Array The griffin classics - The Collected Works of Honore de Balzac

CHAPTER III. PRELIMINARIES

Jean Francois Bernard Dumay, born at Vannes, started as a soldier for the army of Italy in 1799. His father, president of the revolutionary tribunal of that town, had displayed so much energy in his office that the place had become too hot to hold the son when the parent, a pettifogging lawyer, perished on the scaffold after the ninth Thermidor. On the death of his mother, who died of the grief this catastrophe occasioned, Jean sold all that he possessed and rushed to Italy at the age of twenty-two, at the very moment when our armies were beginning to yield. On the way he met a young man in the department of Var, who for reasons analogous to his own was in search of glory, believing a battle-field less perilous than his own Provence. Charles Mignon, the last scion of an ancient family, which gave its name to a street in Paris and to a mansion built by Cardinal Mignon, had a shrewd and calculating father, whose one idea was to save his feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other people’s heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with his wife and all his children except Charles, whom he had sent to find a refuge for the family in the Upper Alps.

Horrorstruck at the news, Charles waited for better times in a valley of Mont Genevra; and there he remained till 1799, subsisting on a few louis which his father had put into his hand at starting. Finally, when twenty-three years of age, and without other fortune than his fine presence and that southern beauty which, when it reaches perfection, may be called sublime (of which Antinous, the favorite of Adrian, is the type), Charles resolved to wager his Provencal audacity — taking it, like many another youth, for a vocation — on the red cloth of war. On his way to the base of the army at Nice he met the Breton. The pair became intimate, partly from the contrasts in their characters; they drank from the same cup at the wayside torrents, broke the same biscuit, and were both made sergeants at the peace which followed the battle of Marengo.

When the war recommenced, Charles Mignon was promoted into the cavalry and lost sight of his comrade. In 1812 the last of the Mignon de La Bastie was an officer of the Legion of honor and major of a regiment of cavalry. Taken prisoner by the Russians he was sent, like so many others, to Siberia. He made the journey in company with another prisoner, a poor lieutenant, in whom he recognized his old friend Jean Dumay, brave, neglected, undecorated, unhappy, like a million of other woollen epaulets, rank and file — that canvas of men on which Napoleon painted the picture of the Empire. While in Siberia, the lieutenant-colonel, to kill time, taught writing and arithmetic to the Breton, whose early education had seemed a useless waste of time to Pere Scevola. Charles found in the old comrade of his marching days one of those rare hearts into which a man can pour his griefs while telling his joys.

The young Provencal had met the fate which attends all handsome bachelors. In 1804, at Frankfort on the Main, he was adored by Bettina Wallenrod, only daughter of a banker, and he married her with all the more enthusiasm because she was rich and a noted beauty, while he was only a lieutenant with no prospects but the extremely problematical future of a soldier of fortune of that day. Old Wallenrod, a decayed German baron (there is always a baron in a German bank) delighted to know that the handsome lieutenant was the sole representative of the Mignon de La Bastie, approved the love of the blonde Bettina, whose beauty an artist (at that time there really was one in Frankfort) had lately painted as an ideal head of Germany. Wallenrod invested enough money in the French funds to give his daughter thirty thousand francs a year, and settled it on his anticipated grandsons, naming them counts of La Bastie-Wallenrod. This “dot” made only a small hole in his cash-box, the value of money being then very low. But the Empire, pursuing a policy often attempted by other debtors, rarely paid its dividends; and Charles was rather alarmed at this investment, having less faith than his father-in-law in the imperial eagle. The phenomenon of belief, or of admiration which is ephemeral belief, is not so easily maintained when in close quarters with the idol. The mechanic distrusts the machine which the traveller admires; and the officers of the army might be called the stokers of the Napoleonic engine, — if, indeed, they were not its fuel.

However, the Baron Wallenrod-Tustall-Bartenstild promised to come if necessary to the help of the household. Charles loved Bettina Wallenrod as much as she loved him, and that is saying a good deal; but when a Provencal is moved to enthusiasm all his feelings and attachments are genuine and natural. And how could he fail to adore that blonde beauty, escaping, as it were, from the canvas of Durer, gifted with an angelic nature and endowed with Frankfort wealth? The pair had four children, of whom only two daughters survived at the time when he poured his griefs into the Breton’s heart. Dumay loved these little ones without having seen them, solely through the sympathy so well described by Charlet, which makes a soldier the father of every child. The eldest, named Bettina Caroline, was born in 1805; the other, Marie Modeste, in 1808. The unfortunate lieutenant-colonel, long without tidings of these cherished darlings, was sent, at the peace of 1814, across Russia and Prussia on foot, accompanied by the lieutenant. No difference of epaulets could count between the two friends, who reached Frankfort just as Napoleon was disembarking at Cannes.

Charles found his wife in Frankfort, in mourning for her father, who had always idolized her and tried to keep a smile upon her lips, even by his dying bed. Old Wallenrod was unable to survive the disasters of the Empire. At seventy years of age he speculated in cottons, relying on the genius of Napoleon without comprehending that genius is quite as often beyond as at the bottom of current events. The old man had purchased nearly as many bales of cotton as the Emperor had lost men during his magnificent campaign in France. “I tie in goddon,” said the father to the daughter, a father of the Goriot type, striving to quiet a grief which distressed him. “I owe no mann anything — ” and he died, still trying to speak to his daughter in the language that she loved.

Thankful to have saved his wife and daughters from the general wreck, Charles Mignon returned to Paris, where the Emperor made him lieutenant-colonel in the cuirassiers of the Guard and commander of the Legion of honor. The colonel dreamed of being count and general after the first victory. Alas! that hope was quenched in the blood of Waterloo. The colonel, slightly wounded, retired to the Loire, and left Tours before the disbandment of the army.

In the spring of 1816 Charles sold his wife’s property out of the funds to the amount of nearly four hundred thousand francs, intending to seek his fortune in America, and abandon his own country where persecution was beginning to lay a heavy hand on the soldiers of Napoleon. He went to Havre accompanied by Dumay, whose life he had saved at Waterloo by taking him on the crupper of his saddle in the hurly-burly of the retreat. Dumay shared the opinions and the anxieties of his colonel; the poor fellow idolized the two little girls and followed Charles like a spaniel. The latter, confidence that the habit of obedience, the discipline of subordination, and the honesty and affection of the lieutenant would make him a useful as well as a faithful retainer, proposed to take him with him in a civil capacity. Dumay was only too happy to be adopted into the family, to which he resolved to cling like the mistletoe to an oak.