lingering questions on the subject of the will. This was my second campaign; I was in love with danger and took nothing seriously, like the green young artillery lieutenant I was! By the time we arrived at the Berezina, the army had lost all its discipline, as you know, and had no sense of military obedience. It was a rabble of men from all manner of nations, all instinctively heading southward. The soldiers did not hesitate to chase a barefooted general in rags away from their bonfires if he had no food or fuel to contribute. This disorder in no way improved once we crossed that notorious river. I had made my way out of the swamps of Zembin all alone, with nothing to eat, and I went looking for a house where I might be taken in. Finding none, or driven away from those I did find, I had the good fortune to spy, just as night was falling, a shabby little Polish farm, a place of which no description can give you an idea unless you have seen the wooden houses of lower Normandy or the poorest smallholdings of the Beauce. These abodes consist of one single room, walled off with planks at one end, the smaller half being a storeroom for forage. Through the dusk I spotted a plume of smoke rising from that distant house, and I walked boldly toward it, hoping to find comrades more compassionate than those I had so far met up with. I entered to find the table set for dinner. Several officers, with a woman among them—not an uncommon thing—were eating a meal of potatoes, horse meat grilled over embers, and frozen beets. Among the tablemates I spied two or three artillery captains from the First Regiment, in which I had served. I was greeted by a hearty ‘Hurrah!’ that would have greatly surprised me on the other bank of the Berezina; but now the cold was less fierce, my comrades were idle, they were warm, they were eating, and the room, strewn with hay bales, promised them a most delightful night. We weren’t so demanding back then. My fellow soldiers could be philanthropists without cost, one of the most common ways of being a philanthropist. I took my place on a hay bale and began eating. At the end of the table, beside the door to the little room full of straw and hay, sat my former colonel, one of the most extraordinary men I have ever encountered in all the motley crowd it has been my lot to meet. He was Italian. Now, when mankind is beautiful in the southern lands, it is sublime. I don’t know if you’ve ever noted the curious fairness of Italians, when their skin is fair . . . it’s magnificent, particularly by lamplight. I was reminded of this man on reading Charles Nodier’s fantastical portrait of Colonel Oudet; I rediscovered my own impressions in each of his elegant sentences. An Italian, like most of the officers who made up his regiment—borrowed by the emperor from Eugène’s army—my colonel cut an imposing figure; he was easily five foot eight or nine inches tall, admirably proportioned, perhaps a little fat, but prodigiously vigorous and agile too, graceful as a greyhound. His abundant black curls set off his complexion, which was as pale as a woman’s; he had small hands, a nicely shaped foot, a graceful mouth, and a slender aquiline nose with nostrils that automatically clenched and paled when he was angry, as he often was. His irascibility was a phenomenon beyond all belief, and so I will tell you nothing of it; in any case, you’ll have a sense of it soon enough. No one could feel at ease in his presence. I alone, perhaps, did not fear him; he had conceived for me, it is true, so singular a friendship that everything I did he found right and proper. When anger took hold of him, his brow tensed and his muscles sketched out a delta in the middle of his forehead—something like Redgauntlet’s horseshoe, to put it more plainly. That sign terrified you perhaps even more than the mesmerizing fire of his blue eyes. His entire body trembled, and his strength, already so great in his normal state, became
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