"A few moments later Derville arrived, in evening dress."

"Monsieur," said Derville, "to whom have I the honor of speaking?"

"To Colonel Chabert."

"Which one?"

"The one who was killed at Eylau," replied the old man.

Hearing those extraordinary words the clerk and the lawyer look at each other as if to say, "He is mad."

"Monsieur," said the colonel, "I desire to confide my secrets to you in private."

The intrepidity which characterizes lawyers is worthy of remark. Whether from their habit of receiving great numbers of persons, whether from an abiding sense of the protection of the law, or from perfect confidence in their ministry, certain it is they go everywhere and take all risks, like priests and doctors. Derville made a sign to Boucard, who left the room.

"Monsieur," said the lawyer, "during the day I am not very chary of my time; but in the middle of the night every moment is precious to me. Therefore, be brief and concise. Tell your facts without digression; I will ask you any explanations I may find necessary. Go on."

Bidding his strange client be seated, the young man sat down before the table, and while listening to the tale of the late colonel he turned over the pages of a brief.

"Monsieur," said the deceased, "perhaps you know that I commanded a regiment of cavalry at Eylau. I was the chief cause of the success of Murat’s famous charge which won the day. Unhappily for me, my death is given as an historic fact in ‘Victories and Conquests’ where all the particulars are related. We cut the three Russian lines in two; then they closed behind us and we were obliged to cut our way back again. Just before we reached the Emperor, having dispersed the Russians, a troop of the enemy’s cavalry met us. I flung myself upon them. Two Russian officers, actual giants, attacked me together. One of them cut me over the head with his sabre, which went through everything, even to the silk cap which I wore, and laid my skull open. I fell from my horse. Murat came up to support us, and he and his whole party, fifteen hundred men, rode over me. They reported my death to the Emperor, who sent (for he loved me a little, the master!) to see if there were any hope of saving a man to whom he owed the vigor of our attack. He despatched two surgeons to find me and bring me in to the ambulances, saying – perhaps too hurriedly, for he had work to attend to – ‘Go and see if my poor Chabert is still living.’ Those cursed saw-bones had just seen me trampled under the hoofs of two regiments; no doubt they never took the trouble to feel my pulse, but reported me as dead. The certificate of my death was doubtless drawn up in due form of military law."

Gradually, as he listened to his client, who expressed himself with perfect clearness, and related facts that were quite possible, though somewhat strange, the young lawyer pushed away his papers, rested his left elbow on the table, put his head on his hand, and looked fixedly at the colonel.

"Are you aware, monsieur," he said, "that I am the solicitor of the Countess Ferraud, widow of Colonel Chabert?"

"Of my wife? Yes, monsieur. And therefore, after many fruitless efforts to obtain a hearing from lawyers, who all thought me mad, I determined to come to you. I shall speak of my sorrows later. Allow me now to state the facts, and explain to you how they probably happened, rather than how they actually did happen. Certain circumstances, which can never be known except to God Almighty, oblige me to relate much in the form of hypotheses. I must tell you, for instance, that the wounds I received probably produced something like lockjaw, or threw me into a state analogous to a disease called, I believe, catalepsy. Otherwise, how can I suppose that I was stripped of my clothing and flung into a common grave, according to the customs of war, by the men whose business it was to bury the dead? Here let me state a circumstance which I only knew much later than the event which I am forced to call my death. In 1814 I met in Stuttgard an old cavalry sergeant of my regiment. That dear man – the only human being willing to recognize me, of whom I will presently speak to you – explained to me the extraordinary circumstances of my preservation. He said that my horse received a bullet in the body at the same moment when I myself was wounded. Horse and rider were therefore knocked over together like a stand of muskets. In turning, either to the right or to the left, I had doubtless been protected by the body of my horse which saved me from being crushed by the riders or hit by bullets."

