MY MEMOIRS
BY
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
TRANSLATED BY
E. M. WALLER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
ANDREW LANG
VOL. I
1802 TO 1821
WITH A FRONTISPIECE
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1907
[NOTE]
The translator has, in the main, followed the edition published at Brussels in 1852-56, in the Preface to which the publishers state that they have printed from "le manuscrit autographe" of the author. They furthermore print a letter from Dumas, dated Brussels, 23rd December 1851, in which Dumas says:
"Je vous offre donc, mon cher Meline, de revoir moi-même les épreuves de votre réimpression, et de faire de votre édition de Bruxelles la seule édition complète qui paraîtra à l'étranger."
The translation has been collated (a) with the current edition, and (b) with the original edition published in Paris in 1852-55, and certain omitted passages have been restored. Dumas' spelling of proper names has been followed save in a few cases deemed to be misprints.
THESE MEMOIRS ARE DEDICATED TO
THE HONOURABLE
COUNT ALFRED D'ORSAY
MY FELLOW-CRAFTSMAN
AND MY BOSOM FRIEND
ALEXANDRE DUMAS
CONTENTS
My birth—My name is disputed—Extracts from the official registers of Villers-Cotterets—Corbeil Club—My father's marriage certificate—My mother—My maternal grandfather—Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, father of Philippe-Égalité—Madame de Montesson—M. de Noailles and the Academy—A morganatic marriage [1]
My father—His birth—The arms of the family—The serpents of Jamaica—The alligators of St. Domingo—My grandfather—A young man's adventure—A first duel—M. le duc de Richelieu acts as second for my father—My father enlists as a private soldier—He changes his name—Death of my grandfather—His death certificate [11]
My father rejoins his regiment—His portrait—His strength—His skill—The Nile serpent—The regiment of the King and the regiment of the Queen—Early days of the Revolution—Declaration of Pilnitz—The camp at Maulde—The thirteen Tyrolean chasseurs—My father's name is mentioned in the order of the day—France under Providence—Voluntary enlistments—St.-Georges and Boyer—My father lieutenant-colonel—The camp of the Madeleine—The pistols of Lepage—My father General of Brigade in the Army of the North [21]
My father is sent to join Kléber—He is nominated General-in-Chief in the Western Pyrenees—Bouchotte's letters—Instructions of the Convention—The Representatives of the People who sat at Bayonne—Their proclamation—In spite of this proclamation my father remains at Bayonne—Monsieur de l'Humanité [33]
My father is appointed General-in-Chief of the Army of the West—His report on the state of La Vendée—My father is sent to the Army of the Alps as General-in-Chief—State of the army—Capture of Mont Valaisan and of the Little Saint-Bernard—Capture of Mont Cenis—My father is recalled to render an account of his conduct—What he had done—He is acquitted [43]
The result of a sword-stroke across the head—St. Georges and the remounts—The quarrel he sought with my father—My father is transferred to the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse—He hands in his resignation and returns to Villers-Cotterets—A retrospect over what had happened at home and abroad during the four years that had just elapsed [56]
My father at Villers-Cotterets—He is called to Paris to carry out the 13th Vendémiaire—Bonaparte takes his place—He arrives the next day—Buonaparte's attestation—My father is sent into the district of Bouillon—He goes to the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and to the Army of the Rhine, and is appointed Commandant at Landau—He returns as Divisional General in the Army of the Alps, of which he had been Commander-in-Chief—English blood and honour—Bonaparte's plan—Bonaparte appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy—The campaign of 1796 [69]
My father in the Army of Italy—He is received at Milan by Bonaparte and Joséphine—Bonaparte's troubles in Italy—Scurvy—The campaign is resumed—Discouragement—Battle of Arcole [82]
The despatch is sent to Bonaparte—Dermoncourt's reception—Berthier's open response—Military movements in consequence of the despatch—Correspondence between my father and Serrurier and Dallemagne—Battle of St.-Georges and La Favorite—Capture of Mantua—My father as a looker-on [90]
My father's first breeze with Bonaparte—My father is sent to Masséna's army corps—He shares Joubert's command in the Tyrol—Joubert—The campaign in the Tyrol [109]
The bridge of Clausen—Dermoncourt's reports—Prisoners on parole—Lepage's pistols—Three generals-in-chief at the same table [119]
Joubert's loyalty towards my father—"Send me Dumas"—The Horatius Codes of the Tyrol—My father is appointed Governor of the Trévisan—The agent of the Directory—My father fêted at his departure—The treaty of Campo-Formio—The return to Paris—The flag of the Army of Italy—The charnel-house of Morat—Charles the Bold—Bonaparte is elected a member of the Institute—First thoughts of the expedition to Egypt—Toulon—Bonaparte and Joséphine—What was going to happen in Egypt [135]
The voyage—The landing—The taking of Alexandria—The Chant du Départ and the Arabian concert—The respited prisoners—The march on Cairo—Rum and biscuit—My father's melons—The Scientific Institute—Battle of the Pyramids—Scene of the victory—My father's letter establishing the truth [151]
Admissions of General Dupuis and Adjutant-General Boyer—The malcontents—Final discussion between Bonaparte and my father—Battle of Aboukir—My father finds treasure—His letter on this subject [161]
Revolt at Cairo—My father enters the Grand Mosque on horseback—His home-sickness—He leaves Egypt and lands at Naples—Ferdinand and Caroline of Naples—Emma Lyon and Nelson—Ferdinand's manifesto—Comments of his minister, Belmonte-Pignatelli [172]
Report presented to the French Government by Divisional-General Alexandre Dumas, on his captivity at Taranto and at Brindisi, ports in the Kingdom of Naples [181]
My father is exchanged for General Mack—Events during his captivity—He asks in vain for a share in the distribution of the 500,000 francs indemnity granted to the prisoners—The arrears of his pay also refused him—He is placed on the retired list, in spite of his energetic protests [197]
Letter from my father to General Brune on my birth—The postscript—My godfather and godmother—First recollections of infancy—Topography of the château des Fossés and sketches of some of its inhabitants—The snake and the frog—Why I asked Pierre if he could swim—Continuation of Jocrisse [204]
Mocquet's nightmare—His pipe—Mother Durand—Les bêtes fausses et le pierge—M. Collard—My father's remedy—Radical cure of Mocquet [212]
Who was Berlick?—The fête of Villers-Cotterets—Faust and Polichinelle—The sabots—Journey to Paris—Dollé—Manette—Madame de Mauclerc's pension—Madame de Montesson—Paul and Virginia—Madame de Saint-Aubin [218]
Brune and Murat—The return to Villers-Cotterets—L'hôtel de l'Épée—Princess Pauline—The chase—The chief forester's permission—My father takes to his bed never to rise again—Delirium—The gold-headed cane—Death [225]
My love for my father—His love for me—I am taken away to my cousin Marianne's—Plan of the house—The forge—The apparition—I learn the death of my father—I wish to go to heaven to kill God—Our situation at the death of my father—Hatred of Bonaparte [232]
My mother and I take refuge with my grandfather—Madame Darcourt's house—My first books and my first terrors—The park at Villers-Cotterets—M. Deviolaine and his family—The swarm of bees—The old cloister [243]
The two snakes—M. de Valence and Madame de Montesson—Who little Hermine was—Garnier the wheelwright and Madame de Valence—Madame Lafarge—Fantastic apparition of Madame de Genlis [253]
Mademoiselle Pivert—I make her read the Thousand and One Nights, or, rather, one story in that collection—Old Hiraux, my music-master—The little worries of his life—He takes his revenge on his persecutors after the fashion of the Maréchal de Montluc—He is condemned to be flogged, and nearly loses the sight of his eyes—What happened on Easter Day in the organ-loft at the monastery—He becomes a grocer's lad—His vocation leads him to the study of music—I have little aptitude for the violin [259]
The dog lantern-bearer—Demoustier's epitaph—My first fencing-master—"The king drinks"—The fourth terror of my life—The tub of honey [277]
My horror of great heights—The Abbé Conseil—My opening at the Seminary—My mother, much pressed, decides to enter me there—The horn inkstand—Cécile at the grocer's—My flight [285]
The Abbé Grégoire's College—The reception I got there—The fountains play to celebrate my arrival—The conspiracy against me—Bligny challenges me to single combat—I win [295]
The Abbé Fortier—The jealous husband and the viaticum—A pleasant visit—Victor Letellier—The pocket-pistol—I terrify the population—Tournemolle is requisitioned—He disarms me [304]
A political chronology—Trouble follows trouble—The fire at the farm at None—Death of Stanislas Picot—The hiding-place for the louis d'or—The Cossacks—The haricot mutton [315]
The quarry—Frenchmen eat the haricot cooked for the Cossacks—The Duc de Treviso—He allows himself to be surprised—Ducoudray the hosier—Terrors [324]
The return to Villers-Cotterets, and what we met on the way—The box with the thirty louis in it—The leather-bag—The mole—Our departure—The journey—The arrival at Mensal and our sojourn their—King Joseph—The King of Rome—We leave Mensal—Our visit to Crispy in Valois—The dead and wounded—The surrender of Paris—The isle of Elba [331]
Am I to be called Davy de La Pailleterie or Alexandre Dumas?—Deus dedit, Deus dabit—The tobacco-shop—The cause of the Emperor Napoleon's fall, as it appeared to my writing-master—My first communion—How I prepared for it [345]
BOOK IV
Auguste Lafarge—Bird-snaring on a large scale—A wonderful catch—An epigram—I wish to write French verses—My method of translating Virgil and Tacitus—Montanan—My political opinions [355]
The single-barrelled gun—Quiot Biche—Biche and Boudoux compared—I become a poacher—It is proposed to issue a writ against me—Madame Darcourt as plenipotentiary—How it happened that Cretan's writ caused me no bother [363]
Bonaparte's landing at the Gulf of Juan—Proclamations and Ordonnances—Louis XVIII. and M. de Vitrolles—Cornu the hatter—Newspaper information [374]
General Exelmans—His trial—The two brothers Lallemand—Their conspiracy—They are arrested and led through Villers-Cotterets—The affronts to which they were subjected [382]
My mother and I conspire—The secret—M. Richard—La pistole and the pistols—The offer made to the brothers Lallemand in order to save them—They refuse—I meet one of them, twenty-eight years later, at the house of M. le duc de Cazes [389]
Napoleon and the Allies—The French army and the Emperor pass through Villers-Cotterets—Bearers of ill tidings [402]
Waterloo—The Élysée—La Malmaison [411]
Cæsar—Charlemagne—Napoleon [421]
The rout—The haricot mutton reappears—M. Picot the lawyer—By diplomatic means, he persuades my mother to let me go shooting with him—I despise sleep, food and drink [427]
Trapping larks—I wax strong in the matter of my compositions—The wounded partridge—I take the consequences whatever they are—The farm at Brassoire—M. Deviolaine's sally at the accouchement of his wife [435]
M. Moquet de Brassoire—The ambuscade—Three hares charge me—What prevents me from being the king of the battue—Because I did not take the bull by the horns, I just escape being disembowelled by it—Sabine and her puppies [441]
The second period of my youth—Forest-keepers and sailors—Choron, Moinat, Mildet, Berthelin—La Maison-Neuve [449]
Choron and the mad dog—Niquet, otherwise called Bobino—His mistress—The boar-hunt—The kill—Bobino's triumph—He is decorated—The boar which he had killed rises again [456]
Boars and keepers—The bullet of Robin-des-Bois—The pork-butcher [464]
A wolf-hunt—Small towns—Choron's tragic death [474]
My mother realises that I am fifteen years old, and that la marette and la pipée will not lead to a brilliant future for me—I enter the office of Me. Mennesson, notary, as errand-boy, otherwise guttersnipe—Me. Mennesson and his clerks—La Fontaine-Eau-Claire [483]
Who the assassin was and who the assassinated—Auguste Picot—Equality before the law—Last exploits of Marot—His execution [491]
Spring at Villers-Cotterets—Whitsuntide—The Abbé Grégoire invites me to dance with his niece—Red books—The Chevalier de Faublas—Laurence and Vittoria—A dandy of 1818 [499]
I leap the Haha—A slit follows—The two pairs of gloves—The quadrille—Fourcade's triumph—I pick up the crumbs—The waltz—The child becomes a man [508]
[ALEXANDRE DUMAS]
BY ANDREW LANG
There is no real biography of Alexandre Dumas. Nobody has collected and sifted all his correspondence, tracked his every movement, and pursued him through newspapers and legal documents. Letters and other papers (if they have been preserved) should be as abundant in the case of Dumas as they are scanty in the case of Molière. But they are left to the dust of unsearched offices; and it is curious that in France so little has been systematically written about her most popular if not her greatest novelist. Many treatises on one or other point in the life and work of Dumas exist, but there is nothing like Boswell's Johnson or Lockhart's Scott. The Mémoires by the novelist himself cover only part of his career, Les Enfances Dumas; and they bear the same resemblance to a serious conscientious autobiography as Vingt Ans Après bears to Mr. Gardiner's History of England. They contain facts, indeed, but facts beheld through the radiant prismatic fancy of the author, who, if he had a good story to tell, dressed it up "with a cocked hat and a sword," as was the manner of an earlier novelist. The volumes of travel, and the delightful work on Dumas's domestic menagerie, Mes Bêtes, also contain personal confessions, as does the novel, Ange Pitou, with the Causeries, and other books. Fortunately Dumas wrote most about his early life, and the early life of most people is more interesting than the records of their later years.
In its limitation to his years of youth, the Mémoires of Dumas resemble that equally delightful book, the long autobiographical fragment by George Sand. Both may contain much Dichtung as well as Wahrheit: at least we see the youth of the great novelists as they liked to see it themselves. The Mémoires, with Mes Bêtes, possess this advantage over most of the books, that the most crabbed critic cannot say that Dumas did not write them himself. In these works, certainly, he was unaided by Maquet or any other collaborator. They are all his own, and the essential point of note is that they display all the humour, the goodness of heart, the overflowing joy in life, which make the charm of the novels. Here, unmixed, unadulterated, we have that essence of Dumas with which he transfigured the tame "copy" drawn up by Maquet and others under his direction. He told them where to find their historical materials, he gave them the leading ideas of the plot, told them how to block out the chapters, and then he took these chapters and infused into them his own spirit, the spirit which, in its pure shape, pervades every page of the Mémoires. They demonstrate that, while he received mechanical aid from collaborators, took from their hands the dry bones of his romances, it was he who made the dry bones live. He is now d'Artagnan, now Athos, now Gorenflot, now Chicot,—all these and many other personages are mere aspects of the immortal, the creative Alexandre.
Dumas's autobiography, as far as it is presented in this colossal fragment, does not carry us into the period of his great novels (1844-1850). Even this Porthos of the pen found the task of writing the whole of his autobiography trop lourd. The work (in how many volumes?) would have been monumental: he left his "star-y-pointing pyramid" incomplete, and no mortal can achieve the task which he left undone.
Despite his vanity, which was genial and humorous, Alexandre Dumas could never take himself seriously. This amiable failing is a mistake everywhere if a man wants to be taken seriously by a world wherein the majority have no sense of humour. The French are more eminent in wit; their masters of humour are Rabelais, Montaigne, Molière, Pascal, and, in modern times, Dumas, Théophile Gautier, and Charles de Bernard. Of these perhaps only two received fair recognition during their lives. Dumas, of course, was not unrecognised; few men of the pen have made more noise in the world. He knew many of the most distinguished people, from Victor Hugo and Louis Philippe to Garibaldi. Dickens he might have known, but when Dickens was in Paris Dumas invited him to be at a certain spot in the midnight hour, when a mysterious carriage would convey him to some place unnamed. Mr. R. L. Stevenson would have kept tryst, Dickens did not; he could not tell what prank this eternal boy had in his mind. Being of this humour, Dumas, however eminent his associates, however great the affairs in which he was concerned, always appeared to the world rather as Mousqueton than as Porthos, a tall man of his hands, indeed, but also much of a comic character, often something of a butt. Garrulous, gay, doing all things with emphasis and a flourish, treating a revolution much in the manner of comic opera, Dumas was not un homme sérieux. In literature it was the same. He could not help being merry; the world seemed a very jolly place to him; he never hooted, he said, at the great spectacle of the drama of Life.
His own extraordinary gifts of industry, knowledge, brilliance, ingenuity, sympathy, were playthings to him. He scattered wit as he scattered wealth, lavishly, with both hands, being so reckless that, on occasion, he would sign work into which he had put nothing of his own. To such a pitch did Dumas carry his lack of seriousness that the last quarter or more of his life makes rather sorry reading. "The chase of the crown piece" may be amusing in youth, but when middle age takes the field in pursuit of the evasive coin, the spectacle ceases to exhilarate. Dumas was really of a most generous nature, but he disregarded the Aristotelian mean—he was recklessly lavish. Consequently he was, of course, preyed upon by parasites of both sexes, odious hangers-on of literature, the drama, and the plastic arts. He, who could not turn away a stray self-invited dog, managed to endure persons rather worse than most of that strange class of human beings—the professional friends of men of genius. "What a set, what a world!" says Mr. Matthew Arnold, contemplating the Godwin circle that surrounded Shelley. "What a set!" expresses Lockhart's sentiments about certain friends of Sir Walter Scott. We cannot imagine why great men tolerate these people, but too often they do; a famous English poet was horrified by "those about" George Sand. The society which professionally swarmed round Dumas was worse—the cher maître was robbed on every hand. He "made himself a motley to the view," and as all this was at its worst after his great novels—with which we are chiefly concerned—were written, I intend to pass very lightly over the story of his decline.
The grandfather of Alexandre Dumas, Antoine Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, was more or less noble. It has not been my fortune to encounter the name of his family in the field of history. They may have "borne St. Louis company," or charged beneath the banner of the Maid at Orléans and Pathay; one can only remark that one never heard of them. The grandfather, at all events, went to San Domingo, and became the father, by a negro woman, of the father of the novelist. As it is hardly credible that he married his mistress, Marie Dumas, it is not clear how the great Alexandre had a right to a marquisate. On this point, however, he ought to have been better informed than we are, who have not seen his parchments. His father at all events, before 1789, enlisted in the army under the maternal name of Dumas. During the Revolution he rose to the rank of General. He was a kind of Porthos. Clasping his horse between his knees and seizing a beam overhead with his hands, he lifted the steed off the ground. Finding that a wall opposed a charge which he was leading, he threw his regiment, one by one, over the wall, and then climbed it himself. In 1792 he married the daughter of an innkeeper at Villers-Cotterets, a good wife to him and a good mother to his son. In Egypt he disliked the arbitrary proceedings of Napoleon, went home, and never was employed again. He had mitigated, as far as in him lay, the sanguinary ferocities of the Revolutionaries. A good man and a good sportsman, he died while Alexandre, born July 24th, 1802, was a little boy. The child had been sent to sleep at a house near his father's, and was awakened by a loud knock at the moment of the General's death. This corresponds to the knocks which herald deaths in the family of Woodd: they are on record in 1661, 1664, 1674, 1784, 1892, 1893, and 1895. Whether the phenomenon is hereditary in the House of la Pailleterie we are not informed. Dumas himself had a firm belief in his own powers as a hypnotist, but thought that little good came of hypnotism. Tennyson was in much the same case.
Madame Dumas was left very poor, and thought of bringing up her child as a candidate for holy orders. But Dumas had nothing of Aramis except his amorousness, and ran away into a local forest rather than take the first educational step towards the ecclesiastical profession. In later life he was no Voltairean, he held Voltaire very cheap, and he believed in the essentials of religion. But he was not built by lavish nature for the celibate life, though he may have exaggerated when he said that he had five hundred children. The boy, like most clever boys, was almost equally fond of books and of field sports. His education was casual; he had some Latin (more than most living English novelists) and a little German. Later he acquired Italian. His handwriting was excellent; his writing-master told him that Napoleon's illegible scrawls perplexed his generals, and certainly Napoleon wrote one of the worst hands in the world. Perhaps his orders to Grouchy, on June 17-18th, 1815, were indecipherable. At all events, Dumas saw the Emperor drive through Villers-Cotterets on June 12th, and drive back on June 20th. He had beaten the British at 5.30 on the 18th, says Dumas, but then Blücher came up at 6.30 and Napoleon ceased to be victorious. What the British were doing in the hour after their defeat Dumas does not explain, but he expresses a chivalrous admiration for their valour, especially for that of our Highlanders.
After the British defeat at Waterloo the world did not change much for a big noisy boy in a little country town. He was promoted to the use of a fowling-piece, and either game was plentiful in these days or the fancy of the quadroon rivalled that of Tartarin de Tarascon. Hares appear to have been treated as big game, the huntsman lying low in ambush while the doomed quarry fed up to him, when he fired, wounded the hare in the leg, ran after him, and embraced him in the manner of Mr. Briggs with his first salmon. The instinct of early genius, or rather of the parents of early genius, points direct to the office of the attorney, notary, or "writer." Like Scott and other immortals, Dumas, about sixteen or eighteen, went into a solicitor's office. He did not stay there long, as he and a friend, during their master's absence, poached their way to Paris, defraying their expenses by the partridges and hares which they bagged. Every boy is a poacher, but in mature life Dumas is said to have shot a large trout in Loch Zug—I find I have written; the Lake of Zug is meant. This is perhaps the darkest blot upon his fame.
His escapade to Paris was discovered by his employer, who hinted a dislike of such behaviour. The blood of de la Pailleterie was up, and Dumas resigned his clerkship. He had made at Villers-Cotterets the acquaintance of Auguste de Leuven, a noble Swede, "kept out of his own" for political reasons. De Leuven knew Paris and people about the theatres; he also tried his own hand at playwriting. Dumas in his society caught the stage fever, and he happened also to see the Hamlet of Ducis acted—a very French Hamlet, but Dumas divined somehow the greatness of Shakespeare through the veil of Ducis. He knew no more English than most Frenchmen of letters know. Like M. Jules Lemaître, he read Shakespeare and Scott, "in cribs," I suspect, but he read them with delight. Homer, too, he studied only in cribs, but he perceived the grandeur of the Greek epics, the feebleness of the cribs, and vowed that he would translate Homer himself. He did not, however, take the preliminary step of learning Greek. The French drama of the period is said by those who know it to have been a watery thing. The great old masters were out—Dumas and Hugo were not yet in. Dumas began by collaborating with young de Leuven in bright little patriotic pieces. Thus his earliest efforts were collaborative, as they continued to be, about which there is much to be said later. Just as Burns usually needed a keynote to be struck for him by an old song or a poem of young Fergusson's—by a predecessor of some sort—so Dumas appears to have needed companionship in composition. It is a curious mental phenomenon, for he had more ideas than anyone else. He could master a subject more rapidly for his purpose than anyone else, yet he required companionship, contact with other minds engaged on the same theme. I am apt to think that this was the result of the pre-eminently social nature of Dumas. Charles II., as we learn from Lord Ailesbury's Memoirs, could not bear to be alone, and must have Harry Killigrew to make him laugh, even on occasions when privacy is courted by mankind. Most people like to write alone; not so Dumas. Comradeship he must have, even in composing, and this, I conceive, was the true secret of his inveterate collaborativeness.
At all events, he began, as a lad, with de Leuven. Through him, after poaching his way to Paris for a day or two, he made the acquaintance of Talma, the famous actor. Returning to Paris after that escapade, he instantly became known to all sorts of useful and interesting people. This gift of making acquaintances stood him in great stead: one often wonders how it is done. In a recent biography of a Scot of letters we find the hero arriving in town, not, it would seem, an eminently attractive hero, but he is at once familiar with George Lewes, George Eliot, Tennyson, Browning, and other sommités. How is it done? Dumas's father had known General Foy, General Foy knew the Duc d'Orléans (Louis Philippe), and got a little clerkship in his service for the young quadroon. A few days later he goes to a play, and to whom must he sit next but Charles Nodier, then celebrated, and Nodier must be reading the Elzevir Pastissier Français, of which I doubt if a dozen copies are known to exist. How Nodier made friends with Dumas, and hissed his own play, is a most familiar anecdote. It sounds like a dream, a dream that came through the ivory gate. Shifted from one clerkship to another, now snubbed, now befriended by officials, Dumas did certainly read a great deal of modern literature at this time, especially Schiller and Scott. Without Scott he might never have written his great novels, for the idea of historical novels, based on a real knowledge of history, and on a vivid realisation of historical persons as actual men and women, is Sir Walter's own. Scott's daring and Turneresque composition was also bequeathed to Dumas. Sir Walter had no scruples about bringing Amy Robsart to life some fifteen years or more after her death, or about making Shakespeare a successful dramatist fifteen years before he came upon the town.
But plays, not novels, at this time occupied Dumas. Chance brought him acquainted with the history of Christine of Sweden, and with that of Henri III. of France. A little collaborative comedy was acted, a volume of contes was published, but was not purchased. A son was born to Dumas in 1824, the celebrated Alexandre Dumas fils, whose talent was so unlike that of his sire. The parent tried, with Soulié, to dramatise Old Mortality, to "Terrify" it, as Scott would have said. They did not finish their attempt, but Dumas now saw Shakespeare acted by Kemble, Liston, and an English company. He found out "what the theatre really was," and he proceeded to evolve many "parts to tear a cat in." More "in Ercles' vein" than in the vein of Shakespeare were the romantic plays which now arose in France: passions and violent scenes of intrigue were within the compass of Dumas: humour, too, he had, and great skill in effect and in charpentage. The style, the charm, the poetry, are absent, carmina desunt.
