playing with skulls, the chef-d'œuvre wherein Ligier Richier has represented, by that simple symbolism, the whole destiny of man. The flame of the lamps barely lighted the waters of the Meuse, winding rapidly through the damp shadows. The platform of the station, when the young man alighted, was deserted and gloomy. So of the streets through which passed the rickety, jolting vehicle found at the station. But for him there issued from those shuttered houses the sensation which is produced in us by the return to a round of daily habits after a violent moral shock.

As his cab turned into Rue du Rempart he recognized the wall of the garden where, on one of the paths, he had told Madame Olier of his love three years before. His heart, exhausted by excess of grief, was amazed to feel a sort of painful relaxation of its tension at sight of those streets where he had so often fed upon his lover's dreams, had performed for so many months his military duties. So he had guessed aright. He could live--a hard and bitter life, it is true--by fastening himself upon, by clinging desperately to those two last resources, hope and activity, which fate had left to him; and it was with an impatience, not happy surely but very manful, that, having donned his uniform, he awaited the hour to go to headquarters and resume his daily occupations.

Although he had hardly slept during the night, his step was brisk as he walked toward the barracks. If he was no longer conscious of what he had called in his conversation with Valentine the joy of the uniform,--that word joy would have no meaning to him for a long, long time!--he felt its manly courage. He gazed at the high gateway with a strange excitement in his eyes, ringed by tears and sleeplessness.

"I still have this, too," he said, using precisely the same form of words as on the day before, when he left his dear friend on Rue Monsieur; and as if in haste to resume the actual contact with that stern but healthy and manly life, he quickened his pace, to enter the courtyard the sooner.

It was barely eight o'clock. Gusts of a cold wind, the bitter northeast wind that constantly sweeps the high plateaus between the Meuse and the Moselle, lashed the white caps of the men engaged in grooming horses before the stable doors. Subaltern officers, wrapped in their cloaks, were overlooking them. In a corner, at the door of the kitchen, other men, sheltered under an awning, were peeling potatoes. Others were marching off in a squad to perform some task. Everything spoke of the energetic and organized activity which makes a well-ordered barracks a very noble human thing.

There, Landri was no longer, as at Grandchamp, the sole heir of a nobleman on parade, himself a nobleman. He was Lieutenant de Claviers, who was obeyed, but who obeyed. It will be remembered that he had called that sensation too a joy. In what fashion he exerted his authority, the glances of the men who saluted him according to rule, touching the vizor with the open hand, told clearly enough. And he looked at them with the watchful and kindly eye of the leader to whom every detail has its importance. He noticed one whose slightly unhealthy pallor indicated recent illness.

"So you have come back to duty, Teilhard? Since when?"

"Since yesterday, lieutenant."

"You are quite sure it was not too soon? Are you entirely cured of your bronchitis?"

"Entirely cured, lieutenant."

"And your father? Did you spend your furlough with him?"

"Yes, lieutenant. In fact, I meant to come to see you, to tell you that his business has picked up. He expects to pay a little of his debt next month."

"Write him that there's no hurry, my good Teilhard," replied Landri affectionately, motioning to the dragoon to move on. He saw a captain in undress uniform approaching--no other than Despois, the husband of Madame Olier's friend.

"So you were talking with your miraculous work?" said Despois laughingly to his subordinate. "Why, yes--why, yes--it's a genuine miracle. To have made a good soldier out of a blockhead like that animal. Don't blame any one but yourself if I entrust the desperate cases to you. I have taken advantage of your absence to turn over Baudoin to you. He still rides badly. I commend him to your very particular attention."

"I will attend to him at once," said Landri. "I'll take him alone before my drill." And when the captain had passed on, he said to the quartermaster, who was waiting at the door of the riding-school with several men and horses: "Saddle Panther for me, and call Baudoin."