The old man paused for a moment as if to collect himself and then resumed:

"When I came to myself, monsieur, I was in a place and in an atmosphere of which I could give you no idea, even if I talked for days. The air I breathed was mephitic. I tried to move but I found no space. My eyes were open but I saw nothing. The want of air was the worst sign, and it showed me the dangers of my position. I felt I was in some place where the atmosphere was stagnant, and that I should die of it. This thought overcame the sense of extreme pain which had brought me to my senses. My ears hummed violently. I heard, or thought I heard (for I can affirm nothing), groans from the heap of dead bodies among whom I lay. Though the recollection of those moments is dark, though my memory is confused, and in spite of still greater sufferings which I experienced later and which have bewildered my ideas, there are nights, even now, when I think I hear those smothered moans. But there was something more horrible than even those cries, - a silence that I have never known elsewhere, the silence of the grave. At last, raising my hands and feeling for the dead, I found a void between my head and the human carrion about me. I could even measure the space thus left to me by some mere chance, the cause of which I did not know. It seemed as if, thanks to the carelessness or to the haste with which we had been flung pell-mell into the trench, that two dead bodies had fallen across each other above me, so as to form an angle like that of two cards which children lay together to make houses. Quickly feeling in all directions, - for I had no time to idle, - I happily came across an arm, the arm of Hercules, detached from its body; and those good bones saved me! Without that unlooked-for succor I must have perished. But now, with a fury you will readily understand, I began to work my way upward through the bodies which separated me from the layer of earth hastily flung over us, - I say ‘us,’ as though there were others living. I worked with a will, monsieur, for here I am! Still, I don’t know today how it was that I managed to tear through the covering of flesh that lay between me and life. I had, as it were, three arms. That Herculean crow-bar, which I used carefully, brought me a little air confined among the bodies which it helped me to displace, and I economized my breathing. At last I saw daylight, but through the snow, monsieur! Just then I noticed for the first time that my head was cut open. Happily, my blood – that of my comrades, possibly, how should I know? or the bleeding flesh of my horse – had coagulated on my wound and formed a natural plaster. But in spite of that scab I fainted when my head came in contact with the snow. The little heat still left in my body melted the snow about me, and when I came to myself my head was in the middle of a little opening, through which I shouted as long as I was able. But the sun had risen and I was little likely to be heard. People seemed already in the fields. I raised myself to my feet, making stepping-stones of the dead whose thighs were solid, - for it wasn’t the moment to stop and say, ‘Honor to heroes!’

"In short, monsieur," continued the old man, who had stopped speaking for a moment, "after going through the anguish – if that word describes the rage – of seeing those cursed Germans, ay, many of them, run away when they heard the voice of a man they could not see, I was at last taken from my living grave by a woman, daring enough or inquisitive enough to come close to my head, which seemed to grow from the ground like a mushroom. The woman fetched her husband, and together they took me to their poor hovel. It seems that there I had a return of catalepsy, - allow me that term with which to describe a state of which I have no idea, but which I judge, from what my hosts told me, must have been an effect of that disease. I lay for six months between life and death, not speaking, or wandering in mind when I did speak. At last my benefactors placed me in the hospital at Heilsberg. Of course you understand, monsieur, that I issued from my grave as naked as I came from my mother’s womb; so that when, many months later, I remembered that I was Colonel Chabert, and endeavored to make my nurses treat me with more respect than if I were a poor devil of a private, all the men in the ward laughed. Happily for me, the surgeon made it a point of honor or vanity to cure me; and he naturally became interested in his patient. When I spoke to him in a connected manner of my former life, that good man (his name was Sparchmann) had my statements recorded in the legal forms of his country, also a statement of the miraculous manner in which I had escaped from the trench, and the day and hour my benefactress and her husband had rescued me, together with the nature and exact position of my wounds and a careful description of my person. Well, monsieur, I do not possess a single one of those important papers, nor the declaration I made before a notary at Heilsberg to establish my identity. The events of the war drove us from the town, and from that day I have wandered like a vagabond, begging my bread, treated as a lunatic when I told my story, unable to earn a single sou that would enable me to send for those papers, which alone can prove the truth of what I say and restore me to my social status. Often my physical sufferings have kept me for weeks and months in some obscure country town, where the greatest kindness has been shown to the sick Frenchman, but where they laughed in his face when he asserted he was Colonel Chabert. For a long while such doubts and laughter made me furious, and that injured my cause, and once I was shut up as a madman at Stuttgard. You can imagine, for what I have told you, that there were reasons to lock me up. After two years in a madhouse, where I was forced to hear my keepers say: ‘This poor man fancies he was once Colonel Chabert,’ to visitors, who replied compassionately, ‘Ah, poor man!’ I myself was convinced of the impossibility of my story being true; I grew sad, resigned, tranquil, and I ceased to call myself Colonel Chabert, so as to get my release and return to France. Oh, monsieur! to see Paris once more! it was a joy I . . ."

With those unfinished words Colonel Chabert sank into a revery, which the lawyer did not disturb.