Part 31 (1/2)
He made the motions of p.r.i.c.king with his bayonet as he spoke, ”One--_two_--hop!”
It made us all tremble only to look at him.
”Yes, Father Moses, so it is,” said he, emptying his gla.s.s by little sips. ”I have nailed this sort of an apothecary to the door of the tile-kiln. He made up a funny face--his eyes starting from his head.
His Aurelia will have to expect him a good while! But never mind!
Only, Madame Sorle, I a.s.sure you that it is a lie. You must not believe a word he says. The Emperor will give it to them! Don't be troubled.”
I did not wish to go on. I felt myself grow cold, and I finished the letter quickly, pa.s.sing over three-quarters of it which contained no information, only compliments for friends and acquaintances.
The sergeant himself had had enough of it, and went out soon afterward, saying, ”Good-night! Throw that in the fire!”
Then I put the letter aside, and we all sat looking at each other for some minutes. I opened the door. The sergeant was in his room at the end of the pa.s.sage, and I said, in a low voice:
”What a horrible thing! Not only to kill the father of a family like a fly, but to laugh about it afterward!”
”Yes,” replied Sorle. ”And the worst of it is that he is not a bad man. He loves the Emperor too well, that is all!”
The information contained in the letter caused us much serious reflection, and that night, notwithstanding our stroke of good fortune in our sales, I woke more than once, and thought of this terrible war, and wondered what would become of the country if Napoleon were no longer its master. But these questions were above my comprehension, and I did not know how to answer them.
XVII
FAMINE AND FEVER
After this story of the landwehr, we were afraid of the sergeant, though he did not know it, and came regularly to take his gla.s.s of cherry-brandy. Sometimes in the evening he would hold the bottle before our lamp, and exclaim:
”It is getting low, Father Moses, it is getting low! We shall soon be put upon half-rations, and then quarter, and so on. It is all the same; if a drop is left, anything more than the smell, in six months, Trubert will be very glad.”
He laughed, and I thought with indignation:
”You will be satisfied with a drop! What are you in want of? The city storehouses are bomb-proof, the fires at the guard-house are burning every day, the market furnishes every soldier with his ration of fresh meat, while respectable citizens are glad if they can get potatoes and salt meat!”
This is the way I felt in my ill-humor, while I treated him pleasantly, all the same, on account of his terrible wickedness.
And it was the truth, Fritz, even our children had nothing more nouris.h.i.+ng to eat than soup made of potatoes and salt beef, which cause many dangerous maladies.
The garrison had no lack of anything; but, notwithstanding, the governor was all the time proclaiming that the visits were to be recommenced, and that those who should be found delinquent should be punished with the rigor of military law. Those people wanted to have everything for themselves; but n.o.body minded them, everybody hid what he could.
Fortunate in those times was he who kept a cow in his cellar, with some hay and straw for fodder; milk and b.u.t.ter were beyond all price.
Fortunate was he who owned a few hens; a fresh egg, at the end of February, was valued at fifteen sous, and they were not to be had even at that price. The price of fresh meat went up, so to speak, from hour to hour, and we did not ask if it was beef or horse-flesh.
The council of defence had sent away the paupers of the city before the blockade, but a large number of poor people remained. A good many slipped out at night into the trenches by one of the posterns; they would go and dig up roots from under the snow, and cut the nettles in the bastions to boil for spinach. The sentries fired from above, but what will not a man risk for food? It is better to feel a ball than to suffer with hunger.
We needed only to meet these emaciated creatures, these women dragging themselves along the walls, these pitiful children, to feel that famine had come, and we often said to ourselves:
”If the Emperor does not come and help us, in a month we shall be like these wretched creatures! What good will our money do us, when a radish will cost a hundred francs?”
Then, Fritz, we smiled no more as we saw the little ones eating around the table; we looked at each other, and this glance was enough to make us understand each other.
The good sense and good feeling of a brave woman are seen at times like this. Sorle had never spoken to me about our provisions; I knew how prudent she was, and supposed that we must have provisions hidden somewhere, without being entirely sure of it. So, at evening, as we sat at our meagre supper, the fear that our children might want the necessary food sometimes led me to say: