The friars avoided the French Consulate, although they continued to show Mme Daville every courtesy when she came to Mass at the Dolats church on Sundays and holidays.
The kavasses wanted to know from D’Avenat how long they could count on remaining in the French service. Rafo Atias began to look around for another job as interpreter or agent, as he could not bear the idea of going to his uncle’s warehouse. By tireless underground work, the Austrian Consulate fed the local populace a steady diet of news about the Allied victories and Bonaparte’s eclipse, now supposedly only a matter of days. The idea gained ground among the people that the era of the French had passed and the days of the French Consulate at Travnik were numbered.
Von Paulich himself did not go anywhere or speak to anyone. Daville had not seen him for almost six months, ever since Austria had come into the war, but he felt his existence at all times; he thought of him with a special emotion which was neither envy nor fear but had a little of both in it. He thought he could see him in the large building on the other bank of the Lashva, quietly going over his business, completely cool and self-possessed, knowing exactly what he wanted, never doubting or hesitant, correct and yet shrewd, incorruptible but somehow inhuman. The exact opposite of the sick demented victor at the Residency, he was, in fact, the only winner in the game that had been going on for years in the Travnik valley. He seemed only to be waiting, with a quietly merciless air, until the quarry they had driven into a corner should fall and, in falling, signify his victory.
And that moment inevitably came. When it did, von Paulich behaved like someone taking part in an ancient and solemn game, the rules of which were painful and inflexible, but logical, just, and honorable alike to winners and losers.
One day in April, an Austrian kavass came to the French Consulate, for the first time in seven months, and brought a letter for the Consul.
Daville recognized the handwriting—an orderly pattern of perfectly straight lines that were like a salvo of metal arrows all streaming in the same direction, all with the same barbed point. He recognized it and guessed the meaning of the letter, but was nevertheless startled by the contents.
Von Paulich wrote that he had just received news that the war between the Allies and France had been happily concluded. Napoleon had abdicated. The lawful heir to the French throne had been reinstated. The Senate had voted a new constitution and a new government had been formed, headed by Talleyrand, Duke of Benevento. Since he assumed that this news relating to the fate of his homeland would be of interest to Daville, he was sending it on, delighted that the end of hostilities would once again enable them to see each other. He tendered his warm respects to Mme Daville, and so forth and so forth.
The Consul’s dismay was so great that the full import and true significance of what he had read did not at once penetrate his mind. His first reaction was to drop the letter on his desk and get up, as though he had just received some message he had long expected from von Paulich.
For some time past, and especially since the defeat in Russia in December of the year before, Daville had been trying to visualize the possibility of such an ending. He had turned it over in his mind and tried to define his attitude toward it. In this way, slowly and imperceptibly, he had come to live with the idea that the Empire might fall, even with the fall itself. Day by day, with each new event, that old and distant threat had come a little closer, gradually shading into reality, finally becoming reality itself. And now beyond the Emperor and the Empire, life beckoned once again, everlasting, all-powerful, unfathomable, life with all its infinite possibilities.
He himself had no idea just when he had begun to accept the thought of a world of affairs and events without Napoleon as its sine qua non. The process had been hard and painful at first, a kind of inner swooning; he had tottered and reeled inwardly like a man who feels the earth shifting and moving under his feet. Later all he had felt was a sense of great desolation, a loss of foothold and absence of any enthusiasm, and only life itself remained, the bare dreary life, stripped of vision and of those marvelous shimmering forms in the distance which might not be real but which give one strength and a little dignity in the passage through life. And by then he had thought about it so much and grown so accustomed to the sensation that he fell into the habit of judging the world and France, his own and his family’s destiny, from that imagined point of view.
Throughout that time, even as now, Daville had conscientiously gone about his duties, had read circulars and articles in Le Moniteur, listened to the couriers’ and travelers’ stories of Napoleon’s plans to defend metropolitan France and the chances of his reaching a settlement with the Allies. Then, once more, he had resumed his brooding—wondering what it would be like when there was no more Emperor or Empire—and the spells of brooding had steadily grown longer and more insistent.
But, in fact, his agonizing was one of a piece with the great drama that was being played out at the time in the hearts of thousands of Frenchmen, worn out in the service of a regime that had long been doomed by having to ask more of the people than they had to give. And when a man grows used to a thought and reconciled to things, he begins sooner or later to seek confirmation in reality, all the more so when that reality hews close to his thoughts and often even overtakes them.
In recent months Daville had been astonished to discover what a tremendous distance he had already gone in that direction. Forgetting the many long conflicts he had fought with himself in these last twelve months, he had the sensation of having reached his present viewpoint all at once and with perfect ease. In any case, he had long felt like a man who was “ready for anything,” which was another way of saying that he had already detached himself from the regime now in its last throes in France and was willing to make his peace with anything that came after it, whatever that may be.
