The Chouans by Honoré de Balzac (open ebook txt) 📕

wife?” said Marche-a-Terre, roughly.

“Besides, cousin, we don’t want excuses, we want your axe. You are condemned.”

At a sign from his companion, Pille-Miche helped Marche-a-Terre to seize the victim. Finding himself in their grasp Galope-Chopine lost all power and fell on his knees holding up his hands to his slayers in desperation.

“My friends, my good friends, my cousin,” he said, “what will become of my little boy?”

“I will take charge of him,” said Marche-a-Terre.

“My good comrades,” cried the victim, turning livid. “I am not fit to die. Don’t make me go without confession. You have the right to take my life, but you’ve no right to make me lose a blessed eternity.”

“That is true,” said Marche-a-Terre, addressing Pille-Miche.

The two Chouans waited a moment in much uncertainty, unable to decide this case of conscience. Galope-Chopine listened to the rustling of the wind as though he still had hope. Suddenly Pille-Miche took him by the arm into a corner of the hut.

“Confess your sins to me,” he said, “and I will tell them to a priest of the true Church, and if there is any penance to do I will do it for you.”

Galope-Chopine obtained some respite by the way in which he confessed his sins; but in spite of their number and the circumstances of each crime, he came finally to the end of them.

“Cousin,” he said, imploringly, “since I am speaking to you as I would to my confessor, I do assure you, by the holy name of God, that I have nothing to reproach myself with except for having, now and then, buttered my bread on both sides; and I call on Saint-Labre, who is there over the chimney-piece, to witness that I have never said one word about the Gars. No, my good friends, I have not betrayed him.”

“Very good, that will do, cousin; you can explain all that to God in course of time.”

“But let me say good-bye to Barbette.”

“Come,” said Marche-a-Terre, “if you don’t want us to think you worse than you are, behave like a Breton and be done with it.”

The two Chouans seized him again and threw him on the bench where he gave no other sign of resistance than the instinctive and convulsive motions of an animal, uttering a few smothered groans, which ceased when the axe fell. The head was off at the first blow. Marche-a-Terre took it by the hair, left the room, sought and found a large nail in the rough casing of the door, and wound the hair about it; leaving the bloody head, the eyes of which he did not even close, to hang there.

The two Chouans then washed their hands, without the least haste, in a pot full of water, picked up their hats and guns, and jumped the gate, whistling the “Ballad of the Captain.” Pille-Miche began to sing in a hoarse voice as he reached the field the last verses of that rustic song, their melody floating on the breeze:—

“At the first town Her lover dressed her All in white satin; “At the next town Her lover dressed her In gold and silver. “So beautiful was she They gave her veils To wear in the regiment.”

The tune became gradually indistinguishable as the Chouans got further away; but the silence of the country was so great that several of the notes reached Barbette’s ear as she neared home, holding her boy by the hand. A peasant-woman never listens coldly to that song, so popular is it in the West of France, and Barbette began, unconsciously, to sing the first verses:—

“Come, let us go, my girl, Let us go to the war; Let us go, it is time. “Brave captain, Let it not trouble you, But my daughter is not for you. “You shall not have her on earth, You shall not have her at sea, Unless by treachery. “The father took his daughter, He unclothed her And flung her out to sea. “The captain, wiser still, Into the waves he jumped And to the shore he brought her. “Come, let us go, my girl, Let us go to the war; Let us go, it is time. “At the first town Her lover dressed her,” Etc., etc.

As Barbette reached this verse of the song, where Pille-Miche had begun it, she was entering the courtyard of her home; her tongue suddenly stiffened, she stood still, and a great cry, quickly repressed, came from her gaping lips.

“What is it, mother?” said the child.

“Walk alone,” she cried, pulling her hand away and pushing him roughly; “you have neither father nor mother.”

The child, who was rubbing his shoulder and weeping, suddenly caught sight of the thing on the nail; his childlike face kept the nervous convulsion his crying had caused, but he was silent. He opened his eyes wide, and gazed at the head of his father with a stupid look which betrayed no emotion; then his face, brutalized by ignorance, showed savage curiosity. Barbette again took his hand, grasped it violently, and dragged him into the house. When Pille-Miche and Marche-a-Terre threw their victim on the bench one of his shoes, dropping off, fell on the floor beneath his neck and was afterward filled with blood. It was the first thing that met the widow’s eye.

“Take off your shoe,” said the mother to her son. “Put your foot in that. Good. Remember,” she cried, in a solemn voice, “your father’s shoe; never put on your own without remembering how the Chouans filled it with his blood, and kill the Chouans!”

She swayed her head with so convulsive an action that the meshes of her black hair fell upon her neck and gave a sinister expression to her face.

“I call Saint-Labre to witness,” she said, “that I vow you to the Blues. You shall be a soldier to avenge your father. Kill, kill the Chouans, and do as I do. Ha! they’ve taken the head of my man, and I am going to give that of the Gars to the Blues.”

She sprang at a bound on the bed, seized a little bag of money from a hiding-place, took the hand of the astonished little boy, and dragged him after her without giving him time to put on his shoe, and was on her way to Fougeres rapidly, without once turning her head to look at the home she abandoned. When they reached the summit of the rocks of Saint-Sulpice Barbette set fire to the pile of fagots, and the boy helped her to pile on the green gorse, damp with hoarfrost, to make the smoke more dense.

“That fire will last longer than your father, longer than I, longer than the Gars,” said Barbette, in a savage voice.

While the widow of Galope-Chopine and her son with his bloody foot stood watching, the one, with a gloomy expression of revenge, the other with curiosity, the curling of the smoke, Mademoiselle de Verneuil’s eyes were fastened on the same rock, trying, but in vain, to see her lover’s signal. The fog, which had thickened, buried the whole region under a veil, its gray tints obscuring even the outlines of the scenery that was nearest the town. She examined with tender anxiety the rocks, the castle, the buildings, which loomed like shadows through the mist. Near her window several trees stood out against this blue-gray background; the sun gave a dull tone as of tarnished silver to the sky; its rays colored the bare