Christine and the murder of Monaldeschi furnished the first topic. After troubles and complications innumerable (there were three Christines in the field), Dumas's play was written, and re-constructed, and accepted. In the interval he had made, for the joy of mankind, the acquaintance of Henri III. and Saint-Mégrin, of Catherine de Medici and Chicot, and Guise, in the Mémoires of L'Estoile. The time was now 1828-30. Dumas left his official work; the authorities did not think him a model clerk, he was a good deal interrupted by actresses while Henri III. was being rehearsed. Just before the first night his mother suffered a shock of apoplexy; his attention was divided between the stage and her bedside. With colossal self-confidence, he invited the Duc d'Orléans to his play. The Due had a dinner-party, but what of that? The party must meet earlier; the play must begin earlier than the usual hours, and all the party must come. But the adventure of the Duchesse de Guise and Saint-Mégrin, the appearance of that Elagabalus of the Valois, Henri III., with his mignons, and cup and ball, his foppery and asceticism, thrilled and entertained a large and distinguished audience in the Théâtre Français. Dumas triumphed; unhappily his mother was unable to share his joy. His fortune was made, and he took pleasure in his publicity. He was probably better known for the time and more spoken of than Victor Hugo, whose really sonorous fame scarcely dates before the first night of Hernani.
Though Dumas thus led the Romantiques of 1830 through the breach, though he was first in the forlorn hope that took the acropolis of the old classical drama, one does not think of him as a Romantique. For one reason or another, he stands a little aloof from Hugo, Gautier, Alfred de Musset, and the set of Pétrus Borel, however intimate he may have been with Augustus Mackeat (Maquet).
Dumas's next play, "classical" in form, was Christine, the long-deferred Christine, for the Odéon. The anecdotes about the difficulties with the classical actress, Mile. Mars, are familiar. Dumas was now one of the most notable men in Paris, and in the July days of 1830 he added to his notoriety, conducting himself much like Mr. Jingle on the same historic occasion. He was prominent, with a fowling-piece, in the street-fighting, and it seems that he really did seize the powder magazine at Soissons, by that "native cheek" which never failed him at need. The details are as good as anything in his novels, but Dumas surely invented the lady who, beholding him armed with pistols, declared that it was "a revolt of the blacks." His unlucky colour and his crisp thick hair gave people so many opportunities for jests, that Dumas anticipated the world and made the jokes himself. Perhaps the accident of blood and complexion was one of the reasons that prevented him from taking himself seriously. We need not linger over his political adventures: they led him into La Vendée, where he found the elements of romance. Dumas, I think, was by nature as Royalist as Athos, who, in his advice to Raoul, expresses the very creed of the great Montrose. He ought to have fought for the Duchesse de Berry and the Queen of Naples, but circumstances threw him with the Orleanists and Garibaldi, though he loved Louis Philippe no more than other gentlemen did. He tried to be elected for the Assembly: he might as well have tried to get into the Academy, he was not un homme sérieux.
Dumas's career as a novelist was brightest in the forties of the nineteenth century. In the thirties he was much more occupied with plays, whereof Antony caused most noise. He went on producing plays of the most various types—he travelled, he married, but soon "went by," he made historical compilations, and glided into the field which chiefly concerns us, that of historical romance. Omitting Le Capitaine Paul (Paul Jones) of 1838, and Le Capitaine Pamphile, a most amusing book (1840), we find Le Chevalier d'Harmental (1843), Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), Vingt Ans Après (1845), La Reine Margot (1845), Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1845), La Dame de Monsoreau (1846), Joseph Balsamo (1846-1848), Les Quarante Cinq (1848), Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-1850), not to specify dozens of others, including unavailing things like Jeanne d'Arc, charming things like La Tulipe Noire, and the novels on the Regency, and the long series on the French Revolution.
Consider the novels of 1844-1850. The Mousquetaire cycle, the Valois cycle, Monte Cristo! Did Scott, or even Dickens, at their best and most prolific, ever equal this rate of production? Perhaps we must give the prize to Scott for the work of 1814-1820, including Waverley, The Antiquary, Old Mortality, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, and so on. That record cannot be broken, and Scott worked in his odd hours, or in his holidays, while he worked alone. But in all the great novels of Dumas, Maquet, the ci-devant Augustus Mackeat, collaborated. Yet who can deny that the work is the work of the Dumas of the Mémoires and of Mes Bêtes? It is the same hand, the same informing spirit, the same brilliant gaiety, the same honest ethics, the same dazzling fertility of resource. Maquet did something—there is no doubt on that head, the men constantly worked together.
But what did Maquet do? He may have made—he did make—"researches." Heaven knows that they were not very deep. Perhaps he discovered that Newcastle is on the Tweed, and that the Scottish army which—shall we say did not adhere to Charles I.?—largely consisted of Highlanders. Perhaps he suggested that Charles I. might want to hear a Mass on the eve of his execution. Perhaps he depicted jolly Charles II. as un beau ténébreux, in the Vicomte de Bragelonne. I think that there I find the hand of Maquet. Whatever he did, Maquet did something. I suggest that he made these remarkable researches, that he listened while Dumas talked, that he "made objections" (as the père invited the fils to do), that sometimes he "blocked out" a chapter, which Dumas took, and made into a new thing, or left standing, like that deplorable Charles II. at Blois. On the whole, I conceive that (as regards the great novels) Maquet satisfied Dumas's need of companionship, that he was to the man of genius what Harry Killigrew was to the actual Charles II.
Before the law, in 1856 and in 1858, M. Maquet claimed his right to be declared fellow-author of eighteen novels, all the best of them. It was recognised by the law that he had lent a hand, but he took no more than that by his legal adventures. M. Glinel publishes two of his letters to his counsel: "It is not justice which has won the day, but Dumas," exclaims Augustus. He also complains that he is threatened with a new law-suit "avec l'éternel coquin qu'on appelle Dumas." Time kills many animosities. According to M. About, M. Maquet lived to speak kindly of Dumas, as did his legion of other collaborators. "The proudest congratulate themselves on having been trained in so good a school; and M. Auguste Maquet, the chief of them, speaks with real reverence and affection of his great friend." Monsieur Henri Blaze de Bury describes Dumas's method thus:—
"The plot was considered by Dumas and his assistant. The collaborator wrote the book and brought it to the master, who worked over the draft, and re-wrote it all. From one volume, often ill-constructed, he would evolve three volumes or four. Le Chevalier d'Harmental by Maquet at first was a tale of sixty pages. Often and often Dumas was the unnamed collaborator of others." M. Blaze de Bury has seen a score of pieces, signed by other names, of which Dumas in each case wrote two-thirds. M. About confirms M. Blaze de Bury's account. He has known Dumas give the ideas to his collaborator. That gentleman then handed in a sketch, written on small leaves of paper. Dumas copied each leaf out on large paper, expanding, altering, improving, en y semant l'esprit à pleines mains.
By this method of collaboration Dumas really did the work himself. He supplied the ideas and the esprit, and gave the collaborator a lesson in the art of fiction, much as a tutor teaches composition in Greek or Latin. In other examples, such as Le Chevalier d'Harmental, the idea, we know, came from Maquet, who had written a conte on the subject. Nobody wanted the conte, and Dumas made it into the novel, whereby Maquet also benefited. In England collaboration in novel-writing is unusual. In the case of Mr. Rice and Sir Walter Besant we have Sir Walter's description of "how it was done," and it appears that he did most of it. In another case familiar to me, A, an unpopular author, found in his researches a good and dramatic historical subject. On this he wrote a tale of seven chapters, and placed that tale in a drawer, where it lay for years. He then showed it to B, who made a play out of it. The play was nibbled at, but not accepted. B then took the subject, and, going behind the original story, worked up to the point at which it began, whence B and A continued it, and now the thing was a novel, which did not rival in popularity the works of Dumas. Probably in each case of collaboration the methods differ. In one case each author wrote the whole of the book separately, and then the versions were blended.
These are legitimate practices, but in his later years Dumas became less conscientious. There is a story, we have seen, that Maquet once inserted sixteen ques in one sentence, and showed it to his friends. Dumas never looked at it, and the sentence with its sixteen ques duly appeared in the feuilleton of next day's newspaper, for in newspapers were the romances "serialised," as some literary journals say. I have never found that sentence in any of the novels, never met more than five ques in one sentence of Dumas's, or more than five "whiches" in one of Sir Walter Scott's. As his age and indolence increased, the nature of things revenged itself on the fame and fortunes of Dumas. The author of the later novels, as M. Henri Blaze de Bury says, is "Dumas-Légion."
The true collaborators of Dumas were human nature and history. Men are eternally interesting to men, but in historical writing, before Scott, the men (except the kings and other chief actors) were left much in the vague. They and their deeds and characters lay hidden in memoirs and unprinted letters. Such a man as the Cavalier, Edward Wogan, "a very beautiful person," says Clarendon, was briefly and inaccurately touched on by that noble author. More justice is done to him by his kinsman, the adventurous Sir Charles Wogan, in a letter to Swift. He did not escape Scott, who wrote a poem to his memory. Now, such a character as Wogan, brave, beautiful, resourceful as d'Artagnan, landing in England with the gallows before his eyes, and carrying a troop of cavalry through the hostile Cromwellian country, "wherever might lead him the shade of Montrose," to join the Clans and strike a blow for King Charles, was precisely the character for Dumas. Such men as Wogan, such women as Jane Lane and Lady Ogilvy, Dumas rediscovered, and they were his inspiration. The past was not really dull, though dull might be the books of academic historians. They omitted the human element, the life, the colour, and, we are told, "scientific history" ought to be thus impartially jejune. The great public turns away from scientific history to Dumas and to modern imitators, good and bad, and how inordinately bad some of his followers can be! An American critic half despairs of his country because some silly novels, pretending to be historical, are popular. The symptom is good rather than bad. Untrained and undirected, falling on the stupid and ignorant new novels most loudly trumpeted, the young Americans do emancipate themselves from the tyranny of to-day, and their own fancy lends a glamour to some inept romance of the past. They dwell with tragedy and with Mary Stuart, though she be the Mary Stuart of a dull, incompetent scribbler. They may hear of Scott and Dumas, and follow them.
Dumas has been blamed by moralists like Mr. Fitzgerald for depraving the morals of France! That he set an example of violence and frenzy, crime and licence on the stage, cannot easily be denied. But in the Musketeers he decidedly improves on the taste and morals of the France of 1630-1660, whether tested by d'Artagnan's Mémoires or by the more authentic works of Tallemant and de Retz. He is infinitely more delicate, he apologises for what he justly calls the "infamies" of certain proceedings of his heroes, and he puts heart and sentiment even into the light love of Milady's soubrette. If d'Artagnan "had no youth, no heart, only ambition," he acquires a heart as he goes on: and, indeed, never lacked one—for friends of his own sex.
Dumas was at the opposite pole from a Galahad or a Joseph. His life, as regards women, was much like that of Burns or Byron. His morality on this point is that of the camp or of the theatre in which he lived so much. This must be granted as an undeniable fact. But there are other departments of conduct, and in the virtues of courage, devotion, fortitude, friendship, and loyalty, the Musketeers are rich enough. Their vices, happily, are not those of our age but of one much less sensitive on certain points of honour, as Dumas remarks, and as history proves. But the virtues of the Musketeers are, in any age, no bad example.
Dumas never writes to inflame the passions, to corrupt, or to instruct a prurient curiosity. The standard of his work is far higher than that of his model or of the age about which he writes. His motto is sursum corda; he has not a word to encourage pessimism, or a taste for the squalid. He and his men face Fortune boldly, bearing what mortals must endure, and bearing it well and gaily. His ethics are saved by his humour, generosity, and sound-hearted humanity. These qualities increase and become more manifest as this great cycle rolls on to its heroic culmination in the death of d'Artagnan, the death of Porthos, the unwonted tears of Aramis.
For many years "high sniffing" French critics have sneered at Dumas as a scene-painter, a dauber, a babe in psychological lore, and so forth. But of late we have seen in the success of M. Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac, that France looks lovingly back on her old ideals of a frank and healthy life in the open air—a life of gallant swordsmen, kind friends, and true lovers. In Major Marchand, of the Fashoda affair, we may recognise a gentleman and soldier of the school of Dumas, not of Maupassant, or Flaubert, or Zola. To know his task and to do it despite the most cruel obstacles; to face every form of peril with gaiety; to accept disappointment with a manly courtesy, winning the heartiest admiration from his political opponents, these are accomplishments after Dumas's own heart; and this is a morality which the study of Dumas encourages, and which our time requires.
The authors who relax, and discourage, and deprave may be thought better artists (an opinion which I do not share), but they are less of men than the author of The Three Musketeers. Who reads it, but wants to go on reading the sequel, and the sequel to that, and, were it possible, yet another sequel? But Aramis alone of the four is left on the stage, and we pine for another sequel—with Aramis as Pope.
I have dwelt on the Musketeers and their historical sources as a type of the powers and methods of Dumas. As much might be said in detail as to the sources of the other great novels, especially those of the Valois circle. History gives little more than the name of Chicot, and his ferocity in the St. Bartholomew massacres. La Mole, Coconnas, and le brave Bussy, were really "rather beasts than otherwise," as the lad in Mr. Eden Philpotts's Human Boy says about pirates. Catherine de Medici is the Catherine of the Mémoires, which are probably truthful on the whole, whatever criticism may say. Dumas fills with gaiety these old times of perfidy and cruelty; he adds Gorenflot and Chicot; he humanises Coconnas; he even inspires regret for Henri III.; he has a Shakespearean love and tolerance for his characters. The critics may and do sniff, but Dumas pleased George Sand, Thackeray, and Mr. Stevenson, who have praised him so well that feebler plaudits are impertinent, Thackeray especially chooses La Tulipe Noire as a complement and contrast to the Musketeers. Monte Cristo, rich and revengeful, has never been my favourite; I leave him when his treasure hunt is ended, and the Cagliostro cycle deals with matters too cruel for fiction.
In brief, though the rest of the life of Dumas was full of labour, the anni mirabiles of 1844-1850 are the prime of his harvests. In 1844, on a tour with the son of Jérôme Napoleon (who certainly had a strange bear-leader), Dumas saw the actual isle of Monte Cristo; it dwelt in his boyish fancy, and became the earliest of all Treasure Islands; but its use as the first part of a tale in the manner of Eugène Sue was an afterthought—like the American scenes and Mrs. Gamp in Martin Chuzzlewit. In 1843-44, Dumas, being rich, built his Abbotsford, Monte Cristo, between Saint Germain and Marly le Roi. Thenceforth it was the farce of which the real Abbotsford is the tragedy. It was open house and endless guests, very unlike the guests who visited the villa on the Tweed. At both houses many dogs were kept, at Monte Cristo only were piles of gold left lying about for everyone to help himself. The Théâtre Historique was also founded, that road to ruin Dumas could not leave untrodden, and he abandoned all his schemes to visit Spain and Algiers with the Duc de Montpensier, like Buckingham with Prince Charles. The celebrated vulture, Jugurtha, was now acquired and brought home, to fill his niche in the gallery of Mes Bêtes, one of the most delightful books in the world.
On returning Dumas found, like Odysseus, "troubles in his house," angry editors clamorous for belated "copy." Then came the parasites, and then the Revolution of 1848, exciting but expensive to a political man of letters. The Théâtre Historique was ruined, and Dumas chose another path to financial collapse, the ownership of a newspaper. In 1851 Dumas went to Brussels, quarrelled with Maquet (one creditor among many), wrote his Mémoires, tried to retrench, but embarked on a new newspaper, Le Mousquetaire. He was the reverse of a man of business; Le Mousquetaire was not profitable like Household Words. The office was a bear garden. More plays were written, more of every kind of thing was written, a weekly paper was attempted, and as the star of Alexandre fils was rising, the star of Alexandre père descended through shady spaces of the sky. Dumas travelled in Russia, and wrote about that; he joined Garibaldi in 1860, and obtained in Italy an archæological appointment! The populace of Naples did not take Dumas seriously, any more than the staff of the British Museum would have done. For reasons known or unknown to the mob they hooted and threatened the Director of Excavations: the editor of a Garibaldian newspaper, the father of the god-daughter of Garibaldi, a child whose mother had accompanied Dumas in the costume of a sailor. At this time the hero was fifty-eight, and perhaps the Neapolitans detected some incongruity between the age and the proceedings of the Director of Excavations. Perhaps la vertu va se nicher in the hearts of the lower classes of "the great sinful streets" of the city of Neapolis.
In 1864 Dumas and the new Italian Government were not on harmonious terms. He left his Liberal newspaper and his meritorious excavations in Pompeii; he returned to Paris accompanied by a lady bearing the pleasing name of Fanny Gordosa. The gordosiousness, if I may use the term, of Fanny far exceeded her capacities as a housekeeper and domestic manager, and the undefeated veteran had to pursue that hunt for the pièce de cent sous whereof we have spoken. La jeunesse n'a qu'un temps, but Dumas was determined "to be boy for ever." Stories are told about him which, whether they be true or untrue, are better unrepeated. Senile boyishness, where the sex is concerned, cannot be seemly. Money became more scarce as work ceased to be genuine work. Dumas fell to giving public lectures. A daughter came to attend him, as the Duchess of Albany presided over and more or less reformed the last years of her royal father. In 1869-70 the strength of this Porthos of the pen was broken: c'est trop lourd! In the autumn of 1870, about the time of the disaster of Sedan, the younger Dumas carried his father to a village near Dieppe. They kept from him the sorrows of these days: his mind dwelt with the past and the dead. He died on December 5th, and on the same day, at Dieppe, the Germans reached the sea. His body lies at Villers-Cotterets, beside his father and mother.
ANDREW LANG.
THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDRE DUMAS
[BOOK I]
[CHAPTER I]
My birth—My name is disputed—Extracts from the official registers of Villers-Cotterets—Corbeil Club—My father's marriage certificate—My mother—My maternal grandfather—Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, father of Philippe-Égalité—Madame de Montesson—M. de Noailles and the Academy—A morganatic marriage.
I was born at Villers-Cotterets, a small town in the department of Aisne, situated on the road between Paris and Laon, about two hundred paces from the rue de la Noue, where Demoustier died; two leagues from La Ferté-Milon, where Racine was born; and seven leagues from Château-Thierry, the birthplace of La Fontaine.
I was born on the 24th of July 1802, in the rue de Lormet, in the house now belonging to my friend Cartier. He will certainly have to sell it me some day, so that I may die in the same room in which I was born. I will step forward into the darkness of the other world in the place that received me when I stepped into this world from the darkness of the past.
I was born July 24th, 1802, at half-past five in the morning; which fact makes me out to be forty-five years and three months old at the date I begin these Memoirs—namely, on Monday, October the 18th, 1847.
Most facts concerning my life have been disputed, even my very name of Davy de la Pailleterie, which I am not very tenacious about, since I have never borne it. It will only be found after my name of Dumas in official deeds that I have executed before a lawyer, or in civil actions wherein I played either the principal part or was a witness.
I therefore ask permission to transcribe my birth certificate, to allay any further discussion upon the subject.
Extract from the Registers of the Town of Villers-Cotterets.
"On the fifth day of the month of Thermidor, year X of the French Republic.
"Certificate of the birth of Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie, born this day at half-past five in the morning, son of Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie, lieutenant-general, born at Jérémie, on the coast of the island of Saint-Domingo, dwelling at Villers-Cotterets; and of Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Labouret, born at the above-mentioned Villers-Cotterets, his wife.
"The sex of the child is notified to be male.
"First witness: Claude Labouret, maternal grandfather of the child.
"Second witness: Jean-Michel Deviolaine, inspector of forests in the fourth communal arrondissement of the department of Aisne, twenty-sixth jurisdiction, dwelling at the above mentioned Villers-Cotterets. This statement has been made to us by the father of the child, and is signed by
"Al. Dumas, Labouret, and Deviolaine.
"Proved according to the law by me Nicolas Brice-Mussart, mayor of the town of Villers-Cotterets, in his capacity as official of the Civil State,
Signed: MUSSART."
I have italicised the words his wife, because those who contested my right to the name of Davy de la Pailleterie sought to prove that I was illegitimate.
Now, had I been illegitimate I should quietly have accepted the bar as more celebrated bastards than I have done, and, like them, I should have laboured arduously with mind or body until I had succeeded in giving a personal value to my name. But what is to be done, gentlemen? I am not illegitimate, and it is high time the public followed my lead—and resigned itself to my legitimacy.
They next fell back upon my father. In a club at Corbeil—it was in 1848—there lived an extremely well-dressed gentleman, forsooth, whom I was informed belonged to the magistracy; a fact which I should never have believed had I not been assured of it by trustworthy people; well, this gentleman had read, in I know not what biography, that it was not I but my father who was a bastard, and he told me the reason why I never signed myself by my name of Davy de la Pailleterie was because my father was never really called by that name, since he was not the son of the marquis de la Pailleterie.
I began by calling this gentleman by the name usually applied to people who tell you such things; but, as he seemed quite as insensible to it as though it had been his family name, I wrote to Villers-Cotterets for a second birth certificate referring to my father, similar to the one they had already sent me about myself.
I now ask the reader's permission to lay this second certificate before him; if he have the bad taste to prefer our prose to that of the secretary to the mayoralty of Villers-Cotterets, let him thrash the matter out with this gentleman of Corbeil.[1]
Certificate of Birth from, the Registers of the Town of Villers-Cotterets.
"In the year 1792, first of the French Republic, on the 28th of the month of November, at eight o'clock at night, after the publication of banns put up at the main door of the Town Hall, on Sunday the 18th of the present month, and affixed there ever since that date for the purpose of proclaiming the intended marriage between citizen Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, aged thirty years and eight months, colonel in the hussars du Midi, born at la Guinodée, Trou-Jérémie, America, son of the late Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, formerly commissary of artillery, who died at Saint-Germain en Laye, June 1786, and of the late Marie-Cessette Dumas, who died at la Guinodée, near Trou-Jérémie, America, in 1772; his father and mother, of the one part;
"And citizen Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Labouret, eldest daughter of citizen Claude Labouret, commandant of the National Guard of Villers-Cotterets and proprietor of the hôtel de l'Écu, and of Marie-Joseph Prévot, her father and mother, of the other part;
"The said domiciled persons, namely, the future husband in barracks at Amiens and the future wife in this town; their birth certificates having also been inspected and naught being found wrong therein; I, Alexandre-Auguste-Nicolas Longpré, public and municipal officer of this commune, the undersigned, having received the declaration of marriage of the aforesaid parties, have pronounced in the name of the law that they are united in marriage. This act has taken place in the presence of citizens: Louis-Brigitte-Auguste Espagne, lieutenant-colonel of the 7th regiment of hussars stationed at Cambrai, a native of Audi, in the department of Gers;
"Jean-Jacques-Étienne de Béze, lieutenant in the same regiment of hussars, native of Clamercy, department of la Nièvre;
"Jean-Michel Deviolaine, registrar of the corporation and a leading citizen of this town, all three friends of the husband;
"Françoise-Élisabeth Retou, mother-in-law of the husband, widow of the late Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, dwelling at Saint-Germain en Laye.
"Present, the father and mother of the bride, all of age, who, together with the contracting parties, have signed their hands to this deed in our presence:
"Signed at the registry:
"MARIE LOUISE ÉLISABETH LABOURET; THOMAS-ALEXANDRE DUMAS-DAVY DE LA PAILLETERIE; widow of LA PAILLETERIE; LABOURET; MARIE-JOSEPH PRÉVOT; L. A. ESPAGNE; JEAN-JACQUES-ÉTIENNE DE BÉZE; JEAN-MICHEL DEVIOLAINE, and LONGPRÉ, Public Officer."
Having settled that neither my father nor I were bastards, and reserving to myself to prove at the close of this chapter that my grandfather was no more illegitimate than we, I will continue.
My mother, Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Labouret, was the daughter of Claude Labouret, as we saw, commandant of the National Guard and proprietor of the hôtel de l'Écu, at the time he signed his daughter's marriage contract, but formerly first steward of Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, son of that Louis d'Orléans who made so little noise, and father of Philippe-Joseph, later known as Philippe-Égalité, who made so much!
Louis-Philippe died of an attack of gout, at the castle of Sainte-Assise, November the 18th, 1785. The Abbé Maury, who quarrelled so violently in 1791 with the son, had in 1786 pronounced the funeral oration over the father at Nôtre-Dame.
I recollect having often heard my grandfather speak of that prince as an excellent and on the whole a charitable man, though inclined to avarice. But far before all others my grandfather worshipped Madame de Montesson to the verge of idolatry.
We know how Louis-Philippe d'Orléans, left a widower after his first marriage with that famous Louise-Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, whose licentiousness had scandalised even the Court of Louis XV., had, on April the 24th, 1775, married as his second wife Charlotte-Jeanne Béraud de la Haie de Riou, marquise de Montesson, who in 1769 had been left the widow of the marquis de Montesson, lieutenant of the king's armies.
This marriage, although it was kept secret, was made with the consent of Louis XV. Soulavie gives some curious details about its celebration and accomplishment which are of sufficient interest to confide to these pages.
We feel sure these details are not unwelcome now that manners have become so different from what they then were.
Let us first impress upon our readers that Madame de Montesson was supposed by Court and town to hold the extraordinary notion of not wishing to become the wife of M. le duc d'Orléans until after he had married her.
M. de Noailles has since written a book which opened the doors of the Academy to him, upon the resistance of Madame de Maintenon to the solicitations of Louis XIV. under similar circumstances.
