The Downfall (La Débâcle): A Story of the Horrors of War

by Émile Zola

They talked. Delaherche, who had already recovered all the assurance of the rich manufacturer, the bonhomie of the master fond of popularity, severe only towards those who failed, reverted to Napoleon III., whose face had been haunting him for a couple of days past. And he addressed himself to Jean, having only that artless fellow there. 'Ah! monsieur,' he began, 'yes, I can indeed say that the Emperor has greatly deceived me. For however much his incense-bearers may plead extenuating circumstances, he is evidently the first cause, the only cause of our disasters.'

He was already forgetting that he had formerly shown himself an ardent Bonapartist, and but a few months previously had done all he could to insure the triumph of the Plebiscitum. And he no longer even pitied the fallen Sovereign who was about to become the Man of Sedan, but taxed him with every iniquity.

'Absolutely incapable, as one is forced to recognise at the present moment; still that by itself would be nothing—but his mind has always been addicted to chimeras; he's a man with an ill-proportioned brain, with whom things seemed to succeed just so long as he had luck on his side. No; people mustn't try to make us pity his fate, by telling us that he was deceived by others, and that the Opposition refused him the necessary men and credits. It is he who has deceived us, whose vices and blunders have plunged us into the frightful mess in which we find ourselves.'

Maurice, who did not wish to take any part in the conversation, could not restrain a smile, whilst Jean, whom this talk about politics rendered uncomfortable, and who feared that he might say something foolish, contented himself with replying: 'Folks say, all the same, that he's a good fellow.'

However, these few words, modestly spoken though they were, almost made Delaherche leap from his seat. All the fright he had experienced, all the anguish he had undergone, burst forth in a cry of exasperated passion that had turned to hatred. 'A good fellow, indeed; that's easily said! Do you know, monsieur, that three shells fell here in my factory, and that it wasn't the Emperor's fault if the buildings were not burnt down? Do you know that I who speak to you, I shall lose a hundred thousand francs in this idiotic affair? Ah! no, no, it is altogether too much—France invaded, burnt, exterminated, industry at a standstill, trade destroyed! We've had quite enough of such a good fellow as that, Heaven preserve us from him! He's down in the mud and the blood, and I say let him stay there!'

Thereupon he made an energetic gesture with his fist as though he were pushing down some struggling wretch and keeping him under water. Then, with a greedy lip, he finished drinking his coffee. Gilberte had given vent to a slight involuntary laugh at sight of the painful abstractedness of Henriette, whom she served like a child. The meal continued till at last the bowls were emptied; still they did not stir, preferring to linger awhile amid the gladsome peacefulness of that large, cool room.

And at that same hour Napoleon III. was in the weaver's poor house on the Donchery road. Already at five in the morning he had insisted upon leaving the Sub-Prefecture, ill at ease at feeling Sedan encompassing him, like a reproach and a threat; still worried, moreover, by a desire to soothe his sensitive heart by obtaining more favourable terms for his unfortunate army. He wished to see the King of Prussia. So, getting into a hired calash, he had set out along the broad highway, bordered with lofty poplars, that first portion of his journey into exile, accomplished in the freshness of the dawn, with a consciousness of all the fallen grandeur that he was leaving behind him in his flight; and it was upon that road that he met Bismarck hastening to him, in an old flat cap and long greased boots, for the sole purpose of trifling with him and preventing him from seeing the King until the capitulation was signed. The King was still at Vendresse, eight and a half miles away. Where should he go? Where could he wait? Afar off, the palace of the Tuileries had disappeared, enveloped in a thundercloud. Sedan, too, already seemed to have receded a distance of many leagues, shut off, as it were, by a river of blood. There were no more imperial châteaux in France, no more official residences; there was not even a corner in the abode of the smallest functionary where he dared to go and seat himself. And it was in the weaver's house that he was minded to strand—the wretched house espied beside the road, with its narrow kitchen-garden skirted by a hedge, and comprising merely a ground-floor and one upper storey with mournful little windows. The room upstairs had whitewashed walls and a tiled floor, and its only furniture was a deal table and two straw-bottomed chairs. There he waited for hours, at first in the company of Bismarck, who smiled on hearing him talk of generosity, and then all alone, dragging his misery up and down the room, pressing his ashy face to the window-panes, and gazing once more upon that soil of France, that Meuse which looked so beautiful as it flowed along athwart vast, fertile fields.[35]

Then that day, the next day, and the following days, there came the other abominable marches and their halting places: the château of Bellevue, that smiling bourgeois country-seat overlooking the river, where he slept, and where he wept after his interview with King William; then the cruel departure, Sedan avoided for fear of the vanquished and the famished, the pontoon bridge, which the Prussians had thrown across the river at Iges, the long circuit on the northern side of the town, the by-ways, the remote roads of Floing, Fleigneux, and Illy—all that lamentable flight in the open calash; and there, on that tragic, corpse-strewn plateau of Illy, occurred the legendary meeting—the wretched Emperor, no longer able to endure the motion of the vehicle, sinking down under the violence of some spasm, maybe mechanically smoking his everlasting cigarette, whilst a flock of haggard, blood-and-dust-covered prisoners, whom their captors were escorting from Fleigneux to Sedan, ranged themselves at the edge of the road to allow the carriage to pass; the first ones silent, the next ones growling, and the others, beyond, growing more and more exasperated until they burst into jeers and brandished their fists with gestures of insult and malediction. And after that there was yet the interminable journey across other portions of the battlefield, a league of broken-up roads, past ruins, and corpses with widely opened, threatening eyes; and then came a bare stretch of country with vast, silent woods, and the frontier atop of an incline; and beyond it the end of everything—a dip into a narrow valley where the road was edged with pines.

And what a first night of exile that was at Bouillon, in an inn, the Hôtel de la Poste, where he found himself amid such a throng of mere sightseers and French refugees that he deemed it proper to show himself, whereat there was loud murmuring and hissing! The room, with its three windows overlooking the Place and the Semoy, was the commonplace hotel-room, with the usual chairs upholstered in red damask, the usual mahogany wardrobe with a plate-glass door, the mantelshelf decked with the usual zinc clock, flanked by shells and vases of artificial flowers under glass cases. Right and left of the door were two little fellow beds. In one of them slept an aide-de-camp, so overcome by fatigue that at nine o'clock he was already sound asleep. In the other one the Emperor must have turned and turned for hours, unable to close his eyes; and if he got up to assuage his sufferings by walking, his only diversion can have been to look at two engravings, hanging on the wall there, on either side of the chimney-piece—one representing Rouget de l'Isle singing the Marseillaise; the other, the Day of Judgment, the mighty call sounded by the trumps of the Archangels, drawing all the dead from the bosom of the earth, the resurrection of the ossuaries of the battlefields, ascending to testify before God.[36]