Shooting Stars: Ten Historical Miniatures Page 9
The same bells ring out from the cathedral to announce the new morning, as usual. Now and then the wind carries the sound of gunfire to the city from the River Rhine; the first skirmishing has begun. Rouget wakes up. With difficulty, he surfaces from a profound slumber. Something has happened, he vaguely feels, something has happened to him, although he has only a hazy memory of it. Only then does he notice the freshly written sheet of paper on the table. Verses? When did I write them? Musical notation in my own handwriting? When did I compose it? Oh yes—the song that my friend Dietrich asked for yesterday, the marching song for the army of the Rhine! Rouget reads his lines of verse, humming the melody that goes with them, but he feels, as the creator of a newly completed work always does, entirely unsure of himself. However, a military comrade is billeted next door to him; he shows his friend the song and sings it. His comrade seems to like it, merely suggesting a few small alterations. This first mark of approval gives Rouget a certain confidence. With all the impatience of an author, and proud to have kept his promise so quickly, he goes straight to the residence of Mayor Dietrich, who is taking a morning walk in his garden and mulling over a new speech. What, Rouget, you mean to say you’ve done it already? Well, let’s have a rehearsal at once. The two of them leave the garden and go into the salon of the house. Dietrich sits down at the piano and plays the accompaniment, Rouget sings the words. Enticed by this unexpected music in the morning, the mayor’s wife comes into the room and, trained musician that she is, immediately begins to work on setting the accompaniment so that it can be performed at a party for the friends of the family that evening, along with all kinds of other songs. Mayor Dietrich, proud of his pleasing tenor voice, says he will now study the song more thoroughly, and on the evening of 26th April, the day that saw the composition of its words and music in the early hours of the morning, it is performed for the first time in the salon of the mayor’s house to an audience chosen at random.
They seem to have given it a friendly reception, and all kinds of civil compliments were probably paid to the author, who was in the audience himself. But of course the guests in the Hôtel de Broglie on the main square of Strasbourg have not the slightest idea that an eternal melody has descended, on invisible wings, into their earthly present. Contemporaries rarely grasp the true stature of a human being or a musical work on first acquaintance, and we can tell how little the mayoress was aware of that astonishing moment from a letter to her brother, in which she makes the miracle into a banal social event. “You know how many people we receive in this house, and we always have to think of some kind of new entertainment for them. So my husband had the idea of getting a song suitable for the occasion composed. The captain of the engineers’ corps, Rouget de Lisle, a charming fellow who writes verse and composes music, swiftly provided the words and notation for a war song. My husband, who has a good tenor voice, sang the piece at once. It is very attractive, and shows certain unique qualities, having the good fortune to be livelier and more spirited than most such songs. For my own part, I turned my talent for orchestration to it, arranging the score for piano and other instruments, which gave me plenty to do. So the piece was played in our house, to the great satisfaction of the whole company.”
“To the great satisfaction of the whole company”—that seems to us today surprisingly cool. But the merely friendly impression of mild approval is understandable, for at this first performance the Marseillaise cannot display its true force. The song is not a piece for a pleasing tenor voice, to be performed as a solo in a bourgeois salon as part of a programme of romances and Italian arias. It is a song that arouses listeners with the hammering, jaunty, demanding opening bars… Aux armes, citoyens… addressing a crowd, a great throng, and its true orchestration is for the clamour of weapons, fanfares blaring, regiments marching. And it is not for the audience at a polite recital, but for those involved, all fighting in the same struggle. It is not to be sung by a single soprano or tenor voice, it is for a crowd of 1,000, the very model of a marching song, a song of victory and death, a song of the singers’ native land, the national anthem of an entire nation. The enthusiasm from which it was born will give Rouget’s song the power that inspires it. It has not yet taken fire, the melody has not yet reached the nation’s soul, the army does not yet know its marching song, its song of victory, the Revolution does not know its eternal paean.