Ten minutes later the mare he had asked for arrived, all saddled, with a simple snaffle in her mouth which she was already champing nervously, and led by the head by a youth of unkempt aspect with very black eyes glowing like coals in a grayish face. Simply from the way in which he wore his képi on one side, one divined in him the insolent vagabond; and from the brusque movement with which he put his hand to it to salute the officer, the smouldering revolt, the mere brute all ready to sing or think the obscene quatrain which we must never weary of citing to the smug optimists who refuse to recognize the ferocities hidden beneath the humanitarian mirage of socialism--those forerunners of a Terror which will be worse than the other, being better organized, and more degraded, being the work of a more degenerate race:--

S'ils s'obstinent, ces cannibales,
À faire de nous des héros,
Ils saurent bientôt que nos balles
Sont pour nos propres généraux.[4]

The beautiful beast led by that creature with the face of an Apache of the faubourgs presented a striking contrast to him by virtue of the dainty grace of her whole frame. She had the elevated tail, the short and supple loins, the long shoulder, legs like a stag's, and a small head. She had been in the regiment five days. The dealer, to improve her appearance for purposes of sale, had clipped her. The hair on her legs and that which showed under the flaps of the saddle was of a brown-bay color; the rest of her body, recently clipped, seemed to be iron-gray. As soon as she entered the riding-school she began to paw the ground impatiently.

"Well, mount her, Baudoin," said the officer; "let's see if she'll behave any better than she did the first day. I kept her for a good rider; and I know that you're one."

Baudoin, apparently insensible to this compliment, mounted Panther, who started off at the restrained trot of a beast who does not abdicate her free will. It was evident that she obeyed neither the pressure of the heel nor that of the rein. In this way she made the circuit of the ring four times, turning her head from side to side, making little attempts to escape when she came near the closed door--a ravishingly beautiful object in that vast empty space where she seemed to wander almost at will.

"She doesn't try any tricks," said Landri. "Let's try her at a gallop.--She won't, eh?--A touch of the whip."

Despite Baudoin's efforts Panther did not even condescend to quicken her trot. The quartermaster, who had the whip in his hand, begun to run, shaking it at the mare. Instead of breaking into a gallop she, taking fright, executed a series of violent sheep-like bounds, in rapid succession, which unhorsed her rider. He tried to remount. The mare, sure of her means of defence, started off again at a trot, then repeated her leaps at a second threat of the lash. Again the man fell. He remounted. A third fall. This time he was thrown against the wall rather hard. Anger turned his face green. A brutal exclamation escaped him, and he said savagely:--

"I don't mount again. I won't ride her any more. I've had enough of breaking my bones so that the officers can have well-trained horses."

He cast an evil glance at the lieutenant, with his hands in his pockets, his clothes all covered with sawdust; and he did not brush himself, or pick up his képi, or follow the mare, who had gone on at a walk, then stopped. She was nibbling, with the ends of her teeth, a tall post, with holes bored in it, intended to hold the jumping-bar.

"Well," said Landri pleasantly, as if he had not heard that outburst of insubordination, "I'll ride her now. You can take her again afterward."

Time to adjust the stirrups to his height, and he was astride the beast, whom he launched at a trot first, then at a gallop. She tried hard to unseat him by leaps and bounds even more out of rule than those which had succeeded so well just before. But Landri had been put in the saddle at the age of six by M. de Claviers, and he too was of the school of those who do not recognize divorce, as the marquis would say jocosely. He held his seat. Panther, the well-named, tried another device. She set off at a gallop, then turned abruptly, end for end. Landri still held his seat. More leaps. Another abrupt turn. The rider did not fall. Weary of the struggle, the mare trots; she gallops; she begins to obey the leg; she obeys the hand.

"Take her again, Baudoin," said the officer, jumping to the ground. "She hasn't broken my bones and she won't break yours."

The dragoon flushed. He looked at the lieutenant, who looked him squarely in the eye, calmly and coolly. Self-esteem aiding, this hint was efficacious with the rebel. He remounted and the session ended without further incident. The conquered beast behaved as well with her new rider as with the other.

"Now," said Landri to the quartermaster, "bring in the others."

"You were in luck," said the quartermaster to Baudoin a few moments later. "With another man, you'd have had a curry-combing, and a good one."

"And the other man, too, perhaps," retorted Baudoin with a leer. "But this one didn't put a gag in my mouth, that's true enough."

