The Happy Warrior
(1)
A Rhyme dear to our childhood informs us that on a day not otherwise dated, in a year unknown to anything so precise as History, the King of an unspecified but surely fortunate dynasty sat in his counting-house counting out his money, while his Queen partook of something deliciously sweet and sticky in her parlour. But we know the year in which a certain King of France—not fortunate—leant out of a window in his palace of Versailles, dangling his watch to and fro in an endeavour to persuade a little boy in the gardens below to come up to him and the Queen. The year was 1784, the King was Louis XVI., and the recalcitrant subject whom he was trying to bribe was the hero of this narrative, who had to be worked upon by his nurse and his mother’s footman before he would give up the attractions of fishing in the Grand Canal and accede to his sovereign’s request. But when he did appear in the apartments of the Enfants de France, he received two hearty kisses from the King, who with his own hands fastened the watch to those tiny breeches. For the recipient was very youthful—not yet turned seven—and it was with an ill grace that he submitted also to be kissed by her who, if he had been a grown man, had made him immortal by that salute. At so little could a small boy rate the lips of Marie Antoinette.
Yet this young gentleman was, of all people in the world, the least infected with democratic ideas, as witness the subsequent history of the royal watch, for eight years later it was lost, with the rest of his baggage, in the campaign of Valmy . . . Ange-Achille-Charles Brunet de Neuilly was, indeed, native to that world of Versailles where he was the playmate of the Dauphin, and had the honour of vaccination with the same lymph. And a star surely danced over the Rue Satory in the September of 1777 which saw his birth—not, it is true, a harbinger of prosperity, but a lucky planet none the less. For he was dowered with wit and charm and intelligence and quick affections—above all, with a heart of unquenchable lightness; and so rides, a mere boy, sword in hand and laughing, through nearly a decade of battle and privation.
His father, the Comte de Neuilly, was écuyer du roi, and had taught the King and his brothers their horsemanship. On terms of affectionate intimacy with the Royal Family, he had married, at fifty-four, Mlle de Beauchamp, the Queen’s lectrice, thirty-two years his junior, the descendant of a Scottish family who had followed the fortunes of James II. Achille was brought up à la Jean-Jacques; every morning, like his sister, younger than he by three or four years, he was plunged into an ice-cold bath, and he was not weaned until an exceptionally late age. At eight and a half he was sent to the Collège du Plessis, with his own servant and tutor. Here, without much application, he did well, for he was extremely quick and lively. His father adored him, and took the child everywhere with him, travelling always, as was his right by virtue of his office, in the Royal carriages with the gilded panels and the arms of France. The small Achille long remembered a ball given by Mme de Tessé (née de Noailles) to which M. de Lafayette of the stiff, frozen physiognomy brought an American Indian in native dress, who rather alarmed him. He played too with the young Orléans princes, but found neither the Duc de Chartres (afterwards Louis-Philippe) or Mlle Adélaïde much to his taste.
In 1788, at the age of eleven, he lost his father. The Comte de Neuilly was perhaps fortunate in the moment of his death, unless he had already recognised the first mutterings of the storm which was soon to sweep away all that he had held dear. It was not long before his son witnessed its early havoc, for he happened to be at the porter’s lodge of the Collège du Plessis, receiving some provisions sent by his mother, when there swept past a horde of the destroyers of the Bastille, with the head of the Marquis de Launay on a pike. Eight days later he saw those of Foulon and Berthier carried in like manner; young as he was, his sensations were rather those of horror than of terror. Mme de Neuilly, considering that Paris was no longer safe for him, then kept him at Versailles with a tutor, and thus he was witness too of the scenes of the 5th and 6th of October, 1789, scenes which fifty years afterwards were still vivid to him.
The young Comte subsequently continued his studies for a little time in Paris, for Mme de Neuilly had followed the Royal Family to the Tuileries, but at the end of that December his mother sent him down to Vrécourt, his father’s estate in Lorraine, whither, after a while, she followed him, bringing his sister Clémentine, of whom so far he had seen little, but to whom he was henceforth greatly devoted. An attempted attack on the château of Vrécourt was foiled by the firmness of Mme de Neuilly, whose little body was tenanted by the soul of a hero. The arrest of the King and Queen at Varennes led to their own, but they were detained only a few days; they sent in their names, however, to swell the suggested list of hostages for their sovereign. Yet, beloved as they were at Vrécourt, it was plain that they were no longer safe there, from the night when Clémentine’s governess rushed screaming from her charge’s room, where a bullet had just embedded itself in the wall.
