IT SEEMS that I remained in this state of unconsciousness for nearly two hours before the Prince de Ligne’s wagons happened past. One of the drivers, who had stopped to cut a switch from a birch tree, stumbled over my body. Supposing I was dead, he gave me a shove with his boot: I showed some sign of life. The driver called to his comrades, and, moved by an impulse of pity, they loaded me into one of the wagons. The jolts of the road revived me. I made an effort to speak to my saviors; I told them I was a soldier in the Army of Princes and that if they could get me to Brussels I would reward them for their troubles.
“Fine, comrade,” one of them replied, “but you shall have to get down at Namur, for we’re forbidden to pick up passengers. We shall find you again at the other end of town.”
I asked for a drink and swallowed a few drops of eau-de-vie, which aggravated my symptoms but momentarily relieved the pain in my chest. Nature had endowed me with extraordinary fortitude.
At about ten o’clock in the morning, we arrived in the suburbs of Namur. I swung my feet to the ground and followed the wagons at a distance. Soon I lost sight of them. At the entrance to the city, I was stopped. While my papers were examined, I sat beneath the gate. The soldiers on guard, seeing my uniform, offered me a tear of ration bread, and the corporal presented me with a blue glass goblet brimming with pear brandywine. I pretended to drink from the cup of military hospitality, and the corporal became angry:
“Take it!” he barked, accompanying his order with a Sacrement der Teufel!
My progress through the town of Namur was painful. I walked leaning against the houses. The first woman to see me came out of her shop, gave me her arm with a look of deep compassion, and helped me drag myself along. I thanked her, and she replied, “No thanks are needed, soldier.” Soon, other women were rushing to join us, carrying bread, wine, fruit, milk, broth, old clothes, and blankets. “He is wounded,” said some, in their Flemish-French patois; “he has the smallpox,” cried others, shooing their children away. “But, young man, you cannot walk: you shall die. Please, you must go to the hospital.” They wanted to take me there themselves; they relayed me from door to door; and in this way they led me through the whole length of town, at the end of which I found the Prince’s wagons. You have already seen a farmer’s wife help me in a time of need, and I shall soon speak of another woman who took care of me on the island of Guernsey. Oh, all you women who have watched over me in my hours of distress, if you are still living, may God comfort you in your old age and your sorrows! If you have left this life, may your children partake of that happiness which heaven has so long denied me!
The women of Namur helped me climb into the wagon, commended me to the driver, and forced me to accept a wool blanket. I observed that they treated me with a certain respect and deference: there is something superior and delicate in a Frenchman’s nature that other nations cannot help but recognize. The Prince de Ligne’s men set me down again on the road outside the gate of Brussels and refused to take my last coin.
But no hotelkeeper in Brussels would receive me. The Wandering Jew, the Orestes of the people, whom the old ballad led through this city—
When he was in the town of Brussels,
In the Duchy of Brabant
—was made far more welcome there than I, for he at least had five sous in his pocket.[4] I knocked, and doors were opened; but at the sight of me everyone cried, “Go on! Get out of here!” and shut the door in my face. I was chased from a café. My hair hung down over my face, which was masked by my beard and mustache; I had plastered my thigh with mud and straw; and, over my tattered uniform, I wore the wool blanket from the women of Namur knotted around my neck like a cloak. The beggar in the Odyssey was more insolent, but nowhere near as poor as me.[5]
I had made my first attempt at the hotel where I’d stayed with my brother earlier in the year; I was now about to try again. But as I was approaching the door, I caught sight of the Comte de Chateaubriand himself, stepping down from a carriage with the Baron de Montboissier. My brother was scared by my spectral appearance. He went in search of a room for me outside the hotel, for the owner absolutely refused to admit me. A wigmaker offered up a hovel well suited to my wretched condition. My brother brought me a doctor and a surgeon. He told me that he had received letters from Paris, and that M. de Malesherbes had urged him to return to France. He informed me of the Tenth of August, the September Massacres, and other political news of which I had heard nothing. He approved of my plan to go to the island of Jersey and advanced me twenty-five louis d’or. My weakened eyesight barely allowed me to pick out the features of my ill-fated brother: at the time, I believed that these shadows emanated from me, but they were the shadows of Eternity spilling around him. Without knowing it, we were seeing each other for the last time. All of us, so long as we exist, have nothing but the present moment; what follows is a matter for God. Always, there are two chances that we will never see the friend we leave again: our death or his. How many men walk down a staircase never to climb up it again?
Death touches us more before than after the passing of one we love: it is a part of us that drifts away—a world of childhood memories, family intimacies, common interests and affections dissolving. My brother preceded me in my mother’s womb; he was the first to sit before my father’s hearth; he waited several years to receive me, give me my Christian name, and become a part of my youth. If my blood had mixed with his in the Revolutionary tub, I have no doubt that it would have had the same savor, like milk from the same mountain pasture. But if men have made my brother’s head drop before its time, the years are not sparing mine. Already my brow is stripped clean, as though the Ugolino of Time were leaning over me, gnawing at my skull:
. . . come ’l pan per fame si manduca.[6]