I
Ronnay de Maurel had been absent nearly a year from his home. He had joined the Emperor in Poland, and despite his game leg, he had fought at Jena and Auerstadt, at Eylau and at Friedland.
When the two Emperors met upon the bridge at Tilsit and decided on the terms of peace, de Maurel, created Marshal of France on the field of Auerstadt, returned quietly to La Vieuville in time, he hoped, to close the eyes of old Gaston and to hear his last dying words. He had been home just three days. The day after his arrival he sent back the military representatives who had looked after his factories for him during his absence, and quietly took up once more the reins of government, which an unendurable heart-ache had caused to drop temporarily out of his hands. He laid aside his fine uniform and once more took up his blouse and his woollen cap. Old Gaston was too feeble to note the subtle change which had come over his nephew during twelve months of rough campaigning among the snows and the marshes of Poland; he did not perceive how passing seldom Ronnay ever spoke now, or how he sat late into the night staring straight out before him with a yearning gaze in his dark, deep-set eyes. He had passed through Paris on his way home and brought back a number of books with him—he who before this had never troubled about one in his life—and when his eyes ached from staring into vacancy, he would open one of these books, and drawing the lamp closer to him, he would rest his elbow on the table and shade his face with his hand and become so absorbed, that the grey dawn would oft find him still sitting in the invalid's room, with the book open in front of him—unless he had pushed it aside and sat with his head buried in his hands.
On the day of his arrival he had, with the help of Madame Lapin, reorganized the La Vieuville household on a more comfortable basis. But little could be done in the way of comforts for the dying man; he was past noticing if his room was aired or his food brought to him at regular intervals. The village doctor visited him from time to time, but there was nothing to be done now. The machinery of life was worn out; for over a year now it had threatened to break down altogether—an iron constitution and an invincible will to live until the beloved nephew came home once more, had alone kept the enfeebled heart to its work.
To Ronnay de Maurel the aspect of La Vieuville seemed infinitely dreary; the thought of the factories and the foundries singularly uninspiring. What mattered it that he had come home—a great deal older, a little more crippled, more impatient and more indifferent? Old Gaston could not now last more than a few days, and the representatives of the War Office had seen to it that the output of guns and of munitions did not fall too far short of the Emperor's needs. Why should a man come home—a man who had courted death in an hundred desperate fights—a man who had nothing to live for, no one to care for, no one who would rejoice when he returned or who would weep if he fell ... when countless precious sons and brothers and lovers and husbands were left to rot unburied on the ice-covered plains of Poland, and countless mothers and widows mourned, broken-hearted, at their loss?
But it was not his way to let things drift. Peace had, of a truth, been signed at Tilsit, but it was not like to be a lasting peace. The European Powers had once and for all decided that France was not to remain in bondage to the Emperor whom she worshipped. He was in everybody else's way, he must be swept aside in order to make room for the effete and incompetent Bourbons, who were hanging on to the coat-tails of England and Austria and Russia, with a view to reaping the chestnuts which others had pulled out of the fire for them. De Maurel was one of those who would have preferred their idolized Emperor to sit at home after this last campaign, to enjoy the fruit of his victories and to prove to the world that France, when she divested herself of the old régime, had gained a benefactor, even though she had had to pass through fire and water, through crime and ignominy, ere she got him. But to know Napoleon intimately, as did the privileged few, was to realize that measureless ambition which was destined to hurl him, not only down from the giddy heights of triumph and of victory whereon his glorious achievements of the last two campaigns had established him, but also from his secure place within the heart of his people, a place which he would only reconquer when his mortal remains were brought back to France after the years of conflict and of misery which were to come.