Any one who had chanced to pass through the little town of Vernon at
this epoch, and who had happened to walk across that fine monumental
bridge, which will soon be succeeded, let us hope, by some hideous iron
cable bridge, might have observed, had he dropped his eyes over the
parapet, a man about fifty years of age wearing a leather cap, and
trousers and a waistcoat of coarse gray cloth, to which something
yellow which had been a red ribbon, was sewn, shod with wooden sabots,
tanned by the sun, his face nearly black and his hair nearly white, a
large scar on his forehead which ran down upon his cheek, bowed, bent,
prematurely aged, who walked nearly every day, hoe and sickle in hand,
in one of those compartments surrounded by walls which abut on the
bridge, and border the left bank of the Seine like a chain of terraces,
charming enclosures full of flowers of which one could say, were they
much larger: “these are gardens,” and were they a little smaller:
“these are bouquets.” All these enclosures abut upon the river at one
end, and on a house at the other. The man in the waistcoat and the
wooden shoes of whom we have just spoken, inhabited the smallest of
these enclosures and the most humble of these houses about 1817. He
lived there alone and solitary, silently and poorly, with a woman who
was neither young nor old, neither homely nor pretty, neither a peasant
nor a bourgeoise, who served him. The plot of earth which he called his
garden was celebrated in the town for the beauty of the flowers which
he cultivated there. These flowers were his occupation.
By dint of labor, of perseverance, of attention, and of buckets of
water, he had succeeded in creating after the Creator, and he had
invented certain tulips and certain dahlias which seemed to have been
forgotten by nature. He was ingenious; he had forestalled Soulange
Bodin in the formation of little clumps of earth of heath mould, for
the cultivation of rare and precious shrubs from America and China. He
was in his alleys from the break of day, in summer, planting, cutting,
hoeing, watering, walking amid his flowers with an air of kindness,
sadness, and sweetness, sometimes standing motionless and thoughtful
for hours, listening to the song of a bird in the trees, the babble of
a child in a house, or with his eyes fixed on a drop of dew at the tip
of a spear of grass, of which the sun made a carbuncle. His table was
very plain, and he drank more milk than wine. A child could make him
give way, and his servant scolded him. He was so timid that he seemed
shy, he rarely went out, and he saw no one but the poor people who
tapped at his pane and his curé, the Abbé Mabeuf, a good old man.
Nevertheless, if the inhabitants of the town, or strangers, or any
chance comers, curious to see his tulips, rang at his little cottage,
he opened his door with a smile. He was the “brigand of the Loire.”
Any one who had, at the same time, read military memoirs, biographies,
the _Moniteur_, and the bulletins of the grand army, would have been
struck by a name which occurs there with tolerable frequency, the name
of Georges Pontmercy. When very young, this Georges Pontmercy had been
a soldier in Saintonge’s regiment. The revolution broke out.
Saintonge’s regiment formed a part of the army of the Rhine; for the
old regiments of the monarchy preserved their names of provinces even
after the fall of the monarchy, and were only divided into brigades in