Mme de Neuilly, therefore, like so many others, determined to emigrate to Coblentz; and, leaving Clémentine temporarily behind, she set off with her son and a maid in her own berline, with little luggage, but with gold sewn into their clothes, and a hundred louis hidden in a powder puff. Joyfully, when they reached the black and yellow posts and two-headed eagle of the frontier, did Achille and the coachman tear off the tricolour, and when at last they rattled into Coblentz by the Moselle bridge, and saw near it the pretty little house and garden which awaited them, his sole regret was that his chin did not yet require the razor of the barber-surgeon from whom this domain was rented.
(2)
Mme de Neuilly and her son took their places at once in that strange society of the emigration at Coblentz, with its intrigues and its delusions. It was but natural that Achille should be presented to the King’s brothers, the Comte de Provence and the Comte d’Artois, who were resident there at the time, and equally natural that, his father having been in the latter’s household, he himself should be attached to that prince, and, despite his extreme youth, given a place among his guards, together with an attractive green uniform with crimson facings and silver braid and—the epaulettes of a captain. “I used to get up at night and look at it,” he confesses. He studied daily, learnt German, and mounted guard every fifth day, his mother having commended him to the care of a comrade eight or nine years older than himself, with whom he lodged.
But in spite of this precaution it was not long before the high-spirited boy become involved in an affair of honour. An émigré from Auvergne having jostled him at the theatre, refused to apologise and called him a ‘blancbec,’ Achille challenged him. Next morning they met on the banks of the Moselle, the youthful Comte de Neuilly having prudently secured a second other than his mentor. His attitude in this encounter would have distressed a fencing-master, for, not wishing to be wounded in the face, he kept his left hand near his mouth. Thus it befell that when his adversary lunged, he put aside his point with that same hand, and got his arm torn from wrist to elbow. He had however the satisfaction of inflicting on the Auvergnat a thrust in the side which kept him in bed for more than a fortnight, and Mme de Neuilly, though she dressed her son’s wound without many words was not, he thought, dissatisfied with him.
Since one of Achille’s most intimate friends at this time was the young Comte de Balbi, whose mother was the maîtresse en titre of His Royal Highness the Comte de Provence, it was in the apartments of that ugly and witty lady that the boy spent many of his evenings. To modern ears the procedure therein seems strange. When Mme de Balbi had finished her attendance on the Comtesse de Provence, whose lady-in-waiting she was, she returned to her own apartments, which were situated below those of the Comte d’Artois in the vast hôtel belonging to the Elector of Trèves where the Princes lodged. Her visitors would already be assembling when a little table was brought in from an adjoining room and her hair dressed at it; after which she proceeded to change her gown—and considerably more than her gown—in public. Yet this seemed to the company a proceeding so natural that they never gave it a thought, and for all that was visible we have Achille’s assurance that she might have had a dozen screens round her. ‘Monsieur’—the Comte de Provence—would himself be there, sitting in an armchair before the hearth with his back turned, his hand resting on his cane, the head of which, in silhouette, formed the profile of Louis XVI., and whose ferule he had the habit of pushing constantly into his shoe. Conversation was lively and familiar. Monsier had a gift for anecdote; they played bouts-rimés or read aloud, and the two boys had to take their turn with the rest. Occasionally they wrote verses, and the future Louis XVIII. condescended to give them lessons in prosody. One evening, when Achille had the luck to end his effusion with a happy Latin tag, the satisfaction of the Prince was such that, after himself reading it aloud, he kissed the youthful versifier on the forehead. “In all my life,” says the Comte de Neuilly, “I have never been so ashamed.” It seems to have been his fate to received unappreciated caresses from the Royal Family.
