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ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH
Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of
Vernon at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that
fine monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope,
by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have observed, had he
dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man about fifty years of
age wearing a leather cap, and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse
gray cloth, to which something yellow which had been a red ribbon,
was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned by the sun, his face
nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead
which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely aged,
who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand, in one of
those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the bridge,
and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were
they much larger:
"these are gardens," and were they a little smaller:
"these are bouquets."
All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and on
a house at the other.
The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes of whom we have
just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures and the
most humble of these houses about 1817.
He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with
a woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty,
neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of
earth which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for
the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there. These flowers
were his occupation.
By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets
of water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and
he had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed
to have been forgotten by nature.
He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange Bodin in the
formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the cultivation
of rare and precious shrubs from America and China.
He was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting,
cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air
of kindness, sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless
and thoughtful for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the
trees, the babble of a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed
on a drop of dew at the tip of a spear of grass, of which the
sun made a carbuncle.
His table was very plain, and he drank more milk than wine.
A child could make him give way, and his servant scolded him.
He was so timid that be seemed shy, he rarely went out, and
he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his pane and his
cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the inhabitants
of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to see
his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with
a smile.
He was the "brigand of the Loire."
Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs,
biographies, the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army,
would have been struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable
frequency, the name of Georges Pontmercy.
When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been a soldier
in Saintonge's regiment.
The revolution broke out. Saintonge's regiment formed a part
of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments of the monarchy
preserved their names of provinces even after the fall of the
monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794.
Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim,
at Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who
formed Houchard's rearguard.
It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps of
the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and
only rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon
had opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of
the glacis.
He was under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel,
where a ball from a biscaien broke his arm.
Then he passed to the frontier of Italy, and was one of the
thirty grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende with Joubert.
Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and Pontmercy
sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst
of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to
say:
"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier."
He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment
when, with uplifted sabre, he was shouting:
"Forward!"
Having been embarked with his company in the exigencies of
the campaign, on board a pinnace which was proceeding from Genoa
to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into a wasps'-nest
of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander wanted
to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between
decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel.
Pontmercy had the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly
past under the guns of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further
on, his audacity having increased, he attacked with his pinnace,
and captured a large English transport which was carrying troops
to Sicily, and which was so loaded down with men and horses that
the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was in
that Malher division which took Gunzberg from the Archduke Ferdinand.
At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a storm of
bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the
9th Dragoons.
He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable march
in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry
of the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of
the line, Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and
overthrew the Guard.
The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.
He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which
Mortier commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred
to the 55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders.
At Eylau he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two
hours, the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author
of this book, sustained alone with his company of eighty-three
men every effort of the hostile army. Pontmercy was one of the
three who emerged alive from that cemetery. He was at Friedland.
Then he saw Moscow.
Then La Beresina, then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig,
and the defiles of Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry,
Craon, the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the
redoubtable position of Laon. At Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain,
he put ten Cossacks to the sword, and saved, not his general,
but his corporal.
He was well slashed up on this occasion, and twenty-seven
splinters were extracted from his left arm alone.
Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just exchanged
with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called
under the old regime, the double hand, that is to say, an equal
aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or
a squadron or a battalion as an officer.
It is from this aptitude, perfected by a military education,
which certain special branches of the service arise, the dragoons,
for example, who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one and
the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba.
At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in
Dubois' brigade.
It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion.
He came and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet.
He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he
had received a sword-cut across his face.
The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him:
"You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer
of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy replied:
"Sire, I thank you for my widow."
An hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain.
Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same "brigand
of the Loire."
We have already seen something of his history.
After Waterloo, Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the
hollow road of Ohain, as it will be remembered, had succeeded
in joining the army, and had dragged himself from ambulance to
ambulance as far as the cantonments of the Loire.
The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent
him into residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon.
King Louis XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during
the Hundred Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize
his quality as an officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade
of colonel, nor his title of baron.
He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat,
and he never went out without fastening to it his rosette as an
officer of the Legion of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had
him warned that the authorities would prosecute him for "illegal"
wearing of this decoration. When this notice was conveyed to him
through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy retorted with a bitter
smile:
"I do not know whether I no longer understand French,
or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is that I do not
understand."
Then he went out for eight successive days with his rosette.
They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times the
Minister of War and the general in command of the department wrote
to him with the following address: A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."
He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken.
At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating
in the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed
to General Bonaparte.
Pontmercy had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by
having in his mouth the same saliva as his Emperor.
In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners
who refused to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's
spirit.
One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the
streets of Vernon, stepped up to him, and said:
"Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted to wear my scar?"
He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron.
He had hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon.
