Suddenly we heard that M. Deviolaine was going to retire with his family to his estate of Saint-Remy, and let his house at Villers-Cotterets to the Count de Ribbing. So the house wherein I had been brought up, the house peopled for me with a host of memories, was to pass from the hands of a relative into the hands of a friend The beautiful garden had taken M. de Leuven's special fancy; he hoped to give vent in it to his hobby for gardening interrupted by the successive sales of Brunoy and Quincy. Furthermore, the count had not met with any more persecution, and whether it was because Louis XVIII. did not know of his being in France, or whether the king closed his eyes to the fact, he was left in undisturbed peacefulness.
De Leuven and his father settled, then, in Villers-Cotterets, where Madame de Leuven joined them in a fortnight's time. As for de la Ponce, he rented a house at the end of the rue de Largny, the first house on the left as you come from Paris: it had a large garden and a fine courtyard. My time was soon divided into three portions—one was devoted to my friendships, another to love-makings, and the third to my legal work. The reader may suggest that my mother was perhaps a little neglected in all this. Is a mother ever forgotten? Is she not always there, whether present or absent? Did I not go in and out of my home ten or twenty times a day? Did I not kiss my mother each time I went in? Every day de Leuven, de la Ponce and I managed to meet. Generally it was at de la Ponce's house: we transformed the courtyard which I have mentioned into a shooting range, and every day we used up twenty or thirty balls. De Leuven had excellent German pistols (Kukenreiter). These pistols were marvellously true, and we soon were able to shoot with such precision, all three of us, that when anyone doubted our powers, we would take it in turn to hold the piece of cardboard which served as a target, whilst the others fired. And we never any of us received a single graze! I remember one day after heavy rain we found I do not know how many frogs in that gloomy, damp courtyard. Here was novel game for us to pot at, and we exterminated every frog with our pistols. Every little while de Leuven read us a fable or an elegy of his own composition; but he was cured of making geographical errors by the nocturnal misadventure at Villers-Hellon and no longer mistook the South for the North, or Spain for Siberia. One morning great news spread through the town. Three strangers had just come to stay with M. de Leuven: M. Arnault and his two sons, Telleville and Louis Arnault. M. Arnault, the author of Germanicus and of Marius à Minturnes, was at that time a splendid-looking old man of sixty, still full of life in spite of his curling white locks, which were as fine as silk. He had a most superabundant flow of spirits and excelled at repartee; he could strike as rapidly at his object as the most accomplished fencing-master could parry a blow or deal a right-handed stroke. The only fault one could find with this wit was its keen, biting edge; but, like bites made by healthy teeth, the poet's bites never left poison behind them. M. Arnault had made the acquaintance of the Count de Ribbing at that famous table d'hôte where the latter had struck the foreign colonel in the face. Since that day, M. de Leuven, Frenchman at heart, and M. Arnault, Frenchman in mind, had struck up a friendship which though broken by death was continued between their children. Telleville Arnault was a handsome young officer of a charming disposition and of tested valour. He had fought a Dud over Germanicus with Martainville which had made a great sensation in the literary world. Louis was still a young lad of about my own age.
I prudently kept from visiting Adolphe all the time M. Arnault and his sons were staying with his father; but M. Deviolaine having invited them to a rabbit shooting in the Tillet woods, I was present, and the acquaintance which began by chance during the walks in the park was sealed gun in hand. Telleville had a little gun made by Prélat, with which he did wonders. This gun had a barrel not fourteen inches long, which filled me with wonder, for I still believed in length of barrel and hunted with siege-guns.
When M. Arnault left Villers-Cotterets, he took de Leuven with him. It was heart-breaking to me to see Adolphe depart. I had two memories of visits to Paris, one in 1806, the other in 1814. These two recollections sufficed to make me passionately envious of the lot of every favoured being who was going to Paris. I remained behind with de la Ponce, and I redoubled my devotion to the study of Italian. I was soon sufficiently far advanced in the language of Dante and of Ariosto to be able to pass on to that of Schiller and of Goethe; but this was quite a different matter. After three or four months' work, de la Ponce put one of Auguste Lafontaine's novels in my way: the task was too difficult, I soon had enough of it. German was dropped, and I have never had the courage to take it up again. My first serious dramatic impression dates from this period. Some nabob who had done business through M. Mennesson, out of unheard-of generosity, left a hundred and fifty francs to be divided among the lads in the office. M. Mennesson distributed it in the following way: thirty-seven francs fifty cents each to Ronsin and myself, seventy-five francs to Paillet. It was the first time I had found myself possessed of so much money. I wondered what I should do with it.
