THE EVENING OF A DAY OF WALKING
Early in the
month of October, 1815, about an hour before sunset, a man who was travelling
on foot entered the little town of D----
The few inhabitants who were at their windows or on their thresholds at the moment
stared at this traveller with a sort of uneasiness. It was difficult to
encounter a wayfarer of more wretched appearance. He was a man of medium
stature, thickset and robust, in the prime of life.
He might
have been forty-six or forty-eight years old. A cap with a drooping leather
visor partly concealed his face, burned and tanned by sun and wind, and
dripping with perspiration. His shirt of coarse yellow linen, fastened at the
neck by a small silver anchor, permitted a view of his hairy breast:
he had a
cravat twisted into a string; trousers of blue drilling, worn and threadbare,
white on one knee and torn on the other; an old gray, tattered blouse, patched
on one of the elbows with a bit of green cloth sewed on with twine; a tightly
packed soldier knapsack, well buckled and perfectly new, on his back; an
enormous, knotty stick in his hand; iron-shod shoes on his stockingless feet; a
shaved head and a long beard.
The sweat,
the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know not what sordid quality
to this dilapidated whole.
His hair was
closely cut, yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little, and did not seem
to have been cut for some time.
No one knew
him.
He was
evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence came he?
From the
south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his entrance into D---- by the
same street which, seven months previously, had witnessed the passage of the
Emperor Napoleon on his way from Cannes to Paris.
This man
must have been walking all day. He seemed very much fatigued.
Some women
of the ancient market town which is situated below the city had seen him pause
beneath the trees of the boulevard Gassendi, and drink at the fountain which
stands at the end of the promenade.
He must have
been very thirsty: for the children who followed him saw him stop again for a
drink, two hundred paces further on, at the fountain in the market-place.
On arriving
at the corner of the Rue Poichevert, he turned to the left, and directed his
steps toward the town-hall. He entered, then came out a quarter of an hour
later.
A gendarme
was seated near the door, on the stone bench which General Drouot had mounted
on the 4th of March to read to the frightened throng of the inhabitants of
D---- the proclamation of the Gulf Juan.
The man
pulled off his cap and humbly saluted the gendarme.
The
gendarme, without replying to his salute, stared attentively at him, followed
him for a while with his eyes, and then entered the town-hall.
There then existed at D----
a fine inn at the sign of the Cross of Colbas.
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