The Downfall

by Émile Zola

As it was to be her kingdom, Henriette constituted herself lawmaker from the beginning. The regulation was that no one save she and the doctor should have access to Jean; this in order to avert suspicion. Silvine, even, was never to set foot in the room unless by direction. Early each morning the two women came in and put things to rights, and after that, all the long day, the door was as impenetrable as if it had been a wall of stone. And thus it was that Jean found himself suddenly secluded from the world, after many weeks of tumultuous activity, seeing no face save that of the gentle woman whose footfall on the floor gave back no sound. She appeared to him, as he had beheld her for the first time down yonder in Sedan, like an apparition, with her somewhat large mouth, her delicate, small features, her hair the hue of ripened grain, hovering about his bedside and ministering to his wants with an air of infinite goodness.

The patient’s fever was so violent during the first few days that Henriette scarce ever left him. Doctor Dalichamp dropped in every morning on his way to the hospital and examined and dressed the wound. As the ball had passed out, after breaking the tibia, he was surprised that the case presented no better aspect; he feared there was a splinter of the bone remaining there that he had not succeeded in finding with the probe, and that might make resection necessary. He mentioned the matter to Jean, but the young man could not endure the thought of an operation that would leave him with one leg shorter than the other and lame him permanently. No, no! he would rather die than be a cripple for life. So the good doctor, leaving the wound to develop further symptoms, confined himself for the present to applying a dressing of lint saturated with sweet oil and phenic acid having first inserted a drain—an India rubber tube—to carry off the pus. He frankly told his patient, however, that unless he submitted to an operation he must not hope to have the use of his limb for a very long time. Still, after the second week, the fever subsided and the young man’s general condition was improved, so long as he could be content to rest quiet in his bed.

Then Jean’s and Henriette’s relations began to be established on a more systematic basis. Fixed habits commenced to prevail; it seemed to them that they had never lived otherwise—that they were to go on living forever in that way. All the hours and moments that she did not devote to the ambulance were spent with him; she saw to it that he had his food and drink at proper intervals. She assisted him to turn in bed with a strength of wrist that no one, seeing her slender arms, would have supposed was in her. At times they would converse; but as a general thing, especially in the earlier days, they had not much to say. They never seemed to tire of each other’s company, though. On the whole it was a very pleasant life they led in that calm, restful atmosphere, he with the horrible scenes of the battlefield still fresh in his memory, she in her widow’s weeds, her heart bruised and bleeding with the great loss she had sustained. At first he had experienced a sensation of embarrassment, for he felt she was his superior, almost a lady, indeed, while he had never been aught more than a common soldier and a peasant. He could barely read and write. When finally he came to see that she affected no airs of superiority, but treated him on the footing of an equal, his confidence returned to him in a measure and he showed himself in his true colors, as a man of intelligence by reason of his sound, unpretentious common sense. Besides, he was surprised at times to think he could note a change was gradually coming over him; it seemed to him that his mind was less torpid than it had been, that it was clearer and more active, that he had novel ideas in his head, and more of them; could it be that the abominable life he had been leading for the last two months, his horrible sufferings, physical and moral, had exerted a refining influence on him? But that which assisted him most to overcome his shyness was to find that she was really not so very much wiser than he. She was but a little child when, at her mother’s death, she became the household drudge, with her three men to care for, as she herself expressed it—her grandfather, her father, and her brother—and she had not had the time to lay in a large stock of learning. She could read and write, could spell words that were not too long, and “do sums,” if they were not too intricate; and that was the extent of her acquirement. And if she continued to intimidate him still, if he considered her far and away the superior of all other women upon earth, it was because he knew the ineffable tenderness, the goodness of heart, the unflinching courage, that animated that frail little body, who went about her duties silently and met them as if they had been pleasures.

They had in Maurice a subject of conversation that was of common interest to them both and of which they never wearied. It was to Maurice’s friend, his brother, to whom she was devoting herself thus tenderly, the brave, kind man, so ready with his aid in time of trouble, who she felt had made her so many times his debtor. She was full to overflowing with a sentiment of deepest gratitude and affection, that went on widening and deepening as she came to know him better and recognize his sterling qualities of head and heart, and he, whom she was tending like a little child, was actuated by such grateful sentiments that he would have liked to kiss her hands each time she gave him a cup of bouillon. Day by day did this bond of tender sympathy draw them nearer to each other in that profound solitude amid which they lived, harassed by an anxiety that they shared in common. When he had utterly exhausted his recollections of the dismal march from Rheims to Sedan, to the particulars of which she never seemed to tire of listening, the same question always rose to their lips: what was Maurice doing then? why did he not write? Could it be that the blockade of Paris was already complete, and was that the reason why they received no news? They had as yet had but one letter from him, written at Rouen, three days after his leaving them, in which he briefly stated that he had reached that city on his way to Paris, after a long and devious journey. And then for a week there had been no further word; the silence had remained unbroken.

