"Ainsi de notre vieille gloire
Chaque jour emporte un débris!
Chaque jour enrichit l'histoire
Des grands noms qui nous sont repris!
Et, chaque jour, pleurant sur la nouvelle tombe
D'un héros généreux dans sa course arrêté,
Chacun de nous se dit épouvante:
'Encore une pierre qui tombe
Du temple de la Liberté!' ..."
With one bound I covered the distance between the rue du Mont-Blanc and the rue Pigale. I longed to tell Adolphe the realisation of all my hopes. I was now, at last, sure of remaining in Paris. A most ambitious career opened out before me, limitless and vast. God, on His side, had done all that was necessary: He had left me with Aladdin's lamp in the enchanted garden. The rest depended on myself. No man had ever, I believe, seen his wishes more completely satisfied, his hopes more entirely crowned. Napoleon could not have been prouder and happier than I on the day when, having espoused Marie-Louise, he repeated three times before nightfall, "My poor uncle Louis XVI.!" Adolphe entered very heartily into my delight. M. de Leuven, to be still characteristic, quietly ridiculed my raptures. Madame de Leuven, the most perfect of women, rejoiced in advance over the joy my mother would shortly experience. All three wanted to keep me to dinner with them; but I remembered that a diligence left at half-past four o'clock, and that by it I should be able to reach home by one in the morning. It was odd I should be as eager to return to Villers-Cotterets as I had been to come to Paris. True, I was not returning for long. I reached Villers-Cotterets at one o'clock. One thing marred my joy: everybody was asleep; no one was in the dark streets; I could not cry out from the door of the diligence, "Here I am! but only for three days; I am going back to Paris for good." Oh! what an incontestable reality had the fable of King Midas become to me! When I reached Cartier's house, I leapt from the coach to the ground without thinking of making use of the step. When on mother-earth I rushed off, shouting to Auguste—
"It is I, it is I, Auguste! Put my fare down to your father's account."
In five minutes I was at home. I had a special way of my own of opening the door, after my nocturnal escapades; I turned it to account, and I entered my mother's room, who had hardly been an hour in bed, crying—
"Victory, dear mother, victory!"
My poor mother sat up in bed in great agitation: such an early return and one so completely successful had never entered her head. She was obliged to believe my word when, after kissing her, she saw me dance round the room still shouting "Victory!" I told her the whole story: Jourdan and his lackeys, Sébastiani and his secretaries, Verdier and his pictures, the Duc de Bellune refusing to receive me and General Foy receiving me twice. And my mother made me repeat it over and over again; unable to believe that I, her poor child, had in three days, without support, without acquaintances, without influence, by my persistence and determination, myself changed the course of my destiny for ever.
At last I got to the end of my tale and sleep had a hearing. I went to the bed that was scarcely cold since I had last used it, and, when I woke up, I wondered if I could really have been absent from Villers-Cotterets during those three days, and if it had not all been a dream. I leapt out of my bed, I dressed myself, I kissed my mother and I ran off along the road to Vouty. M. Danré ought to be the first to hear of my good fortune. This was but fair, since he had brought it about.
M. Danré learnt the news with feelings of personal pride. There is something very comforting to poor human nature when a man counts on a friend for a good action, and this friend accomplishes the deed, without ostentation, in fulfilment of his promise.
M. Danré would have liked me to have stayed there all day; but I was as slippery as an eel. I was not merely in haste that everybody should know of my happiness, but I wanted to increase this happiness twofold, by telling it myself. Dear M. Danré understood this, like the good soul he was. We lunched, and then he set me free. Without, I am thankful to say, representing the same mythological idea as Mercury, my heels, like his, were endowed with wings: in twenty or twenty-five minutes, I was back in Villers-Cotterets; but the news had spread in my absence, in spite of my celerity. Everybody already knew, on my return, that I was a supernumerary in the secretariat of the Duc d'Orléans, and everybody was waiting for me at their doors to congratulate me on my good fortune. They followed me in procession to the door of Abbé Grégoire's house. What recollections of my own have I not put in the story of my poor fellow-countrywoman Ange Pitou! I found our house full of gossips when I returned. Besides our friend Madame Darcourt, our neighbours Mesdames Lafarge, Dupré, Dupuis were holding a confabulation. I was welcomed with open arms, fêted by everybody. They had never doubted my powers; they had always said that I should become somebody; they were delighted to have prophesied an event to my poor mother which was now realised. These ladies, with the exception of Madame Darcourt, let it be noted, were those who had predicted to my mother that her darling son would always be a good-for-nothing. But Fate is the most powerful, the most inexorable of kings; it is not, then, to be wondered at that it has its courtiers. We were never left alone together the whole of the day. I took advantage of the numbers in the house to go and pay a special farewell visit to my good Louise, who would fain have comforted me after Adèle's marriage, if I had been consolable, and whom I would assuredly have comforted after Chollet had gone, had not I myself left.
In the evening my mother and I at last found ourselves alone together for a little while. We took the opportunity to talk over our private affairs. I wanted my mother to sell everything that we did not need and come as soon as possible to settle with me in Paris. Twenty years of misfortunes had sown distrust in my mother's heart. In her opinion, it was far too hasty to act like this. Then, the twelve hundred francs that I looked upon as a fortune was a very small amount to live upon in Paris. Besides, I had not got the salary yet. A supernumerary is but a probationer: if at the end of one month, or two months, they thought that I was not suitable for the post, and if M. Oudard, the head of my office, should make me take a seat as Augustus had made Cinna, as M. Lefèvre had made me, and ask me, as M. Lefèvre had asked me, "Monsieur, do you understand mechanics?" we were lost; for my mother would not even have her tobacco-shop to fall back upon, which she would have left and which she could not sell merely temporarily. My mother, therefore, decided on a common-sense course, which was as follows—