Another discomposure also befell him about this time, at the hands of the other Royal brother. One night, while on guard outside the door of the Comte d’Artois, whom he imagined to be in bed and asleep, Captain the Comte de Neuilly put down his carbine and began to eat with zest a Savoy cake which he had cut in two and stuffed into his pockets. (Let us remember that he was not yet fifteen.) Suddenly there appeared up the staircase the Prince in person, with M. d’Escars, his captain of the guards, and some other individuals. Snatching up his weapon, the boy hastily stuffed the large piece of cake in his hand into his mouth, where, unfortunately, it drew the attention of his Royal master, who stopped to look at him. “Comte François,” said he, “that child is ill; have him relieved.” Then, taking the shamefaced guard by the chin, he asked him what was the matter. Achille naturally could not utter a word, but the Comte d’Escars, observing the unusual rotundity of his pockets, had meanwhile investigated their contents, and the Prince unkindly obliged the unfortunate youth to surrender even what he had in his mouth. Next day the story was all over the place; the Comte de Provence poked fun at Achille, and the Comtesse said that when she knew he was on guard she would see that he had something to drink as well. “To punish her,” comments Neuilly, boylike, “I stole from her two bottles of champagne, which were in a basket between the doors of her apartment.” But, though he might have to suffer royal witticisms, he was determined not to endure those of his equals; and proved his resolution by calling out one of the Comte de Provence’s guards who had laughed at him. The guard gained a sword-thrust in the arm and Achille two days’ arrest.
And then one day came the news—the false news, as it was to prove—that the King, having succeeded in leaving France, was at Ath with 10,000 Austrians. Achille de Neuilly, busy in a cloud of pipeclay, learnt the tidings, and rushed out into the streets, already full of a joyful crowd. By the time that he reached the hôtel of the Princes the number of the Austrians had swelled to 100,000; trunks were being packed and carriages loaded. Monsier confirmed the news, and, in defiance of etiquette, was embraced by everyone in turn. Even the Elector, the venerable Prince-Archbishop of Trèves, did not escape salutation, nor his old and ugly sister. But after a night of suspense the news was found to be a hoax, the inception of which was ascribed to Bigot de Ste. Croix, the revolutionary envoy, who, had it been brought home to him, would probably have been lynched.
But the time was come when the boy should have his first experience of war, in the invasion of his native soil known as the campaign of the Princes, which opened so well and closed in a failure never fully accounted for. The Prussian troops were mobilising under the Duke of Brunswick; the corps of émigrés, horse and foot, amounting to 15,000 men, were under the orders of the Royal brothers. Reviewed by the King of Prussia at Trèves, they crossed the French frontier with cries of Vive le roi, and, after sitting down before Thionville, resumed their march towards Chalons, by way of which they hoped to reach Paris. Verdun surrendered on the second of September. As yet Achille had seen nothing of his hostile compatriots, who continued to fall back before the Prussian advance. At last, however, a stand made by them in a village on the highroad gave him his chance of what he so much desired, a hand-to-hand conflict. Some accident had detached him from his corps, and, instead of returning to it, he rode off in the direction of the fusillade, his white plume drawing on him an ineffectual fire as he went. Joining some hussars, he charged with them. “This was,” he says, “the first time that I made serious use of my sabre,” and his good fortune filled his comrades with envy.
But the great enigma of Valmy was upon them. The 20th of September saw the émigrés, burning with zeal, drawn up at eight in the morning in the plain behind La Croix-en-Champagne. And there they remained, hearing a distant cannonade and nothing more. The young Dukes of Angoulême and Berry, sons of the Comte d’Artois, walked up and down between their ranks to restrain them. Hours passed; they had not been called upon to do anything—but the mysterious and momentous battle of Valmy was over.
That night, bivouacking under a hedge with neither food nor fodder, Achille and some comrades were lucky to find in a deserted farm a large sow, some unthreshed oats and a sack of lentils, all of which were utilised.
Two days later began the retreat, which all readers of Chateaubriand remember. Neuilly believes that the King of Prussia was bribed to evacuate the country, so inexplicable did his conduct appear. All the time it rained, and the white mud of Champagne, clinging to the feet like lime, pulled the soles off their boots, the very shoes off the horses. Their Prussian allies had pillaged their baggage, and the troops a fortnight ago so brilliant had become scarecrows. Dysentery was raging, especially among the Prussians, who were dying by hundreds, and who, when dead, were merely thrown out of the waggons and left on the road, attracting thereby a large escort of the wolves of the Ardennes. The sick were uncared for, and the sound, on emerging from their quarters, might in the morning have to step over a dozen corpses.
