Juana | Page 3

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Etext prepared by John Bickers, [email protected] and
Dagny, [email protected]

JUANA
BY
HONORE DE BALZAC

Translated By Katharine Prescott Wormeley

DEDICATION
To Madame la Comtesse Merlin.

JUANA (THE MARANAS)

CHAPTER I
EXPOSITION
Notwithstanding the discipline which Marechal Suchet had introduced
into his army corps, he was unable to prevent a short period of trouble
and disorder at the taking of Tarragona. According to certain
fair-minded military men, this intoxication of victory bore a striking
resemblance to pillage, though the marechal promptly suppressed it.
Order being re-established, each regiment quartered in its respective
lines, and the commandant of the city appointed, military
administration began. The place assumed a mongrel aspect. Though all
things were organized on a French system, the Spaniards were left free
to follow "in petto" their national tastes.
This period of pillage (it is difficult to determine how long it lasted)
had, like all other sublunary effects, a cause, not so difficult to discover.
In the marechal's army was a regiment, composed almost entirely of
Italians and commanded by a certain Colonel Eugene, a man of
remarkable bravery, a second Murat, who, having entered the military
service too late, obtained neither a Grand Duchy of Berg nor a
Kingdom of Naples, nor balls at the Pizzo. But if he won no crown he
had ample opportunity to obtain wounds, and it was not surprising that
he met with several. His regiment was composed of the scattered
fragments of the Italian legion. This legion was to Italy what the
colonial battalions are to France. Its permanent cantonments,
established on the island of Elba, served as an honorable place of exile
for the troublesome sons of good families and for those great men who
have just missed greatness, whom society brands with a hot iron and
designates by the term "mauvais sujets"; men who are for the most part
misunderstood; whose existence may become either noble through the
smile of a woman lifting them out of their rut, or shocking at the close
of an orgy under the influence of some damnable reflection dropped by
a drunken comrade.

Napoleon had incorporated these vigorous beings in the sixth of the
line, hoping to metamorphose them finally into generals,--barring those
whom the bullets might take off. But the emperor's calculation was
scarcely fulfilled, except in the matter of the bullets. This regiment,
often decimated but always the same in character, acquired a great
reputation for valor in the field and for wickedness in private life. At
the siege of Tarragona it lost its celebrated hero, Bianchi, the man who,
during the campaign, had wagered that he would eat the heart of a
Spanish sentinel, and did eat it. Though Bianchi was the prince of the
devils incarnate to whom the regiment owed its dual reputation, he had,
nevertheless, that sort of chivalrous honor which excuses, in the army,
the worst excesses. In a word, he would have been, at an earlier period,
an admirable pirate. A few days before his death he distinguished
himself by a daring action which the marechal wished to reward.
Bianchi refused rank, pension, and additional decoration, asking, for
sole recompense, the favor of being the first to mount the breach at the
assault on Tarragona. The marechal granted the request and then forgot
his promise; but Bianchi forced him to remember Bianchi. The enraged
hero was the first to plant our flag on the wall, where he was shot by a
monk.
This historical digression was necessary, in order to explain how it was
that the 6th of the line was the regiment to enter Tarragona, and why
the disorder and confusion, natural enough in a city taken by storm,
degenerated for a time into a slight pillage.
This regiment possessed two officers, not at all remarkable among
these men of iron, who played, nevertheless, in the history we shall
now relate, a somewhat important part.
The first, a captain in the quartermaster's department, an officer half
civil, half military, was considered,