CHAPTER I
THE SWINDLE
It was nine o'clock. The little town of Vauchamp, dark and silent,
had just retired to bed amid a chilly November rain. In the Rue des
Recollets, one of the narrowest and most deserted streets of the
district of Saint-Jean, a single window was still alight on the
third floor of an old house, from whose damaged gutters torrents of
water were falling into the street. Mme Burle was sitting up before
a meager fire of vine stocks, while her little grandson Charles
pored over his lessons by the pale light of a lamp.
The apartment, rented at one hundred and sixty francs per annum,
consisted of four large rooms which it was absolutely impossible to
keep warm during the winter. Mme Burle slept in the largest
chamber, her son Captain and Quartermaster Burle occupying a
somewhat smaller one overlooking the street, while little Charles
had his iron cot at the farther end of a spacious drawing room with
mildewed hangings, which was never used. The few pieces of
furniture belonging to the captain and his mother, furniture of the
massive style of the First Empire, dented and worn by continuous
transit from one garrison town to another, almost disappeared from
view beneath the lofty ceilings whence darkness fell. The flooring
of red-colored tiles was cold and hard to the feet; before the
chairs there were merely a few threadbare little rugs of poverty-
stricken aspect, and athwart this desert all the winds of heaven
blew through the disjointed doors and windows.
Near the fireplace sat Mme Burle, leaning back in her old yellow
velvet armchair and watching the last vine branch smoke, with that
stolid, blank stare of the aged who live within themselves. She
would sit thus for whole days together, with her tall figure, her
long stern face and her thin lips that never smiled. The widow of a
colonel who had died just as he was on the point of becoming a
general, the mother of a captain whom she had followed even in his
campaigns, she had acquired a military stiffness of bearing and
formed for herself a code of honor, duty and patriotism which kept
her rigid, desiccated, as it were, by the stern application of
discipline. She seldom, if ever, complained. When her son had
become a widower after five years of married life she had undertaken
the education of little Charles as a matter of course, performing
her duties with the severity of a sergeant drilling recruits. She
watched over the child, never tolerating the slightest waywardness
or irregularity, but compelling him to sit up till midnight when his
exercises were not finished, and sitting up herself until he had
completed them. Under such implacable despotism Charles, whose
constitution was delicate, grew up pale and thin, with beautiful
eyes, inordinately large and clear, shining in his white, pinched
face.
During the long hours of silence Mme Burle dwelt continuously upon
one and the same idea: she had been disappointed in her son. This
thought sufficed to occupy her mind, and under its influence she
would live her whole life over again, from the birth of her son,
whom she had pictured rising amid glory to the highest rank, till
she came down to mean and narrow garrison life, the dull, monotonous
existence of nowadays, that stranding in the post of a
quartermaster, from which Burle would never rise and in which he
seemed to sink more and more heavily. And yet his first efforts had
filled her with pride, and she had hoped to see her dreams realized.
Burle had only just left Saint-Cyr when he distinguished himself at
the battle of Solferino, where he had captured a whole battery of
the enemy's artiliery with merely a handful of men. For this feat
he had won the cross; the papers had recorded his heroism, and he
had become known as one of the bravest soldiers in the army. But
gradually the hero had grown stout, embedded in flesh, timorous,
lazy and satisfied. In 1870, still a captain, he had been made a
prisoner in the first encounter, and he returned from Germany quite
furious, swearing that he would never be caught fighting again, for
it was too absurd. Being prevented from leaving the army, as he was
incapable of embracing any other profession, he applied for and
obtained the position of captain quartermaster, "a kennel," as he
called it, "in which he would be left to kick the bucket in peace."
That day Mme Burle experienced a great internal disruption. She
felt that it was all over, and she ever afterward preserved a rigid
attitude with tightened lips.
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