Achille de Neuilly escaped infection, but his plight was not enviable, that of a boy of fifteen turning his back for the second time on his native country without a penny in his pocket or a single relative—even his mother—of whose whereabouts he knew anything certain. But he was far from losing heart. In his natural gaiety, his energy and his confidence, he possessed a priceless treasure, and he had need, certainly, to draw further on its resources when, at Arlon in Luxembourg, the Princes were obliged to disband their levies. So, with only his horse, his equipment, fifteen francs in silver and some assignats, the boy took the road to Liége. All the countryside was in confusion, for a counter-invasion was expected, and at Liége itself the Prince-Bishop and the chapter were preparing for departure, while relics and treasures were being removed for safety from the churches. After a vain attempt to get himself enrolled among the hussars of Bercheny, Achille left Liége, alone, unguided and without much idea of where he was going. And when he came to a place where the road forked he knew no better method of decision than to set his three-cornered hat upon the hilt of his sabre, and to follow that route which the peak in front should indicate. It was that of Aix-la-Chapelle. Entering that town, he had to pay seven francs, almost all he had in the world, to feed his horse and himself, but, led by chance and curiosity into staking his last crown at biribi—a game of which he did not even know the name—retired the instant winner of sixty-four times his stake. Fate had, too, directed his steps better than he knew, for he found, quite unexpectedly, that his uncle the Vicomte de Boisgelin was at Aix, and was going to Utrecht, whither, six weeks before, Mme de Neuilly had repaired from Coblentz. So uncle and nephew took the road together, the former in his coach, the latter on horseback.
At Neuss M. de Boisgelin, a dandy of over sixty, oblivious of the ravages of time and of the arm which he had lost in Suffren’s flagship, announced his intention of paying a visit to the canonesses, promising his nephew the acquaintance of some ‘femme délicieuses’—for these ladies were, presumably, secular canonesses, highborn dames to whom the cloister furnished an agreeable retreat. The abbess, indeed, whom he had formerly known, had not forgotten M. de Boisgelin, and the young Neuilly looked on with rather malicious amusement at the little airs of conscious coquetry which he perceived to descend upon both of them, and at the pretty things which they said to each other. His incipient boredom was relieved by an excellent supper, and still more by the young canoness who sat beside him at that meal. It was his desire to see this lady again at the earliest opportunity which led him to attend mass at the chapter next morning. Thereafter he walked with the fair canoness in the garden, and she gave him one of her sketches; but next day Achille had to ride away with no more than a wave of the handkerchief, and a promise to return to Neuss which the Fates never allowed him to fulful.
Mme de Neuilly and her daughter were indeed at Utrecht, made much of, like other émigrés, in that rich and hospitable town—she remained there in fact, for two years, making many friends, and receiving on all sides proofs of the utmost kindness and delicacy. But her son had no intention of staying long in Holland. The execution of the King—received there with incredible horror and grief—hastened on the rupture with France, and early in 1793 the Convention declared war. Achille enlisted at Nimeguen, in the ‘hussards nobles’—all French gentlemen—which the Comte de Béon was raising for the Dutch service, though it was not until the autumn that the corps left for the front.
The night of his final departure from Utrecht Achille received from an unknown hand a packet, with instructions not to open it until he joined his regiment. In this packet the same hand had bestowed six fine shirts, handkerchiefs and stockings, a case of mathematical instruments, a box of paints and even plaster for wounds. The young hussar—he was just turned sixteen—never discovered the donor; he only found that it was not, as he had suspected, his ‘second mother,’ the Baroness de Casembroot.
(3)
They marched out in fine show from Nimeguen, these young men of the Légion de Béon, nearly all of exceptional youth and most of them handsome—a regiment of pages in their sky blue uniforms with orange facings and silver lace. At Oudenarde they ate mussels and drank the beer of Louvain; at Brussels they were reviewed by the Archduke Charles, and a special performance of Grétry’s Cœur de Lion, that opera dear to the heart of every Royalist, was given for them; and then they proceeded to the siege of Maubeuge, already begun.
A modern writer of genius has shown the importance at that juncture of Maubeuge, the last, or almost the last, of the string of fortresses defending the passage into France by the Low Countries. If Maubeuge fell, only a ten days’ march lay between the invaders and Paris . . . and the Revolution was over. The Convention intended that it should not fall.