Behold on what slight causes depends the homogeneity of incorporated associations! If the widow Scarron had not been a maid at the time of her second marriage, which was quite possible, M. de Noailles would not have written his book, and the Academy, which felt the need of M. de Noailles' presence, would have remained incomplete, and in consequence imperfect.
That would not have mattered to M. de Noailles, who would always have remained M. de Noailles.
But what would have become of the Academy?
But let us return to M. le duc d'Orléans, to his marriage with Madame de Montesson, and to Soulavie's anecdote, which we will reproduce in his own words.
"The Court and capital were aware of the tortures endured by the duc d'Orléans and of Madame de Montesson's strictness.
"The love-lorn prince scarcely ever encountered the king or the duc de Choiseul without renewing his request to be allowed to marry Madame de Montesson.
"But the king had made it a matter of state policy not to allow either his natural children or those of the princes to be legitimatised, and this rule was adhered to throughout his reign.
"For the same reasons he refused the nobility of the realm permission to contract marriages with princes of the blood.
"The interminable contentions between the lawful princes and those legitimatised by Louis XIV., the dangerous intrigues of M. de Maine and of Madame de Maintenon, were the latest examples cited to serve as a motive for the refusals with which the king and his ministers confronted M. le duc d'Orléans. The royal blood of the house of Bourbon was still considered divine, and to contaminate it was held a political crime.
"In the South the house of Bourbon was allied on the side of Henry IV., the Béarnais prince, to several inferior noble families. The house of Bourbon did not recognise such alliances, and if any gentleman not well versed in these matters attempted to support them it was quite a sufficient ground for excluding him from Court favour.
"Moreover, the minister was so certain of maintaining supremacy over the Orléans family, that Louis XV. steadfastly refused to make Madame de Montesson the first princess of the blood by a solemn marriage, forcing the duc d'Orléans to be contented with a secret marriage. This marriage, although a lawful, conjugal union, was not allowed any of the distinctions belonging to marriages of princes of the blood, and was not to be made public.
"Madame de Montesson had no ambition to play the part of first princess of the blood against the king's wishes, nor yet to keep up hostilities over matters of etiquette with the princesses: it was not in her nature to do so.
"Already accustomed to observe the rules of modesty with M. le duc d'Orléans, she seemed quite content to marry him in the same way that Madame de Maintenon had married Louis XIV.
"The Archbishop of Paris was informed of the king's consent, and allowed the pair exemption from the threefold publication of their banns.
"The chevalier de Durfort, first gentleman of the chamber to the prince, by reversion from the comte de Pons, and Périgny, the prince's friend, were witnesses to the marriage, which was blessed by the Abbé Poupart, curé de Saint-Eustache, in the presence of M. de Beaumont, archbishop of Paris.
"On his wedding-day the duc d'Orléans held a very large Court at Villers-Cotterets.
"The previous evening, and again on the morning of the ceremony, he told M. de Valençay and his most intimate friends that he had reached at last an epoch in his life, and that his present happiness had but the single drawback that it could not be made public.
"On the morning of the day when he received the nuptial benediction at Paris he said:
"'I leave society, but I shall return to it again later; I shall not return alone, but accompanied by a lady to whom you will show that attachment you now bear towards myself and my interests.'
"The Castle was in the greatest state of expectation all that day; for M. d'Orléans going away without uttering the word Marriage had taken the key to the mysteries of that day.
"At night they saw him re-enter the crowded reception chamber, leading by the hand Madame de Montesson, upon whom all looks were fixed.
"Modesty was the most attractive of her charms; all the company were touched by her momentary embarrassment.
"The marquis de Valençay advanced to her and, treating her with the deference and submission due to a princess of the blood, did the honours of the house as one initiated in the mysteries of the morning.
"The hour for retiring arrived.
"It was the custom with the king and in the establishments of the princes for the highest nobleman to receive the night robe from the hands of the valet-de-chambre and to present it to the prince when he went to bed: at Court, the prerogative of giving it to the king belonged to the first prince of the blood; in his own palace he received it from the first chamberlain.
"Madame de Sévigné says in a letter dated 17th of January 1680 that:
"'In royal marriages the newly wedded couple were put to bed and their night robes given them by the king and queen. When Louis XIV. had given his to M. le prince de Conti, and the queen hers to the princess, the king kissed her tenderly when she was in bed, and begged her not to oppose M. le prince de Conti in any way, but to be obedient and submissive.'
"At M. le duc d'Orléans' wedding the ceremony of the night robe took place after this fashion. There was some embarrassment just at first, the duc d'Orléans and the marquis de Valençay temporising for a few moments, the former before asking for it, the latter before receiving it.
"M. d'Orléans bore himself as a man who prided himself upon his moderation in the most lawful of pleasures.
"Valençay at length presented it to the prince, who, stripping off his day vestments to the waist, afforded to all the company a view of his hairless skin, an example of the fashion indulged in by the highest foppery of the times.
"Princes or great noblemen would not consummate their marriages, nor receive first favours from a mistress, until after they had submitted to this preliminary operation.
"The news of this fact immediately spread throughout the room and over the palace, and it put an end to any doubts of the marriage between the duc d'Orléans and Madame de Montesson, over which there had been so much controversy and opposition.
"After his marriage the duc d'Orléans lived in the closest intimacy with his wife, she paying him unreservedly the homage due to the first prince of the blood.
"In public she addressed him as Monseigneur, and spoke with due respect to the princesses of the blood, ceding them their customary precedence, whether in their exits or their entrances, and during their visits to the state apartments of the Palais-Royal.
"She maintained her name as the widow of M. de Montesson; her husband called her Madame de Montesson or simply madame, occasionally my wife, according to circumstances. He addressed her thus in the presence of his friends, who often heard him say to her as he withdrew from their company: 'My wife, shall we now go to bed?'
"Madame de Montesson's sterling character was for long the source of the prince's happiness, his real happiness.
"She devoted her days to the study of music and of hunting, which pastime she shared with the prince. She also had a theatre in the house she inhabited in the Chaussée d'Antin, on the stage of which she often acted with him.
"The duc d'Orléans was naturally good-natured and simple in his tastes, and the part of a peasant fitted him; while Madame de Montesson played well in the rôles of shepherdess and lover.
"The late duchesse d'Orléans had degraded the character of this house to such a degree that no ladies entered it save with the utmost and constant wariness. Madame de Montesson re-established its high tone and dignity; she opened the way to refined pleasures, awakened interest in intellectual tastes and the fine arts, and brought back once more a spirit of gaiety and good fellowship."
Sainte-Assise and this château at Villers-Cotterets wherein, as related by Soulavie, this ardently desired marriage was brought about, were both residences belonging to the duc d'Orléans.
The château had been part of the inheritance of the family since the marriage of Monsieur, brother of King Louis XIV., with Henrietta of England.
The edifice, which was almost as large as the town itself, became a workhouse, and is now a home of refuge for seven or eight hundred poor people. There is nothing remarkable about it from an architectural point of view, except one corner of the ancient chapel, which belongs, so far as one can judge from the little that remains, to the finest period of the Renaissance. The castle was begun by François I. and finished by Henri II.
Both father and son set their own marks on it.
François I. carved salamanders on it, and Henri II. his coat of arms with that of his wife, Katherine de Médicis.
The two arms are composed of the letters K and H, and are encircled in the three crescents of Diane de Poitiers.
A curious intermingling of the arms of the married wife and of the mistress is still visible in the corner of the prison which overlooks the little lane that leads to the drinking trough.
We must here point out that Madame de Montesson was the aunt of Madame de Genlis, and through her influence it was that the author of Adèle et Théodore entered the house of Madame la duchesse d'Orléans, wife of Philippe-Joseph, as maid of honour; a post which led to her becoming the mistress of Philippe-Égalité, and governess to the three young princes, the duc de Valois, the duc de Montpensier and the comte de Beaujolais. The duc de Valois became duc de Chartres upon the death of his grandfather, and, on the 9th of August 1830, he became Louis Philippe I., to-day King of the French.
[1] We ought to say that this incident, which occurred in 1848, is interpolated in MS. written in 1847.
[CHAPTER II]
My father—His birth—The arms of the family—The serpents of Jamaica—The alligators of St. Domingo—My grandfather—A young man's adventure—A first duel—M. le duc de Richelieu acts as second for my father—My father enlists as a private soldier—He changes his name—Death of my grandfather—His death certificate.
My father, who has already been mentioned twice in the beginning of this history—first with reference to my birth certificate and later in connection with his own marriage contract—was the Republican General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas-Davy de la Pailleterie.
As already stated in the documents quoted by us, he was himself the son of the marquis Antoine-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie, colonel and commissary-general of artillery, and he inherited the estate of la Pailleterie, which had been raised to a marquisate by Louis XIV., in 1707.
The arms of the family were three eagles azure with wings spread or, two wings across one, one with a ring argent in the middle; clasped left and right by the talons of the eagles at the head of the escutcheon and reposing on the crest of the remaining eagle.
To these arms, my father, when enlisting as a private, added a motto, or rather, he took it in place of his arms when he renounced his title: this was "Deus dedit, Deus dabit"; a device which would have been presumptuous had not Providence countersigned it.
I am unaware what Court quarrel or speculative motive decided my grandfather to leave France, about the year 1760, and to sell his property and to go and establish himself in St. Domingo.
With this end in view he had purchased a large tract of land at the eastern side of the island, close to Cape Rose, and known under the name of la Guinodée, near Trou-Jérémie.
Here, on March 25th, 1762, my father was born—the son of Louise-Cessette Dumas and of the marquis de la Pailleterie.
The marquis de la Pailleterie, born in 1710, was then fifty-two years old.
My father's eyes opened on the most beautiful scenery of that glorious island, the queen of the gulf in which it lies, the air of which is so pure that it is said no venomous reptile can live there.
A general, sent to re-conquer the island, when we had lost it, hit upon the ingenious idea of importing from Jamaica into St. Domingo a whole cargo of the deadliest reptiles that could be found, as auxiliaries. Negro snake-charmers were commissioned to take them up at the one island and to set them free on the other.
Tradition has it that a month afterwards every one of the snakes had perished.
St. Domingo, then, possesses neither the black snake of Java, nor the rattlesnake of North America, nor the hooded cobra of the Cape; but St. Domingo has alligators.
I recollect hearing my father relate—when I must have been quite a young child, since he died in 1806 and I was born in 1802—I recollect, I say, hearing my father relate, that one day, when he was ten years old, and was returning from the town to his home, when he saw to his great surprise an object that looked like a tree-trunk lying on the sea-shore. He had not noticed it when he passed the same place two hours before; and he amused himself by picking up pebbles and throwing them at the log; when, suddenly, at the touch of the pebbles, the log woke up.
The log was an alligator dozing in the sun. Now alligators, it seems, wake up in most unpleasant tempers; this one spied my father and started to run after him. My father was a true son of the Colonies, a son of the seashores and of the savannas, and knew how to run fast; but it would seem that the alligator ran or rather jumped still faster than he, and this adventure bid fair to have left me for ever in limbo, had not a negro, who was sitting astride a wall eating sweet potatoes, noticed what was happening, and cried out to my already breathless father:
"Run to the right, little sah; run to the left, little sah."
Which, translated, meant, "Run zigzag, young gentleman," a style of locomotion entirely repugnant to the alligator's mechanism, who can only run straight ahead of him, or leap lizard-wise.
Thanks to this advice, my father reached home safe and sound; but, when there, he fell, panting and breathless, like the Greek from Marathon, and, like him, was very nearly past getting up again.
This race, wherein the beast was hunter and the human being the hunted, left a deep impression on my father's mind.
My grandfather, brought up in the aristocratic circle of Versailles, had little taste for a colonist's mode of life: moreover, his wife, to whom he had been warmly attached, had died in 1772; and as she managed the estate it deteriorated in value daily after her death. The marquis leased the estate for a rent to be paid him regularly, and returned to France.
This return took place about the year 1780, when my father was eighteen years of age.
In the midst of the gilded youth of that period, the Fayettes, the Lameths, the Dillons, the Lazuns, who were all his companions, my father lived in the style of a gentleman's son. Handsome in looks, although his mulatto complexion gave him a curiously foreign appearance; as graceful as a Creole, with a good figure at a time when a well-set-up figure was thought much of, and with hands and feet like a woman's; amazingly agile at all physical exercises, and one of the most promising pupils of the first fencing-master of his time—Laboissière; struggling for supremacy in dexterity and agility with St. Georges, who, although forty-eight years old, laid claim to be still a young man and fully justified his pretensions, it was to be expected that my father would have a host of adventures, and he had: we will only repeat one, which deserves that distinction on account of its original character.
Moreover, a celebrated name is connected with it, and this name appears so often in my dramas or in my novels that it seems almost my duty to explain to the public how I came to have such a predilection for it.
The marquis de la Pailleterie had been a comrade of the duc de Richelieu, and was, at the time of this anecdote, his senior by fourteen years; he commanded a brigade at the siege of Philipsbourg in 1738, under the marquis d'Asfeld.
My grandfather was then first gentleman to the prince de Conti.
As is generally known, the duc de Richelieu was, on his grandfather's side (whose name was Vignerot), of quite low descent.
He had foolishly changed the t of the ending of his name to d, to confute pedigree hunters by making them think it was of English origin. These heraldic grubbers claimed that the name Vignerot with a t and not with a d at the end of it had originally sprung from a lute player, who had seduced the great Cardinal's niece, as did Abelard the niece of Canon Fulbert; but, more lucky than Abelard, he finished his course by marrying her after he had seduced her.
The marshal—who at this time was not yet made a marshal—was, by his father, a Vignerot, and only on his grandmother's side a Richelieu. This did not, however, prevent him from taking for his first wife Mademoiselle de Noailles, and for his second Mademoiselle de Guise, the latter alliance connecting him with the imperial house of Austria, and making him cousin to the prince de Pont and the prince de Lixen.
Now it fell out one day that the duc de Richelieu had an attack of colic, and therefore had not taken the usual pains with his toilet; it fell out, I say, that he returned to the camp with my grandfather, and went out hunting, covered with sweat and mud all over.
The princes de Pont and de Lixen were hunting at the same time, and the duke, who was in haste to return home to change his clothes, passed by them at a gallop and saluted them.
"Oh! oh!" said the prince de Lixen, "is that you, cousin? How muddy you are! But perhaps you are a little bit cleaner since you married my cousin."
M. de Richelieu pulled up his horse and leapt to the ground, motioning to my grandfather to do the same, and he advanced to the prince de Lixen:
"Sir," said he, "you did me the honour to address me."
"Yes, M. le duc," replied the prince.
"I am afraid I misunderstood the words you did me the honour to address to me. Will you have the goodness to repeat them to me exactly as you said them?"
The prince de Lixen bowed his head in the affirmative, and repeated word for word the phrase he had uttered.
It was so insolently done that there was no way out of it. M. de Richelieu bowed to the prince de Lixen and clapped his hand to his sword.
The prince followed suit.
The prince de Pont naturally was obliged to be his brother's second, and my grandfather Richelieu's.
A minute later M. de Richelieu plunged his sword through the body of the prince de Lixen, who fell back stone dead into the arms of the prince de Pont.[1]
Fifty-five years had gone by since this event. M. de Richelieu, the oldest of the marshals of France, had been in 1781 appointed president of the Tribunal of Affairs of Honour, in his eighty-fifth year.
He would therefore be eighty-seven when the anecdote we are about to relate took place.
My father would be twenty-two.
My father was one night at the theatre of la Montansier in undress, in the box of a very beautiful Creole who was the rage at the time. Whether on account of the lady's immense popularity or because of his imperfect toilet, he kept at the back of the box.
A musketeer, who had recognised the lady from the orchestra, opened the box door and, without in any way asking leave, seated himself by her and began to enter into conversation.
"Pardon me, monsieur," said the lady, interrupting him at the first words he uttered, "but I think you are not sufficiently aware that I am not alone."
"Who, then, is with you?" asked the musketeer.
"Why, that gentleman, of course," replied the lady, indicating my father.
"Oh! pardon me!" said the young man; "I took monsieur for your lackey."
This piece of impertinence was no sooner uttered than the ill-mannered musketeer was shot forth as from a catapult into the middle of the pit.
This unexpected descent produced a great sensation.
It was a matter of interest both to the falling body and to the people on whom he fell.
In those days people had to stand in the pit, therefore there was no need for them to rise up; they turned to the box from which the musketeer had been hurled, and hooted loudly.
At the same time my father, who naturally expected the usual sequel to such a proceeding, left the box to meet his enemy in the corridor. But instead he found a police constable, who touched him with an ivory-headed ebony baton and informed him that by order of the marshals of France he was attached to his person.
It was the first time my father had encountered the arm of the law. Brought up in St. Domingo, where there was no marshals' tribunal, he was not versed in the practices of that institution.
"Pardon me, monsieur," he said to the guard, "am I right in assuming that you are going to stick to me?"
"I have that honour, monsieur," replied the guard.
"Will you have the kindness to explain to me what that will mean?"
"It means, monsieur, that from this moment until the Tribunal of Affairs of Honour shall have settled your case, I shall not leave your side."
"You will not leave me?"
"No, monsieur."
"What! you will follow me?"
"Yes, monsieur."
"Everywhere I go?"
"Everywhere."
"Even to madame's house?"
The guard bowed with exquisite politeness.
"Even to madame's house," he replied.
"Even to my own?" continued my father.
"Even to your house."
"Into my bedroom?"
"Into your bedroom."
"Oh! this is too much!"
"It is even so, monsieur."
And the guard bowed with the same politeness as at first.
My father felt a strong inclination to disengage himself of the constable as he had of the musketeer; but the whole of the replies and injunctions we have above reported were made so courteously he had no reasonable excuse for taking offence.
My father escorted the lady to her door, saluted her as respectfully as the constable had saluted him, and took home with him the representative of the marshals of France.
This gentleman installed himself in his apartment, went out with him, came back with him, and followed him as faithfully as his shadow.
Three days later my father was summoned to appear before the duc de Richelieu, who then lived at the famous pavilion de Hanovre.
This was the name by which the Parisians had dubbed the mansion Richelieu had built at the corner of the boulevard and of the rue Choiseul (Louis-le-Grand), thereby hinting, and perhaps not without some show of reason, that the war with Hanover had supplied the requisite funds.
My father then styled himself the comte de la Pailleterie; we shall soon relate the reason for his renouncing this name and title. It was under this name and title, therefore, that my father was introduced to the marshal.
The name awoke a recollection alike in the mind and in the heart of the conqueror of Mahon.
"Oh! oh!" he exclaimed, as he turned round in his armchair, "are you by any chance son of the marquis de la Pailleterie, one of my old friends, who was my second in a duel in which I had the misfortune to kill the prince of Lixen during the siege of Philipsbourg?"
"Yes, monseigneur."
"Then, m'sieur (this was the way the duc de Richelieu pronounced the word monsieur), you are the son of a brave gentleman and ought to have a fair hearing; relate your case to me."
My father told what had happened just as I have given it.
There was too close a resemblance between this affair and the one the duc de Richelieu had had with his cousin for the marshal not to be struck with it.
"Oh! oh!" he said, "and you swear that was exactly what occurred, m'sieur?"
"Upon my word of honour, monseigneur."
"You must have reparation, then, and if you will to-day accept me as a second, I shall be delighted to render the same service to you that your father rendered me forty-six or forty-seven years ago."
As may well be imagined, my father accepted the offer, which was thoroughly characteristic of Richelieu.
The meeting took place in the very garden of the pavilion de Hanovre, and my father's adversary received a sword-cut across the shoulder.
This event reunited the two old friends; the duc de Richelieu asked news of the father from his son, and learnt that the marquis de Pailleterie, after having lived in St. Domingo nearly twenty years, had returned to France, and now lived at Saint-Germain en Laye.
An invitation was sent to the marquis de la Pailleterie to come and visit the duke at the pavillon de Hanovre.
Of course my grandfather accepted willingly enough. The two heroes of the Regency held long conversations over their campaigns and their love-affairs. Then over dessert the talk fell on my father; and the marshal proposed to take the first opportunity that offered to place his old friend's son in the army.
It was decreed that my father's military career should begin under less illustrious auspices.
About this time my grandfather married again, and took his housekeeper to wife, Marie-Françoise Retou; he was then seventy-four years of age.
This marriage caused an estrangement between father and son.
The result of this estrangement was that the father tied up his money bags tighter than ever, and the son soon discovered that life in Paris without money is a sorry life.
He then had an interview with the marquis, and told him he had made up his mind to a course of action.
"What is that?" asked the marquis.
"To enlist."
"As what?"
"As a private."
"In what regiment?"
"In the first regiment I come across."
"That is all very fine," replied my grandfather, "but as I am the marquis de la Pailleterie, a colonel and commissary-general of artillery, I will not allow you to drag my name in the mire of the lowest ranks of the army."
"Then you object to my enlisting?"
"No; but you must enlist under an assumed name."
"That is quite fair," replied my father. "I will enlist under the name of Dumas."
"Very well."
And the marquis, who had never in any sense been a very tender parent, turned his back on his son and left him free to go his own gait.
So my father enlisted under the name of Alexandre Dumas, as had been agreed.
He enlisted in a regiment of the Queen's Dragoons, 6th of the Army, as Number 429, on June 2nd, 1786.
It was the duc de Grammont, grandfather of my friend the real duc de Guiche, who entered his enlistment under the name of Alexandre Dumas; and, as a verification of this enlistment, a certificate was drawn up which the duc de Guiche brought me only two years since as a souvenir of his father the duc de Grammont.
It was signed by four noblemen belonging to Saint-Germain en Laye, and stated that although enlisting under the name of Alexandre Dumas the new recruit was really the son of the marquis de la Pailleterie.
As for the marquis, he died thirteen days after his son's enlistment in the Queen's Dragoons, as became an old aristocrat who could not endure to see the fall of the Bastille.
I give his death certificate from the civil registers of Saint-Germain en Laye.
"On Friday, June 16th, 1786, the body of the high and mighty Seigneur Alexandre-Antoine Davy de la Pailleterie, knight, seigneur and patron of Bielleville, whose death took place the preceding day, aged about 76, husband of Marie-Françoise Retou, was interred in the cemetery, and mass was sung in the presence of the clergy, of sieur Denis Nivarrat, citizen, and of sieur Louis Regnault, also citizen; friends of the deceased, who have signed this at Saint-Germain en Laye."
By this death the last tie that bound my father to the aristocracy was severed.
[1] There are different versions of this anecdote, but I give it as I found it related among my father's papers, where this note is added in another handwriting: The general had this story from the duc de Richelieu himself. I cannot, then, do other than adopt or rather retain this version of it.
[CHAPTER III]
My father rejoins his regiment—His portrait—His strength—His skill—The Nile serpent—The regiment of the King and the regiment of the Queen—Early days of the Revolution—Declaration of Pilnitz—The camp at Maulde—The thirteen Tyrolean chasseurs—My father's name is mentioned in the order of the day—France under Providence—Voluntary enlistments—St. Georges and Boyer—My father lieutenant-colonel—The camp of the Madeleine—The pistols of Lepage—My father General of Brigade in the Army of the North.
The new recruit rejoined his regiment, which was quartered at Laon, towards the end of the month of June 1786.
My father, as already stated, was twenty-four, and as handsome a young fellow as could be found anywhere. His complexion was dark, his eyes of a rich chestnut colour, and his well-shaped nose was of the kind only found in the crossing of Indian and Caucasian races. His teeth were white, his lips mobile, his neck well set on his powerful shoulders, and, in spite of his height of five feet nine inches, he had the hands and feet of a woman. These feet were the envy of his mistresses, whose shoes he was very rarely able to put on.
At the time of his marriage the calf of his leg was the same width as my mother's waist.
His free colonial life had developed his strength and prowess to an extraordinary degree; he was a veritable American horse-lad, a cowboy. His skill with gun or pistol was the envy of St. Georges and Junot. And his muscular strength became a proverb in the army. More than once he amused himself in the riding-school by passing under a beam, grasping it with his arms, and lifting his horse between his legs. I have seen him do it, and I recollect my childish amazement when I saw him carry two men standing up on his bent knee and hop across the room with these two men on him. I saw him once in a rage take a branch of considerable toughness in both his hands and break it between them by turning one hand to the right and the other to the left. Another time I remember going out one day from the little château des Fossés where we lived, and my father found he had forgotten the key of a gate: I recollect seeing him get out of the carriage, take up the gate crosswise, and at the second or third attempt break down the stone pillar in which it was fixed.
Dr. Ferus, who served under my father, has often told me that when about eighteen he, Ferus, was sent as assistant-surgeon to the Alpine army. On the first evening of his arrival, by the camp firelight he watched a soldier who, among other trials of strength, amused himself by putting his finger into the mouth of a heavy musket and lifting it up not by, his arm but on his extended finger.
A man wrapped in a cloak mingled among the onlookers and watched with them: then, laughing and flinging back his cloak, he said:
"That is not bad—but now bring four guns."
He was obeyed, for he was recognised as the commander-in-chief.
He then put his four fingers in the four gun holes and lifted the four guns with as much ease as the soldier had lifted one.
"See how easy it is," said he, placing them gently on the ground—"when one is in training for such exercises."
When Ferus told me this incident, he said he still marvelled how any man's muscles could bear such a weight.
Old Moulin, landlord of the Palais-Royal at Avignon, where Marshal Brune was murdered, was also possessed of immense strength. When trying to defend the marshal from assassination he took up one of the assassins, to use his own expression, "by putting his hand under his ribs, and threw him out of the window." This same Moulin told me once, when I was passing through Avignon, that when he was serving under my father in Italy orders were given forbidding the soldiers to go out without their sabres, under penalty of forty-eight hours in the guardroom.
