Among these young folk—and to be exact in our figures we ought to reduce the number of these juvenile nobilities to twenty-one—was one who was neither knight, baron, count, marquis, duke nor prince, and who nevertheless was not the least remarkable inmate of the college. This was a young Spanish officer named Lillo, aged fifteen, who had been taken prisoner at the siege of Badajoz. He had fought like a demon, had killed a French grenadier with his own hand and had been taken only after a heroic defence. They were about to shoot him when Marshal Soult happened to pass by, and, having inquired and been informed what was being done, had him despatched to Madrid, with orders that he should be placed in the college. The order was carried out, and Lillo was sent to the college, but in the twofold capacity of pupil and prisoner. The lad, who had borne the rank of second lieutenant, had commanded grown men, had faced battle in open field, equipped as a soldier, took badly to the college discipline full of Jesuitical chicaneries, to which he had to submit like all the others, save in the matter of the common dormitory, where, however, each pupil had his own cubicle. He therefore, as far as he was permitted, kept to himself in solitude, rage burning at his heart's core, and in his relations with the other young lads he was cold, melancholy and haughty. Of course, the three French boys were the object of his particular aversion, and he was constantly picking quarrels with one and sometimes with all three of the sons of the general attached to Joseph, he a soldier of Ferdinand VII. Once he called Napoleon Napoladron before Eugène—true, nearly every Spaniard called the conqueror of Austerlitz by that nickname, but Eugène was none the less sensitive? to the insult on that account, and he retorted that Lillo had been taken prisoner between the legs of a French grenadier. Lillo had a pair of compasses in his hand; he did not wait for any other weapon, but threw himself on Eugène and stabbed him brutally with it on the cheek. The wound, or rather the tear, was an inch and a half in length. Eugène wished to fight a duel, and Lillo was willing enough; but the professors intervened and separated the youth and the lad. Lillo disappeared the next day; and neither Victor nor his brother ever heard what became of him. I can still hear Victor's grave voice when he told me the anecdote, saying—
"And the young fellow was right: he was standing up for his country ... but children do not understand that."
The living at the Séminaire des Nobles was cloistral; probably no monastery throughout Spain kept severer rules. Once a fortnight they went for a walk, but even this was restricted, and they might not even go to the Délices (corresponding to our Champs-Élysées), for fear of guerilla bands. These twenty or twenty-five lads would have been a great prize, and worth a good ransom, belonging, as they did, not only to the first families in Madrid, but also to the families which had thrown in their lot with the brother of Napoladron, as Lillo had called him.
From time to time, the boys would look up at the sound of an opening door and they would see a vision out of the seventeenth century appear in the beginning of the nineteenth. One day, when in the refectory, eating their meal in silence, while a junior master, seated on a raised chair in the midst of an immense hall, was reading to them in Spanish out of a pious book, suddenly, the door opened, after a couple of knocks, as though a prince, cardinal or Spanish grandee were outside. The four little Benavente boys had not seen their mother for over a year, and it was the Princess of Benavente. She advanced a few steps into the room and waited. Then her four sons rose, ranged themselves according to their age, eldest first, second next, and so on, and, without taking one step faster than another, advanced ceremoniously and kissed their mother's hand in turn from the tallest to the smallest. The three young French lads were greatly astonished at the proceeding and at a loss to understand such etiquette as this, for they were accustomed to rush to their mother and fling themselves on her neck, when they caught sight of her.
At the end of six months' sojourn at the Séminaire des Nobles, Abel attained his twelfth year and was allowed by special privilege to enter as a page at that age.
Then came the winter and famine. It was cold everywhere during the fatal winter of 1812-1813, although it was nothing compared with the severity experienced in Russia.
It was the fate of Napoleon to attract and concentrate the attention of the world upon him during his reverses as during his victories.
The twenty-five pupils buried in that vast Séminaire des Nobles, in the dormitories, schoolrooms and refectories intended for three hundred inmates, were perished with cold. Nothing could warm those great rooms wherein there was not a single fireplace; braziers placed in the middle of the rooms only served to emphasise winter's triumph. Besides this, the children were not only perishing of cold, but, worse still, were dying of starvation. The wealthiest in Madrid could not get bread in 1812. And King Joseph himself—probably to set a good example—ordered that nothing but soldiers' bread should be served at his table. People were constantly found in the streets who had not even as much warmth as the braziers at the Séminaire des Nobles, or King Joseph's army bread, lying down on the thresholds of the great in tattered cloaks and dying of hunger and cold. If they were still alive, every effort was made to feed and warm them; if they were dead, they were removed and buried. Bread was as scarce at the Séminaire des Nobles as elsewhere, and the lads complained bitterly of hunger; to the less patient, father Manoël would say—
"Make the sign of the Cross on your stomachs, and that will feed you."
The boys made many crosses, and, although the action warmed them a little, it certainly did not nourish them. But they suspected Don Manoël, who kept fat amongst all the sad and emaciated faces, to have an illicit intimacy with the kitchen, which he hid even from Don Bazilio.