He lived there alone, we have just seen how.
Under the Empire, between two wars, he had found time to marry
Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, thoroughly indignant
at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh, saying:
"The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815,
Madame Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way,
lofty in sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died,
leaving a child.
This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but
the grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring
that if the child were not given to him he would disinherit him.
The father had yielded in the little one's interest, and had
transferred his love to flowers.
Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred
up mischief nor conspired.
He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which he
was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed
his time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.
M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law.
The colonel was "a bandit" to him.
M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel, except when he
occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."
It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt
to see his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the
latter handed over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands,
Pontmercy was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to
bring up the child in their own way.
Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions,
but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right and
sacrificing no one but himself.
The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much;
but the inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was
considerable. This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very
rich on the maternal side, and her sister's son was her natural
heir.
The boy, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father,
but nothing more. No one opened his mouth to him about it.
Nevertheless, in the society into which his grandfather took
him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually enlightened
the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something of
the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration
and slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father
only with shame and with a pain at his heart.
While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped
away every two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like
a criminal breaking his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice,
at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There,
trembling lest the aunt should turn round, concealed behind a
pillar, motionless, not daring to breathe, he gazed at his child.
The scarred veteran was afraid of that old spinster.
From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon,
M. l'Abbe Mabeuf.
That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice,
who had often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar
on his cheek, and the large tears in his eyes.
That man, who had so manly an air, yet who was weeping like
a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung to his mind.
One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had
encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized
the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance
to the cure, and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext
or other.
This visit led to others.
The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at first, ended
by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden finally came
to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his
happiness to his child's future. This caused the cure to regard
him with veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side,
became fond of the cure.
And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so penetrate
each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old priest
and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same.
The one has devoted his life to his country here below, the
other to his country on high; that is the only difference.
Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's
day, Marius wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated
by his aunt, and which one would have pronounced to be copied
from some formula; this was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated;
and the father answered them with very tender letters which the
grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.
ONE OF THE RED SPECTRES OF THAT EPOCH
Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of
Vernon at this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that
fine monumental bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope,
by some hideous iron cable bridge, might have observed, had he
dropped his eyes over the parapet, a man about fifty years of
age wearing a leather cap, and trousers and a waistcoat of coarse
gray cloth, to which something yellow which had been a red ribbon,
was sewn, shod with wooden sabots, tanned by the sun, his face
nearly black and his hair nearly white, a large scar on his forehead
which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent, prematurely aged,
who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand, in one of
those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the bridge,
and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were
they much larger:
"these are gardens," and were they a little smaller:
"these are bouquets."
All these enclosures abut upon the river at one end, and on
a house at the other.
The man in the waistcoat and the wooden shoes of whom we have
just spoken, inhabited the smallest of these enclosures and the
most humble of these houses about 1817.
He lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with
a woman who was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty,
neither a peasant nor a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of
earth which he called his garden was celebrated in the town for
the beauty of the flowers which he cultivated there. These flowers
were his occupation.
By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets
of water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and
he had invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed
to have been forgotten by nature.
He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange Bodin in the
formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for the cultivation
of rare and precious shrubs from America and China.
He was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting,
cutting, hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air
of kindness, sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless
and thoughtful for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the
trees, the babble of a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed
on a drop of dew at the tip of a spear of grass, of which the
sun made a carbuncle.
His table was very plain, and he drank more milk than wine.
A child could make him give way, and his servant scolded him.
He was so timid that be seemed shy, he rarely went out, and
he saw no one but the poor people who tapped at his pane and his
cure, the Abbe Mabeuf, a good old man. Nevertheless, if the inhabitants
of the town, or strangers, or any chance comers, curious to see
his tulips, rang at his little cottage, he opened his door with
a smile.
He was the "brigand of the Loire."
Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs,
biographies, the Moniteur, and the bulletins of the grand army,
would have been struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable
frequency, the name of Georges Pontmercy.
When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been a soldier
in Saintonge's regiment.
The revolution broke out. Saintonge's regiment formed a part
of the army of the Rhine; for the old regiments of the monarchy
preserved their names of provinces even after the fall of the
monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in 1794.
Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim,
at Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who
formed Houchard's rearguard.
It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps of
the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and
only rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon
had opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of
the glacis.
He was under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel,
where a ball from a biscaien broke his arm.
Then he passed to the frontier of Italy, and was one of the
thirty grenadiers who defended the Col de Tende with Joubert.
Joubert was appointed its adjutant-general, and Pontmercy
sub-lieutenant. Pontmercy was by Berthier's side in the midst
of the grape-shot of that day at Lodi which caused Bonaparte to
say:
"Berthier has been cannoneer, cavalier, and grenadier."