This order was issued on account of the number of assassinations that had taken place.
My father was riding out, and met old Moulin, who was then a handsome, strapping fellow of twenty-five. Unluckily this handsome, strapping fellow had not his sword on.
Directly he caught sight of my father he set off at a run to try and slip down a side street; but my father had spied the fugitive and guessed the cause, so he put his horse to a gallop and, catching up with the culprit, he sang out, "You rascal, so you want to be murdered?" Then, seizing hold of him by his coat-collar, he raised him completely off the ground without either urging on or slackening his horse's pace, and carried him thus in a tight grip, just as a hawk swoops down on a lark, until, meeting a patrol, he threw down his burden and exclaimed:
"Forty-eight hours in the guardroom for this scoundrel!"
Old Moulin had his forty-eight hours in the guardroom, but it was not the forty-eight hours in prison that lived longest in his memory, it was that ten minutes' ride.
My father's skill as a hunter was equal to his strength; I have come across veterans who had hunted with him, when serving in the Alps, where, as we have just seen, he had been in command, and they preserved many traditions of his almost inconceivable agility as a good shot.
One example will suffice.
My father had selected from among his aides-de-camp Captain d'Horbourg de Marsanges, commandant of the crack company of the 15th regiment of dragoons, as an excellent and indefatigable sportsman.
He was my father's regular hunting companion.
One day my father and his aide-de-camp left Cairo, by the Nile Gate, to go hunting on the isle of Rhodes; they had not gone more than five hundred steps from the walls before they met a captain of dromedaries, who, sinning against all the accepted codes of hunting, wished success to their expedition.
"Devil take the brute!" exclaimed Captain d'Horbourg, who was steeped in all the hunter's superstitions. "Our day is ruined, and I expect we had better turn back."
"What!" said my father. "Are you mad?"
"But, General, you know the proverb?"
"Of course I know it, but it is a French proverb and not an Arabian one. Now, if we were hunting over the plain of St. Denis I should not say anything. Come, let us go on."
They embarked, and reached the island.
Usually so abounding in game, the isle seemed barren.
Captain d'Horbourg consigned the captain of dromedaries to the infernal regions every five minutes.
Suddenly he stopped short, his eyes fixed and his gun arrested in his hand.
"General!" he cried to my father, who was about twenty-five paces from him.
"Well, what's the matter?"
"A snake!"
"What! a snake?"
"Yes, and such a size! It is thicker than my arm."
"Where is it?"
"In front of me!"
My father took a few steps forward, but although he looked most attentively, he could not see anything.
He shrugged his shoulders to indicate his inability.
"Why, there, there! Can't you see it?" said the captain. "It is curled round and round, sitting up on its coils with its head poised, hissing."
"Well, then, fire at it as quickly as you can, or it will spring."
Captain d'Horbourg rapidly raised his gun to his shoulder and drew the trigger.
Only the priming went off.
At the same moment the snake sprang, but before it had covered the distance that separated it from the captain, the gun went off, and the ball shattered its head.
The serpent fell at the captain's feet and coiled round his legs in its death convulsions, writhing in its agony.
The captain shrieked, for he did not see for the moment the state the snake was in.
When he had recovered himself and was somewhat reassured, Captain d'Horbourg took the snake to Cairo, skinned it and had the skin made into a sword-belt as a souvenir of his narrow escape.
But the whole way back he kept reiterating to my father—
"Ah! General—didn't I tell you that devil of a rider would bring us ill luck!"
As a matter of fact the two hunters shot nothing but the snake, and it could not be described as a good bag.
In the month of July 1843, on my return from Florence, I lodged at the hotel de Paris, in the rue de Richelieu, where I received a letter signed "Ludovic d'Horbourg," wherein the writer begged an interview with me to unburden his mind of a dying request made him by his father.
The next day was to be the first representation of Les Demoiselles de Saint-Cyr, so I put off the interview till the day after.
General Dumas's old Egyptian aide-de-camp had, on his deathbed, as a sign of his gratitude, ordered his son Ludovic d'Horbourg to give me after his death the skin of the serpent my father had killed so quickly and cleverly on the isle of Rhodes. It seems he had often related this adventure with the Nile serpent to his son, for, amidst the innumerable dangers Count d'Horbourg had encountered throughout his long military career, this one had remained the most deeply imprinted on his memory.
Thanks to this verbal account, I am able to give the story here in all its details.
My father had hardly rejoined his regiment before an occasion for displaying his skill as a pupil of Laboissière presented itself.
The King's and Queen's regiments, which had always been in rivalry with each other, both happened to be stationed in the same town. This afforded a grand opportunity for constant skirmishes between them, and you may be sure such worthy opponents were not going to lose their chances.
One day a soldier of the King's regiment passed one belonging to the Queen's regiment.
The former stopped the latter and said—
"Comrade, I can tell you something you do not know."
"Well," replied the other, "if you tell it me I shall know it."
"All right I the king ... the queen."
"That is a lie," replied the other,—"it is the other way round, the queen ... the king."
One insult was as gross as the other, and could only be wiped out by duels.
About a hundred duels took place during the next twenty-four hours—three fell to my father's account.
In one of them he was cut across the forehead. Luckily his head was as tough as Duguesclin's.
He took no notice of this wound at the time, but it led to grave complications later, which nearly drove him out of his mind.
My father took no part in the earlier events of the Revolution. The National Assembly was constituted, the Bastille fell, and Mirabeau sprang into fame, thundered and died. Meanwhile my father served as private soldier or corporal in provincial barracks.
About 1790 he came with a detachment to Villers-Collerets, and there he met my mother, whom, as we have stated, he married November 28, 1792.
In the meantime the Revolution was spreading throughout France, and coalitions were being formed between the foreign Powers. On August 27, 1791, four days after the first insurrection of the negroes at St. Domingo, Leopold I., Emperor of Germany, and Frederic-William II., King of Prussia, met at Pilnitz and, in the presence of M. de Bouillé, who enjoyed such a terrible celebrity in the affair of the Swiss at Nancy, drew up the following declaration:—
"Their Majesties, having listened to the petitions and remonstrances of their Royal Highnesses Monsieur and the comte d'Artois, brothers of the king, have jointly agreed in considering the present position of the King of France a question of common interest throughout Europe. They hope that this interest will not fail to be recognised by the Powers whose aid has been solicited, and that in consequence they will not withhold the use of the most efficacious means within their power, in conjunction with the undersigned Majesties, for the re-establishment of the King of France in a more stable position, within the limits of the most perfect freedom consistent with the basis of a monarchical government, equally befitting the rights of the sovereigns and the welfare of the French nation. Then, and in that case, their said Majesties the Emperor and the King of Prussia are mutually resolved to take prompt measures with the forces necessary to obtain the end proposed in common. In the meantime, they agree to give orders to their armies to prepare for active service."
These were the lines that kindled the fire at Quiévrain, which was not to be extinguished before the battle of Waterloo.
On January 14, 1792, an edict of the National Assembly invited King Louis XVI. to demand in the name of the nation explanations from the emperor. The 10th of February was the date fixed for his reply. "And, in default of such reply," the edict went on to say, "the silence of the emperor will, after the declaration of Pilnitz, be looked upon as an infraction of the treaties of 1756, and considered hostile."
On March 1st following, the Emperor Leopold died, worn out by debauchery, at the age of forty-five years, and his son François succeeded to the Hereditary Estates.
As no satisfactory reply was returned, the troops proceeded to the frontier, and the regiment of the Queen's Dragoons, in which my father always served (though since February 16th, 1792, in the rank of brigadier), was placed under the command of General Beurnonville.
It was while in camp at Maulde that my father found his first opportunity to distinguish himself. Commanding as brigadier a reconnoitring party of four dragoons, he unexpectedly encountered a patrol of the enemy, comprised of thirteen Tyrolean chasseurs and a corporal.
Despite his inferiority in numbers he did not hesitate for a second to order his men to charge as soon as he saw them. The Tyroleans, who were unprepared for such a sudden attack, retired into a small meadow, surrounded by a ditch large enough to arrest the progress of the cavalry. But, as I have said, my father was a first-rate horseman; he mounted his good horse Joseph, gathered up the reins, urged him on, and they leapt the ditch after the fashion of M. de Montmorency. My father instantly landed alone in the very midst of the thirteen chasseurs, who, completely dumbfounded by such boldness, delivered up their arms and surrendered. The victor piled up the thirteen carbines in a heap, placed them on his saddle-bow, made the thirteen men march to meet his four dragoons, who had stopped on the other side of the ditch, over which they could not jump, and, being the last to cross the ditch, he led his prisoners into the camp.
Prisoners were rare in these days and the apparition of four men leading in thirteen produced a great sensation in the camp. This proof of the courage of the young officer was much talked of. General Beurnonville desired to see him; made him maréchal des logis, invited him to dinner, and mentioned his name in the order of the day.
This was the first mark of distinction attached to the new name of Alexandre Dumas, adopted by the son of the marquis de la Pailleterie.
From that moment General Beurnonville promised my father his good-will, a promise he never failed to keep: he used to say when my father was on duty over the general's quarters:
"Oh! Dumas is watching over us, so I shall sleep peacefully to-night."
This was the time of Volunteer enrolment, and France set a unique example to the world.
Never had a nation been so near its downfall as was France in 1792, unless it were the France of 1428.
Two miracles saved this dearly loved daughter of God. In 1428 the Lord raised up a maiden to save France, as Christ by His death saved the world.
In 1792 He roused and inspired a whole nation.
Xerxes, on the rock of Salamis, was not more sure of Athens, when its fortunes rested on the waves and on the fleet of Themistocles; Louis XIV. at the gates of Amsterdam was not more sure of Holland, who was ready to drown herself to escape his conquest, than was King Frederic-William of conquering France at Longwy and at Verdun.
France felt the hand of death pressed on her, but, by a terrible and powerful convulsion, although her feet were already wrapped in her grave-clothes, she struggled out of her tomb.
She was betrayed on all sides.
By her king, who attempted to fly to Varennes to rejoin Bouillé at Montmédy; her nobility, who fought in the enemy's ranks and urged the Prussians on France; the priests, more terrible still, who spread abroad a spirit of civil war, not merely between citizens of the same country, province, or town, but between members of the same family, between husband and wife, between son and father, between brother and sister.
At this period, when French Rome was struggling, we will not say against the world, but against Europe, there was scarcely a house which did not contain its Camille cursing her brother or weeping for her lover.
Oh! it is at such moments as these that France is great, and it is evident she has a true mission from Providence, since she rose up, struggled and triumphed, when all other nations would have succumbed.
All historians refer to Paris at this period as though it were Paris that did everything and sent the army of the Revolution to march to the frontiers.
Of course Paris did much, Paris with its enlistment offices in every public square, Paris with its recruiting sergeants going from house to house, Paris with its roaring cannons, its beating drums, its clanging bells, Paris with its proclamations of the country's danger, Paris with the great folds of its flag of distress floating from the windows of the hôtel de Ville, Paris with the stentorian tones of Danton calling the people to arms; but the provinces did quite as much as Paris, and they had not passed through those terrible days of the 2nd and 3rd of September.
Two departments alone, le Gard and le Haute-Saône, levied two armies among themselves.
Two men unaided, each equipped and armed a squadron of cavalry.
One village gave every single man it had, and offered besides a sum of three hundred thousand francs.
The mothers did more than give themselves or their money, they gave their sons, a more terrible and heartrending travail than that of giving them birth.
Eight hundred thousand men enlisted; France, which had been under great difficulty to raise an army to defend her Thermopylæ of the Argonne and to win the battle of Valmy, had a dozen armies at her command, and a year later began the march to conquer Europe. Frederic-William and Leopold made a grave error when they declared war against the Revolution; had they been satisfied with drawing a kind of protective cordon round France and with surrounding her with an armed girdle, France would in all probability have preyed upon herself. The volcano which threw up such fire and lava would have engulfed everything in the heart of that deep crater called Paris, wherein such days as the 5th and 6th October, as the 20th June, as the 10th August, as the 2nd and 3rd September, as the 21st January, had seethed and burst forth. But they broke open the mountain with two strokes of their swords, and laid bare a channel by which the Revolution flowed out over the whole world.
New regiments, whose very existence had been unsuspected hitherto, kept pouring into the army daily, regiments whose names were not entered on any list.
Only created the day before, they were totally inexperienced, but on they marched against the enemy.
St. Georges had been made colonel of the Free Legion of American cavalry in the South.
Boyer raised the regiment of the hussars de la Liberté et de l'Égalité as his contribution.
They both knew my father, and both wanted to have him under their orders.
St. Georges took him first, as second lieutenant, on the 1st September 1792.
Boyer made him a lieutenant the next day.
Finally St. Georges, wishing to keep him at any price, made him lieutenant-colonel on January 10th, 1793.
My father was in reality in command of the regiment, for St. Georges, who was no fire eater, remained at Lille under the pretext of superintending the organisation of his troops (using for his own purposes the money given him to buy horses). Placed, as I have said, at the head of the regiment, my father saw before him a vast field for the display of his sagacity and his courage. The squadrons of men trained by him were noted for their patriotism and their good military discipline. Always under fire, very few engagements took place in the camp of la Madeleine without his squadrons taking part, and wherever they went they left an honourable, and often a glorious record behind them. Once, for example, the regiment was in the van-guard when suddenly it came across a Dutch regiment hidden in the rye which, at that season and in that part of the country, grew as high as a man. The presence of this regiment was revealed by the movement of a sergeant who was about fifteen paces from my father, and who raised his gun to fire. But my father saw this movement, realised that at such a distance the sergeant could not fail to hit him, drew a pistol from his holster and pulled the trigger with such rapidity and good luck that before the weapon was levelled its barrel was pierced clean through by the pistol bullet.
This pistol shot was the signal for a magnificent charge, in which the Dutch regiment was cut to pieces.
My father picked up the bullet-pierced firelock on the battlefield, and it was only held together on both sides by two fragments of iron. I had it in my possession a long time, but in the end it was stolen from me in a house-moving.
The pistols which had wrought this miracle of accuracy had been given by my mother, and came from the workshops of Lepage. They acquired further renown in the Italian campaign, and we shall have more to say concerning them when we come to that chapter in our history.
My father received his commission as brigadier-general of the Army of the North on July 30, 1793.
On September the 3rd of the same year he was appointed general of division of the same army.
Finally, five days later, he was made general commander-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees.
So when my mother married my father, on November 28th, 1792, he was lieutenant-colonel of hussars; and in less than a year afterwards he had been appointed general-in-command.
It had taken him but twenty months to rise from the lowest rung of the ladder, where he was nothing but a simple soldier, to one of the highest positions in the army.
[CHAPTER IV]
My father is sent to join Kléber—He is nominated General-in-Chief in the Western Pyrenees—Bouchotte's letters—Instructions of the Convention—The Representatives of the People who sat at Bayonne—Their proclamation—In spite of this proclamation my father remains at Bayonne—Monsieur de l'Humanité.
With the grade of brigadier-general, my father was sent to join Kléber at the siege of Maestricht, but he remained only a short time under his orders. Later, in Egypt, Kléber became his intimate friend.
Created divisional general of the same army on the 3rd of September, he was given the command of the Western Pyrenees, and five days later he received news of his nomination from Bouchotte, minister of war, in these terms:—
"PARIS, 11th September 1793, Year II of the Republic, one and indivisible.
"THE MINISTER OF WAR to CITIZEN DUMAS, General of Division of the Northern Army.
"I have to inform you, General, that the Executive Provisional Council, relying upon your patriotism, your courage, and your experience, has appointed you to the position of general-in-chief to the Army of the Western Pyrenees, rendered vacant by the death of Delbecq. The National Convention has approved this nomination, and I hasten to send you your credentials, and to ask you to lose no time in taking up the post committed to your charge.
"This appointment will afford you fresh opportunities for showing your devotion to the public welfare in beating down its enemies: the zeal for the Republic you have hitherto shown is a sure guarantee that you will not spare her enemies.
J. BOUCHOTTE."
On the 24th, his instructions were sent him.
We transcribe these instructions here, because they seem to us to be important, in that they emanated direct from the Revolutionary Government, at the most revolutionary epoch of that Government, that is to say, on the 24th of September 1793, and yet did not prescribe any of those rigorous measures in which the Representatives of the People indulged in the departments. Perhaps it may be these Representatives of the People had particular instructions, and suffered the soldiers to play the most prominent parts in that bloody tragedy.
We shall see the rôle that was laid out for my father.
"WESTERN PYRENEES.
"PARIS, 24th September, Year II.
"Notes for General Alexandre Dumas.
"The Army of the Western Pyrenees is composed (according to article 2 of the decree of 30th April 1793) of the Republican forces that are situated along the frontier and in fortified towns or ports, in the whole of the territory that borders the left bank of the Garonne, including the departments of the Basses-Pyrénées, Hautes-Pyrénées, the Landes and Gers, as well as the whole of the country along the left bank of the Garonne, in the departments of the Haute-Garonne, of Lot-et-Garonne, and of la Gironde.
"It is thought best that the general should go immediately to Bayonne by Bordeaux. He had better interview the Representatives of the People, the constituted authorities and the military heads, as he goes along. He must consult together with them upon every matter that concerns the defence and the tranquil settlement of the portion of the Republic comprised in his command; as well as upon the most convenient means to be employed in making necessary requisitions, which should be demanded in the troop-centres indicated by the Representatives of the People.
"He will reach Saint Jean-de-Luz as soon as possible, where his headquarters will be made. He will carefully examine his staff and head employés of the different branches of the army.
"He will make himself acquainted with every detail concerning his sphere of administration.
"He must examine all books of orders, plans, charts, and memoranda relative to the defence of the frontier and the seaboards. He must give ear to the chief engineer and other authorised personages.
"He must pay a visit to the camps, cantonments, and stations, in order to regulate the order and discipline that ought to exist throughout the service.
"He must take cognisance of the most important passes, ports, and highways, and if they are occupied by the Spanish he must use his best endeavours to expel them and to take possession of them, if it is desirable from a military point of view, and possible without unduly risking the troops.
"Their actual position is in four divisions.
"1st. That of Saint-Jean-de-Luz, consisting of twelve thousand men, with its van-guard stationed at Bruges and its outposts extending from Trouber in Borda as far as Coulin Baïta.
"The main body is encamped in front of the fort of Socoa de Saint-Jean-de-Luz, upon the heights of la Chapelle de Boudagain de Belchéséa, as far as the river Nivelle.
"The purpose of this division is to keep the enemy behind la Bidassoa and to defend the pass of Reza.
"2nd. The division of Serres and of Saint-Plée, of from four to five thousand men, is stationed at Ascain, Serres, Saint-Plée, and Aintroevé, with its outposts protecting Helbaren and Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours.
"It prevents entrance into France by way of Tugarro, Murdé, and Ordache, and harasses the enemy in the valley of Bastan; furthermore it can throw forward troops to Souzarde, Espelette, and Itlassu.
"3rd. The division of Saint-Jean-Pied-de-port consists of about ten thousand men, of which two battalions and three Basque companies are at Baygorry, to defend the valley, and one battalion at Anhaix. The rest covers the town, which is a most important pivot. Furthermore, it threatens the enemy in les Bloules, the valley of Bastan, and the road from Pampelune by Roncevaux.
"4th. The division of the cantonments of Pau includes Pau, Navarreins, Oleron, the Basse-Burice, the valleys of Barettoux, Ayret, Ossan, Oevar, and Saint-Savin.
"This division numbers five thousand men, and can be increased by requisitioning the departments of Hautes-Pyrénées, of Gers, Haute-Garonne, Lot-et-Garonne, Gironde, and the Landes.
"Its object is to defend the valleys and to be the reserve from which the whole army should be supplemented.
"The Spanish have a formidable artillery from Fontarabia to Biriatou.
"Their forces, it is said, consist of fifteen thousand men from Fontarabia to Cerdac, and as many round Saint-Jean-Pied-de-port, everywhere intrenched.
"Their military arrangements seem excellent.
"In time of peace, our posts on the extreme frontier were stationed at Andaye, at Saint-Jacques de Souberang, Pas-de-Béhobie, Biriatou, and other places a league from the frontier, in the neighbourhood of the Ruhne, and on the banks of the Bidassoa.
"The great camp to be occupied is la Croix des Bouquets and Andaye, with outposts at Serres and at Joliment, to restrain the Spanish, whose flanks and rear will thereby be endangered.
"Beyond Saint-Jean-Pied-de-port is the post of Castel-Mignon, which the Spanish have taken from us. We ought to try to recapture this, and even the pass of Baguette, which is the way into Spain at that point.
"These items of local information have been extracted from memoranda, particulars of which will be found at the headquarters of the general army and at the engineer's office, with transcripts of the military reconnoitrings that have been carried on along the frontier.
"The general will acquaint himself with these details, and he will direct his operations according to the strength of his active and reserve forces, and to those of the enemy and their positions, taking advantage of every circumstance that may promise an advantageous attack, without running risks.
"He will keep a controlling hand over all movements and instructions given to the troops, and especially over the officers, who shall be suspended if they are not found fulfilling their proper duties.
"Military schools shall be open to common use; they shall deal with all branches of the service: police, account-keeping, and Republican discipline.
"A general officer and an officer from the chief staff shall be specially set apart for this object.
"The general will find the army in excellent spirits, and he will only have to keep it so.
"He must watch and arrest suspected men, who might escape from the army.
"All communication with the enemy must be avoided.
"No one must be allowed to penetrate into his camp under any pretext whatever.
"Deserters must be sent to the rear to some suitable place.
"He must maintain an accurate correspondence with the minister of war, independently of that from the headquarters.
"In short, his sense of patriotism and his courage render him worthy of the confidence of the nation. He will not keep back anything, and he will set his brothers-at-arms an example of every Republican virtue."
It is clear that these instructions had nothing very revolutionary about them.
But when he reached Bayonne, serious differences broke out between my father and the Representatives of the People sitting in that town.
These Representatives of the People were citizens Monestier, Pinet senior, Garreau, d'Artigoyte, and Cavaignac.
This Assembly had gained for itself a sorry notoriety in the south; and when the above-mentioned members heard that my father was coming, knowing his moderate views, they tried to ward off the blow.
On the 3rd Brumaire, before my father had actually arrived, they issued the following proclamation:—
"IN THE NAME OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, ONE AND INDIVISIBLE:
"The Representatives of the People within the sphere of the Army of the Western Pyrenees and the adjoining departments, being informed that the minister of war has promoted to the rank of divisional generals in the Army of the Western Pyrenees certain citizens who have not the confidence of Republicans; appointments which have raised a sense of uneasiness among the democratic people of Bayonne; fearing, in the first place, that the sans-culotte officers placed in their posts by the Representatives of the Montagnards may be deprived by them; and, secondly, fearing that they will see a recrudescence of intriguers and military spies at work misleading the soldiers; have been impelled to communicate their fears to their colleague Garreau, who has already on their behalf drawn up the following provisional measures:
"Being informed that citizen Dumas has been appointed by the Executive Council general of the Army of the Western Pyrenees, that he is on his way to Bayonne, and that he has been announced by his aide-de-camp Darièle, who has already arrived in the said town;
"Taking note of the fact that when the minister of war made the above-mentioned appointments he could not then have been acquainted with the important operations which the Representatives of the People have carried out by means of the Army of the Western Pyrenees;—operations rendered imperative on behalf of the public safety, of which the minister and the Executive Council will warmly approve as soon as they are acquainted with them;
"Also having regard to the interests of the army, which require that nominations made by Representatives of the People of generals and officers who have merited the confidence of the soldiery by their courage, their talents, and their Republican opinions, shall be maintained;
"It is resolved:—
"Art. 1. The appointments made up to this date by the Representatives of the People in the Army of the Western Pyrenees, whether that of general in command or those of any other officer, shall hold good.
"Art. 2. Citizen Muller, general commanding the Army of the Western Pyrenees, is forbidden to deliver letters of commission to officers who have just been or who are about to be promoted by the Executive Council to any rank in the said army whatever, or to recognise them in the rank the minister may have conferred or proposes to confer on them.
"Art. 3. It is decreed that citizen Dumas, who has been nominated general of the Army of the Western Pyrenees by the Executive Council, and also all other officers who shall be or have been promoted to any sort of rank in the said army by the above-named Council, shall on their arrival remain outside the walls of Bayonne and of Saint-Esprit, until such time as the Representatives of the People of this town shall have arrived.
"General la Roche, commandant of the town of Bayonne and of the fort of Saint-Esprit, will see that this command is strictly adhered to. Those officers, however, who were already in the army when they were appointed by the minister, are exempted from this order, and will remain at their posts in the ranks they have held previously.
"Art. 4. The Representatives of the People will frequently visit Bayonne to confer together as to what action shall be taken relative to the nominations of the Executive Council.
"In the meantime they request their colleague, citizen Garreau, at present at Bayonne, to adhere strictly to this proclamation, and to look to it that its regulations are enforced.
"Drawn up at Mont-de-Marsan, 1st of the second month of the year II of the French Republic, one and indivisible.
"J. B. B. MONESTIER (of Puy-de Dôme),
"J. PINET (senior), and D'ARTIGOYTE.
"The above-signed Representatives, approving this decree, declare that it does not and cannot apply to citizen Fregeville, general of division so long attached to this army, whom the Representatives of the People have summoned to them both at Toulouse and at Bordeaux. They therefore consider that General Fregeville should exercise his functions as general of division whether at Bayonne or in the army, from the time of his arrival.