On the 2nd of October, 1793, a thick, cloudy morning, the vedettes of Béon heard the sound of hoofs along the glacis. The regiment was soon in the saddle, the Hungarian hussars of Barko likewise, and after a while it became evident that a party of French horse was trying to get from Maubeuge through the besiegers’ lines. In the end they were dispersed or killed; yet their leader, better mounted, might have got away if his horse had not put its foot into a hole. The hussars searched the fallen man, and profitably, for he had round his waist a belt full of gold. Indeed, by the time that Neuilly got to him he was all naked as a needle (as Malory has it), but Achille knew from his hat with its tuft of tricoloured plumes in front that he was a ‘representative of the people’; and when he had transmitted this fact, in Latin, to the Hungarians, explaining that he was one of the villains who had murdered the King and were even now keeping in prison the daughter of their Maria Theresa, they proposed to kill him. Their officers opposing this, they contented themselves with beating him with the flat of their sabres, and finally dragged him to headquarters. There (and, fortunately for himself, not earlier) it was discovered who he was—the man by whose hands Fate had wrecked the flight to Varennes, Drouet, the postmaster of Ste. Menehould, sent by the Convention in mid-September to Maubeuge to superintend the defences, and now attempting to carry news of its desperate plight. His capture resulted in two years’ imprisonment.
Mr. Belloc has shown also, in poignant and unforgettable pages, the connection between the trial of the Queen and the siege of Maubeuge, and how, on the same day, the 16th of October, both reached their consummation, the one by the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, the other by the victory of Wattignies, where Jourdain (or rather Carnot) defeated the Austrians and saved the town. The news of that scaffold—of the battle he says nothing—came to Achille de Neuilly one morning as he was grooming his horse. It is not difficult to imagine its effect. . . .
The Dutch army, as well as the Austrian, abandoned the siege and went into winter quarters. The Légion de Béon was sent to the Sambre, and occupied the outposts at Bousignies. Here Achille met an old friend of Le Plessis days, only to lose him again; for, on a day when they had been fishing together for trout, he was captured while recklessly pursuing a whole squadron of French dragoons, and shot by the Paris volunteers, the troops of the line refusing the task. At Rouvray the young Comte received a bayonet thrust in the leg, and saved the life of a wounded French officer, whom in after years he met again. He witnessed the horrors of the sack of Thuin—largely the work of the Hungarians, Croats and Wallachians—and, a few days afterwards, cut down in self-defence a French foot soldier who, as he was preparing to give him the coup de grace, called out, “Mercy! I am a woman.” It was true. The young man had her conveyed to a convent at Thuin, and went next day to see her; there was no hope of saving her. She had followed her lover to the war. It was not very unusual for women to fight in the French ranks, and among the émigrés themselves was a certain Chevalier de Haussey with her husband, passing as his brother. The ‘Chevalier’ was cited as a model of every soldierly virtue—“she was ugly enough for a man,” observes Neuilly ungallantly—and though her sex was suspected no one dared to make any allusion to it. She buried her husband with her own hands at the defence of the canal of Louvain, was captured at Quiberon, condemned to death and saved by some Breton women. Neuilly saw her again in 1814, still wearing man’s attire, in the Palais-Royal; she was a Chevalier de St. Louis(1).
The campaign went on, the Allies little by little losing ground before the French. Neuilly had a horse killed under him at Quatre-Bras, and supplied its loss on the field of battle itself by a steed of the enemy’s which he fancied “was flattered at carrying a gentleman instead of a carmagnole.” He really thought that his last hour had come at the passage of the Moerdyk, when three boatloads of Dutch were drowned. At Nimeguen, he saw, for the first time, “the regiments of Scottish mountaineers with their petticoats,” and ascertained for himself that they could climb like cats. And he was privileged, at the château of Rosendaal near Arnheim, to pay his court once more to the Princes, and to receive from the royal hand of the Comte de Provence the sum of ten ducats. “The Béarnais is poor,” whispered the descendant of Henri Quatre, mindful of his great ancestor, to whom his resemblance, it must be admitted, was of the slightest.
The Netherlands were now completely abandoned by the Allies, and Neuilly soon found himself in Westphalia, part of a none too orderly retreat. Tired and almost starving, horses and soldiers alike, he and his detachment of twenty men knocked one day at the door of a monastery and demanded food. The brother who opened responded by several phrases, of which the refrain was always “sumus pauperes.” Neuilly answered in the same classic tongue that they also were poor, and hungry to boot, and that if food were not forthcoming he should burn the monastery—“aut caritas aut ignis.” His alternative (though he had no intention of carrying out his own share) was perfectly successful.
