Sir Jasper Carew: His Life and Experience

by Charles James Lever

This dream might possibly have ended without a waking shock, and the long night of the grave have succeeded to the dim twilight of oblivion, had not an event occurred to rouse me from my stupor, and bring me back to life and its troubles.

An order had arrived from Paris to put the fortress into a state of perfect defence. New redoubts and bastions were to be erected, the ditches widened, and an additional force of guns to be mounted on the walls. The telegraph had brought the news in the morning, and ere the sunset that same evening my little garden was a desert; all my care and toil scattered to the winds; the painful work of long months in ruin, and my one sole object in life obliterated and gone. I had thought that all emotions were long since dead within me. I fervently believed that every well of feeling was dry and exhausted in my nature; but I cried and cried bitterly as I beheld this desolation. There seemed to my eyes a wantonness in the cruelty thus inflicted, and in my heart I inveighed against the ruthless passions of men, and the depravity by which their actions are directed. Was the world too much a paradise for me, I asked, that this small spot of earth could not be spared to me? Was I over-covetous in craving this one corner of the vast universe? In my folly and my selfishness I fancied myself the especial mark of adversity, and henceforth I vowed a reckless front to fortune.

He who lives for himself alone, has not only to pay the penalty of unguided counsels, but the far heavier one of following impulses of which egotism is the mainspring. The care for others, the responsibilities of watching over and protecting something besides ourselves, are the very best of all safeguards against our own hearts. I have a right to say this.

From a life of quiet and orderly regularity, I now launched out into utter recklessness and abandonment. I formed acquaintances with the least reputable of my comrades, frequented their haunts, and imitated their habits. I caught vice as men catch a malady. It was a period little short of insanity, since every wish was perverted, and every taste the opposite of my real nature. I, who was once the type of punctuality and exactness, came late and irregularly to my duties. My habits of sobriety were changed for waste, and even my appearance, my very temper, altered; I became dissolute-looking and abandoned, passionate in my humors, and quick to take offence.

The downward course is ever a rapid one, and vices are eminently suggestive of each other. It took a few weeks to make me a spendthrift and a debauchee; a few more, and I became a duellist and a brawler. I ceased to hold intercourse with all who had once held me in esteem, and formed friends among the dissolute and the depraved. Amidst men of this stamp the sentence of a Provost-Marshal, or the durance of the Salle de Police, are reckoned distinctions; and he who has oftenest insulted his superiors and outraged discipline is deemed the most worthy of respect. I had won no laurels of this kind, and resolved not to be behind my comrades in such claims. My only thought was how to obtain some peculiar notoriety by my resistance to authority.

I had now the rank of sergeant,—a grade which permitted me to frequent the café resorted to by the officers; but as this was a privilege no sous-officer availed himself of, I of course did not presume to take. It now, however, occurred to me that this was precisely the kind of infraction the consequences of which might entail the gravest events, and yet be, all the while, within the limits of regimental discipline. With this idea in my head I swaggered, one evening, into the “Lion Gaune,” at that time the favorite military café of Strasburg. The look of astonishment at my entrance was very soon converted into a most unmistakable expression of angry indignation; and when, calling for the waiter, I seated myself at a table, my intrusion was discussed in terms quite loud enough for me to hear.

It was well known that the Emperor distinguished the class I belonged to, by the most signal marks of favor: the sergeant and the corporal might have dared to address him when the field-marshal could not have uttered a word. It was part of his military policy to unbend to those whose position excluded them from even the very shadow of a rivalry, and be coldly distant to all whose station approached an equality. This consideration restrained the feelings of those who now beheld me, and who well knew, in any altercation, into which scale would be thrown the weight of the imperial influence.

To desert the side of the room where I sat, and leave me in a marked isolation, was their first move; but seeing that I rather assumed this as a token of victory, they resorted to another tactic,—they occupied all the tables, save one at the very door, and thus virtually placed me in a position of obloquy and humiliation. For a night or two I held my ground without flinching; but I felt that I could not continue a merely defensive warfare, and determined, at any hazard, to finish the struggle. Instead, therefore, of resuming the humble place they had assigned me, I carried my coffee with me, and set the cup on a table at which a lieutenant-colonel was seated, reading his newspaper by the fire. He started up as he saw me, and called out, “What means this insolence? Is this a place for you?”

“The general instructions of the army declare that a sous-officer has the entrée to all public cafés and restaurants frequented by regimental officers, although not to such as are maintained by them as clubs and messrooms. I am, therefore, only within the limits of a right, Monsieur Colonel,” said I, offering a military salute as I spoke.

“Leave the room, sir, and report yourself to your captain,” said he, boiling over with rage.