But oddly, in belittling his confession, in seeing him defeated and drunk—in his last months he never stopped drinking—a feeling of compassion moved me to thank him for his belated honesty with a caress to the cheek and a: “I’m glad you told me.” I led him by the hand to the bed and began to undress him tenderly, as if he were a child. Afterwards, he fell asleep, and I remained there, pressed up against him.
The reinitiation of the war did us good. As soon as Field Marshal Lannes arrived from Paris, I went to see him in his office. As Robert was on duty, guarding the barracks, I was perfectly content waiting in the foyer until nearly midnight. Lannes received me without interrupting his work. He had a pleasant face and a beautiful mouth. Through Robert, I knew that he was thirty-six years old and that Napoleon considered him his friend.
“Yes, citoyenne?” he said, seeing me enter, almost without lifting his eyes from the enormous map spread across his desk. Standing before him, I spoke quickly, and got straight to the point: I wanted to accompany my husband to the war because I knew that he was going to die. I had followed him from Boulogne to Vienna and did not fear long marches.
“And how did you manage to enter Vienna?” he asked, placing the point of his compass on the map.
“First I dressed as a Mameluke and then as a sutler,” I replied.
“I see. Congratulations, citoyenne. You are a good patriot and you love Renaud well,” he said and, turning to one of his assistants, he ordered: “Tell Huet to name this woman as second sutler to the 9th Hussars.”
Saalfeld, Jena, Auerstedt. . . . It took only two weeks in October to sweep away the Prussian army. Since Ma Valoin’s wagon traveled at the rear of the regiment, the only time I saw Robert was when he turned up wounded. He came on foot, his fur soaked in blood. A musket ball had opened a furrow in his neck and he was walking with his head exposed and rigid. The surgeon had insisted that he go to the wagons for the wounded but he’d refused, explaining: “Do you imagine, my little Turk, that I would ever pass up an opportunity to sleep with you?” Ma Valoin made space for us and, curling up in her sheepskins, she spent the night between the wagon’s wheels. We didn’t sleep; he couldn’t. Excited from the battle, he told me how the Prussian cavalry had been decimated, how a Hussar named Guindet, an old friend of his, had killed Prince Louis Ferdinand with his saber.
“But this is only the beginning. You’ll see. A great battle is coming. We’ll take Berlin, just as we took Vienna,” he said, enthusiastically.
As I listened to him talk in the darkness, hoping in vain that he’d offer me a kind word, or even take an interest in me, I decided once and for all that Robert was not made for times of peace. As much as he loved me, he would always love the war more. In the end, Corinne had been right: Wars claimed lives, but for people like Robert, they represented the means to achieving a personal destiny, and this was something that neither I, nor anyone else, could ever offer him. At the break of dawn, he drank his glass of cognac while I changed the bandage on his wound. Then he put on his clean uniform, gave a gold coin to Ma Valoin, and kissed me on the forehead. “Off I go, my little Turk. It’s time to reap some Prussian hay.”
A short time later, Berlin already occupied, we celebrated his promotion to captain. He was ecstatic: Lannes had given him a leopard skin to drape over his saddle. We were happy again for a few days, but it was a provisional happiness, one we had to feed continuously—usually by trying to make one another laugh—like a bird that required constant care to ensure that it would keep singing. We no longer spoke of the things we would do together after the war was over. In December, in a shabby guesthouse in Warsaw on the eve of a somber winter campaign, Robert, already very drunk, suddenly stopped laughing. On the way back to the hotel, he had slipped on a sheet of ice covering the street, pulling me down with him as he fell. Later, in our room, with a melancholy smile that I’d never seen before, he stood up and staggered toward the window, broke one of the frosty windowpanes with his fist and hurled his glass of vodka to the street.
“You could have thrown it into the fire,” I said, from the bearskin rug where we’d been stretched out.
“No, my little Turk. If I’d done that, you would never have remembered this moment. We only remember the exceptional things, the strange things.”
“And why do you want me to remember this moment? The room smells bad, the soup is cold and I’ve had too much to drink. So have you, don’t you think?”
Robert, leaning against the wall so as not to fall over, raised his cut hand to his face and began to lick the wound with all the gusto of a stray dog. He looked pathetic.
“It’s not only this moment, my little Turk. It’s all of them, it’s everything,” he stammered. “I mean, you and me . . . every moment. It’s hard to explain. Don’t pay me any mind.”
Then he zigzagged his way back to me and collapsed at my side, his left arm encircling my waist. (Odd, how inconsistent our memories are. Once again, I’ve tried to remember the music of our first waltz, to no avail. And yet I can still feel the weight of his motionless arm on that night, smell his vodka-and-tobacco-laced breath on my cheek, and hear the ceaseless wails of a small child in the next room.) It took me a very long time to fall asleep. When I awoke, he had already left.
After the terrible battle at Pultusk, widowed and weeping in desolation, I stared at length at his uniforms, his pipes, his things on the dressing table. I had decided not to take any of his things with me. What purpose would it serve? Everything would remain there, just as he had left it in that frigid room in Warsaw. As I was leaving, my eyes came to rest on the piece of newspaper covering the hole in the windowpane, and suddenly I understood what he’d been trying to say that night. It wasn’t just that moment that I should remember, but all of the moments I had lived with him. Breaking the window, hurling the vodka glass and licking his wound marked out the sequence of a metaphor for our marriage; a compact poem that alluded to the space where, bewitched at first glance by his persuasive charm, I’d been drawn into a kind of emotional duel whose feints, retreats, attacks and blows I would carry in my memory like indelible scars. Taking his death as a given, he had shaped me as if I were one of those miniature oriental temples that, patiently carved out of a piece of marble, represent the entire life of the artisan. Even his final words, terrible and sad, which he’d uttered in the hospital, throwing up blood, had been to that purpose: “Ah, it’s you. Doesn’t it seem that spring is awfully late to arrive here in Foix?”
Yes, it’s true that there is reason to think that Robert married me for money. There is also reason to think that it was Robert himself who sent Corinne to test the strength of my love. But the threads of life are not tied together with reason. He saw something in me that impelled him to choose me as his great work, his grand project; so that his memory would live on in the world of my dreams, so that he might reign supreme in the limbo of my memory, my nostalgia, in the place where loneliness is less perishable. And I’m grateful to him for it.
Did he achieve his goal from beyond the grave? Yes and no. The deep chord of his presence still vibrates within me. How could it fail to be so, when it was he who launched me into the world? But it vibrates alongside other, no less sonorous chords, which come together to form something like an arpeggio. Did he truly love me? I believe he did. He loved me as much as he was capable of loving, as much as a man who no longer belongs entirely to this world can love. A man who had risen above his lineage and religion in order to become someone, in order to conquer me and his cross of honor and his posthumous rank as squadron leader; in order to prove to himself that he was no less than the best of them. Robert made me a woman so that I would never forget him, so that I’d become his funeral urn, his great pyramid. He loved himself through me. His love—there really is no other way to see it—was as selfish as the pharaohs. “But, my little Turk, is there any love in this world that isn’t selfish?” he’s just whispered in my ear. Robert, my Hussar of death.
MARYSE