The Légion de Béon was long in Westphalia, quartered in the villages cut off from each other by the six foot deep snow. Achille was a little bored by the patriarchal simplicity of the farms in which he found himself, although he would sometimes read, for the father of the family, the chapter of the Bible which it was the latter’s custom to read aloud every evening, while the spinningwheel went round, by the light of the pinewood chips, the only candles. But when the snow had melted they camped with the British army—or what was left of it after the hardships of the retreat—at Hoya. They knew not in whose service they would shortly find themselves. There was talk of an expedition under English auspices to the coat of Brittany, and those who came from the Western provinces were inclined to take part in that ill-fated venture; but Neuilly, a Lorrainer, did not care to go so far from home. It was at this juncture that a misguided émigré, the Marquis de St. Simon, who was in the hussars of Salm, one of the regiments in British pay, conceived the idea of offering himself to Prussia or Austria with as many men as he could withdraw from their present service. He succeeded in detaching about a hundred, was betrayed, tried by an English court-martial, and condemned to be shot. In spite of his name and of the efforts made to save him, Lord Cathcart had the sentence carried out, and eighteen others were condemned to run the gauntlet, which, from Neuilly’s description of the process, was an incomparably less merciful way of quitting the world.
Meanwhile Achille had received a letter from his mother who, with her fourteen-year-old daughter Clémentine, had been obliged to fly from Utrecht owing to the evacuation of Holland, had been captured by the French, and had only reached Hamburg after a series of adventures, and owing to the gratitude of a ‘patriot’ to whom Mme de Neuilly had once been of service. At Breda, in fact, they had actually been condemned to death as émigrées. It was on that occasion that Mme de Neuilly extorted an unwilling admiration from the public accuser when, on his asking her whose was the portrait on the snuff box which she had, she replied, with all the courage of her caste, “It is that of Monseigneur le Comte d’Artois, brother of the King.” However, she was now at Hamburg, if not in comfort—for she had lost everything—at least in safety, and there, when his regiment was disbanded, her son joined her.
(4)
At Hamburg, henceforward the great centre of the emigration, the young hussar now entered upon a short period of social life. It was not very grateful to him, for the state of his finances made employment of some kind necessary, and the choice of that employment was not difficult since, as he says, he saw in himself no material of which to make anything but a soldier. He tried to enlist in the army of Condé, but there were obstacles. Mme de Neuilly, with the spirit which always distinguished her, set up a small milliner’s shop, while Clémentine embroidered ribbons for sashes with flowers, and netted purses. They were by no means alone in taking such steps. Some of their compatriots of good birth were keeping restaurants and hotels; a letter of Mme de Neuilly’s tells how “M. de St. Hilaire had gone twice this week with M. de Langeac to Mme de Nellesteyn’s to paper a room; they will finish it to-morrow”; and for a certain F—— in absolute destitution she made appeal to the charity of her friends—and to her own.
Achille saw a good deal of society at Hamburg. There was the music-mad Marquis Ducrest and his sister, the well-known Mme de Genlis, whom Mme de Neuilly and many of the émigrées would not visit. Achille found her affected and pedantic, but there was always the beautiful Pamela, “entirely divine, rather pale, with an oval visage, the finest eyes in the world,” her dark hair in ringlets, her dress always simple and in the best of taste. She had been married since 1792 to Lord Edward Fitzgerald.
Mme de Genlis, having just finished writing Les Chevaliers du Cygne, “a poor enough novel,” got Achille, who read aloud very well—a talent he inherited from his mother—to read it aloud at a select gathering. The proceeding gained for him a kiss from the authoress—he had rather it had been from Pamela—and shortly afterwards a medallion painted by her own hand, representing a swan by the edge of a lake, and an urn with the words, ‘Candour and Loyalty,’ the device of the Chevaliers du Cygne. Yet, while they were amusing themselves thus, arms and ammunition for Ireland were being accumulated in the warehouses of M. Mattiesen, who had married Ducrest’s niece, and the dénouement was not far off which was to leave Pamela a widow.
In Hamburg also was Zouboff, the last of the favourites of the great Catherine of Russia, rich, “vain as a turkeycock,” square shouldered and far from beautiful. He lived in style and carried in his waistcoat pocket quantities of unset diamonds, with which he used to play. Klopstock was likewise to be met with at the house of his niece, Mme Shroeder. The intelligent Achille, who took pleasure in his conversation. found him of a childlike simplicity, and distinguished neither in face nor figure. He told the celebrated poet that, in spite of his knowing German well, he found the Messiad very hard to understand, that in fact he sometimes could not understand it at all. Klopstock laughed, and said that he was in the same case himself if he happened upon the middle of a canto.
There was one sad and gracious memory which remained with the young man all his life—that of Mrs. Fraser, the wide of the English resident, who died at the end of that winter. In life he had always known her with a smile on her lips; he saw her now in her coffin, dressed as for a reception, wearing her diamonds, very calm and “parfaitement belle.” In the brilliant lit room, where everyone passed before the coffin and made a profound obeisance, Achille could not keep back his tears.
