Colonel Chabert
Honoré de Balzac, Carol Cosman
Language: English
Pages: 101
ISBN: 0811213595
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The story of a French military hero of the Napoleonic Wars, long assumed to be dead, tries to recover his fortune and former wife through the help of a famous Parisian lawyer.
Colonel Chabert, a Napoleonic War hero supposedly killed in the Battle of Eylau, returns to Paris after a long convalescence to find his wife remarried, and his pension gone. He employs a young, well-known lawyer to at least reclaim his pension. It is a game of wits: first to convince the lawyer that he is who he says he is; secondly to get his wife to admit to his identity and thereby give up some of her wealth. Once the lawyer believes Chabert's story, the wife must be made to part with his pension...
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happy thought, a ray of hope. “Does the pipe smoke bother you?” he said, directing his lawyer to the dilapidated chair. “Colonel, you must be miserably uncomfortable here.” These words were torn from Derville by the distrust natural to lawyers, and by the deplorable experience they acquire early in life from the ghastly untold tragedies they witness. “Here,” he said to himself, “is a man who has surely spent my money satisfying the trooper’s three cardinal virtues: wine, women, and cards.” “It
did not cherish only the lover in the young man, she had also been seduced by the idea of entering that disdainful society which, despite its degradation, still dominated the imperial Court. In this marriage her vanity was satisfied as much as her passion. She was set on becoming a proper lady. When the Faubourg Saint-Germain understood that the young Count’s marriage was not a defection, its salons were opened to his wife. Then came the Restoration. Count Ferraud’s political fortunes were not
State, a Director-General, he regarded this as only the beginning of his political career. Preoccupied with his consuming ambition, he hired as his secretary a bankrupt attorney named Delbecq, a terribly clever man admirably acquainted with the resources of chicanery, to whom he entrusted all his private affairs. Self-interest kept this shrewd operator faithful to the Count. He hoped to succeed through his patron’s influence, and made the Count’s fortune his primary concern. His conduct so
lived with courtly grace. Rich in her own right, rich through her husband—who was touted as one of the ablest men of the Royalist party, a friend of the King, almost certain to be made a minister—she belonged to the aristocracy and shared its splendor. In the midst of this triumph, though, she was attacked by a moral cancer. There are certain feelings women will intuit despite the care men take to hide them. When the King first returned, Count Ferraud began having some regrets about his marriage.
in a strangled voice, suddenly standing before Derville. “She knows that I am alive; since my return she has received two letters written in my own hand. She does not love me anymore. As for me, I do not know if I love her or hate her! I desire her and curse her. She owes her fortune and her happiness to me, and she has not offered me the slightest help! Sometimes I don’t know what will become of me!” At these words, the old soldier fell back in his chair and again sat motionless. Derville sat in