"I have not wasted my morning," Landri reflected, as he left the riding-school. Awaiting the hour for the foot-drill, he entered the small room used by the officers as a library and gathering-place. It was very simply furnished, with a divan, a few easy-chairs, and a large table, all covered with coarse blue stuff with a red border. On two sides were book-shelves. On the other walls were engravings, some of which represented the early days of the 32nd Dragoons. First, there was a Cavalier de Lévis, with the date 1703, in three-cornered hat and white tunic, with red lapels and trimmings. Another Cavalier de Lévis, in a very similar uniform, bore this inscription: 1724. Then came two troopers of the Royal-Normandie, dated 1768 and 1784. They wore blue tunics with amaranth-colored lapels, and white cockades in their hats. A trooper of the 19th Cavalry, in a blue coat _à la française_, with a tri-colored plume in his shako, marked the beginning of modern times.

It needed no more than a glance at those engravings for Landri's comparative tranquillity of the last hour to come to an abrupt end. The sight of those uniforms of the old régime recalled the scene of two days before, M. de Claviers pointing to the portrait of the lieutenant-general, and his exclamation about the uniforms and the dandyfied heroism of bygone days. The thought of the marquis recalled the old gentleman's other outbreak, only the night before, concerning the inventories, just as the memory of the Parrocel portrait revived the sensations born of the hideous falsehood of his birth. The associations of these various ideas resulted in a new idea which, when it had once entered his mind, could no more be expelled from it than could the hateful fact with which it was connected. It was only the continuation, the smoothing-off as it were in the lucid portions of the love-child's consciousness, of a course of reasoning that he had been working out, unknowingly, for twelve hours past.

"But have I the right, from this time on, bearing a name that is not my own, and knowing it, to act with that name as if it were my own?"

On the table lay a newspaper rolled about its stick. The young man took it up mechanically, and, from more habit, looked for the rubric, "Military Affairs." Another wave of ideas swept over him. If the inventories at Hugueville-en-Plaine and Montmartin should be taken, and if he should have to direct one of them to the point of breaking into the church, the account would certainly appear under that heading, printed in that same type. His name would be there, at the top of a paragraph describing his act. His name? A name is an inheritance, it is a piece of property, personal and collective at once. It belongs to him who bears it and to those who have borne and will bear it. All of their interests are united in him. Against this mutual responsibility Landri had contended throughout his youth, and no longer ago than the day before yesterday, when he proclaimed before Madame Olier, and again to the marquis's face, the right of the heirs of a great name to lead their individual lives.

It seemed--he himself had thought so at first--that the grievous discovery of the secret of his birth had finally snapped the chain, already so worn, of a hateful solidarity between the Claviers-Grandchamps and himself. True, if he had laid aside their name, if, realizing that he was not of their family, he had ceased to call himself by their name. But such an open rupture was impossible. Even if Landri had not loved the marquis too dearly ever to deal him such a blow, there was his mother's memory, which forbade him to dishonor her. But in that case, if he kept the name of Claviers, he was in their debt. He was no longer a free agent. When people should read, in that newspaper and in many others, that a Claviers-Grandchamp had dared to do something so absolutely opposed to all the traditions of the family, what would his conscience say to him? That he had done his duty? Nay, since it was not from any thought of duty that he had resolved, if occasion should require, to execute a task which he himself had called revolting. His companions had discussed too often in his presence that question of the limits of discipline, which functionaries no less insane than criminal have gratuitously raised of late years. He had reflected upon it too seriously himself not to understand that passive obedience is a phrase devised by enemies of that great school of praiseworthy energy that the army really is. He had meditated upon the wise and judicious terms of the officer's oath, which excludes every degrading order: "You will obey him in everything that he shall command you to do, for the good of the service and to carry out the military regulations." He knew that this problem of obedience to requisitions from the civil authorities, as it had presented itself in the recent religious disputes, is of the sort that become tragic in the most upright consciences. Excellent soldiers have solved it in one way. Excellent soldiers have solved it in another way. It is a crime, we repeat, on the part of a government, to place men of spirit in such dilemmas,--a crime against those who did not enter the army to perform certain tasks,--a crime against the fatherland, which is by this means robbed of some of its best leaders.

