Robert Helmont: Diary of a Recluse, 1870-1871

This ebook was transcribed by Les Bowler
ALPHONSE DAUDET
1870–1871
TRANSLATED BY
LAURA ENSOR
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY PICARD AND MONTÉGUT
LONDON GEORGE ROUTLEDGE AND SONS, Limited Broadway, Ludgate Hill MANCHESTER AND NEW YORK 1892


While spending a day in the country on one of those pretty green islets that are dotted about in clusters on the Seine between Champrosay and Soisy, and wrestling with a friend, my foot slipped on the damp grass, and I broke my leg. My unfortunate love for athletic and violent exercise has already played me so many ugly tricks, that I should probably have forgotten this accident, as I have others, but for its precise and memorable date: the 14th of July 1870! . . . I still see myself at the close of that sad day, lying on the sofa in the former studio of Eugène Delacroix, whose small house on the borders of the forest of Sénart we were then occupying. When my leg was stretched out, I hardly suffered, for already I felt the vague restlessness of increasing fever, exaggerating the sensation and heat of the stormy atmosphere, and enveloping all around me in a misty cloud, as it were, of shimmering gauze. To the accompaniment of the piano they were singing the choruses of Orphée , and no one, not even I, suspected how serious was my condition. Through the wide-open bay window in the studio came the sweet breath of the jasmine and roses, the beat of the night-moths, and the quick flashes of lightning showing up, above the low garden walls, the sloping vineyards, the Seine, and the rising ground opposite. Suddenly the stillness was broken by the sound of a bell; the evening papers are brought in and opened, and voices broken by emotion, anger, or enthusiasm exclaim: “War is declared!”
From this moment nothing remains to me but the feverish recollection of a state of languor lasting six weeks; of six weeks of bed, of splints, of cradle and plaster case, in which my leg seemed imprisoned in company with thousands of tormenting insects. During that hot summer, so exceptionally stormy and scorching, this inaction full of agitation was dreadful, and my anxiety, increased by the accounts of the public disasters which filled the papers that covered my bed, added to my restlessness and sleeplessness. At night the rumble of the distant trains disturbed me like the tread of endless battalions, and by day, pale and sad faces, scraps of conversations overheard in the road or at the neighbour’s, through my open window: “The Prussians are at Châlons, mother Jean,” and the vans at every moment raising clouds of dust in the quiet little village, lent a mundane and sinister echo to my perusal of “the news of the war.” Soon we were the only Parisians left at Champrosay, left alone with the peasants, obstinately attached to the land, and still refusing to admit the idea of an invasion. Directly I could leave my couch and be moved, our departure was decided.