But he could not, and did not desire to continue this kind of life for ever. The army of Condé, whic he had thought of joining, was disbanded; he now made up his mind to take service under the English flag, either in the West or East Indies. He procured a letter of recommendation to Lord Spencer, and began to study English and Dutch with ardour. But finding his mother, despite her heroic temper, despite the fact that she approved of his resolution, nearly heartbroken at the thought of so complete a separation, he abandoned the idea at once, with only one regret—the hours that he had spent in learning English. Mme de Neuilly shortly afterwards suggested his entering the service of Russia, and to this he had no objection, since his only desire was to take up his sword again, and he eventually obtained the promise of a sub-lieutenancy of hussars as soon as he should know Russian. So the indefatigable young man immediately set to work on that tongue, not doubting his power to acquire it, but a little fearing that at the present rate of progress his memory would become a veritable Babel. At the same time he amused himself by giving rein to what he modestly calls “un fort mince talent” for water colours. People were not difficult to please in those days, hence his “moonlight forest scenes,” his “sunsets on the seashore” and his Alpine views did not lack admirers.
Literature and art, however, received a temporary check through yet another affaire, arising out of an insult offered at a masked ball to a lady in his company, which led to a meeting at Wandsbeck next morning. Neuilly resolved to let his adversary fire first, and in consequence received a bullet through the neck. He did not fall, and, after holding his opponent a moment in suspense, fired in the air. They had not brought a surgeon, and he had to drive back to his uncle’s at Hamburg before he could receive attention. Before they left the ground, despite the fact that he was losing blood rapidly, he suddenly began, of all things, to sing, in order to make sure that his throat was uninjured, for the bullet had grazed the jawbone and apparently only just missed the artery. It was a narrow escape.
When he recovered he paid a visit to Prussia with a friend whose family had an estate near Magdeburg, and at Berlin (where, since the émigrés were not admitted, he passed as a Swiss) he saw the King and the “divine Queen,” Louise of Prussia, who often walked unter den Linden with her sister Princess Louis of Prussia (afterwards Duchess of Cumberland). He also visited Potsdam, where all had been left in exactly the same state as at the death of the great Frederick, though since then the scales had fallen from the hands of the figure of Justice which stood always in his sight outside his study window, leaving to her only the sword. The visit to his friend’s family, which included two very pretty sisters, enraptured Achille; he was especially charmed with the German absence of ceremony and simplicity of manners, the use of Christian names, and the custom of saluting each other with a kiss morning and evening. The only cloud on his pleasure was that Herr Benecke would not allow him to shoot his hares, which were so tame that they did not trouble to move when approached.
His return to Hamburg brought yet another change of plans, and he did not, after all, lay his sword at the disposal of Russia any more than at that of England. A friend, an Austrian captain, persuaded him to take service under the Imperial eagle, and so he entered the infantry regiment of Stain as a cadet—not, as he observes, a very brilliant opening for a young gentleman who had already served three or four years, seen four campaigns and held the commission of a captain of horse. Yet, in spite of his experience, he was only twenty-one, and had no intention of remaining long a cadet, announcing indeed to his mother on departure that, at the first battle, he meant either to become an officer or to be killed outright. Small wonder that the poor lady writes a little later when he was wounded for the second time since leaving her, “God grant that this wound keep him in check for the rest of the campaign! His immoderate desire to win the Cross of Maria Theresa drives him to expose himself beyond what his duty requires, and throws me into unspeakable anxiety.” So that when he was put hors de combat by a splinter from a cannon ball, and was ridden over, though not injured, by half a squadron of hussars—“pour me rechauffer,” as he cheerfully says—she could at least congratulate herself that for the moment he was out of the way of worse things.
It is a good moment to take farewell of the young man. We will not follow him to the Tyrol or the Danube, nor to Hohenlinden, where, with a ball in his shoulder, he led a forlorn hope, nor look at him, now rolled in his cloak in the snow, sleeping “as soundly as a prelate on down,” now trying to make good the gaps in his education by sitting, during a convalescence, at the feet of a learned Benedictine in a Suabian abbey. Still less will we follow him on his return to France, or dip into his memories of the court of Louis XVIII. and that of Charles X., in whose service he was écuyer de main and then écuyer cavalcadour, and with whom he was on terms of considerable intimacy. The revolution of 1830 naturally severed his connection with the Tuileries, but he lived till 1868, dying in his bed, after all, at the age of eighty-six, and leaving four daughters, but no son to carry on his name. His memoirs were written for the wife of his nephew Maurice de Barbarey, the son of his sister Clémentine, to whom he was always tenderly attached.