"At Bayonne, 3rd of the second month of the year II of the French Republic, one and indivisible.
"Authenticated copy.
GARREAU."
If you would know how these famous Representatives of the People occupied their time at Bayonne and in the surrounding country, and in what way my father's presence was distasteful to them, glance through their correspondence. That will explain why it was decreed that General Dumas should depart outside the walls of Bayonne as soon as he reached the town.
Unfortunately, my father was not the type of man who could be made meekly to go out of a town when he believed he had the right to remain in it.
So he stayed at Bayonne.
This refusal to obey the order of the Representatives of the People led to a fresh proclamation, which was issued the day after his entrance, on the 9th Brumaire:—
"IN THE NAME OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC, ONE AND INDIVISIBLE:
"The Representatives of the People, in the sphere of the Army of the Western Pyrenees and the neighbouring departments,
"Assured that the Committee of Public Safety and the National Convention are neither aware of the urgently needed reforms which have been brought about in this army, nor of the fresh appointments that had taken place in it, when the minister of war or Executive Council, supported by the National Council, promoted General Dumas;
"And in view of the fact that General Muller has received from these Representatives the position of provisional commander-in-chief of this army by reason of the proofs he has already given of his abilities, of his activity, of his courage, and of his pronounced Republican opinions; and in consideration of his tried experience of four months' laborious work in conducting war in countries and localities where it is impossible to exercise the same methods of warfare as among the armies of the Republic; work which takes considerable time and requires great intelligence in order to unite all the scattered forces employed at a multitude of different points, and to weld them into one harmonious army corps; and finally, on account of his services to this army and of his high moral character, which have won for him the respect, affection, and confidence of its officers and men;
"Seeing that General Muller is still in full enjoyment of this esteem, of this friendship, and of this confidence; that he alone can carry on the campaign to its completion as he alone has the clue to its workings; and finally, that this campaign and war can hardly last more than another three weeks, or even less;
"Considering that General Dumas (against whom, let it be understood, the Representatives of the People have no personal objections) cannot obtain a knowledge of these localities, of the plans and of the positions, in a less period than six weeks, as he himself admitted in the friendly Conference which the Representatives of the People have had with him;
"And as order and discipline, harmony and concord have reigned more forcibly and with more marked success since the provisional election of General Muller and the reforms made in the army;
"It is resolved, in the highest interests of the Republic, that temporarily, and until a definite command comes from the National Assembly, General Muller shall retain the command-in-chief of the Army of the Western Pyrenees;
"But it is also resolved that General Dumas be left at liberty to serve in this same army as general of division until a definite decree is received.
"At Bayonne, 2nd day of the 2nd month in the year II of the Republic, one and indivisible.
"Signed:
"J. B. B. MONESTIER (of Puy-de-Dôme), D'ARTIGOYTE, GARREAU, CAVAIGNAC, and PINET (senior.)"
My father had obtained the satisfaction he desired.
The Representatives of the People had declared that they had no complaint to make against him, and had withdrawn the clause in their decree that had enjoined him to leave Bayonne.
As to the sanction they granted him to serve as general of division, it may easily be guessed he meant to ignore it altogether.
So he installed himself and his staff in the square where lodgings had been taken for him in advance. Unluckily, all the executions took place in this square.
When the ghastly hours arrived, and all other windows were filled with spectators, my father closed his, pulled down the blinds and drew his curtains.
Soon a terrible commotion began under his closed windows—all the sans-culottes of the countryside gathered below and yelled:
"Hah! Monsieur de l'Humanité! Come to your windows! Show yourself!"
But in spite of these yells, which were of such a threatening character that my father and his aides-de-camp stood sword and pistols in hand, fearing, more than once, matters would develop into an attack, not one of the windows were opened, not one of the officers belonging to my father's general staff appeared at the balcony.
After this affair, the new general appointed by the Executive Powers was no longer addressed as citizen Alexandre Dumas, he was known only by a name sufficiently compromising at that time—especially among the people who had dubbed him with it—that of Monsieur de l'Humanité.
Dispute if you wish, gentlemen, my name of Davy de la Pailleterie; but what you cannot dispute is the fact that I am the son of a man who in face of the enemy was called Horatius Cocles, and before a scaffold Monsieur de l'Humanité.
[CHAPTER V]
My father is appointed General-in-Chief of the Army of the West—His report on the state of La Vendée—My father is sent to the Army of the Alps as General-in-Chief—State of the army—Capture of Mont Valaisan and of the Little Saint-Bernard—Capture of Mont Cenis—My father is recalled to render an account of his conduct—What he had done—He is acquitted.
It can be seen that such a state of things could not last: moreover, my father by his resistance risked his life in a far more dangerous game than that of the battlefield.
The Committee of Public Safety replied on the 10th of Frimaire in the following terms:—
"The Committee of Public Safety decrees:
"That the Provisional Executive Council shall immediately send 10,000 men of the Army of the Western Pyrenees into la Vendée to join the portion of the Army of the West which is acting against the rebels of that department and its neighbouring tracts on the left bank of the Loire. This division is to be under the command of General Dumas.
"The Executive Council is to take the most active steps to carry out these orders, and must forward its despatches by special courier.
"Signed in the Records:
"ROBESPIERRE, LINDET, RIVIÈRE, CARNOT, BILLAULD-VARENNES, and C. A. PRIEUR.
"Authenticated copy.
"J. BOUCHOTTE, Minister of War."
My father went to la Vendée.
There he found an entirely different state of things.
As soon as he arrived General Canclaux was recalled to Paris under suspicion.
Everything fell on my father's shoulders; and he received the chief command of the Army of the West.
He began his work by taking stock of the men at his disposal, as a good workman before setting to work examines the tools in his hands.
The tools were bad, according to my father's report. If we read it attentively in the light of to-day, if we take careful note of the time it was penned (17 Vendémiaire, year II), we shall see that there was sufficient matter in this report to have guillotined him twenty times over.
It was miraculous that he escaped.
Here is the report:—
"REPORT ON THE ARMY OF LA VENDÉE.
"WESTERN ARMY.
"GENERAL QUARTERS AT FONTENAY-LE-PEUPLE, 17th Vendémiaire, Year II of the Republic, one and indivisible.
"The Commander-in-Chief to the Committee of Public Safety.
"I have delayed my report on the state of the war and army at la Vendée, so that I might be able to make quite sure of my information from personal observation; otherwise it would have been but an echo of the various accounts which have been told me by persons who had each his own particular point of view. Now, on my return from my tour of inspection, it will be quite another matter; I shall speak of facts which have come to my personal knowledge, and of irregularities which I myself have witnessed.
"Well, to speak plainly, there is no part of the Army of the West, whether in its military or administrative departments, which does not need the hand of a martinet. The battalions have no sort of cohesion. The old muster-rolls are reduced to a hundred and fifty men.
"By that you can judge of the small number of recruits there has been, of the incapacity of its regiments, the efficient portions of which are paralysed by the inexperience of the majority, whilst the officers themselves are so undisciplined it is quite hopeless to expect them to train fresh men.
"But there are worse evils than these.
"The evil lies deeper, in the spirit of lawlessness and pillage that prevails through the whole army, a spirit fostered by lack of punishment and produced by long-standing habit. This spirit has been carried to such a pitch that I have ventured to say it is quite impossible to put it down, except by transferring these corps to other armies and in replacing them by troops that have been trained to subordination.
"To convince you of the truth of this it will be sufficient to tell you that the soldiers have threatened to shoot their officers for trying to stop pillage according to my orders. You may at first be amazed at such outrages; but you will cease to be surprised when you reflect that it is the necessary consequence of the system carried on till now during this war. When once an impulse to plunder and pillage has been indulged in, it is difficult to stop it at will, as you, citizen Representatives, know; la Vendée has been treated just like a town taken by assault: everything in it has been sacked, pillaged, burnt. The soldiers do not understand why they are forbidden to do to-day what they did yesterday. You will not find even among the general officers any means of recalling the rank and file to a love of justice and more decent behaviour. I do not doubt that there are some who have higher principles and desire to return to a better state of things. Some of these men served in this army when pillage was in practice; witnesses to the defeat of our arms, these men have lost, by their participation in these past defeats, the requisite authority to put a stop to the state of disorganisation I have pointed out; the remainder are lacking in intelligence, in firmness, in proper methods for reducing the troops to order and discipline. Therefore, after careful examination, I have found but few general officers capable of doing any good. Their influence is usually bad, and a deplorable spirit of pillage, of lawlessness, and of license reigns throughout the army. There is no spirit of activity, no supervision, no teaching. One night I walked right through the whole camp without being so much as observed, let alone recognised. Is there, then, any wonder at our recent defeats?
"And this, notwithstanding that military virtues are never more needed than in civil warfare. How can we fulfil your orders without such virtues? How are we to convince these country-people of your just dealings when justice is violated by your own troops? of your respect for persons and property when the men who are charged to proclaim that respect publicly pillage and murder unpunished? Your designs and their carrying out constantly contradict one another, and there can be no successful outcome unless this is all changed: to change the system we must change the men. It is above all urgently necessary to support precepts by example, as the inhabitants of these parts have so often been deceived by false hopes and broken promises.
"I shall, however, have expressed myself badly if you infer from my report that la Vendée is still a source of danger to the Republic and threatens her liberty.
"That is not my opinion at all, for I fully believe the war could be quickly ended if such measures as I propose were adopted. These are:
"1. A complete reorganisation of the army.
"2. A thorough change in the staff officers.
"3. A carefully sifted selection of officers intended for la Vendée. They should be able to maintain the strictest discipline and to stop the tendency to pillage, by their tried experience, their intelligence, and their integrity, and, finally, by their own steady and determined conduct.
"Citizen Representatives, must I speak out? So many difficulties confront me that I prefer to make this admission to you rather than fall short of your expectations. I should be proud to be able to end this disastrous war and to help to deliver the Republic at last from the perils with which it is threatened; but desire for glory does not make me blind to facts; the materials at my disposal are not adequate to satisfy your views, to reorganise the army, to make up for the inefficiency of the general officers, to restore the confidence of the inhabitants of the revolted provinces; in short, to rouse new life and infuse a better spirit all round.
"Whilst, therefore, matters remain in this condition it will be quite impossible for me to respond to your hopes and to assure you of a speedy termination to the war in la Vendée."
Could not the reader fancy he was studying the report of an old Roman warrior of the time of Regulus or of Cato the Elder, who had had to be sent into a revolted province as a result of the proconsulship of a Calpurnius Piso or a Verres?
This report was equivalent to a resignation, and, considering the spirit of the time, seemed pretty certain to lead to that end; but some good genius always seemed to protect my father; and, instead of forfeiting his head as the penalty for declaring such terrible truths, he was made commander-in-chief of the Army of the Alps on 2nd Nivôse, year II. He took up his new command on the 2nd of the following Pluviôse.
Let us here say a few words about the situation of the Alpine army at the time my father was appointed commander-in-chief.
In the first place, the defeats of Quiévrain and of Marchain and the taking of Longwy and the bombardment of Lille were such comparatively ancient history as to have been almost forgotten. At the end of a year France, who had been so near a foreign invasion, had carried war into the enemy's territory. Belgium was entirely conquered; our soldiers were examining the mountains of the Savoy which they were soon to scale; and our old enemy Austria was already threatened on the one hand by Germany and on the other by Italy.
Three fresh enemies, England, Spain and Holland, rose against us, in response to Francis's and Frederic William's cry of distress. The old Allies, who had placed the old monarchy within an ace of destruction at Fontenoy and at Rosbach, threatened the young Republic; but, as we have said, to the chant of la Marseillaise, a miracle was wrought, the whole of France rose simultaneously, and seven armies confronted their enemies on all sides.
When the Prussians had penetrated as far as la Champagne and the Austrians had invaded Flanders, the King of Sardinia made sure that France was lost; he did not hesitate to join the Coalition and to prepare his army for war. The Government, alarmed by these demonstrations, sent General Montesquiou South to prospect. He had not been there a month before, becoming convinced that France ought to reckon the King of Sardinia henceforth among her enemies, he sent the Government a plan for the invasion of Savoy. After untold difficulties, including even a temporary disgrace, General Montesquiou received orders to put his project into execution. He transported his camp to Abrelles, and ordered General Anselme, who was in command of the camp of Var, to make ready to invade the district of Nice towards the end of September, and to combine his forces with those of the fleet then under the command of Admiral Truguet at the port of Toulon.
As soon as the Piedmontese were aware of our preparations to invade, they hastened to make ready for our attack. Three forts had been built, one near Champareille, and the other two at Miaux. Montesquiou allowed these preparations to grow and intrenchments to be thrown up. Then, just when he knew the Piedmontese were about to mount guns in them, he sent Major-General Laroque with the 2nd battalion of light infantry and some grenadiers to take them by surprise. The Piedmontese, whose preparations for defence were not yet complete, made no attempt to resist the attack, and, abandoning the half-finished fortifications which they had raised with such labour, they fled without firing a single shot. The evacuation of the bridges, the marches from Bellegarde and Nôtre-Dame-de-Miaux and Apremont, were the result of this retreat. The French followed the Piedmontese a half-day's march behind. Montmeillan opened its gates.
Public opinion, checked until now by the Sardinian occupation, began to wake up. The French were welcomed on all sides as liberators. The Piedmontese fled to the sound of the cheering which greeted the tricoloured flag. Deputations from all the villages hurried up to General Montesquiou; his march was a triumphal procession; deputies came to him even to the château des Marches to bring him the keys of Chambéry, and the next day he entered the town with an escort of a hundred cavalry, eight companies of grenadiers and four pieces of cannon. There a grand banquet awaited him, his staff, and his soldiers, given by the Municipal Council.
Savoy was now incorporated into France under the name of the department of Mont-Blanc, a title retained until 1814. This first conquest was brought about without the firing of a single rifle—solely by the superiority of the tactics of the French general over those of his enemy.
In the meantime, General Anselme took possession of the district of Nice and added the department of the Alpes-Maritimes to France; the principality of Monaco soon followed.
But here the French invasion ended. Civil war began to rage at home. Jean Chouan had raised la Vendée by his nocturnal whisperings; the scaffold, ever ready in the squares of Revolutionary towns, claimed its ghastly toll; General Montesquiou was proscribed by the Convention, but succeeded in escaping to Switzerland, where he found refuge. Anselme was arrested and beheaded for the conquest of Nice. Biron took his place, and followed him to the scaffold. Finally Kellermann, whom my father was to succeed, took a turn as commander-in-chief in a post known to be under suspicion, and more dangerous than grapeshot; but Kellermann soon found himself between the Piedmontese army, eager to assume the offensive, and Lyon, which was in a state of revolt. He kept his eyes on Italy and France alternately, and divided his small army into two corps, leaving one under General Brunet's command, and leading the other up to the walls of Lyon himself.
Directly the Piedmontese discovered Kellermann's departure, they took advantage of the reduced numbers of the French troops, and fell upon them with 25,000 men. For eighteen days that handful of brave men fought incessantly, only falling back step by step, losing but a matter of twenty leagues of ground, and saving all their magazines.
However, General Brunet could not hold out much longer, and he notified his position to Kellermann. Kellermann immediately raised the siege of Lyon, and joined the army with a reinforcement of three thousand men, bringing up the total of his forces to eight thousand men. He placed three hundred of the National Guards in the second line, and with these trifling numbers he began the attack on 13th September 1793.
His plan of attack was most cleverly contrived, and was carried into execution with equal skill by his lieutenants and men. It was a complete success, and, from October 9th following, the enemy was chased from Faucigny, from Tarantaise, and from la Maurienne; the Piedmontese were driven from post to post till they reached St. Maurice, which they hoped to hold, since they had mounted there several pieces of cannon. The advance guard reached it at seven o'clock on the morning of October 4th; the cannonade lasted until ten o'clock, till the bulk of the army appeared on the scenes with its artillery. Whilst the French guns were silencing the enemy's battery, Kellermann ordered the 2nd battalion of light cavalry to outflank the Piedmontese. The eight hundred men who composed this battalion were accustomed to mountain warfare, and dashed over the boulders, leaped the precipices, climbed down the abysses and attacked the Piedmontese with such impetuosity that they could not withstand the onslaught, but fled in disorder, abandoning St. Maurice.
When Kellermann left this village he wrote to the Convention as follows:—
"Mont Blanc was invaded several days ago by a considerable number of the enemy, but to-day it is evacuated; the frontier from Nice to Geneva is open, and the retreat of the Piedmontese from la Tarantaise will necessitate their retiring from la Maurienne. The taking of Mont Blanc has cost the enemy two thousand men and a vast quantity of money."
Kellermann's reward was a warrant for his arrest and a summons to appear before the Convention.
It was to replace him whilst he went to give an account of his victories, that my father was called to the Army of the Alps.
His first care on arrival was to reconnoitre the enemy's lines and to re-establish the broken communications between the Army of the Alps and the Army in Italy; while busied over these preliminary operations he sent the Convention a plan of campaign which was adopted.
All this time my father was making friends with the boldest chamois-hunters; he made one or two excursions with them to show them that he was capable of making one of their party, and, when he had gained their confidence, or rather their devotion, by hunting with them among the snows, he converted his hunting comrades into guides.
One morning the general left his army in command of General Bagdelaune, took provisions to last several days, and set out with three of his faithful hunters.
He was absent five days; during these five days he examined all the passes by which it might be possible to reach the redoubt on Mont Cenis. This work was no easy task, for the passes could only be examined by night; and the least false step would have hurled a reckless scout into the precipices.
He returned on the fifth day.
Mont Cenis was the strategic point, the pivot on which all his plans had to turn; Mont Cenis, with its everlasting snows, its bottomless abysses, and its impracticable paths, was reckoned impregnable.
As he re-entered the camp my father remarked:
"In a month Mont Cenis will be ours."
It should be pointed out that the men who had to second him in this enterprise were used to mountain warfare; they stuck at nothing short of the impossible; now they were about to overcome the impossible: the soldiers would have to pass where no mountaineer had ever passed, paths whose snows the foot of man had never trodden, where only the hoofs of chamois or the eagle's talons had pressed.
My father had three thousand iron crampons (frost-nails) made for distribution among his soldiers, and they were bidden to practise the use of these in crossing the most difficult places.
Spring came, and with it the possibility of action; but the Piedmontese too had been busy, and were preparing to give their enemies a warm reception. Mont Cenis, the Valaisan, and the Little St. Bernard bristled with guns. My father decided he must begin by seizing St. Bernard and the Valaisan. The enemy he wanted to get at were bivouacking among the clouds. It was a war with Titans: and the heavens had to be climbed.
On the evening of April 24th General Bagdelaune received instructions to scale the Little St. Bernard and to be ready by daybreak to attack it.
My father reserved Mont Valaisan to himself.
General Bagdelaune set out at nine at night; he marched for six hours in the region of precipices without the least sign of paths, trusting in guides who themselves several times got confused in the darkness and misled our soldiers. At last, at break of day, they reached the redoubt, and attacked it with that courage and fury of which his men had so many times before given proof; but the redoubt was a hard nut to crack. The mountain seemed like a flaming volcano; three times Bagdelaune rallied his men to the attack and three times they were driven back. Suddenly the muzzles of the cannon of an outlying fort, which my father had just stormed, were turned on them; a hail of bullets overwhelmed the defenders of St. Bernard; my father had been the first to succeed in his enterprise, he had turned the Piedmontese cannon against themselves. Mont Valaisan, which should have protected St. Bernard, now destroyed it. The French, seeing the help that had so unexpectedly come to them, made a fourth dash. The Piedmontese, intimidated by this effectual diversion, did not even attempt to offer resistance, but fled on all sides; General Bagdelaune sent two battalions of new recruits from the Côte d'Or with the 2nd battalion of light infantry in pursuit of them; for three leagues the Piedmontese were followed and hunted down like chamois in bloody tracks; twenty pieces of cannon, six howitzers, thirteen pieces of mountain artillery, two hundred muskets, and two hundred prisoners were the trophies from this twofold victory.
But there was still Mont Cenis to take.
The possession of this last redoubt would complete the effective occupation of the whole of the Savoy, and to gain it the commander-in-chief of the Army of the Alps concentrated all his attention. The Piedmontese would thus be cut off from all means of pouring down the defiles into this duchy at their own sweet will, and they would be compelled to camp in the plains of Piedmont.
Several attempts had been already made and proved abortive; in one of these attempts, tried in the month of February, General Sarret had lost his life. His foot slipped, and he fell to the bottom of a precipice, where his body was buried beneath the snows.
This accident had suggested to my father the precaution of having crampons made for himself and his men.
Mont Cenis was only assailable from three sides; the fourth was so well defended by Nature that the Piedmontese simply protected it by a stockade.
To get up from this side meant a climb from the very bottom of a precipice.
My father made a pretence of attacking the other three sides; then, on the 19th Floréal (8th of May), he set out at night with three hundred men.
He had to turn the mountain, climb the inaccessible rock-side, and give the signal for attack to the other corps by his own attack.
Before beginning the ascent my father showed his men the rock they had to climb.
"Understand beforehand," he said, "that any man who slips is a dead man, for nothing can save him if he falls from such a height. It will therefore be useless to call for help; his cry will not save him, and may imperil the enterprise by giving the alarm."
Three men fell; their bodies were heard bounding from rock to rock; but no cry, not a groan, not a murmur, escaped them.
The climbers reached the plateau. Although it was a dark night, the long line of soldiers, clothed in blue uniforms, could have been perceived outlined against the snow from the fort. But my father had foreseen this contingency; each man had a cotton cap and a shirt rolled up in his knapsack.
This was the ordinary dress my father adopted at night when he hunted chamois.
They reached the foot of the palisade without having roused a single challenge. The men began climbing the palisades as soon as they reached them; but thanks to my father's herculean strength he thought of a better and quieter way—namely, to take each man by the seat of his trousers and the collar of his coat and throw him over the palisades. The snow would break the fall, and also deaden the noise. Surprised out of their sleep, and seeing the French soldiers in their midst without knowing how they had come there, the Piedmontese hardly offered any resistance.
So just a month to the day, after it had been predicted, Mont Cenis became ours!
Whilst my father was taking Mont Cenis, another column of the Army of the Alps crossed the pass of Argentière, near Barcelonnette, seized the post at the Barricades, invaded the valley of la Hure, and thereby put the Army of the Alps in close connection with the Army of Italy, the extreme left arm of which had advanced as far as the little village of Isola, near San-Dalmatio-Salvatico.
My father had just reached the stage at which the commanding generals of the Army of the Alps were recalled to be guillotined.
He expected this reward, and he was not therefore surprised to receive this communication:—
6th Messidor, Year II.
"CITIZEN GENERAL,—You are commanded to leave the Army of the Alps instantly and to present yourself in Paris, to answer the accusations which are being made against you."
"COLLOT D'HERBOIS."
The accusations, or rather the accusation, which my father had to answer was this:
My father had entered the little village of St. Maurice in mid-winter.
The first thing he saw in the open square of the village was a guillotine ready prepared for an execution.
He was informed that four wretched men were going to be executed for trying to steal and smelt down the church clock.
The crime did not seem to my father deserving of the penalty of death, and he turned to Captain Dermoncourt—the same who was soon to become his aide-de-camp:—
"Dermoncourt," he said to him, "it is horribly cold, as you can see and feel for yourself; we may not find any wood where we are going, let that devilish red-coloured machine you see there be pulled down and taken away to make firewood for us."
Dermoncourt, accustomed to implicit obedience, obeyed implicitly.
This proceeding, put into execution with truly military rapidity, very much embarrassed the executioner, who had four men to guillotine and no longer a guillotine to do it with.
My father, perceiving the poor man's dilemma, took pity on him, relieved him of his four prisoners, gave him a quittance for them, and let them go, with the advice to flee to the mountains as fast as their legs could carry them.
It need hardly be said that the prisoners did not wait for a second bidding.
By nothing short of a miracle my father escaped paying for the four heads he had saved by his own; but, thanks to his conquest of the St. Bernard, of Valaisan, and of Mont Cenis, he was pardoned for this insult to patriotism.
But the nickname of "M. de l'Humanité" was now more applicable than ever, and was more often than ever applied to him.
I have already said how lucky my father was.
[CHAPTER VI]
The result of a sword-stroke across the head—St. Georges and the remounts—The quarrel he sought with my father—My father is transferred to the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse—He hands in his resignation and returns to Villers-Cotterets—A retrospect over what had happened at home and abroad during the four years that had just elapsed.
My father was glad enough to find himself once more in Paris, as soon as he saw they were not going to guillotine him. He had been troubled for long by a wen on his forehead, which had caused him great pain. This wen had grown upon the old sword-cut he had received in one of those three army duels he fought to sustain the pre-eminence of the queen over the king. The wen was found to have adhered to his skull, and its removal meant a rather critical operation.
The operation was very successfully performed by M. Pelletan.
On the 15th of Thermidor this year, an order from the Committee of Public Safety appointed my father as commandant of the military school established at the camp of Sablons.
This appointment did not last long.
On the 18th Thermidor, three days, that is, after this appointment, he was ordered to join the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse.
But before quitting Paris my father had an account to settle with his old colonel, St. Georges.
We mentioned previously that instead of joining his regiment St. Georges had found it more convenient to settle at Lille, where he induced the Government to place him in charge of a remount depot; in addition to this, by virtue of the powers which regimental heads arrogated to themselves at this period, he requisitioned an immense number of pleasure-horses, in which he traded.
