CHAPTER I

TO THE READER

Before the history of any life can be written, that life must be lived; so that it is not my life that I am now writing.  Attacked in early youth by an abominable moral malady, I here narrate what happened to me during the space of three years.  Were I the only victim of that disease, I would say nothing, but as many others suffer from the same evil, I write for them, although I am not sure that they will give heed to me.  Should my warning be unheeded, I shall still have reaped the fruit of my agonizing in having cured myself, and, like the fox caught in a trap, shall have gnawed off my captive foot.

CHAPTER II

REFLECTIONS

During the wars of the Empire, while husbands and brothers were in Germany, anxious mothers gave birth to an ardent, pale, and neurotic generation.  Conceived between battles, reared amid the noises of war, thousands of children looked about them with dull eyes while testing their limp muscles.  From time to time their blood-stained fathers would appear, raise them to their gold-laced bosoms, then place them on the ground and remount their horses.

The life of Europe centred in one man; men tried to fill their lungs with the air which he had breathed.  Yearly France presented that man with three hundred thousand of her youth; it was the tax to Caesar; without that troop behind him, he could not follow his fortune.  It was the escort he needed that he might scour the world, and then fall in a little valley on a deserted island, under weeping willows.

Never had there been so many sleepless nights as in the time of that man; never had there been seen, hanging over the ramparts of the cities, such a nation of desolate mothers; never was there such a silence about those who spoke of death.  And yet there was never such joy, such life, such fanfares of war, in all hearts.  Never was there such pure sunlight as that which dried all this blood.  God made the sun for this man, men said; and they called it the Sun of Austerlitz.  But he made this sunlight himself with his ever-booming guns that left no clouds but those which succeed the day of battle.

It was this air of the spotless sky, where shone so much glory, where glistened so many swords, that the youth of the time breathed.  They well knew that they were destined to the slaughter; but they believed that Murat was invulnerable, and the Emperor had been seen to cross a bridge where so many bullets whistled that they wondered if he were mortal.  And even if one must die, what did it matter?  Death itself was so beautiful, so noble, so illustrious, in its battle-scarred purple!  It borrowed the color of hope, it reaped so many immature harvests that it became young, and there was no more old age.  All the cradles of France, as indeed all its tombs, were armed with bucklers; there were no more graybeards, there were only corpses or demi-gods.