He beheld his old general, Joubert, fall at Novi, at the moment
when, with uplifted sabre, he was shouting:
"Forward!"
Having been embarked with his company in the exigencies of
the campaign, on board a pinnace which was proceeding from Genoa
to some obscure port on the coast, he fell into a wasps'-nest
of seven or eight English vessels. The Genoese commander wanted
to throw his cannon into the sea, to hide the soldiers between
decks, and to slip along in the dark as a merchant vessel.
Pontmercy had the colors hoisted to the peak, and sailed proudly
past under the guns of the British frigates. Twenty leagues further
on, his audacity having increased, he attacked with his pinnace,
and captured a large English transport which was carrying troops
to Sicily, and which was so loaded down with men and horses that
the vessel was sunk to the level of the sea. In 1805 he was in
that Malher division which took Gunzberg from the Archduke Ferdinand.
At Weltingen he received into his arms, beneath a storm of
bullets, Colonel Maupetit, mortally wounded at the head of the
9th Dragoons.
He distinguished himself at Austerlitz in that admirable march
in echelons effected under the enemy's fire. When the cavalry
of the Imperial Russian Guard crushed a battalion of the 4th of
the line, Pontmercy was one of those who took their revenge and
overthrew the Guard.
The Emperor gave him the cross. Pontmercy saw Wurmser at Mantua,
Melas, and Alexandria, Mack at Ulm, made prisoners in succession.
He formed a part of the eighth corps of the grand army which
Mortier commanded, and which captured Hamburg. Then he was transferred
to the 55th of the line, which was the old regiment of Flanders.
At Eylau he was in the cemetery where, for the space of two
hours, the heroic Captain Louis Hugo, the uncle of the author
of this book, sustained alone with his company of eighty-three
men every effort of the hostile army. Pontmercy was one of the
three who emerged alive from that cemetery. He was at Friedland.
Then he saw Moscow.
Then La Beresina, then Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden, Wachau, Leipzig,
and the defiles of Gelenhausen; then Montmirail, Chateau-Thierry,
Craon, the banks of the Marne, the banks of the Aisne, and the
redoubtable position of Laon. At Arnay-Le-Duc, being then a captain,
he put ten Cossacks to the sword, and saved, not his general,
but his corporal.
He was well slashed up on this occasion, and twenty-seven
splinters were extracted from his left arm alone.
Eight days before the capitulation of Paris he had just exchanged
with a comrade and entered the cavalry. He had what was called
under the old regime, the double hand, that is to say, an equal
aptitude for handling the sabre or the musket as a soldier, or
a squadron or a battalion as an officer.
It is from this aptitude, perfected by a military education,
which certain special branches of the service arise, the dragoons,
for example, who are both cavalry-men and infantry at one and
the same time. He accompanied Napoleon to the Island of Elba.
At Waterloo, he was chief of a squadron of cuirassiers, in
Dubois' brigade.
It was he who captured the standard of the Lunenburg battalion.
He came and cast the flag at the Emperor's feet.
He was covered with blood. While tearing down the banner he
had received a sword-cut across his face.
The Emperor, greatly pleased, shouted to him:
"You are a colonel, you are a baron, you are an officer
of the Legion of Honor!" Pontmercy replied:
"Sire, I thank you for my widow."
An hour later, he fell in the ravine of Ohain.
Now, who was this Georges Pontmercy? He was this same "brigand
of the Loire."
We have already seen something of his history.
After Waterloo, Pontmercy, who had been pulled out of the
hollow road of Ohain, as it will be remembered, had succeeded
in joining the army, and had dragged himself from ambulance to
ambulance as far as the cantonments of the Loire.
The Restoration had placed him on half-pay, then had sent
him into residence, that is to say, under surveillance, at Vernon.
King Louis XVIII., regarding all that which had taken place during
the Hundred Days as not having occurred at all, did not recognize
his quality as an officer of the Legion of Honor, nor his grade
of colonel, nor his title of baron.
He, on his side, neglected no occasion of signing himself
"Colonel Baron Pontmercy." He had only an old blue coat,
and he never went out without fastening to it his rosette as an
officer of the Legion of Honor. The Attorney for the Crown had
him warned that the authorities would prosecute him for "illegal"
wearing of this decoration. When this notice was conveyed to him
through an officious intermediary, Pontmercy retorted with a bitter
smile:
"I do not know whether I no longer understand French,
or whether you no longer speak it; but the fact is that I do not
understand."
Then he went out for eight successive days with his rosette.
They dared not interfere with him. Two or three times the
Minister of War and the general in command of the department wrote
to him with the following address: A Monsieur le Commandant Pontmercy."