The price these horses fetched was estimated at upwards of a million francs.
Although people were not very strict in those days at this kind of peccadillo, St. Georges went to such lengths that he was summoned to Paris to show his accounts. As St. Georges' books were very badly kept, he hit on the idea of throwing the blame upon my father, by saying it was Lieutenant-Colonel Dumas who had had charge of the regimental remounts.
The minister of war therefore wrote to my father, who immediately proved that he had never ordered a single requisition, nor bought nor sold a single horse.
The reply of the minister entirely exculpated my father from blame. But this did not lessen his grudge against St. Georges, and as his wen caused him horrible suffering and kept him in a perpetual state of irritability of temper, he positively swore he would fight a duel with his old colonel.
Brave though St. Georges was with pistol or sword in hand, he much preferred to choose his own duels. Fortunately or unfortunately, this one was noised abroad. My father called three times at St. Georges' house without finding him at home; he called again another three times, each time leaving his card. At length he wrote such a pressing threat in pencil on the last of these cards, that, the day but one after he had undergone his operation, my father, who was in bed and nursed by Dermoncourt (the captain who had turned the guillotine of St. Maurice into faggots), received a visit from St. Georges, who, on being told that the invalid was ill in bed, was about to leave his card and withdraw, when Dermoncourt, who had heard a great deal about him, seeing a magnificent specimen of a mulatto, who stuttered in his talk, recognised St. Georges, and ran after him.
"Ah! M. de St. Georges," he exclaimed, "is it you? Do not go away, I beseech you; for, ill though he is, the general is quite capable of running after you, so anxious is he to see you."
St. Georges at once made up his mind what part to play.
"Oh! dear good Dumas!" he cried. "I know how very much he longs to see me; and I him. We were always such great friends. Where is he? where is he?"
And darting into the room he flung himself upon the bed, clasped my father in his arms and hugged him almost to suffocation.
My father endeavoured to speak, but St. Georges did not give him time.
"Ah!—and you wanted then to kill me, Dumas?" he said. "To kill me—me? To kill St. Georges? Is it possible? Why, you are my own son! Were St. Georges dead, no other man but you could replace him. Be quick and get up! Order me a cutlet, and let there be an end to all this nonsense."
At first my father was strongly inclined to pursue the quarrel to the bitter end; but what could you say to a man who threw himself on your bed, embraced you, called you his son, and invited himself to lunch?
My father held out his hand and said:
"Ah! you ruffian, you may well be pleased to call me your successor instead of being the successor of the former minister of war; for I promise you I would have hung you!"
"Oh! but surely you would have guillotined me," said St. Georges, laughing at the wrong side of his mouth.
"Not a bit of it, not a bit of it! Only honest folk are guillotined nowadays; thieves are hung."
"Now tell me frankly what were your intentions in coming to see me?" said St. Georges.
"First of all to find you."
"Certainly, but what next?"
"Next?"
"Yes."
"I should have gone into the room I was told you were in, I should have shut the door behind me, I should have put the key in my pocket, and whichever of us two remained alive at the end of five minutes would have had to open it."
"In that case," replied St. Georges, "you see I was very wise not to be found at home."
But as at that moment the door opened to announce that lunch was ready, the discussion ended and the meal began.
With that rapidity of movement with which the Convention manoeuvred its generals at this period, my father was changed from the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse to the chief command on the coast of Brest; but he had grown disgusted with these factitious moves, and, sixteen days after his appointment, he sent in his resignation, and retired to Villers-Cotterets, to be with my mother, who, a year or two before, had given birth to my eldest sister.
Many things had happened since the 28th November 1792, when Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas-Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie had married Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Labouret.
In the first place, to look abroad, a speedy vengeance had succeeded the defeats of Marchain and the taking of Longwy and of Verdun, in the victories of Valmy and of Jemappes. Charleroy had been occupied by General Montesquiou, and Nice by General Anselme. The siege of Lille was raised; and Mayence was taken by General Custine. Our troops had entered Frankfort-on-the-Maine. Brussels had been occupied by General Dumouriez, and Savoy restored to France. The citadel of Anvers had been taken by General Labourdonnaye, Namur by General Valence. England, Holland and Spain had declared war. Breda and Gertruydenberg had been taken by Arçon. The First Coalition against France was formed, comprising Prussia, Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Holland, Spain, Portugal, the two Sicilies, the Papal States, and the King of Sardinia. The battle of Nerwinde had been lost, which led to the emigration of Dumouriez and of the duc de Chartres. Porentruy was restored to France. The English took Tobago from us. Spain invaded le Roussillon. Lyons rose in arms. Negroes massacred the whites at St. Domingo. Mayence surrendered to the Prussians, Valenciennes to the Austrians, and Pondichéry to the English. Toulon was handed over. Le Quesnoy capitulated. But Jourdan blockaded Maubeuge, Toulon was retaken, and Bonaparte appeared on the scenes.
The year 1794 opened under brighter auspices. Jourdan, Marceau, Lefebvre, Championnet, and Kléber won the battle of Fleurus. Ypres was re-captured by Moreau. A second battle of Fleurus opened up Belgium once more to the French armies. The taking of Ostende and of Tournay by General Pichegru, and the occupation of Mons by General Ferrand, had freed our frontiers and made way for the besieging of Condé, Valenciennes, le Quesnoy, and Landrecies, which were taken—Condé on June 15th, Valenciennes on the 28th July, le Quesnoy the 11th of September 1793, and Landrecies the 30th April 1794. Finally we re-entered Ghent, Brussels, Landrecies, Nieuport, Anvers, Liège, Fontarabia, St. Sébastien, Valenciennes, Condé, and Aix-la-Chapelle. We invaded Roncevaux, that valley of poetical associations. We took by force Andernach, Coblentz, Venloo, Maestricht, Nimègue, Figuières. We gained the battle of Escola, which lasted five days, from the 15th to the 20th October 1794, and in which the two generals commanding were killed; Dugoummier on the 18th; and la Union on the 20th. We took possession of Amsterdam, and the Stadtholder fled to London. We took the Dutch fleet (which was blocked up in the ice of the Texel) with a charge of cavalry. Berg-op-Zoom surrendered to Pichegru. Ross was taken after a seventy days' siege. Holland was conquered; and finally a treaty was concluded between Tuscany and France; which openly recognised the French Republic as a part of the political system of Europe.
Prussia imitated Tuscany's example, and concluded a treaty of peace with France at Bâle. It was signed by baron de Hardenberg and François Barthélemy, nephew of the author of the Voyages du jeune Anacharsis. By April 5th, 1795, the two Powers had nothing further to restore to each other.
A third treaty of peace was signed on May 16th between France and the United Netherlands. The United Netherlands ceded the whole of the Batavian provinces along the left bank of the eastern Escaut, and on both banks of the Meuse to the south of Venloo.
The United Netherlands paid France 100,000,000 florins sterling, Dutch currency, to indemnify the cost of the war.
Finally, on July 22nd, Spain in her turn treated for peace with France; France surrendered to Spain her conquests in Biscay and in Catalonia. Spain ceded to France the portion of St. Domingo which she possessed.
Such was our position with regard to Europe towards the middle of the year 1795.
Now a word about our home politics.
On all sides were signs of arrest and change.
The old world was tottering and dragging down into the débris with it the very people who had undermined it. A new world was springing into being.
The age of Louis XV. was at an end. The age of Napoleon was beginning.
The great event which occupied the mind of France was the trial of Louis XVI. on the 28th November 1792.
On the 7th November the Convention had decreed, upon the report of the Mailhe (Deputy of the Haute-Garonne) that Louis XVI. could be tried and that the Convention should try him. The same day Robespierre demanded that the king should without further delay be pronounced a traitor to his country, a criminal towards humanity, and that he should be sentenced to death to set a good example to the world.
On December 4th it was decreed that whoever should attempt to reinstate royalty in France, or any other power which might assail the supremacy of the people, should suffer the penalty of death.
On December 6th a decree was issued nominating a Commission of twenty-one members, with instructions to accelerate the examination and trial of Louis XVI.
On December 11, Louis XVI. appeared before the Convention.
On the 25th he made his will.
On the 15th January the nominal appeal turned upon these two queries:
1. Was Louis guilty of conspiracy against liberty and of an attempt against the safety of the State?—YES or NO.
Out of 719 members present, 683 voted in the affirmative.
2. Should the sentence to be passed upon Louis be submitted to the sanction of the people in their primary assemblies?—YES or NO.
Out of 749 members present, 424 refused an appeal to the people.
A third question was put; vital, supreme, final.—What penalty had Louis incurred?
Three hundred and eighty-seven votes out of seven hundred and thirteen replied: The penalty of death.
Finally they proceeded to promulgate a fourth nominal appeal, couched in these terms:
Should the execution of the sentence on Louis Capet be reprieved?—YES or NO.
Three hundred and eighty votes were against reprieve.
Three hundred and ten for it.
There could not then be any reprieve.
On January 20th the sentence was declared to Louis XVI.
On the 21st January at ten o'clock Louis XVI. was executed.
The Convention created ten armies to meet the outburst of indignation that rose throughout the whole of Europe: the Army of the North and of the Ardennes, commanded by General Custine; the Army of the Moselle, commanded by Houchard; the Army of the Rhine, commanded by Alexandre Beauharnais; the Army of the Alps, commanded by Kellermann; the Army of Italy, commanded by Brunet; the Army of the Eastern Pyrenees, commanded by Defiers; the Army of the Western Pyrenees, commanded by Dubousquet; the Army of the Coastline of Rochelle, commanded by General Canclaux; the Army of the Shores of the Channel, commanded by Félix Wimpfen; the Army of the West, commanded by Westermann.
At the same time, Representatives of the People were appointed in connection with each army, selected by the Convention, and invested with absolute powers.
Three of the generals we have just named died on the scaffold: Custine, Houchard, and Alexandre Beauharnais.
The Girondists, who had voted with the Jacobins at the king's trial, now split off from them.
On the 18th April a Commission was formed to restrain the Terrorist party.
This Commission was elected on the 18th, dissolved on the 27th, re-established on the 28th, and definitely suppressed on the 31st.
The result was to bring about a total separation between the two parties.
On the 31rst of May the Girondists were proscribed.
On the 13th June Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat.
On August 1st, Marie-Antoinette was accused by the Revolutionary Tribunal.
On the 5th August an itinerary Revolutionist army was created to survey the departments, bearing the guillotine and artillery with them.
On September the 3rd the trial of Marie-Antoinette began.
On the 5th the decree which abolished the Christian Calendar and dated the beginning of the French Era from the 22nd September 1792 was issued.
On the 12th, Marie-Antoinette underwent her first examination.
On the 16th, Marie-Antoinette was condemned to death.
At eleven o'clock the same morning she ascended the scaffold.
On the 31st October the execution of the Girondists followed.
On the 6th November it was Philippe-Égalité's turn.
On the 11th, Bailly's.
On the 1st December the prisoners were reckoned up: they numbered 4130 in the various prisons of Paris.
On March 1st, 1794, there were 6000.
On April 27, 7200.
On April 5th, Danton, Charbot, Bazire, Lacroix, Camille Desmoulins, Hérault de Séchelles, and Fabre d'Églantine were guillotined.
Robespierre ruled without opposition as master of France, aided by Barère, Merlin de Douai, Saint-Just, Couthon, Collot d'Herbois, Fouché de Nantes, Vadier, and Carnot.
On the 16th the following decrees were issued:—
1. That all individuals warned of conspiracy, or who are under suspicion, shall be conducted to the Revolutionary Tribunal at Paris from any part of the Republic.
2. That all so-called nobles and foreigners shall leave the frontier and sea-board towns within ten days under penalty of death.
On the 22nd they guillotined Malesherbes, who defended Louis XVI. They made the martyrdom and holocaust complete by conducting to the scaffold at the same time his daughter, his sister, his son-in-law, his granddaughter and her husband.
The number of prisoners grew and grew. On the 1st May they mounted to 8000.
On the 8th, Lavoisier was executed; and twenty-seven other tax-collectors, whose names are now forgotten, were executed with him.
On the 10th, Princess Élisabeth ascended the scaffold; and, as her neckerchief was pushed aside, she exclaimed to the executioner:
"In the name of modesty, monsieur, cover up my bosom."
She died as she had lived, a Christian, a saint, a martyr.
On the 8th June, Robespierre celebrated the Feast of Supreme Reason. He was the high priest of the new religion. Standing on a platform raised against the walls of the Tuileries, and surrounded by his disciples, he made a speech in which he condescended to recognise the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul; after which he set fire to two mannikins representing Atheism and Fanaticism.
Still the prisoners went on increasing. 11,400 were incarcerated in Paris prisons.
There were thirty-two prisons in Paris—twenty-seven more than in the time of the Bastille.
A 2nd and 3rd of September was expected.
A 9th and 10th of Thermidor arrived, and it was high time. At Bicêtre the experiment of a guillotine with nine blades was tried. The former machine, it seemed, could not work fast enough. By the 25th, 26th, and 27th July they had only managed to execute some 135 persons in all by means of the guillotines between the Place de la Révolution and that of the faubourg St. Antoine.
The Thermidorians next reigned; their rule was milder, but it nevertheless had its special events.
On the 26th July the two Robespierres were executed, with Couthon, St. Just, Lebas, Henriot, and seventeen other Jacobins.
On August 10th a decree lessened the power of the Revolutionary Tribunal, which the nation did not yet dare to abolish altogether.
It issued regulations more favourable to the accused: they were now allowed to have legal counsel to defend their cases. True, the queen had been allowed two; but they had received orders not to defend her.
Executions no longer occurred daily, and each execution accounted for only a small number of victims.
In former times, when they guillotined the condemned in batches of twenty-five and thirty, the blades grew blunt by the time the last person's turn arrived. They had to fall two or three times before they finished their task; this method spilt such a quantity of blood that it set up an epidemic in the faubourg St. Antoine, caused by the smell of the blood. In the Place de la Révolution the blood flowed into a ditch which was dug round the scaffold. A child fell into this ditch and was drowned.
After the Revolutionary Tribune came the Committee of Public Safety. Here cause followed effect instead of preceding it. The Committee of Public Safety indeed! A name of terrible omen. The Committee of Public Safety might, indeed, have saved France; but you will remember the saying of Pyrrhus after the battle of Siris:
"Another victory like that, and we are lost."
Another Committee of Public Safety, and there would be no France left.
On August 24th a decree was made to limit its prerogatives. Barère, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois, and Carnot were turned out of this formidable institution; Barère after having sat there seventeen months, and Carnot fourteen.
On October 8th seventy-three of the proscribed deputies re-entered the Convention. They were proscribed after the 31st of May; they returned to office after the 9th Thermidor. Chief among these were Lanjuinais, who sat last on 31st May; Boissy-d'Anglas, who saluted the head of Féraud on 1st Prairial, Daunou and Henri la Rivière.
On the 16th, Carrier was accused by a majority of 418 votes out of 500, and condemned to death.
On the 2nd February 1795, Barère, Billaud-Varennes, Collot d'Herbois and Vadier were impeached, and on the 1st April they were sentenced to banishment.
Barère took refuge in Belgium, returned to France in 1830, and died in the bosom of his family.
Billaud-Varennes was transported to Cayenne with Collot d'Herbois, but managed to escape to Mexico, where he entered a monastery of Dominicans, under the name of Polycarpe Vareñas. He fought on the side of the settlers against the mother country, twice narrowly escaped being shot, and died at Haiti in 1820.
Collot d'Herbois, an indifferent comedian and poet, nearly always half drunk, mistook a bottle of nitric acid for brandy, and died in horrible agony at Cayenne in 1796.
And last on the list, Vadier disappeared completely, and was never afterwards heard of.
On May 3rd a decree restored confiscated goods to the families of all those who were condemned for any reason whatsoever save emigration.
Two families were excepted from the operation of this beneficial law, those of Louis XVI. and Robespierre.
What a strange turn of fortune's wheel it was which subjected these two names to the same punishment!
Lanjuinais and Boissy-d'Anglas marked their return to the Assembly by this decree.
On the 6th, Fouquier Tinville and fifteen judges or members of the ancient Revolutionary Tribune were executed en Grève in Paris. Do you understand the significance of that term en Grève? Public order was now restored, for had not the scaffold itself resumed its place?
Notwithstanding all that had happened, means for defending France, as we have seen, had sprung up on all sides as if by miracle. France, which scarcely had an army in 1789, had had six in 1792, ten in 1793, and fourteen in 1795.
On the 3rd October 1793, Carnot drew up a report for the Convention, wherein he advocated the setting up of workshops, and suggested that measures should be taken to facilitate as rapidly as possible the formation of divers and formidable means of defence against the enemy.
Science, in fact, placed herself at the disposition of the Committee of Public Safety; she took her part in the Revolution in busying herself about the provision of special methods of defence. She was confronted with almost insoluble problems, and she succeeded in solving them.
France was short of gunpowder, of guns, and of cannons. In nine months the scientific Commission had extracted soil out of France which yielded 900,000 pounds of gunpowder per annum—12,000,000 pounds of gunpowder.
Before the French Revolution there were but two foundries for making pieces of bronze ordnance and four for making iron gunnery; these six foundries turned out 900 cannon annually.
Fifteen foundries were built to turn out bronze cannon, and thirty for iron ones.
The former produced 7000 cannon per annum, and the latter 13,000. An enormous firearms factory had even been improvised at Paris, which made 140,000 muskets per annum, that is to say, more than all the other factories together were capable of turning out previous to the Revolution. There was only one manufactory for side arms before the war.
Twenty factories were now opened and directed their attention to fresh processes.
A manufactory of rifles was founded and set to work; these arms were unknown in France; air-balloons and the telegraph became organs of war.
And, thanks to a new process, hides, which ordinarily took several years to be cured, were made fit for use in a week.
Thus, whilst the Convention was evolving its fourteen armies, science was providing the material for their use; and the members of the Committee of Public Safety boasted loudly.
"These fresh triumphs, and all those which signalised the immortal campaign of 1794, belong to us. They are the outcomes of measures for which we have been reproached as though they were crimes, it is with these successes we pay back to you all the blood we have shed."
These terrible words, so profoundly true, were not uttered by an Attila nor a Genseric, but were pronounced by Carnot.
Yes, you terrible heroes of the Convention, you have wielded the hammer of God and made the sword which was to deliver the world!
What a dark and melancholy creed you formidable Titans reared; you who from 1793 to 1795 piled up June upon August, September on January, Prairial on Thermidor, and who, from the height of the ruins of the monarchical Olympus which you scaled, have confounded all Europe!
[CHAPTER VII]
My father at Villers-Cotterets—He is called to Paris to carry out the 13th Vendémiaire—Bonaparte takes his place—He arrives the next day—Buonaparte's attestation—My father is sent into the district of Bouillon—He goes to the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and to the Army of the Rhine, and is appointed Commandant at Landau—He returns as Divisional General in the Army of the Alps, of which he had been Commander-in-Chief—English blood and honour—Bonaparte's plan—Bonaparte appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy—The campaign of 1796.
Such are the events which took place in the period which elapsed between my father's marriage and his return to Villers-Cotterets, after his resignation as commander-in-chief of the Army of the coast near Brest.
He was very happy, very comfortable, and hoped to be left in peaceful oblivion by the side of his young wife, when, on the morning of the 14th Vendémiaire, he received this letter:—
"PARIS, 13 Vendémiaire of the Year IV of the French Republic, one and indivisible.
"The Representatives of the People in charge of the Army of Paris and of the Army of the Interior
"Order General Dumas to present himself at once at Paris to receive instructions from the Government.
"J. J. B. DELMAS,
"LAPORTE."
What, then, had happened in Paris?
We must explain.
The 13th Vendémiaire had taken place. Bonaparte had fired grapeshot on the rebels on the steps of the church of Saint-Roch.
The Convention had settled on my father to defend it, my father was not in Paris. Barras proposed Bonaparte, and Bonaparte was accepted.
That momentous hour that comes, so people say, once at least in the life of every man, and decides his future, had struck inauspiciously for him.
My father accepted the position instantly, but he did not arrive till the 14th. He found the rebels conquered, and Bonaparte general of the Army of the Interior.
This is the certificate that was given my father; we have copied this precious document from the original.
"LIBERTY—JUSTICE—EQUALITY.
"We, general officers and others, certify and attest that citizen Alexandre Dumas, general in the army, arrived in Paris on the 14th of Vendémiaire, and that he immediately joined his brothers-in-arms in defence of the National Convention against the attack of the rebels; who have this day laid down their arms.
"PARIS, 14th Brumaire, Year IV of the French Republic.
"Signed:
J. J. B. DELMAS; LAPORTE; GASTON; BERNARD, Aide-de-Camp; HUCHÉ, General of Division; TH. ARTEL, Captain Adjutant—General; BERTIN, Brigadier-General; PAREIN, General of Division; ROINAY, Commissaire-Ordonnateur.
Then, at the bottom of all these signatures, in his illegible writing, every letter of which was like a Gordian knot, the man who was going to weld the Revolution by bloodshed wrote these three lines:—
"Certified correct.
"BUONAPARTE, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of the Interior."
He dropped the u which Italianised his name three months later, and then signed himself Bonaparte.
It was doubtless during these three months that he had his Macbeth-like apparition, when the three witches addressed him, "Hail! thou shalt become commander-in-chief; Hail! thou shalt become First Consul; Hail! thou shalt become Emperor."
The Convention which Bonaparte saved, ended its three years' session on the 26th October (1792), by a decree of amnesty for all the Revolutionary misdemeanants who had not been concerned in theft or assassination.
Then, when it had delivered 8370 decrees, it dissolved or rather reorganised itself, to reappear under the triple form of Council of Elders, Council of Five Hundred, and the Directory.
The five directors were: La Reveillère-Lepaux, Letourneur de la Manche, Rewbell, Barras, and Carnot.
They were, every one of them, members of the Convention.
Each of them had voted for the death of the king.
These Revolutionist appointments caused a rising in the district of Bouillon. On the 23rd Brumaire, year IV, my father was again in active service, and was sent to repress this insurrection—an end he accomplished without the shedding of blood.
From Bouillon my father rejoined the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse and the Army of the Rhine. He was made commandant at Landau, on the 21st Nivôse, year IV, returned to Villers-Cotterets on furlough in the month of Ventôse, and finally, on the 7th Messidor, he returned to the Army of the Alps as general of division. This army, of which he had formerly been commander-in-chief, was intended to guard the frontier and to keep a watch on Piedmont, with which we were at peace.
My father at first wanted to decline the post. In times of war he was always ready, even to act a common soldier's part; but in times of peace he was not in his element.
"Nevertheless, accept it, General," Dermoncourt advised him. "You will be close to Italy. From Chambéry to Suze there is only Mont Cenis to cross."
"In that case," replied my father, "I had better take it."
And he went.
At this time, as we have said, war had ceased between us and Spain, Prussia, Tuscany, Piedmont, and Holland; we were only at war with our two eternal enemies, Austria and England.
On the 17th November 1795, the English, who were vainly expected at Quiberon, evacuated l'Ile Dieu. Sombreuil and twelve hundred French emigrants were condemned to military executions. The rattle of this fusillade echoed as far as London, where Pitt exclaimed: "At least no English blood has been spilled."
"No," retorted Sheridan, "but English honour oozed out at every pore."
We continued warfare with Austria in the north and south simultaneously. Masséna won the battle of Loano in the south, and Bernadotte gained one in the north, at Crutznach.
Nevertheless, nothing seemed to be gained by these victories. Using Barras as an intermediary, Napoleon submitted a gigantic plan to the Directory, which was carried.
The war of la Vendée was tending towards its conclusion, and Hoche had shot Stofflet and Charette. France, therefore, freed from her internal strife and completely settled within her own borders, was now able to concentrate all her energies upon Germany and Italy.
This was the plan laid before the Directory.
When la Vendée was quelled, the forces were immediately to assume the offensive. Our armies of the Rhine were to blockade and besiege Mayence, to subjugate the princes of the empire one after another, to transfer the theatre of war into the Hereditary States, and to establish themselves in the noble valleys of the Mein and Necker.
From this time forward the armies would not cost France anything, the war would defray the expenses of the war.
As for Italy, a great victory was needed to force the King of Piedmont to make peace, or to compel him to give up his kingdom. This end achieved, the kingdom of Piedmont wiped off the map of Italy and joined to France under the title of the department of the Po, they would cross the river, skirt Pavia, wrest Milan from Austria, then break through into Lombardy, and penetrate up to the very gates of Vienna by way of the Tyrol and Venice.
As in the case of Germany (and certainly as well able to do it as Germany), Italy would feed our armies.
In consequence of this scheme, and in order to put it into execution, Hoche was to unite under his command the three armies of the coasts of Cherbourg, the shores of Brest, and of the West, a hundred thousand men all told, to achieve the pacification of la Vendée.
Jourdan was to keep the command of the Army of Sambre-et-Meuse.
Moreau was to replace Pichegru on the Rhine.
And Bonaparte was appointed commander-in-chief of the Army of Italy.
On the 21st March 1796, Bonaparte left Paris, taking with him in his carriage two thousand louis. It was all he had been able to get together, and it included his own fortune, the contributions of his friends, and the subsidies of the Directory.
Alexander took seven times more when he set out to conquer the Indies.
It should be stated that each louis d'or, in the time of Bonaparte, was worth seven thousand two hundred francs in assignats.
