Les Misérables
his axe.
It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm. For the
antiquary, Hougomont is _Hugomons_. This manor was built by Hugo, Sire
of Somerel, the same who endowed the sixth chaplaincy of the Abbey of
Villiers.
The traveller pushed open the door, elbowed an ancient calash under the
porch, and entered the courtyard.
The first thing which struck him in this paddock was a door of the
sixteenth century, which here simulates an arcade, everything else
having fallen prostrate around it. A monumental aspect often has its
birth in ruin. In a wall near the arcade opens another arched door, of
the time of Henry IV., permitting a glimpse of the trees of an orchard;
beside this door, a manure-hole, some pickaxes, some shovels, some
carts, an old well, with its flagstone and its iron reel, a chicken
jumping, and a turkey spreading its tail, a chapel surmounted by a
small bell-tower, a blossoming pear-tree trained in espalier against
the wall of the chapel—behold the court, the conquest of which was one
of Napoleon’s dreams. This corner of earth, could he but have seized
it, would, perhaps, have given him the world likewise. Chickens are
scattering its dust abroad with their beaks. A growl is audible; it is
a huge dog, who shows his teeth and replaces the English.
The English behaved admirably there. Cooke’s four companies of guards
there held out for seven hours against the fury of an army.
Hougomont viewed on the map, as a geometrical plan, comprising
buildings and enclosures, presents a sort of irregular rectangle, one
angle of which is nicked out. It is this angle which contains the
southern door, guarded by this wall, which commands it only a gun’s
length away. Hougomont has two doors,—the southern door, that of the
château; and the northern door, belonging to the farm. Napoleon sent
his brother Jérôme against Hougomont; the divisions of Foy,
Guilleminot, and Bachelu hurled themselves against it; nearly the
entire corps of Reille was employed against it, and miscarried;
Kellermann’s balls were exhausted on this heroic section of wall.
Bauduin’s brigade was not strong enough to force Hougomont on the
north, and the brigade of Soye could not do more than effect the
beginning of a breach on the south, but without taking it.
The farm buildings border the courtyard on the south. A bit of the
north door, broken by the French, hangs suspended to the wall. It
consists of four planks nailed to two cross-beams, on which the scars
of the attack are visible.
The northern door, which was beaten in by the French, and which has had
a piece applied to it to replace the panel suspended on the wall,
stands half-open at the bottom of the paddock; it is cut squarely in
the wall, built of stone below, of brick above which closes in the
courtyard on the north. It is a simple door for carts, such as exist in
all farms, with the two large leaves made of rustic planks: beyond lie
the meadows. The dispute over this entrance was furious. For a long
time, all sorts of imprints of bloody hands were visible on the
door-posts. It was there that Bauduin was killed.
The storm of the combat still lingers in this courtyard; its horror is
visible there; the confusion of the fray was petrified there; it lives
and it dies there; it was only yesterday. The walls are in the death
agony, the stones fall; the breaches cry aloud; the holes are wounds;
the drooping, quivering trees seem to be making an effort to flee.
This courtyard was more built up in 1815 than it is to-day. Buildings
which have since been pulled down then formed redans and angles.
The English barricaded themselves there; the French made their way in,
but could not stand their ground. Beside the chapel, one wing of the
château, the only ruin now remaining of the manor of Hougomont, rises
in a crumbling state,—disembowelled, one might say. The château served
for a dungeon, the chapel for a block-house. There men exterminated
each other. The French, fired on from every point,—from behind the
walls, from the summits of the garrets, from the depths of the cellars,
through all the casements, through all the air-holes, through every
crack in the stones,—fetched fagots and set fire to walls and men; the
reply to the grape-shot was a conflagration.
In the ruined wing, through windows garnished with bars of iron, the
dismantled chambers of the main building of brick are visible; the
English guards were in ambush in these rooms; the spiral of the
staircase, cracked from the ground floor to the very roof, appears like
the inside of a broken shell. The staircase has two stories; the
English, besieged on the staircase, and massed on its upper steps, had
cut off the lower steps. These consisted of large slabs of blue stone,
which form a heap among the nettles. Half a score of steps still cling
to the wall; on the first is cut the figure of a trident. These
inaccessible steps are solid in their niches. All the rest resembles a
jaw which has been denuded of its teeth. There are two old trees there:
one is dead; the other is wounded at its base, and is clothed with
verdure in April. Since 1815 it has taken to growing through the
staircase.
A massacre took place in the chapel. The interior, which has recovered
its calm, is singular. The mass has not been said there since the
carnage. Nevertheless, the altar has been left there—an altar of
unpolished wood, placed against a background of roughhewn stone. Four
whitewashed walls, a door opposite the altar, two small arched windows;
over the door a large wooden crucifix, below the crucifix a square
air-hole stopped up with a bundle of hay; on the ground, in one corner,
an old window-frame with the glass all broken to pieces—such is the
chapel. Near the altar there is nailed up a wooden statue of Saint
Anne, of the fifteenth century; the head of the infant Jesus has been
carried off by a large ball. The French, who were masters of the chapel
for a moment, and were then dislodged, set fire to it. The flames
filled this building; it was a perfect furnace; the door was burned,
the floor was burned, the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed
upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen;
then it stopped,—a miracle, according to the assertion of the people of
the neighborhood. The infant Jesus, decapitated, was less fortunate
than the Christ.