He sent back the letters with the seals unbroken.
At the same moment, Napoleon at Saint Helena was treating
in the same fashion the missives of Sir Hudson Lowe addressed
to General Bonaparte.
Pontmercy had ended, may we be pardoned the expression, by
having in his mouth the same saliva as his Emperor.
In the same way, there were at Rome Carthaginian prisoners
who refused to salute Flaminius, and who had a little of Hannibal's
spirit.
One day he encountered the district-attorney in one of the
streets of Vernon, stepped up to him, and said:
"Mr. Crown Attorney, am I permitted to wear my scar?"
He had nothing save his meagre half-pay as chief of squadron.
He had hired the smallest house which he could find at Vernon.
He lived there alone, we have just seen how.
Under the Empire, between two wars, he had found time to marry
Mademoiselle Gillenormand. The old bourgeois, thoroughly indignant
at bottom, had given his consent with a sigh, saying:
"The greatest families are forced into it." In 1815,
Madame Pontmercy, an admirable woman in every sense, by the way,
lofty in sentiment and rare, and worthy of her husband, died,
leaving a child.
This child had been the colonel's joy in his solitude; but
the grandfather had imperatively claimed his grandson, declaring
that if the child were not given to him he would disinherit him.
The father had yielded in the little one's interest, and had
transferred his love to flowers.
Moreover, he had renounced everything, and neither stirred
up mischief nor conspired.
He shared his thoughts between the innocent things which he
was then doing and the great things which he had done. He passed
his time in expecting a pink or in recalling Austerlitz.
M. Gillenormand kept up no relations with his son-in-law.
The colonel was "a bandit" to him.
M. Gillenormand never mentioned the colonel, except when he
occasionally made mocking allusions to "his Baronship."
It had been expressly agreed that Pontmercy should never attempt
to see his son nor to speak to him, under penalty of having the
latter handed over to him disowned and disinherited. For the Gillenormands,
Pontmercy was a man afflicted with the plague. They intended to
bring up the child in their own way.
Perhaps the colonel was wrong to accept these conditions,
but he submitted to them, thinking that he was doing right and
sacrificing no one but himself.
The inheritance of Father Gillenormand did not amount to much;
but the inheritance of Mademoiselle Gillenormand the elder was
considerable. This aunt, who had remained unmarried, was very
rich on the maternal side, and her sister's son was her natural
heir.
The boy, whose name was Marius, knew that he had a father,
but nothing more. No one opened his mouth to him about it.
Nevertheless, in the society into which his grandfather took
him, whispers, innuendoes, and winks, had eventually enlightened
the little boy's mind; he had finally understood something of
the case, and as he naturally took in the ideas and opinions which
were, so to speak, the air he breathed, by a sort of infiltration
and slow penetration, he gradually came to think of his father
only with shame and with a pain at his heart.
While he was growing up in this fashion, the colonel slipped
away every two or three months, came to Paris on the sly, like
a criminal breaking his ban, and went and posted himself at Saint-Sulpice,
at the hour when Aunt Gillenormand led Marius to the mass. There,
trembling lest the aunt should turn round, concealed behind a
pillar, motionless, not daring to breathe, he gazed at his child.
The scarred veteran was afraid of that old spinster.
From this had arisen his connection with the cure of Vernon,
M. l'Abbe Mabeuf.
That worthy priest was the brother of a warden of Saint-Sulpice,
who had often observed this man gazing at his child, and the scar
on his cheek, and the large tears in his eyes.
That man, who had so manly an air, yet who was weeping like
a woman, had struck the warden. That face had clung to his mind.
One day, having gone to Vernon to see his brother, he had
encountered Colonel Pontmercy on the bridge, and had recognized
the man of Saint-Sulpice. The warden had mentioned the circumstance
to the cure, and both had paid the colonel a visit, on some pretext
or other.
This visit led to others.
The colonel, who had been extremely reserved at first, ended
by opening his heart, and the cure and the warden finally came
to know the whole history, and how Pontmercy was sacrificing his
happiness to his child's future. This caused the cure to regard
him with veneration and tenderness, and the colonel, on his side,
became fond of the cure.
And moreover, when both are sincere and good, no men so penetrate
each other, and so amalgamate with each other, as an old priest
and an old soldier. At bottom, the man is the same.
The one has devoted his life to his country here below, the
other to his country on high; that is the only difference.
Twice a year, on the first of January and on St. George's
day, Marius wrote duty letters to his father, which were dictated
by his aunt, and which one would have pronounced to be copied
from some formula; this was all that M. Gillenormand tolerated;
and the father answered them with very tender letters which the
grandfather thrust into his pocket unread.
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