Why did Bonaparte prefer the 25,000 naked and famished soldiers of the coastline of Genoa to those grand armies of the Rhine, to those 80,000 well-armed, well-equipped men who had been put under the orders of Jourdan and Moreau, whose command could have been his, had he wished it? Because Italy is Italy—the country of wonderful memories; he chose rather the Éridan and the Tiber to the Rhine and the Meuse, the Milanese country to the Palatinate; he preferred to be a Hannibal rather than a Turenne or the Marshal of Saxony.
When he reached Nice, he found an army minus food, minus clothing, minus shoes, striving with great difficulty to keep to its posts, facing 60,000 Austrian troops and the most famous generals of the empire.
The day after his arrival Bonaparte distributed the sum of four louis to each general, in respect of his entry upon the scene; then, pointing to the plains of Italy, he said to the soldiers, "Comrades, you starve among these rocks! Cast your eyes over those fertile plains which spread out below your feet; they belong to you, take them."
Hannibal had made a similar remark nineteen hundred years before to his Numidian troops, as they crouched like sphinxes on the highest pinnacles of the Alps and gazed with eager eyes down into Italy; and during those nineteen hundred years there had only risen two men—Cæsar and Charlemagne—worthy to be compared with these two.
Bonaparte, as we have stated, had nearly 60,000 men against him: 22,000 were stationed at Céva, on the other side of the mountains, under Colli; Beaulieu, he of the boy's courage beneath his white hairs, had advanced with 38,000 upon Genoa by the passes of Lombardy.
Bonaparte moved his army to Albenga, and on the 11th April he made a dash against Beaulieu, near Voltri.
From this concussion flashed the spark which before eleven days had elapsed set fire to Italy; the young commander-in-chief beat his enemy five times—at Montenotte, at Millesimo, at Dego, at Vico, and at Mondovi. In eleven days the Austrians were cut off from the Piedmontese, Provera was taken, the King of Sardinia was forced to sign an armistice in his own capital, to surrender the three fortresses of Coni, Tortona, and Alexandria, and Bonaparte issued the following proclamation to his soldiers:—
"Soldiers, in fifteen days you have won six victories, taken twenty-one flags, fifty-five pieces of cannon, several fortified places, and have conquered the richest half of Piedmont. You have taken 15,000 prisoners, killed or wounded more than 10,000 men; your courage would have overcome the sterile rocks, had we not deemed the sacrifice useless to the country; your services, to-day, equal those of the armies of the Rhine and of Holland. Deprived of everything, you have managed without anything; you have won battles without cannons, crossed rivers without bridges, made forced marches without shoes on your feet, bivouacked without your allowance of spirits, often without bread; the phalanxes of the Republic and the soldiers of Liberty alone were capable of suffering what you have suffered. All thanks are due to you, soldiers! The country owes a debt of gratitude to you for her prosperity. Conquerors of Toulon if you foreshadowed the immortal campaign of 1793, your actual victories predict still finer things to come. The two armies which recently had the effrontery to attack you, fled before you in terror; wicked men, who mocked at your misery and rejoiced in their hearts at the thought of your enemies triumphing over you, have been put to shame, and they tremble before you. But, soldiers, whilst there still remains something not yet accomplished, your duties are not at an end. Neither Turin nor Milan are ours. The ashes of the conquerors of Tarquin are still being scattered by the assassins of Basseville! I have heard it whispered that there are those among you whose courage is ebbing, who would rather return across the Apennines and Alps. But I cannot believe it—no, the conquerors of Montenotte, of Millesimo, of Dego, and of Mondovi are burning to carry the glory of the French people still farther afield."
Bonaparte next advanced to Northern Italy, and, predicting his future successes by those of the past, he wrote to the Directory:—
"To-morrow I march upon Beaulieu. I shall compel him to recross the Po, I shall cross it forthwith, I shall take possession of the whole of Lombardy, and before a month is past I hope to be on the mountains of the Tyrol, there to join forces with the Army of the Rhine, and in conjunction with it to carry the war into Bavaria."
Beaulieu was, in fact, overtaken. He returned in vain to try to oppose the passage of the Po; the Po was crossed; so he returned to shelter behind the walls of Lodi. A battle, lasting three hours, chased him from his position; and he formed a line of battle along the left bank, defending with all his artillery the bridge he had not had time to destroy. The French army, drawn up in serried columns, dashed at the bridge, scattering all before it, dispersed the Austrians, and went on its way over what was left of the enemy's army. Pavia was the next to submit, Pizzighitone and Cremona fell, the castle of Milan opened its gates, the King of Sardinia definitely accepted peace; the dukes of Parma and of Modena followed his example, and Beaulieu only just managed to shut himself up in Mantua.
It was at this moment that news of Wurmser's advance reached him: he came with 60,000 men, 30,000 taken from the Army of the Rhine, 30,000 drawn from the interior of Austria.
These 60,000 men advanced through the Tyrol.
Let us now examine the state of the French army and of its adversaries.
The French army had entered Italy with a strength of 30,000 to 32,000 men, of which they had lost 2000; nearly 9000 men had joined from the Army of the Alps, 4000 or 5000 had been added from the military centres of Provence and the Var. The army therefore numbered 44,000 to 45,000 men—disposed about the Adige or grouped round Mantua.
In addition to these, two divisions could be reckoned on, drawn from the Army of the West, now that la Vendée was pacified. But these two divisions had yet to journey across France.
The Austrian army comprised from 10,000 to 12,000 men, not including the sick and wounded shut up in Mantua; 12,000 or 15,000 men, the remnants of the various battles fought since the commencement of the campaign and dispersed through Northern Italy, and 60,000 men headed by Wurmser.
The fame of this 60,000 men was spread abroad, and rumour boldly doubled its numbers. This time, so rumour had it, Bonaparte was not only going to encounter an army four times stronger than his own, but a general who was a match for him. Hannibal was to meet his Scipio; people repeated the old proverb, L'Italia fu e sarà sempre il sepolcro dei Francesi.
Italy had been, and always would be, the grave of the French.
That is what people said.
Wurmser then, as we have said, had 60,000 men; of these 60,000 men he had detached 20,000, whom he had given to Quasdanovitch, with orders to march by the road which runs along by the lake of Garda, by the tiny lake of Idra and, after crossing the Chiesa, comes out at Salo.
The remaining 40,000 he took with him, dividing them between the two roads which run by the Adige—one portion marched on Rivoli, the others were directed towards Verona.
In this way the French army, concentrated round Mantua, would be surrounded, attacked in front by Wurmser's army, attacked in the rear by Beaulieu's garrison and by the remaining scattered 10,000 men which were being rallied together.
The whole of this stratagem of Wurmser's was revealed to Bonaparte by its very execution.
Step by step he learnt:
That Quasdanovitch had attacked Salo and routed General Sauret, and that General Guyeux was left there isolated, in an ancient building into which he had withdrawn himself with a few hundred men;
That the Austrians had stormed Corona between the Adige and Lake Garda;
Finally, that they were in front of Verona.
On the morrow they were at Brescia. From all these points they would cross the Adige.
Whether doubtful of his chances, or whether on the contrary he wished to show the superiority of his genius, Bonaparte called together a council of his generals; all of whom advised a retreat. Augereau alone, the Parisian soldier, a son of the faubourg St. Antoine, declared that the rest might do what they liked, but that neither he nor his division would fall back a step.
Bonaparte knit his eyebrows, for from the first that had been his own intention; how did it happen that Augereau was of his opinion? Was it boldness or genius? He looked at his head, finely carved but depressed at the temples and enlarged at the back. It was simply and solely from temerity.
Bonaparte dismissed this council of war without openly deciding anything, but, when alone, his mind was made up.
Bonaparte's headquarters were at Castelnovo, almost at the end of the lake of Garda; he gathered as large an army round him as possible, raising the siege of Mantua; he abandoned the Lower Mincio and the Lower Adige, concentrating all his forces at Peschiera, to beat Quasdanovitch and Wurmser separately before they had accomplished their junction.
He began with Quasdanovitch, who was the nearest and weakest.
On the 21st Thermidor (July 31), while Serrurier was abandoning the siege of Mantua, burning his watch-towers, spiking his guns, burying his projectiles, and throwing his powder into the water, Bonaparte crossed the Mincio at Peschiera, and defeated Quasdanovitch at Lonato, whilst Augereau entered Brescia without striking a blow, and General Sauret, ascending as far as Salo, relieved Guyeux, who had been fighting for two days without bread or water, in his old building.
Quasdanovitch, who thought to surprise and beat us, was himself surprised and beaten; he stopped, dismayed, and decided not to engage in another battle until he knew what had become of Wurmser.
Bonaparte also pulled up: Wurmser was the real enemy to be wary of. Wurmser must be confronted: his rear-guard must become his van-guard, and vice versâ; it was high time to reverse the position.
Wurmser's generals had crossed not only the Adige, but also the Mincio, in order to effect their conjunction with Quasdanovitch at Peschiera: Bayalist advanced on the road to Lonato, and Lilpay drove General Varelle out of Castiglione; whilst Wurmser moved towards Mantua, which he believed was still blockaded, with his two divisions of infantry and two of cavalry.
When he reached General Serrurier's quarters, he found the watch-towers in ashes and the guns spiked.
Bonaparte was afraid, he had fled. To the Austrian general's mind the calculations of genius looked like fear.
But Bonaparte, whom Wurmser thought had flown, was engaged in cutting Bayalist's army in two at Lonato, forcing one portion upon Salo, which Junot pursued and scattered, himself pursuing the other, which he drove on Castiglione. The Austrian fugitives were caught between two fires, General Sauret being at Salo, and General Augereau at Castiglione.
They took 3000 prisoners at Salo and 1500 prisoners at Castiglione, they killed and wounded 3000 or 4000 men, they took twenty pieces of cannon, and Bayalist's fugitives were thrown amongst Quasdanovitch's.
Wurmser saw his mistake when he had scarcely got into Mantua: he rushed off with 15,000 men at the noise of the firing, managed to rally 10,000 of Bayalist's and Lilpay's forces, and drew up in line of battle.
Bonaparte accepted the challenge, but he needed all his troops; he galloped off to Lonato; in three days he personally inspected and organised everything; he rode five horses to death in those three days. He arrived at Lonato; a portion of the troops in that town were to advance on Salo and on Gavado to settle with Quasdanovitch; whatever troops besides were unengaged he took with him to Castiglione; he gave the command for the various troops to march forth, each to its destination; he remained at Lonato with 1000 men; he took a few moments' rest, and at night he intended to set out for Castiglione to fight a battle with Wurmser at break of day.
Bonaparte had just dismounted from his horse and sat down to table when news was brought to him to the effect that Lonato was surrounded by 4000 men, and that an Austrian bearer of a flag of truce was waiting to demand him to surrender.
With his 1000 men Bonaparte might manage to face 4000, and perhaps to conquer them. But he was urgently needed elsewhere, and he had resource to another method. He gave orders to the whole of his general staff to mount on horseback, caused the envoy to be brought in, and then ordered his eyes to be unbandaged.
The envoy, who little knew with whom he was dealing, was amazed to find himself before a general staff, when he expected but to find a few officers; nevertheless, he delivered his message.
"So, my poor fellow," Bonaparte said to him when he had finished, "you neither know who I am nor where you are? I am Bonaparte, commander-in-chief, and you and your 4000 men have fallen right into the midst of my army; go back to those who sent you and tell them I give them five minutes to surrender, and if they refuse I shall put every one of them to the sword, to punish them for the insult offered me."
A quarter of an hour later, the 4000 men had laid down their arms.
When night fell, Bonaparte was at Castiglione.
On the following day Wurmser was defeated, and left 2000 men on the field of battle, where our soldiers, worn out with fatigue, slept pell-mell among the dead.
In five days' time Bonaparte with 30,000 men had beaten 60,000; Wurmser had lost 20,000 men, killed, wounded, or taken prisoners. He had recaptured the Rivoli road between the Adige and the lake of Garda, which was the key to the Tyrol.
Bonaparte collected 28,000 men and dashed in pursuit of Wurmser, who, gaining Quasdanovitch's force, had still 40,000 men left; he won the battle of Roveredo, entered Trent, the capital of the Tyrol, left Vaubois to guard it and threw himself into the gorges of the Tyrol in pursuit of Wurmser; he chased 30,000 men before him with his 18,000, covering twenty leagues in two days, caught up Wurmser upon the banks of the Brenta, gave him battle at Bassano, took 4000 of his men prisoners, took all his war-material, drove him back upon the Adige, and left him and his remaining 14,000 men no other resource but to retire for shelter within the walls of Mantua, the blockade of which he had essayed to raise with 60,000 men.
This was the third Austrian army that Bonaparte had destroyed since he entered Italy.
Wurmser entered Mantua resolved to defend it to the last extremity, and, to add to his provender, he slew and salted his 7000 cavalry horses, converting the cavalrymen into foot-soldiers.
Then, infuriated at the way his men had been led, he condemned his officers as a punishment to parade the streets of Mantua for three months with distaffs in their hands instead of walking-sticks.
The officers obeyed this singular punishment without a murmur.
Bonaparte allowed Serrurier to blockade Mantua, and, turning back to Milan, he awaited fresh supplies from the Directory, employing his time until they came in founding the Cis-Alpine Republic.
[CHAPTER VIII]
My father in the Army of Italy—He is received at Milan by Bonaparte and Joséphine—Bonaparte's troubles in Italy—Scurvy—The campaign is resumed—Discouragement—Battle of Arcole.
Whilst these wonders were being performed in Upper Italy my father was still commanding a division of the Army of the Alps: as we have pointed out, since it was a post of observation, he had placed the brigadier-generals Dufresne and Pailloc respectively at the foot of Mont Cenis, and at St. Pierre d'Albigny in the Tarantaise, whilst he established his own headquarters at la Chambre, a little village comprising a dozen houses, situated at the base of a chain of peaks which abounded in chamois. Herein lay his predilection for la Chambre, where, besides, he knew he would meet again one of his old guides from Mont Cenis, a most ardent hunter, with whom he spent days and nights on the mountains.
One night, on his return after three days' grand sport, my father found a letter commanding him to go to Italy and put himself at the disposal of General Bonaparte. This order was dated 22 Vendémiaire (October 14th).
Bonaparte no longer signed himself "Buonaparte."
It was exactly what my father had been hoping for, although to some extent he shared the same dislike felt by his colleagues, who considered themselves experienced generals at the age of thirty-two and thirty-four years, and who objected to serve under a general aged twenty-six; yet the roar of the cannons and the sound of many battles had been ringing in his ears for a year, until he was quite ready to ask for service in Italy, no matter in what rank.
My father reached Milan, October the 19th, 1796.
Bonaparte gave him a cordial welcome, and Joséphine an even warmer reception; she had just joined her husband, and, as a Creole, was passionately attached to anything that recalled her beloved Colonies.
He found Bonaparte in a state of great uneasiness, and very angry because of the conduct of the Directory, which had deserted him. The Austrian generals were beaten, but Austria herself was not beaten.
The troops at the emperor's disposition in Poland, thanks to the promises Catherine had given him, were able to march to the Alps; many troops, too, were stationed to watch over the Danube and to keep an eye on Turkey; moreover, all the reserves of the Austrian monarchy were being prepared for Italy; a new and splendid army therefore was being equipped in Friuli, made up of the remnant of Wurmser's troops, those from Poland and Turkey, with reserves and recruits. Marshal Alvintzy was charged to take command of this fourth army, intended to avenge the honour of Colli, Beaulieu and Wurmser.
Bonaparte had not more than 25,000 men of the troops which had accompanied him to Italy, or had joined him there, with which to meet this new army; for the Austrian cannon had made great gaps in our ranks, in spite of their defeats. Some battalions had reached him from la Vendée, but they were greatly reduced by desertion; Kellermann, who had just despatched my father, sent word by him that he could not weaken the line of the Alps, as he was compelled to keep a watch on Lyons and the banks of the Rhone, where the Compagnies de Jésus were given over to all kinds of brigandage. Bonaparte clamoured vehemently for the 40th and the 83rd brigades with their 6000 men, and, if they should arrive, he would be equal to anything.
He wrote thus to the Directory:—"I am unwell, I can hardly sit my horse; there is nothing left me but courage, and that alone is not enough for the position I am in: our prestige is regarded as evaporated; send troops or Italy is lost."
Indeed, my father found Bonaparte very ill. The malady of which he complained was scurvy, which he had caught at Toulon in doing a very heroic act, in himself cleaning out a gun with the sponge of an artillery-man who had just been killed; he had neglected the disease, and it was wearing him out; he was frightfully thin, he looked like a walking skeleton with nothing alive about him but his eyes.
Nevertheless, he did not despair; he recommended my father to exercise the utmost vigilance and incessant industry; and, informing him of his next plan of campaign, he sent him to take command of the first division before Mantua.
So, eleven days later, the campaign re-opened.
The fourth hydra-head was scotched; Marshal Alvintzy had thrown bridges over the Piave and advanced to Brenta with 40,000 men.
The struggle was terrible. It lasted from the 1st to the 17th of November; Bonaparte, with 20,000 men, attacked 50,000; once his army was reduced to 15,000; once Bonaparte, discouraged by the indecisive battles of Bassano and Caldiero, addressed the following cry of distress to the Directory.
It was the 14th November; on the 13th Bonaparte had reached Verona after ten days of struggle, not only against the Austrians, but against mud, rain, and hail.
"All our superior officers," he wrote, "are hors de combat; the Army of Italy, reduced to a mere handful, is exhausted; the heroes of Millesimo, of Lodi, of Castiglione and of Bassano have died for their country or are in the hospital; there is nothing left the corps but their pride and their reputation; Joubert, Lannes, Lamart, Victor, Murat, Charlet, Dupuis, Rampon, Pigeon, Menard, Chabadon are wounded; we are abandoned in the heart of Italy; the brave men who remain to us have to face inevitable death in the very midst of continual hazards and with inferior numbers. Perhaps the fatal hour for the brave Augereau and the dauntless Masséna is on the point of striking; then, then what is to become of these brave men? This thought keeps me back. I dare no longer court death to the discouragement of those I value so highly; had I only received the 83rd and been strengthened by 3500 tried men, I would have dared anything; perhaps in a few days 40,000 men will not suffice to save us.
"To-day our troops are resting; to-morrow, subject to the movements of the enemy, we will take action."
Here we have the complaints, or rather the gloomy predictions, of a tired-out, discouraged, and depressed man: the strongest of constitutions succumb to such moments of doubt, and experience these hours of despair: after great fatigue the body overrides the mind, the sheath tarnishes the blade.
Two hours after having penned this letter Bonaparte had devised a new plan.
The battle of Roneo took place on the following day, being the beginning of the famous battle of Arcole, which lasted three days.
By the third day the Austrians had lost 5000 men as prisoners, 8000 or 10,000 killed or wounded, and, although still 40,000 strong, they withdrew to the mountains, pursued by 15,000 French.
They retreated into the capital of the Tyrol: 15,000 French had accomplished the gigantic undertaking of fighting against and conquering 50,000 men.
But they had only repulsed the army of Alvintzy, they had not destroyed it, as they had destroyed the three others.
Bonaparte advised Serrurier to continue the blockade of Mantua, to harass Wurmser as he had harassed Beaulieu (Cauto d'Irles), and took up his winter quarters at Milan, a centre for negotiations with all the little princedoms of Italy, which through fear alone became our allies.
About three weeks after, an event occurred during the blockade which was to have a great influence on the course of events of this terrible campaign.
One night—either the 23rd or 24th December, which corresponded to that of the 2nd or 3rd Nivôse—my father was awakened by the visit of three or four soldiers, who brought a man before him who had been captured by one of our advanced sentinels just as he was going to leap over the first barricade at Mantua.
My father was at Marmirolo.
The colonel in command of our outposts at St. Antoine sent this man to my father with the message that he was a Venetian spy and he believed he carried important intelligence.
The man's replies were astonishing. He was in the Austrian service, and one of the garrison of Mantua, which town he had left on account of a love affair; he was just returning when he was challenged and arrested by the sentinel, who had heard the noise of his footsteps on the frozen snow.
Although he was searched all over, nothing was found on him.
But, in spite of the apparent frankness of his answers and his ease of manner during his examination, my father thought he detected certain quick glances, certain nervous twitches, which denoted a man who was not quite sure of his ground. Moreover, the word "spy" when used before him confused him, and made the reasons he gave for his going out and returning hard to believe. Furthermore, when a general is watching' a town of the importance of Mantua, and hopes he has caught hold of a spy, he does not easily renounce his hopes.
But there seemed nothing further to be said: the man's pockets were perfectly empty, and his replies mathematically precise.
Favourite books of my father's were Polybius and Cæsar's Commentaries. A volume of the Commentaries of the conqueror of Gaul lay open on the table near his bed, and the passage my father had just been re-reading before going to sleep was where Cæsar relates how, in order to pass his lieutenant through to Labienus with valuable information, he had enclosed his letter in a little ivory ball about the size of a child's toy; how the messenger when he came to the enemy's pickets, or to any place where he feared being taken prisoner, was to carry the ball in his mouth, and to swallow it if he were pushed to extremes.
This passage from Cæsar flashed across my father's mind as a ray of light.
"Very well," said my father; "since this man lies, he must be taken out and shot."
"What! General," the Venetian exclaimed in terror. "Why am I to be shot?"
"To cut open your stomach and find the despatches you have swallowed," said my father with as much certainty as though the matter had been revealed to him by his familiar spirit.
The spy trembled.
The men hesitated.
"Oh! it is not a joke," said my father to the soldiers who had taken the prisoner; "if you wish it, I will give you a written order."
"No, General," replied the soldiers; "if you are serious—"
"Perfectly serious; take him away and shoot him."
The soldiers moved forward to lead off the spy.
"One moment!" he said, seeing that matters had taken a grave turn.
"Will you confess?"
"Yes, yes, I confess," said the spy, after a moment's hesitation.
"You confess you have swallowed your despatches?"
"Yes, General."
"And how long ago did you do that?"
"About two hours and a half ago, General."
"Dermoncourt," said my father to a young aide-de-camp who slept in the next room to his, and who had been listening and looking on since the beginning of this scene with the greatest attention, not seeing what it was going to lead to.
"Here I am, General."
"You have heard?"
"What, General?"
"That this man has swallowed his despatches?"
"Yes."
"Two and a half hours ago?"
"Two and a half hours ago."
"Very well, go and find the chemist of the village and ask him whether it is a purgative or an emetic that should be given to a man to make him get rid of what he has taken two hours and a half ago; he is to tell you which will have the quickest result."
Five minutes later Dermoncourt returned, his hand at the salute and, with wonderful command of his features, he replied:
"A purgative, General."
"You have brought one with you?"
"Yes, General."
They gave the purgative to the spy, who swallowed it with a grimace; then they took him to Dermoncourt's room, where two soldiers kept him in view, whilst Dermoncourt passed a very bad night, being waked up by the soldiers each time they thought the medicine was going to take effect. At last, towards three in the morning, he was delivered of a tabloid of wax, as large as a filbert. This little ball of wax was washed in one of those irrigating canals which are to be found in thousands in the meadows round Mantua, steeped in a liquid the spy carried for the purpose in a tiny flask hidden in his waistcoat pocket which the soldiers had not thought necessary to take from him, and handed to my father; he passed it on to be opened by Dermoncourt, who, in his capacity of secretarial aide-de-camp, had to open despatches.
One fear alone remained to them—the despatch might be in German, and not a single man in the general's quarters could speak German.
In the meantime, Dermoncourt was performing the Cæsarian operation on the wax pellet with his pen-knife; and he drew from it a letter written on vellum in such small characters that, when rolled between the fingers, the letter was not larger than a big pea.
Great was the delight of the two operators when they perceived that the letter was written in French; one might almost have said the emperor and his commander-in-chief had foreseen the possibility of this letter falling into my father's hands.
I give the tenor of the letter, which I take from a copy in my father's handwriting; the original, as we shall see presently, was sent to Bonaparte:—
"TRENT, 15th December 1796.
"I have the honour to transmit to your Excellency His Majesty's commands, dated 5th of the month, literally, and in the same language in which I received them.
"You will take care to advise Field Marshal Vurmser without delay not to discontinue his operations; you will inform him that I am expecting him valorously and zealously to defend Mantua to the last extremity; that I know him, and the brave officers of his staff who are with him, too well to fear they will give themselves up as prisoners; moreover, he must try to transport the garrison into France rather than to send it back into my realm; I desire that in the event of his being reduced to the last extremity and without means of subsistence, he will take measures to destroy as far as possible anything in Mantua that would be serviceable to the enemy, and, in leading out the portion of his troops that are fit to follow him, to make for and to cross the Po, and then to march to Ferrara or to Bologna, holding himself ready, if the need arises, to go towards Rome or into Tuscany; he will find very few of the enemy in those regions, which are favourably disposed towards the provisioning of his troops, on whose behalf, if needful, he must use force, as he would to surmount any other obstacle.
"FRANÇOIS.
"A reliable man, a cadet from the Straroldo regiment, brings this important despatch to your Excellency. I would add that the actual situation and the requirements of the army do not allow of attempting any fresh operations for three weeks or a month, without exposing it anew to the danger of non-success.
"I cannot too strongly urge upon your Excellency to hold on in Mantua as long as you possibly can, His Majesty's commands acting as your general instructions; whatever happens, I beg of your Excellency to send me news by some safe means, in order that I may keep in touch with you.
"ALVINTZY.
