London, April to September 1822
BEHIND our camp a sort of market had formed. Peasants had brought casks of white Moselle wine in their wagonbeds. Unhitched horses fed at one end of these carts, while men drank at the other. Here and there, small fires glowed. Sausages were being fried in pans, puddings boiled in basins, crêpes spread over iron plates, and pancakes stacked up in baskets. You could buy aniseed cakes, penny-a-piece rye bread, corn cakes, green apples, brown and white eggs, pipes, and tobacco all under a tree whose branches were hung with coarse cloth greatcoats, bargained for by passersby. Village girls straddling wooden stools milked cows, and every man stood in line and waited his turn to present the milkmaid with his cup. Provisioners in smocks and soldiers in uniforms loitered around the ovens. Cooks went back and forth, hawking their wares in French and German. Some stood in groups and others sat at pinewood tables set unevenly on the rocky ground. A few sought shelter wherever they could find it, under a canvas sheet or a roof of branches cut from the forest, as on Palm Sunday. I believe there were even marriages performed in covered wagons, in memory of the Frankish kings. The patriots might easily have followed the example of Majorian and stolen the bride’s chariot away: Rapit esseda victor, Nubentemque nurum (Sidonius Apollinaris).[32] Everyone sang, laughed, and smoked. It was an extremely cheerful scene at night, between the fires that lit the earth and the stars that twinkled in the sky.
Whenever I was not on guard at the batteries or on duty in the camp, I loved to go sup at this fair. Here, the camp’s stories were told over again; but enlivened by booze and high spirits, they were still more wonderful.
One of our comrades, a brevet captain whose name is lost to me under that of “Dinazarde,” the name we gave him, was famous for his storytelling. It may have been more correct to call him “Scheherazade,” but we did not consider the matter so closely at the time. We rushed to him the moment we saw him, scrabbling to get him into our mess. A short man with long legs, a saggy face, a sad mustache, eyes like commas at their outer edges, a hollow voice, a big sword in a scabbard the color of café au lait, the rigid posture of a military poet, looking like a cross between a suicide and a jolly good fellow, that solemn wag Dinazarde never laughed, but no one could lay eyes on him without laughing. He was the obliging witness to every duel and a great lover to all the ladies of the wine cask. Everything he said, he said in a tragic manner, and he never interrupted his narratives except to drink in this same manner from his bottle, or relight his pipe, or swallow a sausage.
One night, when the sky was a mist, we made a circle around the tap of a cask tilted toward us, set on the edge of a cart with its shafts in the air. A candle fastened to this cask illuminated our faces, and a piece of cloth stretched from the shafts of the cart to two posts served us as a roof. To our great satisfaction, Dinazarde, with his sword holstered at an angle after the fashion of Frederick II, standing between the wheel of the cart and the rump of a horse, began to tell us a tale; the provisioners who had brought us our rations stayed with us to listen to our Arab: our attentive mob of Bacchantes and Silenuses accompanied the story, like an ancient chorus, with noises of surprise, approval, and disgust.
“Gentlemen,” said the memorialist, “you have all heard about the Green Knight who lived in the days of King John?”
“Yes, yes,” everyone replied.
Dinazarde gulped down a rolled-up crêpe and burned himself.
“This Green Knight was, as you all know, since you’ve heard of him, very handsome. When the wind blew his red locks against his helmet, it looked like a garland of oakum wound round a green turban.”
“Bravo!” cried the chorus.
“One evening in May, he blew his horn at the drawbridge of a castle in Picardy, or Auvergne. It’s not important which. In this castle lived the Lady of Great Companies. She received the knight graciously, made him disarm, led him to a bath, and later came to sit with him at a magnificent feast; but she ate nothing, and her attendants were silent.”
“Oh! Oh!” said the chorus.
“The Lady, you see, was tall, flat, thin, and hunched, like the major’s wife; but she had a fair-looking face and a flirtatious way about her. When she laughed, and her long teeth showed beneath her snub nose, you no longer knew where you were. Well, now, the Lady fell in love with the Green Knight, and the Green Knight fell in love with the Lady, even if he was afraid of her.”
Dinazarde knocked out the ashes from his pipe on the rim of the wheel behind him. He made to refill the briar, but we forced him to go on:
“Well, the Green Knight, who was by now quite bewildered, resolved to quit the castle; but before he went, he asked the Lady to explain several strange things, and at the same time, he made her a formal offer of marriage, if she would swear that she was not a sorceress.”
Dinazarde’s rapier was planted straight and stiff between his feet. Motionless, and leaning forward with our pipes, we formed a garland of sparks around him like the ring of Saturn. All of a sudden Dinazarde cried out as though beside himself, “Now, gentlemen, the Lady, the Lady of Great Companies—she was Death! Death! Death!”
And the brevet captain, breaking the ranks and crying out Death! Death! put all the provisioners to flight. The session was ended. Our brouhaha was loud and our laughter was long. We went back to Thionville in silence, to the noise of its guns.