One of the four great fêtes of the year was approaching, when we should have Sunday and Monday as holidays. Paillet proposed we should both club our thirty-seven francs fifty cents to his seventy-five francs, and that we should go and sink this fabulous sum of fifty crowns in the delights that Soissons, the seat of the sous-prefecture, could offer us. The suggestion was hailed with joy. Paillet was deputed cashier, and we boldly took seats on the diligence for Paris, which passes through Villers-Cotterets at half-past three in the morning, and arrives at Soissons at six o'clock. Paillet and Ronsin each took a place in the coupé, where one was already taken, and I went inside, where there were four other passengers, three of whom got out at la Vertefeuille, a post three leagues away from Villers-Cotterets, the fourth continuing his journey to Soissons. From la Vertefeuille to Soissons, therefore, I was left alone with this person, who was a man of forty years or thereabouts, very thin of body, pale of face, with auburn hair and well groomed. He had laid great stress on my sitting near him, and, in order to leave me as much room as possible, squeezed himself as closely into a corner of the coach as he could. I was much touched by this attention, and felt sensibly drawn to the gentleman, who had condescended to treat me with so much consideration.
I slept well and anywhere in those days. So, as soon as we got out of the town I fell asleep, only to wake when the horses were changed, and I should most certainly not have waked up then if the three passengers who left us had not trodden on my toes as they got out, with the habitual heavy-footed tread travellers indulge in at the expense of those who remain behind. When the passenger saw I was awake, he began to talk to me, and asked me, in a kindly, interested way, my age, my name and my occupation. I made haste to supply him with full particulars, and he seemed much interested therein. I told him the object of our journey to Soissons; and, as I coughed while I related my tale, he good-naturedly offered me two different sorts of cough lozenges. I accepted both, and in order to get the full benefit of them I put them both in my mouth together; then, although I found the gentleman's conversation agreeable and his manners fascinating, there was something even more seductive and pleasing than that conversation and those manners, namely sleep, so I wished him a good-night, and, with plenty of room to dispose myself in, I settled down in the corner parallel with his, with my back upon one seat and my feet on the other. I do not know how long I had slept when I felt myself awakened in the oddest fashion in the world. My sleeping fellow-traveller had apparently passed from mere interest to a more lively expression of his sentiments, and was embracing me. I imagined he had a nightmare, and I tried to awake him; but as I saw that the more soundly he slept, the worse his gesticulations became, I began to strike him hard, and as my blows had no effect, I cried aloud with all my might. Unluckily, they were descending the hill of Vaubuin and they could not stop the coach; the struggle therefore lasted ten minutes or more, and without in the least knowing what danger I was combating, I was just about to succeed in getting the better of my enemy, by turning him over under my knee, when the door opened and the conductor came to my rescue. Paillet and Ronsin were sleeping as I should have slept if my travelling-companion had not waked me up by his overpowering friendliness. I told the conductor what had happened and blamed him for having put me along with a somnambulist or a madman, begging him to put me in any other corner of the coach convenient to him, when, to my intense astonishment, whilst the traveller was readjusting his toilet, which had been considerably damaged by my struggle with him, without uttering any sort of complaint against me, the conductor began apostrophising him in the severest terms, made him get down out of the coach, and told him that, as there only remained three-quarters of a league from where we were to the hôtel des Trois-Pucelles, where the coach stopped, he must have the goodness to do it on foot, unless he would consent to mount up on the roof, where he could not disturb anybody else. The gentleman of the auburn locks hoisted himself on the roof, without opening his lips, and the diligence started off again. Although I was now alone once more and consequently more at my ease inside the coach, I was too much excited by the struggle I had just gone through, to think of going to sleep again. I could hear the conductor, in the cabriolet, relate my story to my two fellow travelling-companions, and apparently he presented it to them under a gayer light than that in which I had looked at it myself, for they roared with laughter. I did not know what there could be to laugh at in an interchange of fisticuffs with a somnambulist or a maniac. A quarter of an hour after the gentleman had been installed on the imperial, and I reinstated in the carriage, I heard by the heavy sound of the coach wheels that we were crossing under the drawbridge. We had reached our destination.
Five minutes after we had left the coach, Paillet and Ronsin told me why they had laughed, and it sounded so ridiculous that I rushed off in search of my gentleman of the cough lozenges almost before they had finished; but I searched the imperial in vain in every corner and cranny:—he had disappeared.
This nocturnal struggle upset me so greatly that I felt dazed the whole of the day.
[1] Translator's note.—Member of the Society of Law Clerks.