Landri, as we have seen, had solved the problem in a manner entirely personal to himself. He had said: "To obey is to remain in the service. To refuse to obey is to resign. I want to remain in the service. I shall obey." But now a new element had intervened: the evidence of a felony committed against the lineage of the Claviers, in which his mere existence made him an accomplice. His mother's sin had given him a place in that lineage. What became of his personal convenience when put in the scale with such usurpation? Did it not bind him on his honor--for he still had such a thing whatever he may have said in the first shock of the revelation--never to do any act for which that lineage, now incarnate in the marquis, could reproach him from its standpoint? The conclusion was inescapable. At an incident of his military life so public, so certain to make a noise in the world, as obedience to an order to proceed against a church, it was not his own opinion that he should follow, but that of the head of that house in which he himself occupied a stolen place. This indisputable obligation suddenly imposed itself on Landri with irresistible force, and for the first time he recoiled in spirit from the prospect of an occurrence which would place before him the alternative of making up his mind against the will, so clearly expressed, of the Marquis de Claviers, or of sacrificing the profession to which he was at that moment more attached than ever. His whole thought was bent upon rejecting the probability of that test. He could not bear to face it now.

"I am crazy. If they employ the dragoons for one of these inventories, they'll send more than one platoon. A lieutenant won't be in command, but a captain. I shall be second in command. If there's a door to be broken in, and the civil authorities don't furnish any men to do it, the captain will have to give the order, not I."

He harangued himself thus, pacing to and fro in the main courtyard while the instructors drilled the new recruits, under his superintendence. But upon whom would that responsibility fall, if Landri's supposition should be realized? In the absence of the captain commanding the squadron, to the captain next in seniority, who happened to be that very Despois with whom he had exchanged so hearty a greeting that morning. Landri at once remembered the letter written by that officer's wife, which Madame Olier had given to him. He had read the letter at the time--without reading it. He remembered nothing about it except Valentine's remark: "She says so well what I should say so badly." But then Captain Despois, if such an order should be given to him, would refuse to comply with it? As had happened before, the command would then devolve upon the officer next below him, in this case upon Landri! Such was now the young man's apprehension in respect to an emergency which was still only possible, and which he had hitherto faced with such firm determination.

He cut the drill short in order to return to his quarters the sooner and really read Madame Despois' letter. His hands trembled a little as they unfolded the sheet, which was badly crumpled from its sojourn in his pocket while he was rolling about in despair on the cushions of the railway carriage. He found there, near the end, after the narrative of a really touching interview between the captain and his wife, these lines, which, although they lessened one element of his anxiety, only intensified another, alas!

"So my husband has made up his mind," wrote Julie Despois. "He ended the conversation by repeating poor Captain Magniez' noble declaration: 'I prefer to be shot rather than commit sacrilege.'--If this thing happens to us, we shall be very poor, my dear friend. The education of our three sons will be seriously endangered. But I could do nothing but say to him: 'You are right. We are Christian folk. We have founded a Christian family. God help us!'--And you will recognize my dear Despois in this. His only anxiety is for his officers. He doesn't want to see the hecatomb at Saint-Servan repeated.--'If they call on me for sappers to break in the church doors, I shall refuse. I sha'n't give the civil authorities time to telegraph for further orders. I shall order all my men to remount, and return to Saint-Mihiel. In this way I shall be sure of being the only one to be disciplined.'--You see, Valentine, what a sad time we are passing through, so that we can't turn our minds to any other subject! In all the officers' families, nothing else is thought of. We shouldn't talk about anything else if we didn't know that to-day an orderly may be an informer listened to at headquarters. We are all wondering when these two inventories will be taken, and to whom they will be entrusted. Will anything happen or not? God grant that we are imagining chimæras, and that everything will go off peacefully, as it has in so many places! Whatever happens, I am writing down these conversations with my husband so that my sons may have them some day, when he and I are no more. They will see what sort of man their father was, and that their mother understood him."

Landri read the last sentence again and again. The captain's magnanimous determination made it possible for him to have no fear of consequences if Despois were in command.--But what followed? How could he fail to make a comparison between that simple-hearted helpmate of a gallant officer, devoted to her husband, so proud to esteem and admire him,--and another woman? Between those children who found at their humble fireside no reason for aught save respect,--and another child? Why had not his own mother understood the man whose name she bore? Why had she betrayed him? Why was a son born of that treachery? And why was not that son, who knew nothing of that horror for so many years, left in ignorance forever? Upon what trivial chances our destinies depend! Suppose that the train from Clermont had reached Paris an hour late yesterday? Doubtless Landri would have found the invalid of Rue de Solferino unconscious. The physician would not have let him in. He would have known nothing. He would not have had to undergo this inward agony which everything renewed--and when would it end? Oh, never! never!

