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38 pages

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An old man arrives at the offices of the lawyer Derville, claiming to be Colonel Chabert, a hero of the Napoleonic Wars who was left for dead on the battlefield, but in fact managed to survive under a pile of corpses before spending years as a recovering amnesiac. Having returned to Paris and discovered that his wife has married an aristocrat who has liquidated all his assets, Chabert enlists the help of Derville to recover both his name and his fortune.Part of Balzac's La Comedie humaine cycle, Colonel Chabert is a poignant tale about the pursuit of justice, as well as a portrait of France's transition from the Napoleonic Empire to the Restoration. Inspired by actual events, the novella has captured the imagination of generations of readers and has been adapted for the stage and screen numerous times.

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Publié par	Alma Books
Date de parution	09 octobre 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780714549088
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0150€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Colonel Chabert
Honoré de Balzac
Translated by Andrew Brown

ALMA CLASSICS

alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.101pages.co .uk
Colonel Chabert first published in French in 1832 This translation first published by Hesperus Press Limited in 2003 This edition first published by Alma Classics in 2018
Translation, introduction and notes © Andrew Brown, 2003, 2018
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-773-4
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents
Introduction
Colonel Chabert
Note on the Text
No tes

Introduction
At the end of January 1807, Napoleon and his Grande Armée chased the Russian Army through the blizzards of a wintry East Prussia. In an anticipation of the great campaign of 1812, when Napoleon marched into Russia itself, the Russians had two things in their favour: firstly, their ability to retreat at the right moment, luring the French ever onwards into eastern immensities from which so many of them would never return; and secondly, General Winter. In 1807 Napoleon was aiming at Königsberg, where the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III had established his temporary capital; the Russians halted to block his path, taking up position near the town of Preussisch-Eylau. The Battle of Eylau, fought under a heavy fall of snow on 8 February 1807 between two rows of frozen lakes, set 80,000 Russians against about 60,000 French. The French infantry, subjected to heavy Russian cannonades, fell back in disarray; Davout and Ney did not bring their French troops into action until it was almost too late. What saved the Grande Armée from complete defeat, ensuring that the battle was no worse than a particularly ruinous draw, were the French cavalry charges repeatedly launched straight at the centre of the Russian and Prussian lines.
One of these charges – later seen as one of the most daring cavalry assaults in history – was led by Colonel Chabert: the troops under his command broke through the Russian lines, but as they tried to return to their own side, Chabert himself was cut down from his horse by a Russian sabre, and disappeared under the hooves of the 1500-strong cavalry charge led by Murat. Napoleon, who held Chabert in high esteem and was later to declare that the Colonel had saved the day for him, sent surgeons to discover whether his life could be saved; but they found what they took to be a lifeless body, and he was later buried in the common grave of those slain on the battlefield – of whom there were many, for nearly a third of the French troops had been killed or wounded in the engagement. When Ney surveyed the battlefield the following day, he exclaimed, “What a massacre, and without a result!” This did not prevent Napoleon sending news of his inevitable “victory” back to Paris, whereupon he set about retreating with his starving army, through temperatures of minus twenty-two degrees, to winter quarters. Vexed at his failure to take Königsberg, he declared that such had never been his intention in the first place.
“The grapes would have been sour anyway,” said the fox, and trotted away. Those who take part in historic events are just as inventive at editing their motives and memories as the historians who try to find out, in the words of the German historian Ranke, “ wie es eigentlich gewesen ”, what it was really like, or the novelists who try to re-imagine historical experience in more intimate ways. So much fact, so much fiction. The Battle of Eylau took place: at least, a huge sequence of events has been subsumed, for the sake of intelligibility, under that name, which, like all names (“Napoleon”, “Chabert”), is a useful kind of shorthand. I have taken the details of the battle from a recent history of Napoleon’s campaigns, but I added one item not to be found in any historical account, though it is found in Balzac’s story: the cavalry charge led by Colonel Chabert. Although he is what the French call “ vraisemblable ”, a perfectly plausible figure, he did not exist as such, and his name is not (despite his claims) signalled in the