Part 271 (1/2)
Boulatruelle, accustomed to taking crooked courses, was on this occasion guilty of the fault of going straight.
He flung himself resolutely into the tangle of undergrowth.
He had to deal with holly bushes, nettles, hawthorns, eglantines, thistles, and very irascible brambles. He was much lacerated.
At the bottom of the ravine he found water which he was obliged to traverse.
At last he reached the Blaru-bottom, after the lapse of forty minutes, sweating, soaked, breathless, scratched, and ferocious.
There was no one in the glade. Boulatruelle rushed to the heap of stones. It was in its place. It had not been carried off.
As for the man, he had vanished in the forest. He had made his escape.
Where? in what direction? into what thicket? Impossible to guess.
And, heartrending to say, there, behind the pile of stones, in front of the tree with the sheet of zinc, was freshly turned earth, a pick-axe, abandoned or forgotten, and a hole.
The hole was empty.
”Thief!” shrieked Boulatruelle, shaking his fist at the horizon.
CHAPTER II--MARIUS, EMERGING FROM CIVIL WAR, MAKES READY FOR DOMESTIC WAR
For a long time, Marius was neither dead nor alive. For many weeks he lay in a fever accompanied by delirium, and by tolerably grave cerebral symptoms, caused more by the shocks of the wounds on the head than by the wounds themselves.
He repeated Cosette's name for whole nights in the melancholy loquacity of fever, and with the sombre obstinacy of agony. The extent of some of the lesions presented a serious danger, the suppuration of large wounds being always liable to become re-absorbed, and consequently, to kill the sick man, under certain atmospheric conditions; at every change of weather, at the slightest storm, the physician was uneasy.
”Above all things,” he repeated, ”let the wounded man be subjected to no emotion.” The dressing of the wounds was complicated and difficult, the fixation of apparatus and bandages by cerecloths not having been invented as yet, at that epoch. Nicolette used up a sheet ”as big as the ceiling,” as she put it, for lint. It was not without difficulty that the chloruretted lotions and the nitrate of silver overcame the gangrene. As long as there was any danger, M. Gillenormand, seated in despair at his grandson's pillow, was, like Marius, neither alive nor dead.
Every day, sometimes twice a day, a very well dressed gentleman with white hair,--such was the description given by the porter,--came to inquire about the wounded man, and left a large package of lint for the dressings.
Finally, on the 7th of September, four months to a day, after the sorrowful night when he had been brought back to his grandfather in a dying condition, the doctor declared that he would answer for Marius.
Convalescence began. But Marius was forced to remain for two months more stretched out on a long chair, on account of the results called up by the fracture of his collar-bone. There always is a last wound like that which will not close, and which prolongs the dressings indefinitely, to the great annoyance of the sick person.
However, this long illness and this long convalescence saved him from all pursuit. In France, there is no wrath, not even of a public character, which six months will not extinguish. Revolts, in the present state of society, are so much the fault of every one, that they are followed by a certain necessity of shutting the eyes.
Let us add, that the inexcusable Gisquet order, which enjoined doctors to lodge information against the wounded, having outraged public opinion, and not opinion alone, but the King first of all, the wounded were covered and protected by this indignation; and, with the exception of those who had been made prisoners in the very act of combat, the councils of war did not dare to trouble any one. So Marius was left in peace.
M. Gillenormand first pa.s.sed through all manner of anguish, and then through every form of ecstasy. It was found difficult to prevent his pa.s.sing every night beside the wounded man; he had his big arm-chair carried to Marius' bedside; he required his daughter to take the finest linen in the house for compresses and bandages. Mademoiselle Gillenormand, like a sage and elderly person, contrived to spare the fine linen, while allowing the grandfather to think that he was obeyed.
M. Gillenormand would not permit any one to explain to him, that for the preparation of lint batiste is not nearly so good as coa.r.s.e linen, nor new linen as old linen. He was present at all the dressings of the wounds from which Mademoiselle Gillenormand modestly absented herself.
When the dead flesh was cut away with scissors, he said: ”Aie! aie!”
Nothing was more touching than to see him with his gentle, senile palsy, offer the wounded man a cup of his cooling-draught. He overwhelmed the doctor with questions. He did not observe that he asked the same ones over and over again.
On the day when the doctor announced to him that Marius was out of danger, the good man was in a delirium. He made his porter a present of three louis. That evening, on his return to his own chamber, he danced a gavotte, using his thumb and forefinger as castanets, and he sang the following song:
”Jeanne est nee a Fougere ”Amour, tu vis en elle; Vrai nid d'une bergere; Car c'est dans sa prunelle J'adore son jupon, Que tu mets ton carquois.