"I am amusing myself with absurd scruples," he said to himself twenty-four hours later. It was afternoon. He was riding along the Meuse. He had received a despatch from the marquis to the effect that Jaubourg's funeral would take place on the following Friday at nine o'clock, and he had answered, by telegraph, that he could not be there. He had understood what the selection of that early hour in the morning meant, as well as a note in the newspapers stating that the deceased had desired a very simple ceremony, without invitations, and without flowers or wreaths. This insistence upon effacement after death avoided comments upon M. de Claviers-Grandchamp's presence behind the bier of his wife's lover. Therein Landri saw a new proof of the ominous secret. He would have been no less irritated by a showy funeral. His irritation manifested itself in a recurrence of the blind and almost savage revolt of the first moments. This feeling imparted its sombre hue to his renewed reflections on the possibility of his responsible participation in one of the inventories--the sole object, as Madame Despois had said, of the silent meditations of all the officers of the garrison. Three of his comrades, who were as sure of him as he was of them, had spoken to him about it in confidence that morning. He had evaded a reply, and he reproached himself bitterly for it.

"Yes, absurd! With respect to _him_"--he was still unable to name M. de Claviers in his heart, as he was to name the other elsewhere,--"with respect to him, I cannot have any duty. The mere fact that I am breathing is an insult so dishonoring to him that I can never add anything to it. All that I can do is to avoid contact between us. He will follow the body to-morrow. I shall not be there. Nobody shall see us walking side by side. Hereafter it must be so in life. My impulse yesterday was the best, the wisest one. Yes, if I am ordered to take part in the expedition to Hugueville or Montmartin, so much the better! If I have to break into one of those two churches, so much the better! That will be irreparable. The name of Claviers-Grandchamp will be dishonored because a soldier has made every other sentiment yield to discipline. That theory can be supported, too. A proof of it is that Despois hesitated, and he's a professed Christian. Even Valentine, who is very religious, but who knows what our profession is, accepts the idea!--He will condemn me. But he won't be able to despise me, in his heart. And it will be all over, all over, all over! He will suffer, suffer terribly. And shall I not suffer when I no longer have him to call 'father,' when I can no longer live with him in that heart-to-heart intimacy which was complete,--I realize it now!--despite the differences in our ideas! I understand them now, those differences which used to surprise me--they were Race. He is right. There is such a thing as Race. I hadn't the instincts of a true noble. Nor have I those of a true bourgeois, either. What a terrible word that is, to which I never gave a thought--adultery! And how just it is! It is the stranger at the hearth. It is a forged Race. It is the creation of a hybrid personality like mine. That is the secret of the vacillations of my nature, of the contradictions that I never could explain: why I have never loved in my inmost heart any of the women of my caste, and why, even to-day, I cannot bring myself to a simple and definite decision. I shall come to it. My relations with him are impossible. That is the one fact to which I must cling, firmly, irrevocably. Let the occasion come to dig the abyss, and I will dig it!"

This second line of reasoning corresponded too nearly with the actual situation not to prevail in the young man's mind. He retained, none the less, deep down in his heart, a hope, almost a certainty, that he would not be required to adapt his conduct to it. One need not have in his veins blood imbued with contradictory inherited characteristics, to be subject to such incoherences. It is enough to be passionately attached to some one from whom one deems it necessary to part forever. So that he felt a shock that was most painful to him, as he was returning from his ride, upon meeting, in one of the streets of the town, the colonel of his regiment, on foot,--the one who did not like "names with currents of air." He was the son of a petty government official who had reached his present rank by a combination of energy and shrewdness,--a good officer with fundamentally false ideas, in whose heart were fermenting those extraordinary anticlerical and anti-noble passions of which sincere Jacobinism is made.

