Madame Chalice had been merely whimsical in sending these violets, which her gardener had brought her that very morning.
“It will help along the pretty farce,” she had said to herself; and then she sat her down to read Napoleon’s letters to Josephine, and to wonder that a woman could have been faithless and vile with such a man. Her blood raced indignantly in her veins as she thought of it. She admired intellect, supremacy, the gifts of temperament, deeds of war and adventure beyond all. As yet her brain was stronger than her feelings; there had been no breakers of emotion in her life. A wife, she had no child; the mother in her was spent upon her husband, whose devotion, honour, name, and goodness were dear to her. Yet—yet she had a world of her own; and reading Napoleon’s impassioned letters to his wife, written with how great homage! in the flow of the tide washing to famous battle-fields, an exultation of ambition inspired her, and the genius of her distinguished ancestors set her heart beating hard. Presently, her face alive with feeling, a furnace in her eyes, she repeated a paragraph from Napoleon’s letters to Josephine:
The enemy have lost, my dearest, eighteen thousand men, prisoners,
killed, and wounded. Wurmzer has nothing left but to throw himself
into Mantua. I hope soon to be in your arms. I love you to
distraction. All is well. Nothing is wanting to your husband’s
happiness, save the love of Josephine.
She sprang to her feet. “And she, wife of a hero, was in common intrigue with Hippolyte Charles at the time! She had a conqueror, a splendid adventurer, and coming emperor, for a husband, and she loved him not. I—I could have knelt to him—worshipped him. I”—With a little hysterical, disdainful laugh, as of the soul at itself, she leaned upon the window, looking into the village below, alternately smiling and frowning at the thought of this adventurer down at the Louis Quinze. “Yet, who can tell? Disraeli was half mountebank at the start,” she said. “Napoleon dressed infamously, too, before he was successful.” But again she laughed, as at an absurdity.
During the next few days Valmond was everywhere—kind, liberal, quaint, tireless, at times melancholy; “in the distant perspective of the stage,” as Monsieur De la Riviere remarked mockingly. But a passing member of the legislature met and was conquered by Valmond, and carried on to neighbouring parishes the wondrous tale.
He carried it through Ville Bambord, fifty miles away; and the story of how a Napoleon had come to Pontiac reached the ears of old Sergeant Eustache Lagroin of the Old Guard, who had fought with the Great Emperor at Waterloo, and in his army on twenty other battle-fields. He had been at Fontainebleau when Napoleon bade farewell to the Old Guard, saying: “For twenty years I have ever found you in the path of honour and glory. Adieu, my children! I would I were able to press you all to my heart—but I will at least press your eagle. I go to record the great deeds we have done together.”
When the gossip came to Lagroin, as he sat in his doorway, babbling of Grouchy and Lannes and Davoust, the Little Corporal outflanking them all in his praise, his dim blue eyes flared out from the distant sky of youth and memory, his lips pursed in anger, and he got to his feet, his stick fiercely pounding the ground.
“Tut! tut!” said he. “A lie! a pretty lie! I knew all the Napoleons—Joseph, Lucien, Louis, Jerome, Caroline, Eliza, Pauline—all! I have seen them every one. And their children—pah! Who can deceive me? I will go to Pontiac, I will see to this tomfoolery. I’ll bring the rascal to the drumhead. Does he think there is no one? Pish! I will spit him at the first stroke. Here, here, Manette,” he cried to his grand-daughter; “fetch out my uniform, give it an airing, and see to the buttons. I will show this brag how one of the Old Guard looked at Saint Jean. Quick, Manette, my sabre polish; I’ll clean my musket, and to-morrow I will go to Pontiac. I’ll put the scamp through his facings—but yes! I am eighty, but I have an arm of thirty.” True to his word, the next morning at daybreak he started to walk to Pontiac, accompanied for a mile or so by Manette and a few of the villagers.
“See you, my child,” he said, “I will stay with my niece, Desire Malboir, and her daughter Elise, there in Pontiac. You shall hear how I fetch that vagabond to his potage!”
Valmond had purchased a tolerable white horse through Medallion. After a day’s grooming the beast showed off very well; and he was now seen riding about the parish, dressed after the manner of the First Napoleon, with a cocked hat and a short sword at his side. He rode well, and the silver and pennies he scattered were most fruitful of effect from the martial elevation. He happened to be riding into the village at one end as Sergeant Lagroin entered it at the other, each going towards the Louis Quinze. Valmond knew nothing of Sergeant Lagroin, so that what followed was of the inspiration of the moment. It sprang from his wit, and from his knowledge of Napoleon and the Napoleonic history, a knowledge which had sent Monsieur Garon into tears of joy in his own home, and afterwards off to the Manor House and also to the Seigneury, full of praise of him.