Rouget de Lisle himself, the man who experienced that nocturnal miracle, has as little idea as the others of what he created in a single night, as if sleepwalking and led by a faithless genius. Of course that amiable dilettante is delighted to hear the invited guests applaud his work enthusiastically, to receive their civil compliments as its author. With the petty vanity of a petty mind he industriously tries to exploit this minor success in his small provincial circle. He sings the new tune to his comrades in the coffee houses, he has copies made and sends them to the generals of the Rhine army. Meanwhile, on orders from the mayor and at the recommendation of the military authorities, the regimental band stationed in Strasbourg has studied the War Song of the Army of the Rhine, and four days later, when the troops march away, the band of the Strasbourg National Guard plays the new march in the main square. The local Strasbourg publisher patriotically says that he is prepared to print the Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin, which is dedicated respectfully to General Luckner by his military subordinates. But not one of the generals of the Rhine army thinks of having the new tune played or sung during the march itself, and so it seems, like all Rouget’s efforts to date, that the salon success of Allons, enfants de la patrie is destined to remain a one day’s wonder, a provincial matter, and as such to be forgotten.
But the innate power of a work cannot be hidden or fade away in the long run. Time can forget a work of art, can forbid it to be performed, leave it for dead and buried, but the elemental will always conquer the ephemeral. For a month, two months, nothing more is heard of the War Song of the Army of the Rhine. The printed and handwritten copies lie around or end up here and there, in hands indifferent to it. But if a work has truly aroused enthusiasm in a single human being, that is enough: genuine enthusiasm is creative in itself. At the other end of France, in Marseilles, the Club of Friends of the Constitution gives a banquet on 22nd June in honour of the volunteers marching away to war. Five hundred spirited young men sit at a long table in their new National Guard uniforms, and the atmosphere is as feverish as it was on 25th April in Strasbourg, or indeed even more heated and passionate, thanks to the southern temperament of the people of Marseilles. And now they are not so vain and sure of victory as in that first hour after war was declared. For the war does not live up to the predictions of the generals, who had said that the revolutionary French troops had only to march straight over the Rhine to be welcomed everywhere with open arms. On the contrary, the enemy has made incursions far into French territory. The liberty of France is threatened, the cause of liberty itself in danger.
In the middle of the banquet one of the young men—his name is Mireur, and he is a medical student from Montpellier University—strikes his glass to call for quiet, and gets to his feet. They all fall silent and stare at him, expecting a speech, an address, but instead the young man raises his right arm in the air and strikes up a song, a new song unknown to them all, and no one knows how it came into his hands. Allons, enfants de la patrie. And this time the spark catches fire as if it had fallen into a keg of gunpowder. One man’s emotion has touched another’s; the eternal poles of feeling have come into contact. All these young men, who are setting out in the morning, prepared to fight for freedom and die for their native land, are aware that these words express their innermost will and their own true thoughts. The rhythm irresistibly carries them away into a unanimous ecstasy of enthusiasm. Verse after verse is hailed with jubilation, the whole song must be repeated once, then a second time, and now the melody is their own, they are singing, leaping to their feet in excitement, glasses raised, thundering out the refrain. Aux armes, citoyens! Formez
vos bataillons! People come in from the street, their curiosity aroused, to hear the song that is being sung with such verve, and then they are singing it too. Next day the melody is on 1,000, 10,000 pairs of lips. A reprint spreads it further afield, and when the 500 volunteers march away on 2nd July the song goes with them. When they feel tired on the road, when their steps slow down, it takes only one man to strike up the anthem again and its irresistible rhythm gives them all new heart. When they march through a village and the peasants gather in amazement, when all the inhabitants assemble to see what is going on, they join in the chorus. It has become their song too. Without knowing that it was meant for the army of the Rhine, without any idea who composed it and when, the volunteers have adopted it as the hymn of their own battalion, bearing witness to their own life and death. It belongs to them, like their regimental banner, and, marching passionately ahead, they plan to carry it all over the world.