The walls are covered with inscriptions. Near the feet of Christ this
name is to be read: _Henquinez_. Then these others: _Conde de Rio Maior
Marques y Marquesa de Almagro (Habana)_. There are French names with
exclamation points,—a sign of wrath. The wall was freshly whitewashed
in 1849. The nations insulted each other there.
It was at the door of this chapel that the corpse was picked up which
held an axe in its hand; this corpse was Sub-Lieutenant Legros.
On emerging from the chapel, a well is visible on the left. There are
two in this courtyard. One inquires, Why is there no bucket and pulley
to this? It is because water is no longer drawn there. Why is water not
drawn there? Because it is full of skeletons.
The last person who drew water from the well was named Guillaume van
Kylsom. He was a peasant who lived at Hougomont, and was gardener
there. On the 18th of June, 1815, his family fled and concealed
themselves in the woods.
The forest surrounding the Abbey of Villiers sheltered these
unfortunate people who had been scattered abroad, for many days and
nights. There are at this day certain traces recognizable, such as old
boles of burned trees, which mark the site of these poor bivouacs
trembling in the depths of the thickets.
Guillaume van Kylsom remained at Hougomont, “to guard the château,” and
concealed himself in the cellar. The English discovered him there. They
tore him from his hiding-place, and the combatants forced this
frightened man to serve them, by administering blows with the flats of
their swords. They were thirsty; this Guillaume brought them water. It
was from this well that he drew it. Many drank there their last
draught. This well where drank so many of the dead was destined to die
itself.
After the engagement, they were in haste to bury the dead bodies. Death
has a fashion of harassing victory, and she causes the pest to follow
glory. The typhus is a concomitant of triumph. This well was deep, and
it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast
into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says
they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment,
feeble voices were heard calling from the well.
This well is isolated in the middle of the courtyard. Three walls, part
stone, part brick, and simulating a small, square tower, and folded
like the leaves of a screen, surround it on all sides. The fourth side
is open. It is there that the water was drawn. The wall at the bottom
has a sort of shapeless loophole, possibly the hole made by a shell.
This little tower had a platform, of which only the beams remain. The
iron supports of the well on the right form a cross. On leaning over,
the eye is lost in a deep cylinder of brick which is filled with a
heaped-up mass of shadows. The base of the walls all about the well is
concealed in a growth of nettles.
This well has not in front of it that large blue slab which forms the
table for all wells in Belgium. The slab has here been replaced by a
cross-beam, against which lean five or six shapeless fragments of
knotty and petrified wood which resemble huge bones. There is no longer
either pail, chain, or pulley; but there is still the stone basin which
served the overflow. The rain-water collects there, and from time to
time a bird of the neighboring forests comes thither to drink, and then
flies away. One house in this ruin, the farmhouse, is still inhabited.
The door of this house opens on the courtyard. Upon this door, beside a
pretty Gothic lock-plate, there is an iron handle with trefoils placed
slanting. At the moment when the Hanoverian lieutenant, Wilda, grasped
this handle in order to take refuge in the farm, a French sapper hewed
off his hand with an axe.
The family who occupy the house had for their grandfather Guillaume van
Kylsom, the old gardener, dead long since. A woman with gray hair said
to us: “I was there. I was three years old. My sister, who was older,
was terrified and wept. They carried us off to the woods. I went there
in my mother’s arms. We glued our ears to the earth to hear. I imitated
the cannon, and went _boum! boum!_”
A door opening from the courtyard on the left led into the orchard, so
we were told. The orchard is terrible.
It is in three parts; one might almost say, in three acts. The first
part is a garden, the second is an orchard, the third is a wood. These
three parts have a common enclosure: on the side of the entrance, the
buildings of the château and the farm; on the left, a hedge; on the
right, a wall; and at the end, a wall. The wall on the right is of
brick, the wall at the bottom is of stone. One enters the garden first.
It slopes downwards, is planted with gooseberry bushes, choked with a
wild growth of vegetation, and terminated by a monumental terrace of
cut stone, with balustrade with a double curve.
It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded Le
Nôtre; to-day it is ruins and briars. The pilasters are surmounted by
globes which resemble cannon-balls of stone. Forty-three balusters can
still be counted on their sockets; the rest lie prostrate in the grass.
Almost all bear scratches of bullets. One broken baluster is placed on
the pediment like a fractured leg.
It was in this garden, further down than the orchard, that six
light-infantry men of the 1st, having made their way thither, and being