The Red Inn | Page 2

interest. During this blessed interregnum the voice of a narrator is
always delightful to our languid senses; it increases their negative
happiness. I, a seeker after impressions, admired the faces about me,
enlivened by smiles, beaming in the light of the wax candles, and
somewhat flushed by our late good cheer; their diverse expressions
producing piquant effects seen among the porcelain baskets, the fruits,
the glasses, and the candelabra.
All of a sudden my imagination was caught by the aspect of a guest
who sat directly in front of me. He was a man of medium height, rather
fat and smiling, having the air and manner of a stock-broker, and
apparently endowed with a very ordinary mind. Hitherto I had scarcely
noticed him, but now his face, possibly darkened by a change in the
lights, seemed to me to have altered its character; it had certainly grown
ghastly; violet tones were spreading over it; you might have thought it
the cadaverous head of a dying man. Motionless as the personages
painted on a diorama, his stupefied eyes were fixed on the sparkling
facets of a cut-glass stopper, but certainly without observing them; he
seemed to be engulfed in some weird contemplation of the future or the
past. When I had long examined that puzzling face I began to reflect
about it. "Is he ill?" I said to myself. "Has he drunk too much wine? Is
he ruined by a drop in the Funds? Is he thinking how to cheat his
creditors?"
"Look!" I said to my neighbor, pointing out to her the face of the
unknown man, "is that an embryo bankrupt?"
"Oh, no!" she answered, "he would be much gayer." Then, nodding her
head gracefully, she added, "If that man ever ruins himself I'll tell it in
Pekin! He possesses a million in real estate. That's a former purveyor to
the imperial armies; a good sort of man, and rather original. He married
a second time by way of speculation; but for all that he makes his wife

extremely happy. He has a pretty daughter, whom he refused for many
years to recognize; but the death of his son, unfortunately killed in a
duel, has compelled him to take her home, for he could not otherwise
have children. The poor girl has suddenly become one of the richest
heiresses in Paris. The death of his son threw the poor man into an
agony of grief, which sometimes reappears on the surface."
At that instant the purveyor raised his eyes and rested them upon me;
that glance made me quiver, so full was it of gloomy thought. But
suddenly his face grew lively; he picked up the cut-glass stopper and
put it, with a mechanical movement, into a decanter full of water that
was near his plate, and then he turned to Monsieur Hermann and smiled.
After all, that man, now beatified by gastronomical enjoyments, hadn't
probably two ideas in his brain, and was thinking of nothing.
Consequently I felt rather ashamed of wasting my powers of divination
"in anima vili,"--of a doltish financier.
While I was thus making, at a dead loss, these phrenological
observations, the worthy German had lined his nose with a good pinch
of snuff and was now beginning his tale. It would be difficult to
reproduce it in his own language, with his frequent interruptions and
wordy digressions. Therefore, I now write it down in my own way;
leaving out the faults of the Nuremburger, and taking only what his tale
may have had of interest and poesy with the coolness of writers who
forget to put on the title pages of their books: "Translated from the
German."

THOUGHT AND ACT
Toward the end of Venemiaire, year VII., a republican period which in
the present day corresponds to October 20, 1799, two young men,
leaving Bonn in the early morning, had reached by nightfall the
environs of Andernach, a small town standing on the left bank of the
Rhine a few leagues from Coblentz. At that time the French army,
commanded by Augereau, was manoeuvring before the Austrians, who
then occupied the right bank of the river. The headquarters of the

Republican division was at Coblentz, and one of the demi-brigades
belonging to Augereau's corps was stationed at Andernach.
The two travellers were Frenchmen. At sight of their uniforms, blue
mixed with white and faced with red velvet, their sabres, and above all
their hats covered with a green varnished-cloth and adorned with a
tricolor plume, even the German peasants had recognized army
surgeons, a body of men of science and merit liked, for the most part,
not only in our own army but also in the countries invaded by our
troops. At this period many sons of good families taken from their
medical studies by