But, for a close in character, let us take one incident from his experiences under the Austrain flag, and leave him to tell it himself. It occurred quite soon after his enlistment, in an engagement(2) which took place on August 14th, 1799, near the Lake of Zurich, when Masséna and Suvarov were pitted against each other in the War of the Second Coalition. Achille had kept his word to his mother, and was already a subaltern, having remained a cadet but nine days. He had been detached by his captain with forty men to retake a post on the slopes of the Rosenberg abandoned by their pickets. At first the French conscripts withdrew at their advance, but Neuilly soon discovered, after pursuing them, that, higher up, were posted some veterans whose well-directed fire soon accounted for thirty of his little band. The captain, further down the slope, was seriously wounded and another ensign killed, after which all the fire was concentrated on the Comte de Neuilly.
“I was tired and fasting; however, I made a last effort and got up a few feet further, at the end of which I received a ball in the right thigh, and, almost at the same moment, another in the left. I fell, but was almost immediately raised by two of my men, who took me under the arms and dragged me down the mountain as quickly as they could . . . I heard the French saying, ‘There’s another of those —— officers got his marching orders!’ My soldiers carried me seated on their arms; I had mind round their necks . . . I do not know how it was, but our men kept losing ground, and, the French having retaken the first height, I was hardly down before their balls were whistling about my ears. One passed under my right arm and broke the neck of the soldier who was carrying me. He fell dead, and dragged me down in his fall as well as his comrade, of whom I had not let go. The only man left, burdened with his arms and his knapsack, could not carry me alone; my wounds smarted horribly and I was unable to walk. Fortunately an artilleryman passed near me. I ordered him to come and help carry me. He refused—I do not remember on what pretext—so I told my soldier to kill him if he did not obey. With such methods of procedure anything can be obtained.
“They made a sort of litter with two muskets, covered it with their capes . . . and I travelled like Virginia with her negroes. The surgeon major set about me, and in order to stop up the four holes made by the bullets made eight very deep incisions. . . . When the dressings were on, a stretcher was furnished with a truss of straw and a couple of pillows, and, as there was no means of having a cart . . . four young and strong peasant girls carried me on their shoulders, and we set off briskly for Schindellegi.
“I was not so collapsed as to be unable to observe the faces of my portresses; one, above all, to my right, was of remarkable beauty. I began to chatter to them and laugh, and they could not get over their astonishment that, wounded as I was, I could be so gay. ‘What a pity,’ said she whom I had noticed, ‘that a young and handsome officer must die so soon.’ ‘What the devil!’ I cried, ‘I have no intention of dying just now!’ ‘Oh, que si!’ she returned; ‘it is certain that you will not recover, for my cousin Franz, wounded in the same way, did not live a week.”
Neuilly combatted these prognostications, kissed his not unwilling bearers at parting, found that a boat had been got ready for him at Pffäfikin by his servant, and was soon at Rapperschwyl. “The Capucin monastery was to receive the wounded; two brothers were at the harbour with a black bier, embellished with white deaths’ head and crossbones.” On this cheerful couch the young man was conveyed into a room on the first floor where he was laid on a pallet which his servant had made somewhat more comfortable with straw. But his adventures were not over.
“Excited by the events of the day, bothered by my wounds, and above all anxious as to what was happening in the regiment, I fell at last into an agitated sleep. About midnight I was wakened by frightful irritation. I called Piringer, who was lying on a mattress at my side. He brought a light, and I was horrified to find myself covered with large bugs, of which it appeared the good Fathers had a great stock, since they were so liberal of them to their guests. We passed the rest of the night in the chase, and at daybreak I sent to the hôtel de ville to ask for another lodging.”
And it is, at least, from more amenable quarters in a naturalist’s house at St. Gall that he writes a week later to his mother a long letter, brimming with high spirits, signed “Achille le vulnérable,” telling her that his wounds are doing famously, and crying, from his sickbed, “On a beau dire, l’état militaire est le plus beau que je connoise!”
If this be not the utterance of one
“Happy as a lover, and attired
With sudden brightness, like a man inspired,”
it is hard to know where to look for it.