list of Victories and Conquests . Likewise, the history books do not refer to the presence of a Prince Andrei Bolkonsky fighting for the Russians at Austerlitz (as Tolstoy depicts him in War and Peace ), or a Fabrice del Dongo at Waterloo (as in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma ). But once you have read Balzac, Tolstoy or Stendhal, it is difficult to peruse historical accounts of Napoleonic battles without the field being haunted by their fictitious protagonists, just as their fictions are haunted by our awareness of history (we know, as we read War and Peace , that Napoleon will be defeated). What we read first (history through fiction, or fiction through history) matters: it’s a question of precedence – like the question of who is Countess Ferraud’s real husband: her first husband, Chabert, whom she believed to have died at Eylau; or her second husband, Count Ferraud.
Colonel Chabert is a story of hauntings. The fictitious Chabert, as we learn early on, did not perish at Eylau but was buried alive, and managed to escape from the common grave, emerging as naked as from his mother’s womb. The symbolic and mythical dimensions of the story are powerfully suggested: his survival is a rebirth, or even a resurrection. But it gives little cause for joy. The Napoleon he had served, that tyrant of genius (in every sense of the phrase) for whom he maintains a sentimental devotion, is now on St Helena, having himself staged a rebirth (the escape from exile on Elba) that led merely to renewed defeat and definitive exile. And when Chabert returns from Prussia to France, he discovers that he is no longer wanted, either by his wife, or by his country, both of them having, as it were, changed regime: his wife by remarrying, his country (his “fatherland”, he calls it) by accepting as its master after Napoleon’s fall the restored Bourbon Louis XVIII.
The history of France in the nineteenth century is indeed a history of repetitions and comebacks, or “ revenants ” (this French word for ghosts means “those who return”). History itself can be spookily recursive, caught in a time warp, endlessly recycling old systems of government and outdated regimes. The French Revolution that began in 1789 swept from power an absolutist monarch, Louis XVI, and was followed by the First Republic, then the Directory and Empire under a Napoleon who ended up as yet another absolutist monarch; he was defeated and exiled, but returned, only to be defeated and exiled again. He was succeeded by the restored monarchy of Louis XVIII, who had returned from exile in 1814, fled from Paris in 1815 during the Hundred Days and returned again after Waterloo. Then came the autocracy of Charles X, who hoped to return France to the days of the ancien régime , was exiled at the July Revolution of 1830 and succeeded by the “bourgeois” monarchy of Louis-Philippe, who was exiled after the February revolution of 1848 and succeeded by the Second Republic, which succumbed to the coup d’état of the previously exiled Louis Napoleon (nephew of Napoleon I) in 1851 and the Second Empire, which collapsed during the Franco-Prussian War to be replaced by the Third Republic in 1870, with Louis Napoleon in turn taking the road into exile… So many comings and goings of kings and emperors, so many exiles returning to assume or reassume power before departing into exile again: every monarch haunted by Napoleon (haunted by the desire to be him, or to prevent anyone like him ever rising to seize power again), every revolution haunted by the Revolution (haunted by the desire to live up to it, or to correct its errors).
Marx claimed how much he had learnt about the socio-political history of France from Balzac. One of the things he learnt was the power of the symbol. The famous first sentence of the Communist Manifesto could justifiably be rewritten: “A spectre is haunting history – the spectre of the symbol”. Louis Napoleon, obsessed by the imperial glory of his uncle, tried to reincarnate that symbol in a France that finally and belatedly moved on. Chabert, having “died” and been resurrected, returns to a reality in which he can no longer find a place, but where his very presence is seen as an embarrassment and a threat. He symbolizes all that the new France refuses to acknowledge: Napoleon, military heroism and above all the way the past never achieves closure, but lingers on – in short, the symbol. He is like a Vietnam vet haunting the America of the years after 1973. The harshness shown by Countess Ferraud to her first husband is no greater than that of a whole society, which seems to have condemned other survivors of the Grande Armée – Chabert’s old comrade Vergniaud, for instance, now a humble dairyman living in squalor in one of the most sordid of Paris suburbs – to an equally shameful “posthumous” existence.
Countess Ferraud herself is a Penelope who has rewoven the web of her life story to edit out her missing Odysseus rather than, as in Homer, to stave off any successor; but the story does not condemn her for her “unfaithfulness”. She is indeed cruel towards Chabert, but her choices are circumscribed: if she does not have him locked away, she will always be vulnerable to the loss of her own new identity as a wife and mother. She is also haunted, as