"P.S.-In all probability the next action I am arranging will take place on the 13th or 14th January. I shall march with 30,000 men to the plateau of Rivoli, and I shall despatch Provera with 10,000 men along the Adige to Legnago, with a considerable convoy. When you hear firing, make a sortie to cause a diversion in favour of his movement."
[CHAPTER IX]
The despatch is sent to Bonaparte—Dermoncourt's reception—Berthier's open response—Military movements in consequence of the despatch—Correspondence between my father and Serrurier and Dallemagne—Battle of St. Georges and La Favorite—Capture of Mantua—My father as a looker-on.
My father's joy was great, and so was Dermoncourt's; the despatch was clearly of the greatest importance. For one thing it proclaimed Tuscany and the Venetian and Pontifical States as countries favourably disposed. Moreover, it revealed Alvintzy's intention of taking no action for three weeks or a month.
The despatch must be taken to Bonaparte post haste.
Dermoncourt instantly mounted his horse and rode off to Milan.
He reached there the next day but one, at seven in the morning, and dismounted at the steps of the hôtel Serbelloni, where General Bonaparte lodged. He had made part of his journey on horseback and part in a kind of calessino called a sediollo.
But here Dermoncourt met an unexpected difficulty: the aide-de-camp on duty had received instructions that no one was to be admitted to Bonaparte until nine o'clock.
Dermoncourt grew angry.
"But, monsieur," he said, "you can see clearly by my muddy condition that I have not come from a ball, and why I insist on seeing the commander-in-chief is because I have important news to give him."
The aide-de-camp persisted in his refusal. Dermoncourt grew furious in his wish to see Bonaparte; the aide-de-camp barred the passage; Dermoncourt was a bulldog of the Republican school; he took the aide-de-camp by both shoulders, twisted him round, and passed in; but all this scuffle had not been accomplished quietly, and Dermoncourt found Bonaparte standing at the door of his room.
"Now, what is the matter?"asked Bonaparte, frowning.
"Upon my word, General," replied Dermoncourt, "it is not very pleasant after travelling thirty leagues in twenty-six hours to have to force one's way across the bodies of your aides-de-camp to get at you."
"But what if those were the given orders?"
"If those were the orders given, General," Dermoncourt replied lightly, "have me shot for transgressing orders; only, I entreat of you not to send for the picket before you have read this despatch."
Bonaparte read the despatch.
Then turning to his aide-de-camp he said, "You have forgotten, monsieur, that the order is not meant for any officer attached to the staff who may arrive from Mantua, and that no matter whether they come at noon or at midnight the door is open. Place yourself under arrest."
The aide-de-camp saluted and went out.[1]
"How did Dumas get hold of this despatch?" Bonaparte demanded.
Dermoncourt related the incident with full details.
"Berthier! Berthier!" shouted Bonaparte.
Berthier appeared with his accustomed air of importance and gravity.
"Here, Berthier," exclaimed Bonaparte, handing the despatch to him, "smell that and tell me what the scent is."
"Why, General," said Berthier, "it smells of dung."
"Not so bad that; you have not minced matters. Now read it." Berthier read.
"Oh! oh!" he exclaimed.
"Do you see, Berthier? The next battle will be called the battle of Rivoli, and, if I am not greatly mistaken, it will decide the campaign. At all events, as Alvintzy says, we have quite three weeks before us."
"And as one man forewarned is worth two," said Dermoncourt, "and as even when you are not forewarned you are worth a hundred, there is surely cause for laughter."
"Meanwhile," said Bonaparte, "as you are probably hungry, you had better just brush the mud off you,—don't bother to do more than that,—and you shall breakfast with us. Have you met Joséphine?"
"No, General, I have not had that honour."
"Very well, I will introduce you to her: go and come back quickly."
Dermoncourt did not wait to be told twice. He breakfasted and dined with Bonaparte, who insisted that he should stay and sleep at the palace.
Next morning he sent a letter by him to my father loaded with compliments, and told him he might set off when he liked, a carriage being at his disposal. Dermoncourt entered the carriage in the courtyard; Bonaparte and Joséphine were at one window, and Berthier at the next.
"A good journey to you!" cried Bonaparte to Dermoncourt.
"Thank you, General," he replied; "do not forget the 13th of January, and be careful with those delicacies of Capua."
"Rest easy," cried the commander-in-chief; "I will not act as Hannibal did."
Here is Bonaparte's letter to my father:—
"ARMY OF ITALY—THE FRENCH REPUBLIC.
"Liberty—Equality.
"FROM THE HEADQUARTERS AT MILAN, 7 Nivôse (Sunday, 28th December), Year V of the Republic, one and indivisible.
"BONAPARTE, Commander-in-Chief of the Army of Italy, to GENERAL DUMAS.
"I am in receipt of the letter brought[2] me by your aide-de-camp; it would have been impossible to have acquired more opportune or more valuable information. You will receive an order to the effect that all the inhabitants of the countryside are to be sent a league away from Mantua; I do not doubt that you will faithfully carry out this order; although somewhat harsh, it is extremely necessary.
"I give this order because precautions are being taken on the other side of the Po; this project from the Court of Vienna seems to me very mad. I beg you to send the spy you have arrested under a good escort to Milan.
"I congratulate you on your good fortune and augur better to come.
BONAPARTE."
It will be seen that, though a year had hardly elapsed, after the battles of Montenotte, Millesimo, Dego, Mondovi, Lonato, Castiglione, and Arcole, Bonaparte recognised so clearly that his fate was bound up with that of France that he suppressed the u in his name.
Dermoncourt reached my father's camp, and gave him the commander-in-chief's letter; my father read it, and probably the observation we make in the light of to-day did not then occur to him, namely, that by suppressing the u Bonaparte had suppressed that which gave an Italian flavour to his name.
The same day that Dermoncourt left Milan, the French army received the order to occupy the positions of Montebaldo, Corona, and Rivoli.
On the 5th of January, General Alvintzy left Bassano.
On the 6th, Bonaparte occupied Bologna with 7000 men.
On the 11th, Bonaparte advanced to the walls of Mantua.
On the 12th, the Austrian army gave battle at Saint-Michel and Corona, and encamped at Montebaldo.
On the 13th, Joubert evacuated Corona and took up his position at Rivoli, whilst the Austrians occupied Bevilacqua.
Finally, on the 14th, Bonaparte visited the plateau of Rivoli, which he reached at two o'clock in the morning.
Here it was that the final battle took place, as he had predicted.
We know the results. At eight in the morning 45,000 Austrians invited battle.
At five in the evening they were nowhere to be seen; it was as though an earthquake had swallowed them up; Alvintzy had been wiped out at a single stroke.
There was still Provera to be dealt with.
Provera followed the plan indicated in the letter intercepted by my father; he slipped away from Augereau and threw a bridge over Anghiari, a little above Legnago. He marched on Mantua, which he intended to reinforce with nine or ten thousand men.
Augereau had obtained knowledge of his crossing; falling upon his rear, he took 2000 of his men prisoners; but Provera continued his march with the remaining 7000.
Luckily, Bonaparte learnt these details at Castelnovo. He was about the same distance from Mantua, he had Frenchmen under his command, and he would therefore reach it before Provera.
If he did not arrive, and if the garrison attempted the sortie Wurmser had been ordered to take in Alvintzy's letter, the blockading corps would be caught between two fires.
Masséna's division received orders to march at double quick pace to Mantua, where it should arrive the same evening. The reserves from Villa-Franca were to take the same route and march at the same speed.
Finally, Bonaparte himself galloped off to reach Mantua before nightfall.
Now let us see from General Serrurier's letters to my father what was going on round Mantua, and what action was taking place in the French camp.
"HEADQUARTERS AT ROVERBELLA,
"20 Nivôse, Year V.[3]
"SERRURIER, General of Division, in command of the blockade, to GENERAL DUMAS, in command of the 2nd Division.
"MY DEAR GENERAL,—I have just received a letter from Divisional-General Augereau, dated from Porto-Legnago, on the 19th inst.; wherein he informs me that the enemy attacked his outposts with a force greatly superior to his own, and that Adjutant-General Duphot has abandoned the Castle of Bevilacqua, to prevent himself from being outflanked. He will write and tell me the various movements of the enemy that night. All our troops are thoroughly on the alert; but I do not believe the enemy at Mantua will undertake any big action unless its army has a very marked advantage, or unless they try to slip away. As soon as I receive news from General Augereau I will let you know it.—Yours, with all good wishes, SERRURIER."
Provera was the enemy referred to who was attacking Augereau, in carrying out his instructions to march on Mantua.
"HEADQUARTERS AT ROVERBELLA,
"22 Nivôse.
"SERRURIER, etc.
"In consequence of the letter you sent me yesterday, General, relative to the disembarking carried out by the enemy, I believe the means for the defence of the Mincio. I have therefore just written off to General Victor to send to-day a battalion of his reserve to Formigosa, to be held in readiness to send immediately where help is most needed; although I have asked this general to communicate with me direct, I have at the same time requested him to keep you and General Dallemagne informed of all important news.
"The remainder of the 57th battalion, to which you previously referred, will stay in reserve at Goïto.—Yours, etc.
SERRURIER."
"23 Nivôse.
"SERRURIER, etc.
"This is to inform you, General, that the enemy has attacked our lines; they began fighting at nine in the morning. I do not doubt that the garrison of Mantua will aid them by some movement; as we are ready to receive them, we shall send them back pretty quickly within their walls. In event of any emergency, I beg you to communicate with me and with the generals near you; it may possibly be that some part of the line of army will be compelled to yield ground; for this reason it is more than ever necessary to watch the approaches, to prevent any troop or convoy entering the town.—Yours faithfully,
SERRURIER."
At ten o'clock on the morning of the 25th Nivôse my father received this letter:—
"HEADQUARTERS AT ROVERBELLA,"
25 Nivôse.[4]
"SERRURIER, etc.
"I have to advise you, General, that the enemy crossed the Adige last night at Anghiari, near Porto Legnago; I do not know in what strength; but we must be prepared, for it is quite likely we shall be attacked to-night: do not forget, I beg you, to warn General Miollis; tell him to send out a reconnoitring party by Castellaro—or at all events near Due-Castelli.—Faithfully yours,
SERRURIER."
"I have ordered the commandant of the 64th, who is at Formigosa, to fall back on General Miollis, if he cannot hold out. In case of need I shall withdraw to Goïto."
Two hours later my father received another letter:—
"SAINT-ANTOINE,
"25 Nivôse.
"SERRURIER, etc.
"I hazard the opinion, General, that there will be no sortie on General Dallemagne's side.[5] I believe the enemy mean to present themselves in force on Governolo and Formigosa, to make sure of those two bridges and to secure the Po, in order to relieve Mantua. It is quite certain they will not have so far to march if they go there, instead of coming here. But I think we must protect ourselves on all sides; that will not prevent us from availing ourselves of any opportunity that may arise.
"General Beaumont has no cavalry left. I withdrew them all to-night to send to Castelnovo.—Yours,
SERRURIER.
"I am counting greatly on General Miollis and on a battalion I have sent to Governolo. On second thoughts, to save time, I am returning to Roverbella, where I hope to receive news from the commander-in-chief."
My father sent on copies of these two letters to General Miollis, who was at St. Georges.
The day was employed in keeping a strict look-out. My father spent the night at the outposts.
At nine o'clock on the morning of the 26th, he received this despatch:—
"GENERAL SERRURIER, etc.
"I advise you that the enemy is appearing on the Due-Castelli side.
"Issue your orders in accordance with this.—Yours,
"SERRURIER.
"ROVERBELLA, 26 Nivôse."
Two hours later he received this second letter:—
"SERRURIER, etc.
"It is imperative, General, that you should prevent the enemy from disembarking: to effect this, take as many as 1500 men to that quarter.
"We are not short of troops at present, so do not be anxious.—Yours,
SERRURIER.
"26 Nivôse, ROVERBELLA."
If 1500 men had to be taken to the place appointed by General Serrurier, it was necessary to have that number to take. My father therefore wrote to his friend Dallemagne at Montanara to spare as many men from his division as he could and to send them him.
Dallemagne replied immediately:—
"MONTANARA, 26 Nivôse, Year V.
"DALLEMAGNE to his friend DUMAS.
"Although I do not expect to be attacked, my dear friend, yet the means at my disposal are too weak to allow of my sending much of a force to Formigosa; a third of my division is unable to get on its feet, and its whole strength is but 2000 men. Judge therefore, my dear fellow, if I have any to spare. Nevertheless, directly I got your letter I gave orders to General Montant to hold a few troops ready to march. Moreover, I must inform you that General Serrurier gave me notice in his letter of last night that he was about to give orders to destroy the bridge at Formigosa. If, therefore, he executes this order, it will be impossible for me to send you aid; furthermore, if the enemy, which has crossed the Adige, succeeds in the attack on St. Georges, the sortie from Mantua is certain to take place, and we shall be forced to succumb in spite of all our efforts to withstand the shock, because the enemy will engage without running great risks where he has the stronger force. Good-bye, my dear friend. Rely upon it that I shall always eagerly seek every opportunity to serve you, as to serve my country.—With affectionate regards,
"DALLEMAGNE."
Nevertheless, the worthy Dallemagne was very reluctant to refuse my father the men he asked for, for he knew that, if he asked for them, it was because he believed himself to be hard pressed.
So, towards noon, he wrote him from Casanova:—
"GENERAL DALLEMAGNE to GENERAL DUMAS.
"I have just heard, General, that the bridge of Formigosa is still standing; so I have given General Montant orders to start off for Formigosa with 500 men and two pieces of artillery, and have given him the necessary instructions to take the enemy in the rear, in the event of your being attacked.—Yours,
DALLEMAGNE."
The following copy, which was attached to this letter, explains why the bridge at Formigosa had not been destroyed:—
"Copy of the letter written by CITIZEN DORÉ, Head of the 1st Battalion of the 64th Demi-Brigade, to GENERAL DALLEMAGNE.
"I have to inform you, General, that in accordance with the instructions I received last night from General Serrurier, I went this morning to Governolo with my battalion; the general had instructed me to break the bridge at Formigosa before I left Governolo.
"When I began to carry out his order, the commandant of a detachment of the 45th demi-brigade, who occupied that position, opposed the execution of this order, as being contrary to the instructions you gave him, saying that we ought at all events to make sure the enemy was in sight first. I yielded to his argument, which seemed to me reasonable.
"Signed: DORÉ.
"Authenticated copy.
DALLEMAGNE."
At six o'clock my father received this third letter:—
"HEADQUARTERS AT MONTANARA,
"26 Nivôse, 4.30 o'clock.
"GENERAL DALLEMAGNE to GENERAL DUMAS.
"Fearing that General Montant and his 500 men have not yet reached Formigosa, I have just written to him to hasten his march. As General Serrurier notifies me that in case of attack we must hold out to the last extremity, if the enemy attacks me, as I quite expect he will, and you see that those 500 men will not be of much use to you, do me the kindness to send them back to me; so that if the enemy attacks us we shall be better able to meet them.—Ever yours,
"DALLEMAGNE."
We see how anxious this worthy Dallemagne was at the thought of my father incurring any danger.
But it was Miollis who was to bear the brunt throughout that day, not my father.
Provera had marched straight before him, and, by way of Cevea, Sanguinetto, Torre, and Castellaro, had drawn up in front of St. Georges, where Miollis was in command.
The Austrian general knew what a bad state the fortifications of St. Georges were in, so he was in good hopes that Miollis would not even attempt to dispute his passing, therefore he simply asked him to surrender.
Miollis replied by a terrible cannonading. My father not only heard the firing at St. Antoine, but he could even see the smoke of it.
My father despatched Dermoncourt in hot haste to obtain definite news. Dermoncourt was very young, thoroughly active and full of courage; he rode across hedge and ditch till he reached St. Georges, where he found General Miollis facing both Provera and Wurmser at the same time.
Just as he got up to Miollis, through the firing, and saluted, a bullet carried the general's cap off.
"Ah! is it you, my lad?" said Miollis. "Have you come from Dumas?"
"Yes, General; he heard your cannonade, and, knowing the rotten condition of your fortifications, he was very uneasy about you."
"Very good. Tell him not to worry about me; I have made my headquarters here in the citadel, and, if there is one thing more certain than another, it is that the enemy will have to pass over my grave if they enter the citadel."
"But what about Provera?" asked Dermoncourt.
"Bah! Provera is in a trap. My friend Augereau, who let him pass by, is following him, and, while I stay here, he has gone to drive him into a corner. So tell Dumas that to-morrow will see Provera despatched."
Dermoncourt had seen enough; he returned to St. Antoine, which my father had made his headquarters so as to be more within reach of the enemy.
He arrived there at five o'clock, and reported that all was going forward satisfactorily. Victor had rejoined my father with his brigade and he was dining with him, when Dermoncourt entered.
This was the third sleepless night they had passed. My father and Victor flung themselves clothed as they were upon their beds. Dermoncourt remained up to draw out the report to General Serrurier of his excursion to St. Georges. He was in the full tide of his narrative when he felt someone place a hand on his shoulder.
He turned; it was Bonaparte; he had arrived.
"Well!" he said, "we have won the battle of Rivoli; here I am; the head of Masséna's division is following me at top speed. What is Miollis doing? Where is Provera? From what I hear, Augereau let him slip by. Surely he followed him? What is Wurmser doing? Has he attempted any move? Do you hear? Speak."
"General," Dermoncourt replied, as laconically as Bonaparte had interrogated him, "Augereau was overpowered, but he fell back on Provera's rear, and took two thousand prisoners and twelve pieces of cannon."
"Good."
"Provera is now before St. Georges, which Miollis has held all day long, and means to hold until he and his men are exterminated."
"Good."
"Wurmser has tried to make sorties, but he has been forced back into Mantua."
"Good. Where is Dumas?"
"Here I am, General," replied my father, appearing at his bedroom door.
"Ah! there you are, monsieur," said Bonaparte, who looked rather black at him.
My father could not pass by such a look without asking an explanation of it.
"Yes, it is I! Well, what is wrong?"
"General Serrurier wrote two letters to you yesterday, monsieur."
"Well! what then?"
"In the first he notified you that in certain events he should withdraw to Goïto."
"Yes, General."
"Did you reply to that letter?"
"Certainly."
"What did you reply?"
"Do you wish to know?"
"I should like to hear what you said."
"Very well! I replied, 'Retreat to the devil, if you like; I don't care; but I'll shoot myself rather than retire.'"
"Do you know that if you had written me such a letter as that I would have had you shot?"
"May be; but you would probably never have written me such a letter as General Serrurier wrote me."
"That is true."
Then, turning to Dermoncourt, he said to him:
"Go and have the troops drawn up in three columns, and come back and tell me when it is done."
Dermoncourt went out; then, turning to my father, who was about to return to his room, he said:
"Stay, General; I was obliged to speak to you as I did before your aide-de-camp; deuce take it, when a man writes such letters to his chief, he should at least write them himself, and not dictate them to his secretary. But we will say no more about it. Who are your commanding officers here?"
"The first column, General, is composed of the 57th demi-brigade, under its own leader, Victor; the second is under the command of Adjutant-General Rambaud, our chief staff officer; the third, of Colonel Moreau, commandant of the 11th demi-brigade."
"Very good. Where is Victor?"
"Oh! he is not far off," said my father; "listen and you will hear him snoring."
"Go and wake him."
My father went into the room close by and shook Victor, who could not be induced anyhow to wake up.
"Come, my lad!" said my father, "you must wake up."
"What the deuce do you want?" he growled.
"I want to make you general of division."
"What, me?"
"Yes, Bonaparte is here, and has given you the command of a column in to-morrow's battle."
"Goodness me!"
Victor shook himself awake and ran out.
Dermoncourt entered at the same time.
"Well?" asked Bonaparte.
"Your orders are executed, General."
"Good. Now go to the outskirts of la Favorite and find out the position of the enemy."
Dermoncourt went.
It was eight in the evening, and our troops occupied la Favorite. Dermoncourt went beyond the outposts, and, venturing towards Mantua, fell up against a sortie which Wurmser was making.
So, three-quarters of an hour after his departure, they heard him shouting a long way off:
"To horse, General, to horse! The enemy is following me."
Indeed, he narrowly escaped being caught, and feeling himself almost overtaken, he called out for help.
My father leapt to his saddle, dashed out at the head of the 20th regiment of dragoons and fell upon the enemy, whom he drove back to their base, holding them in check till day; whilst Masséna's division, which was completely disorganised by the forced march and immense distance it had had to traverse, reached Marmirolo and St. Antoine, where it re-formed.
Bonaparte's intention in making such speed was to finish off Provera at a blow, as he had finished Alvintzy.
Indeed, Provera was lost from the moment he had failed to enter Mantua. Augereau was at his heels, Miollis in front of him, Bonaparte on his flanks, with Masséna's division.
Bonaparte spent the night in making his plans for the morrow.
My father remained where he was; it was an important post, as he was deputed to drive Wurmser back into the town with his 15,000 or 20,000 men—a garrison which, without reckoning Provera, was much stronger than the enemy which blockaded them.
During the night Provera managed to communicate with Wurmser, by means of a boat, and to plan for the next day a combined attack with that general upon la Favorite and Montada. No one in Mantua or in Provera's camp knew that Bonaparte had arrived with the troops that had fought on the previous day at Rivoli.
Had they been told, it would have sounded to them too incredible for belief, and they would not have believed it.
My father was attacked by Wurmser at five in the morning; it was a terrific struggle. After his letter to Serrurier of three days back he could not, and did not, retreat; he held his ground with two or three regiments and his own regiment of dragoons, till Bonaparte had time to send him the 57th demi-brigade under Victor, whose troops cut such a fearful gap in the enemy's ranks to get to my father's relief that from that day forth they went by the name of "the Terrible."
They found my father with 700 or 800 men, surrounded by dead; he had had one horse killed under him, a second had been slain by a cannon-ball, but its rider, whom they took for dead, rose triumphantly out of his glorious tomb.
Wurmser thus repulsed, fell back upon la Favorite; but la Favorite, defended by 1500 men, withstood Wurmser's efforts, and even made a sally. What with this sally, the repeated charges of my father and his dragoons, and Victor's heroic stubbornness, whose fresh troops fought with pent-up fury after being condemned to inaction whilst the rest of the army had been covering itself with glory at Rivoli, Wurmser was beaten back, and forced to re-enter the town.
From that time Provera, abandoned by his ally, was lost; caught between Bonaparte, Miollis, Serrurier, and Augereau, he and his 5000 men laid down their arms,—the rest of his troops had all been killed.
So the battles of Rivoli and la Favorite had been won in two days, two armies had been destroyed, and 20,000 men taken prisoner. All their guns and ammunition had been captured, and the Austrians rendered too demoralised to continue the campaign without raising a fifth army. All these events had resulted from the lucky chance of my father's taking the spy, combined with the fertile genius of Napoleon.
My father's brigade alone captured six standards. And on the following day, 28 Nivôse, my father received this letter from General Serrurier:—
"HEADQUARTERS AT ROVERBELLA,
"28 Nivôse, Year V of the Republic, one and indivisible.
"SERRURIER, etc. etc., to DUMAS, Divisional General.
"Will you please give orders, General, for the colours which you took from the enemy yesterday to be brought here to General Berthier, or if he is away, to me.
"The general-in-chief grants four louis to each man who takes a standard.—Faithfully yours,
SERRURIER."
On the same evening after the battle, my father received a despatch from General Serrurier, containing a letter for Wurmser.
This letter was virtually a demand for the surrender of Mantua.
General Serrurier's letter was as follows:—
"ROVERBELLA, 27 Nivôse, Year V.
"GENERAL SERRURIER, etc., to DIVISIONAL-GENERAL DUMAS.
"This is to inform you, General, that I have just issued orders to the 18th and 57th demi-brigades to proceed to la Favorite, with instructions to put themselves at your service. I must tell you, however, that these two corps must not form a permanent part of your division, therefore do not send them to a distance unless in case of urgent necessity.
"The general-in-chief has been informed that you have captured a considerable convoy of bullocks and grain; if so, give orders for it to be taken to Porto Legnago under a strong escort.
"Also let all the artillery and ammunition waggons taken from the enemy be forwarded to our artillery park immediately. See that there is the strictest surveillance throughout the military stations. It is suspected that General Wurmser will take advantage of our rejoicings to make good his escape.—With sincere regards, yours,
SERRURIER.
"P.S.—I beg you, General, to hand over the enclosed letter to General Wurmser at Mantua as soon as possible.
"SERRURIER."
The convoy of bullocks and grain was sent off at once to Legnago, and the letter went to Wurmser the same night.
The army was in great want of that convoy of grain and meat, as we learn from the following letter which General Serrurier wrote to my father on the 20th Nivôse:—
"I am informed, General, that you are short of meat; I have not mentioned it before, because I could not supply the deficiency. We areas badly off as the troops at Verona. I have given orders to the army commissariat to deliver rice instead, until we can supply something better.
"You need never be afraid of wearying me, General, with any matter concerning the soldiers; those who have served with me know how interested I am in their welfare.
"I have asked for some fresh equipments of clothing and outfits; and they have sent word that since my arrival a thousand roupes[6] and some shoes for the whole of the division are on their way, but nothing has come yet.
"Remind our adjutant-general of the list of officers I asked for; I must have it before I can fill in the general-in-chief's inspection list.—Faithfully, etc.,
SERRURIER."
The garrison was, as we can quite understand, in a deplorable condition with regard to provisions: famine had reached such a pitch that a fowl cost ten louis, and a cat fifteen; rats might be procured with the greatest difficulty for two louis.