The expression of his superior, by whom he knew that he was detested, froze Landri's blood, it betrayed such ironical and fiendish delight. He did not mistake its meaning. The supposition hitherto treated as imaginary was coming true. It began to take shape. The hostile colonel's face expressed the satisfied hatred of one who knows with certainty that misfortune is about to befall his enemy. The affair of the inventories was about to be solved, and he, Landri, was involved in it in some way or other.

Five minutes later this presentiment became an established fact. As he dismounted, his orderly handed him a note from Captain Despois, begging him to come to his quarters about an important matter connected with the service.

"That's what it is," said Landri to himself. "We are to go."

He found the devout officer, whose most secret thoughts he knew, so intimate was their confidence, busily writing, in the exceedingly modest salon that he used as an office. Despois was a man of forty-five, very tall, with a bony, tanned face, his temples worn smooth by the rubbing of the helmet, hair already almost white, reddish mustache, and light greenish-gray eyes. The eyes were clouded with so sad an expression that Landri was deceived.

"It is he who is ordered to command us," he thought. He remembered the letter he had read the day before. His heart swelled with pity for that father who was evidently making ready to sacrifice his military future to his faith. But from his first words Landri understood that he himself aroused a like pity on the part of that excellent man, who said as he handed him two sheets of paper the official size of which betrayed their source:--

"Will you run your eye over this, my dear Claviers?"

The first of the two documents had at its head:--"General orders relating to the assistance to be furnished by the troops in making inventories of church property"; and the second: "Supplementary instructions for the lieutenant commanding the 1st and 2nd platoons of the third squadron of the 32nd Cavalry, who is to sustain the action of the police and gendarmerie during the operation of taking the inventory of the church property at Hugueville-en-Plaine." The "general orders" stated that both inventories would be taken on Friday, November 16, at nine o'clock in the morning. The "supplementary instructions" added that the duty of the officer despatched to Hugueville would consist in these three points: "to form barriers across the different streets leading to the church, according to the general scheme of the annexed sketch"; "to support the action of the police and gendarmerie, in maintaining order, dispersing the crowds, and looking to the evacuation of the church if necessary"; and thirdly, "to enable the official recorder to perform his duties."

Prepared as Landri should have been, by his reflections of the past week and of that very afternoon, for the possibility of this event, he turned pale as he read the words. He did not hesitate a second, however, but replied:--

"Very good, captain; I will obey orders."

"Did you read it carefully?" said Despois, pointing to one sentence in the first paper: "Six sappers supplied with the necessary tools to perform, in the absence of civilian workmen, such work of demolition as there may be occasion to do."--"In the absence of civilian workmen," he repeated. "You will take the greatest pains, therefore, to assure yourself that civilian workmen cannot be found; _cannot be found_," he insisted.

Evidently he was anticipating the case of the lieutenant refusing to execute the commissioner's orders, and was preparing to shield him, if necessary, before the court-martial.

"I will make sure of it, captain." And, in a firm voice, "I hope that we shall not come to that point, but if we do my sappers will do the work."

Not a muscle moved in the Catholic Despois' impassive face. If Landri had not been acquainted with his real thought, he might have believed that the peculiarly painful character of this expedition was a matter of indifference to the old trooper, who began at once to give him detailed orders concerning the equipment of the men. It was not until they rose, after half an hour of professional conversation, that he let certain words escape him which proved how his heart was beating under his undecorated tunic. It was unhoped-for good fortune, that he was not given the command of the detachment on this occasion. But as he was incapable of selfish exultation, so he gave no thought to his own interests. His expression had grown even more gloomy since the other had made that declaration which left no room for doubt. As he accompanied his visitor to the door, he detained him in front of a mediocre engraving, the Last Cartridge. He was neither a collector with the taste of an Altona, nor a connoisseur of art like a Bressieux, was poor Captain Despois. He was something higher in the scale of human culture,--a good soldier. All the martyrdom of the army, of the army forced by shameless politicians into such tragedies of the conscience, quivered in the tone in which, calling his lieutenant's attention to that wretched lithograph of a scene of disaster, but of an heroic disaster and face to face with the enemy, he repeated simply the famous line:--

"Heureux ceux-là qui mouraient dans ces fêtes!"

[Footnote 4: If they persist, these cannibals, In making heroes of us, They'll soon learn that our bullets Are for our own generals.]