But a new alarm now seized me. The extreme indifference with which I had begun to regard all things, at length struck the eye of one of the military surgeons, who had been sent from Paris in consequence of the influx of prisoners. He seemed to take some interest in my consumptive visage and lack-lustre eye; asked me whether "some of my family had not died early in life," and offered to dictate my pursuits and regimen. The French are by nature a kindly people, with this one proviso, that, though every Frenchman on earth is more or less a persifleur, you must never practise the art upon himself. M. Rossignol Perigord Pantoufle would have been an incomparable subject for the exercise, for he was eccentricity from top to toe. But the state of my spirits prevented my taking any share in the burlesque which too frequently befell this worthy person; and he attached himself to me as a sort of refuge from the sly, but stinging, persecution of his fellow-officers. When the hen-wife plucks the goose's bosom it makes her nestle more closely to her goslings. It was the calamity of my friend Pantoufle to be born with what the novelists call a "too feeling heart;" he was always in love with some one or another, and always jilted. But misfortune was thrown away upon him; he was still a complete sensitive plant, shivering and shrinking at every new touch: a dish of blancmange could not have shaken with a slighter impulse, nor a shape of jelly more easily dissolved. He was now past fifty; and, never much indebted to nature in his youth, time, the foe to beauty, had been more than a foe to the doctor. I never recollect to have seen a figure or physiognomy less fitted to disturb the female soul. But he made me the confidant of his woes; and if I did not, like Desdemona, "to him seriously incline," at least I never laughed, amusing as were his agonies, and diverting as was his despair. I had either the presence of mind, or the feebleness of pulse, to look and listen;—the art has succeeded in higher places than prisons.
Yet all was not sentimentality with him. He was an honest and high-spirited man in the main. He questioned me—and no question could then be a bolder one at the time—in what manner he could best serve me. My answer was immediate—"Find out the commercial house of Elnathan, and tell the head of the family that I am here." The service was done, and I received for answer, on my friend's return from his ride to the Rue Vivienne—"That the firm kept no account with any person of my name; and that they had no desire to have any further application on the subject." The doctor, too, had been received with such gathering of black brows, and such murmurs between indignation and astonishment; that if Rabbi Elnathan had not been deemed altogether beneath the vengeance of "an officer in the service of the Republic," the consequence would have been a proposal to choose his own time to be run through the body in the Champs Elysées.
It was late when my ambassador had returned, and I had begun to feel some alarm for his peril by other than the shafts of Cupid in the rashness of exposing him to the jealous eye of his government, or perhaps to the denunciation of the Jewish firm, who, to screen themselves, might hasten with the intelligence to the first police-office. And I had an uneasy walk of a couple of hours, gazing from the ramparts, for every movement in the direction of the capital. The night was calm, and the glow of the lamps in the streets strikingly marked their outline; when on a sudden the sky was filled with flame of every colour, shot up in all directions, the cannon round the barriers began to roar, and Montmartre was in a perpetual blaze. It was plain that some extraordinary event had occurred; but whether this were the fall of the triumvirate or of their enemies, a new revolution or a new monarch, was beyond our knowledge; we were all hermetically sealed up in Vincennes; and if Paris had been buried in its own catacombs at the moment, the news would have been doled out to us only in the segments which suited the dignity of the governor.
But Pantoufle for once was popular in the fortress. If he had brought nothing to raise my spirits, his tidings threw the garrison into ecstasy. The Republic "had gained a great victory," whose value was enhanced by the previous disasters of the campaign. The favourite of the French armies, too, had gained that victory. This was another feature of the rejoicing. Dumourier was one of the people; "no noble, no aristocrat, no son of landed wealth, no lord of forests and feeder on privileges." He had been a simple captain of engineers; he was now conqueror of those Austrian provinces on which France had cast an eager eye for centuries. That prize, which all the monarchs of France, with all their titled marshals, had never been able to seize, "the Republic, with a republican army and a republican general, had won in the first month of her first invasion."
The garrison, of course, had its fireworks, its salute from the ramparts, and its feu de joie. But, in the midst of the festivity, I observed Pantoufle's countenance loaded with some mighty secret. He broke it to me with the air of a man revealing a conspiracy. Taking me on one side, while the ramparts were blazing with blue-lights, and every man, woman, and child of the garrison were chattering, huzzaing, and waltzing round us; he communicated to me the solemn fact, that his heart had been pierced again. This execution had been done while he was waiting in Elnathan's counting-house: a young Rachel or Rebecca had accidentally glanced across his sight, with such inimitable eyes, that his fate was decided for life. The world was valueless without her; and my particular advice was requested as to the way in which he was to make his approaches. I advised a sonnet. He smiled, and acknowledged that he had anticipated my advice, and had spent an hour of that twilight, dear to love and the muses, during which he had kept me in all the discomforts of suspense, devoting all the energies of his soul to the composition of a song to the beauties of the irresistible Israelite. Boileau has told the world, that a poet once insisted on his listening to an ode of his composition, while they were kneeling together at high mass. Our situation might not be quite as solemn, but the doctor was quite as pressing; and seated on the corner of a bastion, while the guns were roaring above our heads, I listened to an effusion in the most established style of sexagenarian poetry.
"Rachel est sans désirs,
C'est un bouton de rose,
Que la nature arrose,
Et dispose à s'ouvrir.
Dans son cour sans detour,
Il n'est pas jour encore;
Il attend pour eclore
Un rayon de l'amour!"
I listened without a laugh, and won the eternal gratitude of the writer. Nothing could be clearer than that, whatever the effusion might owe to the inspiration of Cupid, Apollo had no share in its charm. On my part, it would probably have been an act of the truest friendship, to have bid him burn his tablets, forswear poetry for ever, and regard himself as forbidden the temptations of the maids of Parnassus. But I should have broken his heart. I took the simpler but more effectual cure—I bade him find out this idol, and marry her. Before I forget him and his sorrows, let me mention, that he took my advice, and that, on my return to the Continent some years after, I found the poet transferred into the benedict, with a pretty wife at his side, and a circle of lively children at his knee—an active, thriving, and rational member of the community. I always quote the doctor, for the superiority of the soothing system. The vinegar of criticism would have festered the wounds of his vanity; the art of (must I call it) flattery healed them. It left a scar, I acknowledge; for the doctor still wrote verses, and still had a lurking propensity for climbing the slippery slope of poetic renown. But the realities of life are fortunate correctives to this passion, and, like Piron, luckily
"Il ne fut rien
Pas même academician."
But on this night our "intercourse of souls" was interrupted by one of those painful evidences of the renewal of hostilities which shows war in its truest aspect. A long column of vehicles, which we had seen moving for some time across the plain, and whose movement, by the torches of the escort, looked from the ramparts like the trailing of an immense phosphoric serpent, approached the gates. The announcement was soon made that it was a large detachment of prisoners and wounded, who had arrived from the desperate but decisive battle in Flanders. All the medical officers of the garrison were immediately in requisition; and the sights which I saw, even when standing at the gate, as the carts and cars rolled over the drawbridge, were sufficient to startle feelings more used to such terrible demonstrations of the folly or the frenzy of the world. But this was no time to indulge indolent sensibilities. Of course, I have no desire to enter into the startling details of that spectacle. But mastering myself so far, as to volunteer my attendance for the time in the hospital, the thought often occurred to me, that there could be no better lesson for the love of conquest than a walk through a military hospital after the first battle.