In the morning, after Doctor Dalichamp had attended to his patient, he liked to sit a while and chat, putting his cares aside for the moment. Sometimes he also returned at evening and made a longer visit, and it was in this way that they learned what was going on in the great world outside their peaceful solitude and the terrible calamities that were desolating their country. He was their only source of intelligence; his heart, which beat with patriotic ardor, overflowed with rage and grief at every fresh defeat, and thus it was that his sole topic of conversation was the victorious progress of the Prussians, who, since Sedan, had spread themselves over France like the waves of some black ocean. Each day brought its own tidings of disaster, and resting disconsolately on one of the two chairs that stood by the bedside, he would tell in mournful tones and with trembling gestures of the increasing gravity of the situation. Oftentimes he came with his pockets stuffed with Belgian newspapers, which he would leave behind him when he went away. And thus the echoes of defeat, days, weeks, after the event, reverberated in that quiet room, serving to unite yet more closely in community of sorrow the two poor sufferers who were shut within its walls.

It was from some of those old newspapers that Henriette read to Jean the occurrences at Metz, the Titanic struggle that was three times renewed, separated on each occasion by a day’s interval. The story was already five weeks old, but it was new to him, and he listened with a bleeding heart to the repetition of the miserable narrative of defeat to which he was not a stranger. In the deathly stillness of the room the incidents of the woeful tale unfolded themselves as Henriette, with the sing-song enunciation of a schoolgirl, picked out her words and sentences. When, after Froeschwiller and Spickeren, the 1st corps, routed and broken into fragments, had swept away with it the 5th, the other corps stationed along the frontier en échelon from Metz to Bitche, first wavering, then retreating in their consternation at those reverses, had ultimately concentrated before the intrenched camp on the right bank of the Moselle. But what waste of precious time was there, when they should not have lost a moment in retreating on Paris, a movement that was presently to be attended with such difficulty! The Emperor had been compelled to turn over the supreme command to Marshal Bazaine, to whom everyone looked with confidence for a victory. Then, on the 14th[^[3]] came the affair of Borny, when the army was attacked at the moment when it was at last about to cross the stream, having to sustain the onset of two German armies: Steinmetz’s, which was encamped in observation in front of the intrenched camp, and Prince Frederick Charles’s, which had passed the river higher up and come down along the left bank in order to bar the French from access to their country; Borny, where the firing did not begin until it was three o’clock; Borny, that barren victory, at the end of which the French remained masters of their positions, but which left them astride the Moselle, tied hand and foot, while the turning movement of the second German army was being successfully accomplished. After that, on the 16th, was the battle of Rezonville; all our corps were at last across the stream, although, owing to the confusion that prevailed at the junction of the Mars-la-Tour and Etain roads, which the Prussians had gained possession of early in the morning by a brilliant movement of their cavalry and artillery, the 3d and 4th corps were hindered in their march and unable to get up; a slow, dragging, confused battle, which, up to two o’clock, Bazaine, with only a handful of men opposed to him, should have won, but which he wound up by losing, thanks to his inexplicable fear of being cut off from Metz; a battle of immense extent, spreading over leagues of hill and plain, where the French, attacked in front and flank, seemed willing to do almost anything except advance, affording the enemy time to concentrate and to all appearances co-operating with them to ensure the success of the Prussian plan, which was to force their withdrawal to the other side of the river. And on the 18th, after their retirement to the intrenched camp, Saint-Privat was fought, the culmination of the gigantic struggle, where the line of battle extended more than eight miles in length, two hundred thousand Germans with seven hundred guns arrayed against a hundred and twenty thousand French with but five hundred guns, the Germans facing toward Germany, the French toward France, as if invaders and invaded had inverted their roles in the singular tactical movements that had been going on; after two o’clock the conflict was most sanguinary, the Prussian Guard being repulsed with tremendous slaughter and Bazaine, with a left wing that withstood the onsets of the enemy like a wall of adamant, for a long time victorious, up to the moment, at the approach of evening, when the weaker right wing was compelled by the terrific losses it had sustained to abandon Saint-Privat, involving in its rout the remainder of the army, which, defeated and driven back under the walls of Metz, was thenceforth to be imprisoned in a circle of flame and iron.

[3] August.—TR.

As Henriette pursued her reading Jean momentarily interrupted her to say:

“Ah, well! and to think that we fellows, after leaving Rheims, were looking for Bazaine! They were always telling us he was coming; now I can see why he never came!”

The marshal’s despatch, dated the 19th, after the battle of Saint-Privat, in which he spoke of resuming his retrograde movement by way of Montmedy, that despatch which had for its effect the advance of the army of Châlons, would seem to have been nothing more than the report of a defeated general, desirous to present matters under their most favorable aspect, and it was not until a considerably later period, the 29th, when the tidings of the approach of this relieving army had reached him through the Prussian lines, that he attempted a final effort, on the right bank this time, at Noiseville, but in such a feeble, half-hearted way that on the 1st of September, the day when the army of Châlons was annihilated at Sedan, the army of Metz fell back to advance no more, and became as if dead to France. The marshal, whose conduct up to that time may fairly be characterized as that of a leader of only moderate ability, neglecting his opportunities and failing to move when the roads were open to him, after that blockaded by forces greatly superior to his own, was now about to be seduced by alluring visions of political greatness and become a conspirator and a traitor.