The Marseillaise—for that will soon be the name given to Rouget’s song—wins its first victory in Paris. On 30th July the battalion marches through the suburbs, the banner and the song going ahead of it. Thousands, tens of thousands stand waiting in the streets to give them a festive welcome, and as the men of Marseilles advance, 500 of them singing in time with the song as if it rose from a single throat, singing it over and over again, the crowd listens. What kind of a wonderful, captivating song are the soldiers from Marseilles singing? What fanfare is it that goes to all hearts, accompanied by the beating of drums? Aux armes, citoyens! Two hours, three hours later, the refrain is being sung in all the streets of Paris. The Ça ira is forgotten, so are the old marches, the worn-out couplets; the Revolution has recognized its own voice, the Revolution has found its song.
It moves on now like an avalanche in a victorious course that cannot be halted. The anthem is sung at banquets, in the theatres and clubs, then even in church after the Te Deum, and soon instead of the Te Deum. In a couple of months the Marseillaise has become the song of the French nation and the whole army. With his clever mind Servan, the first republican Minister of War, recognizes the tonic and exalting power of such a unique battle song. In short order, he gives orders for 100,000 copies to be distributed to all the detachments, and in two or three nights the song of an unknown composer has spread farther than all the works of Molière, Racine and Voltaire. Every party ends with the Marseillaise, every battle is preceded by the regimental musicians singing the song of liberty. At Jemappes and Neerwinden the regiments line up to the song for the final onslaught, and the enemy generals, who have no means of stimulating their troops but the old recipe of a double ration of brandy, see in alarm that they have nothing to set against the explosive power of this “terrible” hymn when it is sung by thousands upon thousands at the same time, storming like an echoing wave of sound against their own ranks. The Marseillaise now presides over all the battles of France, like Nike the winged goddess of victory, carrying away countless numbers into enthusiastic frenzy and to their deaths.
*
Meanwhile, an unknown captain of fortifications sits in the little garrison of Hüningen, busily designing ramparts and entrenchments. Perhaps he has already forgotten the War Song of the Army of the Rhine, the work he wrote long ago on the night of 26th April 1792, and does not dare to guess, when he reads what the gazettes have to say about that other anthem, the other war song that has taken Paris by storm, the victorious Song of the Men of Marseilles, that it is word for word and bar for bar the miraculous song that came to him and out of him on that night. For by a cruel irony of fate there is only one man who does not feel uplifted by its melody—roaring as it does to the skies, battering against the stars—and that is the man who wrote it. No one in all France troubles about Captain Rouget de Lisle, and the greatest fame that a song ever had is the song’s alone; not a trace of it falls on its creator Rouget. His name is not printed on the text, and he himself would remain entirely unnoticed by the masters of the present hour if he had not irritated them by drawing attention to himself. For—a brilliant paradox of the kind that only history can produce—the creator of the revolutionary hymn is not a revolutionary himself; on the contrary, the man who did more than anyone else to promote the Revolution with his immortal song would like to dam it up again as firmly as possible. By the time the men of Marseilles and the Parisian rabble storm the Tuileries and depose the king, with his song on their lips, Rouget de Lisle has had enough of the Revolution. He refuses to take an oath on the Republic, and would rather leave the armed services than serve the Jacobins. The description of liberté chérie, beloved freedom, in his hymn is not an empty phrase; he hates the new tyrants and despots in the National Convention no less that he hated the crowned and anointed despots on the enemy side. He frankly vents his dislike of the Committee of Public Safety when his friend Mayor Dietrich, the godfather of the Marseillaise, with General Luckner, to whom it was dedicated, and all the officers and aristocrats who were present in the audience on the evening of its first performance, are dragged away to the guillotine. And soon a grotesque situation arises: the poet of the Revolution is imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary, he of all people is put on trial for betraying his native land. Only the 9th of Thermidor, opening the prisons on the fall of Robespierre, spared the French Revolution the shame of having handed over the author of its most immortal song to the “national razor”.
