bataille d'eylau

bataille de moscou

 "Monsieur," said the deceased, "perhaps you know that I commanded, a regiment of cavalry at Eylau. I was the chief cause of the success of Murat's famous charge which won the day. Unhappily for me, my death is given as an historic fact in 'Victories and Conquests' where all the particulars are related. We cut the three Russian lines in two; then they - closed behind us and we were obliged to cut our way back again. Just before we reached the Emperor, having dispersed the Russians, a troop of the enemy's cavalry met us. I flung myself upon them. Two Russian officers, actual giants, attacked me together. One of them cut me over the head with his sabre, which went through everything, even to the silk cap which I wore, and laid my skull open. I fell from my horse. Murat came up to support us, and he and his whole party, fifteen hundred men, rode over me. They reported my death to the Emperor, who sent (for he loved me a little, the master!) to see if there were no hope of saving  a man to whom he owed the vigor of our attack. He despatched two surgeons to find me and bring me in to the ambulances, saying—perhaps too hurriedly, for he had work to attend to—'Go and see if my poor Chabert - is still living.' Those cursed saw-bones had just seen me trampled under the hoofs of two regiments; no doubt they never took the trouble to feel my pulse, but reported me as dead. The certificate of my death was doubtless drawn up in due form of military law."
Gradually, as he listened to his client, who expressed himself with perfect clearness, and related facts that were quite possible, though somewhat strange, the young lawyer pushed away his papers, rested his left elbow on the table, put his head on his hand, and looked fixedly at the colonel.
 "Are you aware, monsieur," he said, "that I am the solicitor of the Countess Ferraud, widow of Colonel Chabert?"
 "Of my wife? Yes, monsieur. And therefore, after many fruitless efforts to obtain a hearing from lawyers, who all thought me mad, I determined to come to you. I shall speak of my sorrows later. Allow me now to state the facts, and explain to you how they probably happened, rather than how they actually did happen. Certain circumstances, which can never be known except to God Almighty, oblige me to relate much in the form of hypotheses. I must tell you, for instance, that the wounds I received probably produced something like lockjaw, or threw me into a state analogous to a disease called, I believe, catalepsy. Otherwise, how can I suppose that I was stripped of my clothing and flung into a common grave; according to the customs of war, by the men whose business it was to bury the dead? (...)  my horse received a bullet in the body at the same moment when I myself was wounded. Horse and rider were therefore knocked over together like a stand of muskets. In turning, either to the right or to the left, I had doubtless been protected by the body of my horse which saved me from being crushed by the riders or hit by bullets."
(...)
 'When I came to myself, monsieur, I was in a place and in an atmosphere of which I could give you no idea, even if I talked for days. The air I breathed was mephitic. I tried to move but I found no space. My eyes were open but I saw nothing. The want of air was the worst sign, and it showed me the dangers of my position. I felt I was in some place where the atmosphere was stagnant, and that I should die of it. This thought overcame the sense of extreme pain which had brought me to my senses. My ears hummed violently. I heard, or thought I heard (for I ean aflfirm nothing), groans from the heap of dead bodies among whom I lay. Though the recollection of those moments is dark, though my memory is confused, and in spite of still greater sufferings which I experienced later and which have bewildered my ideas, there are nights, even now, when I think I hear those smothered moans. But there was something more  horrible than even those cries—a silence that I have never known elsewhere, the silence of the grave. At last, raising my hands and feeling for the dead, I found a void between my head and the human carrion about me. I could even measure the space thus left to me by some mere chance, the cause of which I did not know. It seemed as if, thanks to the carelessness or to the haste with which we had been flung pell-mell into the trench, that two dead bodies had fallen across each other above me, so as to form an angle like that of two cards which children lay together  to make houses. 
(...)
 "Monsieur," said the lawyer, "you have upset all my ideas; I fancy I dream as I listen to you. Let us pause here for a moment, I beg of you."
 "You are the only person," said the colonel sadly, "who have ever listened to me patiently. No lawyer has been willing to lend me ten napoleons, that I might send to Germany for the papers necessary for my suit.
 "What suit?" asked the lawyer, who had forgotten the unfortunate present position of his client, as he listened to the recital of his past misery.
 "Why, monsieur, you are well aware that the Comtesse Ferraud is my wife. She possesses an income of thirty thousand francs which belongs to me, and she refuses to give me one penny of it. When I  tell this to lawyers and to men of common-sense, when I, a beggar, propose to sue a count and countess, when I, risen from the dead, deny the proofs of my death, they put me off—they refuse to listen to me, either with that coldly polite air with which you lawyers know so well how to rid yourselves of hapless creatures, or brutally, as men do when they think they are dealing with a swindler or a madman. I have been buried beneath the dead, but now I am buried beneath the living—beneath facts, beneath records, beneath society itself, which seeks to trust me back underground!"

arc de triomphe

napoleon couronne