The Recruit | Page 7

contracted from the effort that she made to exhibit
firmness, and the implacable eye of the public prosecutor lost none of
her movements.
"Well, receive him," continued the functionary of the Revolution, "but
do not keep him under your roof later than seven o'clock in the morning.
To-morrow, at eight, I shall be at your door with a denunciation."
She looked at him with a stupid air that might have made a tiger pitiful.
"I will prove," he continued in a kindly voice, "the falsity of the
denunciation, by making a careful search of the premises; and the
nature of my report will protect you in future from all suspicions. I will
speak of your patriotic gifts, your civic virtues, and that will save you."
Madame de Dey feared a trap, and she stood motionless; but her face
was on fire, and her tongue stiff in her mouth. A rap sounded on the
door.
"Oh!" cried the mother, falling on her knees, "save him! save him!"
"Yes, we will save him," said the official, giving her a look of passion;
"if it costs us our life, we will save him."
"I am lost!" she murmured, as the prosecutor raised her courteously.
"Madame," he said, with an oratorical movement, "I will owe you only
--to yourself."
"Madame, he has come," cried Brigitte, rushing in and thinking her

mistress was alone.
At sight of the public prosecutor, the old woman, flushed and joyous as
she was, became motionless and livid.
"Who has come?" asked the prosecutor.
"A recruit, whom the mayor has sent to lodge here," replied Brigitte,
showing the billet.
"True," said the prosecutor, reading the paper. "We expect a
detachment to-night."
And he went away.
The countess had too much need at this moment to believe in the
sincerity of her former attorney, to distrust his promise. She mounted
the stairs rapidly, though her strength seemed failing her; then she
opened the door, saw her son, and fell into his arms half dead,--
"Oh! my child! my child!" she cried, sobbing, and covering him with
kisses in a sort of frenzy.
"Madame!" said an unknown man.
"Ah! it is not he!" she cried, recoiling in terror, and standing erect
before the recruit, at whom she gazed with a haggard eye.
"Holy Father! what a likeness!" said Brigitte.
There was silence for a moment. The recruit himself shuddered at the
aspect of Madame de Dey.
"Ah! monsieur," she said, leaning on Brigitte's husband, who had
entered the room, and feeling to its fullest extent an agony the fear of
which had already nearly killed her. "Monsieur, I cannot stay with you
longer. Allow my people to attend upon you."
She returned to her own room, half carried by Brigitte and her old

servant.
"Oh! madame," said Brigitte, as she undressed her mistress, "must that
man sleep in Monsieur Auguste's bed, and put on Monsieur Auguste's
slippers, and eat the pate I made for Monsieur Auguste? They may
guillotine me if I--"
"Brigitte!" cried Madame de Dey.
Brigitte was mute.
"Hush!" said her husband in her ear, "do you want to kill madame?"
At that moment the recruit made a noise in the room above by sitting
down to his supper.
"I cannot stay here!" cried Madame de Dey. "I will go into the
greenhouse; there I can hear what happens outside during the night."
She still floated between the fear of having lost her son and the hope of
his suddenly appearing.
The night was horribly silent. There was one dreadful moment for the
countess, when the battalion of recruits passed through the town, and
went to their several billets. Every step, every sound, was a hope, --and
a lost hope. After that the stillness continued. Towards morning the
countess was obliged to return to her room. Brigitte, who watched her
movements, was uneasy when she did not reappear, and entering the
room she found her dead.
"She must have heard that recruit walking about Monsieur Auguste's
room, and singing their damned Marseillaise, as if he were in a stable,"
cried Brigitte. "That was enough to kill her!"
The death of the countess had a far more solemn cause; it resulted, no
doubt, from an awful vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey
died at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact
may be added to many recorded observations on sympathies that are

known to ignore the laws of space: records which men of solitude are
collecting with far-seeing curiosity, and which will some day serve as
the basis of a new science for which, up to the present time, a man of
genius has been lacking.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Recruit, by Honore de
Balzac
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