However, it would have been a heroic death, and not such a pitiful twilight fate as lies in store for Rouget. For the unlucky man survives the one really creative day of his life by more than forty years, by thousands and thousands of days. He has been stripped of his uniform, his pension goes unpaid; the poems, operas and other texts that he writes are not printed or performed. Fate does not forgive the dilettante for forcing an entrance, unsummoned, into the ranks of the immortals. The little man lives out his little life by dint of working at petty and not always entirely honest businesses. Carnot and later on Bonaparte try in vain to help him. But something in the character of Rouget has been poisoned and distorted beyond redemption by the cruel chance that made him a godlike genius for three hours, and then scornfully cast him back into his own insignificance. He quarrels acrimoniously with all the authorities, he writes audacious and emotional letters to Bonaparte, who wanted to help him; he boasts openly of having voted against him in the constitutional referendum. His business involves him in dubious affairs, and he even becomes an inmate of the Sainte-Pélagie debtors’ prison over the matter of an unpaid bill of exchange. Unpopular everywhere, hunted by his debtors, always in bad repute with the police, he finally hides somewhere in the provinces and, as if forgotten and departed in his grave, he listens there to the fate of his immortal song. He still remembers that the Marseillaise stormed all the countries of Europe with the victorious armies, that no sooner had Napoleon become emperor than he had it banned from all public musical programmes as being too revolutionary, and then the Bourbons had its performance entirely forbidden. Only with amazement does the embittered old man see how, after an age in human terms, the July revolution of 1830 resurrects his words and melody with their old force at the barricades of Paris, and the Citizen King, Louis-Philippe, grants him a small pension. It seems to the ruined and forgotten man like a dream that anyone still remembers him at all, but it is not much of a memory, and when he dies at last in 1836 in Choisy-le-Roi, when he is seventy-six, no one knows or can even give his name. Another human age must pass before the Marseillaise, by now well established as the national anthem, is sung again in the Great War at the French fronts in warlike conditions, and orders are given for the body of little Captain Rouget to be buried in the same place, the cathedral of Les Invalides, as the mortal remains of little Lieutenant Bonaparte. And so, at last, the creator of a famous song who was never famous himself lies in his native land’s place of fame, resting after the disappointment of having been nothing but the poet of a single night.
THE FIELD OF WATERLOO
NAPOLEON
18 June 1815
DESTINY MAKES its urgent way to the mighty and those who do violent deeds. It will be subservient for years on end to a single man—Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon—for it loves those elemental characters that resemble destiny itself, an element that is so hard to comprehend.
Sometimes, however, very seldom at all times, and on a strange whim, it makes its way to some unimportant man. Sometimes—and these are the most astonishing moments in international history—for a split second the strings of fate are pulled by a man who is a complete nonentity. Such people are always more alarmed than gratified by the storm of responsibility that casts them into the heroic drama of the world. Only very rarely does such a man forcefully raise his opportunity aloft, and himself with it. For greatness gives itself to those of little importance only for a second, and if one of them misses his chance it is gone for ever.
GROUCHY
The news is hurled like a cannonball crashing into the dancing, love affairs, intrigues and arguments of the Congress of Vienna: Napoleon, the lion in chains, has broken out of his cage on Elba, and other couriers come galloping up with more news. He has taken Lyons, he has chased the king away, the troops are going over to him with fanatical banners, he is in Paris, in the Tuileries—Leipzig and twenty years of murderous warfare were all in vain. As if seized by a great claw, the ministers who only just now were still carping and quarrelling come together. British, Prussian, Austrian and Russian armies are raised in haste to defeat the usurper of power yet again, and this time finally. The legitimate Europe of emperors and kings was never more united than in this first hour of horror. Wellington moves towards France from the north, a Prussian army under Blücher is coming up beside him to render aid, Schwarzenberg is arming on the Rhine, and as a reserve the Russian regiments are marching slowly and heavily right through Germany.