And yet now, at the moment when all of it loomed before him as reality, Daville could not help staggering, as if from an unexpected and crushing blow. He paced around the room and the import of what he had read in von Paulich’s letter welled up inside him in wave after wave of confused emotion: wonder, horror, sorrow, even a kind of abject gratitude that he and his family were spared and alive amidst so much ruin and change; and then again fear and uncertainty. He was suddenly reminded of the line from the Old Testament, “God is great in His Works”; and the sentence kept haunting him like a persistent tune that he could not get out of his mind, although he was unable to say what kinds of “works” they were or what their greatness was or what any of it had to do with the Lord of the Bible.
For a long time he paced like that around the room but was unable to come to grips with any one thought, and still less to grasp and sort out what he had heard. He felt that for this he would need much more time.
He told himself that no pondering, foresight, or shallow mental comfort was worth very much, nor were they any help at the moment when the blow fell. For it was one thing to project one’s fears in imagination, to anticipate the worst, to determine one’s attitude and the mode of one’s defense, while at the same time feeling smug in the knowledge that everything was still in order and in its proper place, and quite another thing to find oneself facing an actual collapse which required one to make instant decisions and take concrete action. It was one thing to listen to a tipsy and wrought-up colleague from the Ministry of the Navy saying with round eyes, “The Emperor is mad! He and all of us together are rushing headlong to ruin, which is waiting for us just beyond the last victory,” and quite another to grasp and accept the fact that the Empire was defeated and in pieces, that there was no longer any Napoleon but only a throneless usurper, whose worth was less than if he had perished in one of his own victories. It was one thing to doubt the value of conquests and the permanence of armed successes, as he had so often done in recent years, and to speculate what would happen to him and his family “in the event that . . .”; it was something else again to learn suddenly that not only the Revolution and all it had brought but also “the G
eneral” and the irresistible magic of his conquering genius and the whole scheme of things founded on it had vanished overnight as if they had never been; and that now the clock would have to be turned back to the time when as a boy, in the main square of his home town, moved by the “King’s goodness,” he had cheered Louis XVI.
Even in a dream that would have been too much to ask.
Unable to concentrate or think clearly, to divine the essence of what was happening and to pierce the future, Daville clutched at the fact that his old protector Talleyrand was now at the head of the new government. This struck him as his only hope of salvation, an extraordinary gesture of grace on the part of Fate toward him personally, in the midst of general ruin and chaos.
As with “the General,” Daville had spoken with Talleyrand only once in his life, more than eighteen years before, when the latter was not yet famous or had the title Duke of Benevento. In the old Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was then in an appalling muddle of transition, reflected not only in the quality of work and personnel but in its furnishings and system as well, he had been received for a few minutes in an improvised salon. Talleyrand had noticed his articles in Le Moniteur and had wanted to see him. The chaotic mood of the Ministry also played over their short interview.
The well-set man who received him standing and remained like that throughout the conversation, gave him a quiet, barefaced, once-over kind of look, as if the object of his attention were not young Daville but something behind him. His talk too was superficial and absent-minded, as though he regretted having shown an interest in the articles and in meeting the young man. He told Daville that he “must go on,” that he would always back him up in his work and in the service. And that, in reality, was all Daville ever saw or heard of his patron. Nevertheless, throughout these eighteen years most of the Ministry officials and Daville himself had taken it quite for granted that he was Talleyrand’s protégé and that his official career was hitched to Talleyrand’s star. And in fact, whenever Talleyrand had been in power and in office, he had supported Daville. Cases of this sort were not uncommon: in which powerful individuals obstinately trailed behind them a horde of protégés, not for the sake of the protégés themselves, whom they neither knew nor sometimes esteemed very highly, but for their own sake, because the shelter and backing they afforded these people were a visible proof of their own power and nobility.
“I must get in touch with the Duke,” Daville told himself, unclear as yet as to how and on what grounds this might be done. “I shall appeal to him,” he kept saying to himself all through the night, unable to think of any other scheme and oppressed by regret that he had no one with whom to talk it over. And the next day found him exhausted, but still as bewildered and undecided as the day before.
Watching his wife, as she bustled around the house without any idea of what had happened, planning the work of the garden as though she intended to spend the rest of her life in Travnik, he felt like a damned creature who knew what the other mortals did not know, and was therefore both superior to them and unhappier than they were.
The arrival of a courier from Istanbul shook him out of his lethargy. The courier bore the congratulations of the Ambassador and his staff to the new government and messages of loyalty to the new ruler Louis XVIII and the House of Bourbon. He also brought orders to Daville to inform the Vizier and the local authorities of the changes in France and to notify the Vizier that henceforward he would be in Travnik as the representative of Louis XVIII, King of France and Navarre.
As if carrying out a long-laid plan or listening to some unspoken directive, Daville wrote all that was necessary to Paris that same day, without any further hesitation or delay.
“I learn from the Austrian Consul here of the happy change that has returned a descendant of Henry the Great to the French throne and peace and a firm promise of a better future to France herself. So long as I live, I shall regret not having been in Paris on this occasion, to add my own voice to the manifest enthusiasm of the people.” So began Daville’s letter, in which he placed his service at the disposal of the new government, with the request that his “expressions of devotion and loyalty be laid at the feet of the Throne,” and adding modestly that he was a “plain citizen, one of the Twenty Thousand Parisians who had signed the well-known petition in the defense of the Martyr King, Louis XVI, and the Royal House.” He concluded his letter with the hope that the “Age of Steel may be followed by a Golden Age.”
At the same time he sent a congratulatory poem to Talleyrand, as he had often done before when Talleyrand was in office. The poem opened with the verses:
“Des peuples et des rois heureux moderateur,
Talleyrand, tu deviens notre libérateur.”
(Blessed guide of peoples and kings,
Talleyrand, you now become our liberator.)
And because the courier could not wait, Daville had no time to complete the poem and designated the two-dozen-odd verses as a “fragment.”
In the same letter he proposed that the Travnik Consulate be closed, as the changed circumstances had removed the need for its further existence. He requested permission to leave Travnik with his family in the course of that month, and to appoint D’Avenat, whose loyalty was proven and had been demonstrated so many times, to supervise the office and carry out the liquidation. In view of these exceptional developments, unless he received contrary instructions by the end of the month, he would proceed with his family to Paris.
Daville spent the night writing these congratulations, requests, and letters. He slept no more than a couple of hours, but got up feeling fresh and invigorated, and accompanied the courier to the gate.
From the terrace, where the still unopened tulips were bent under the great weight of dew, Daville watched the courier and his companion descend the steep hill toward the road down in the valley. Their horses waded through a dense ground mist that reached above their knees and was suffused with faint morning sunlight; and then, sinking deeper and deeper into it, they disappeared from view.
He went back to his study on the ground floor. All over the room there were visible traces of the night just past, a night spent in work and writing: candles askew, burnt down to their base, strewn sheets of paper, crumbs of sealing wax. Daville sat down among the litter of copies and torn paper, not touching a thing. A wave of deep weariness broke over him again, though lightened by the knowledge that everything had been written and forwarded to the proper quarter, finally and beyond recant, that there could be no more doubts and agonizing over it. He bent over the desk and put his drowsy head on his folded arms.
And still it was hard not to think, not to remember, not to see. He had spent twenty-five years of his life questing for a “middle road” that would lead to serenity and the kind of dignity without which an individual could not endure. Twenty-five years he had blundered, groping and finding, losing and regaining, swinging from one enthusiasm to another; and now, tired, spent, inwardly wrung dry, he had arrived at the point from which he had started when he was eighteen. There was plainly no such thing as a road leading onward; in reality all roads led one around in a circle, like those tricky mazes in Eastern tales; and so now they had brought him, weary and despondent, back to this spot among the shreds of paper and the jumble of drafts, to the point where another circle began, as it would from every other point on its circumference. It meant that there was no such thing as a middle road, the true road leading onward to peace, dignity, and stability; that all men simply groped around and around, always along the same paths that led them up the garden path eventually. The only things that changed were the men and the generation who traveled the path, forever deluded. It meant—the tired, stumbling mind of this tired man concluded—that no roads of any kind existed and that this new direction, in which his game-legged protector, the great Duke of Benevento, was supposed to lead him, hobbling, was only a part of that circle which was utter roadlessness. One simply went on. The long trek had no point or value, save those we might le
arn to discover within ourselves along the way. There were no roads, no destinations. One just traveled on. One traveled on, spent oneself, and grew weary.
And so he, too, was now moving along without a pause or rest. His head was nodding, his eyelids drooped, and behind them a sun-kindled pile of mist rose higher and higher, lapping at a couple of shadowy horses, mincing along daintily, until, finally, it enveloped and swallowed them up, together with their riders. But fresh horses and riders kept appearing, an endless host, looming up without surcease and quietly vanishing in the mother fog, where one dropped from exhaustion and longed for sleep.
Letting his head fall on his crossed arms, overcome with exhaustion and the strain of thinking, Daville fell asleep at his writing table, among sheets of paper and guttered candles from the night before.
If only they would let him sleep. If only he could keep his eyes shut and his head down, even in this dank reddish mist, among the swarming and lurching horde of riders! But they would not leave him alone. One of the riders, behind him, kept placing a cold implacable hand on the nape of his neck and talking to him indistinctly. He bowed his head lower and lower, but it stubbornly tugged him awake.