The physician talked with her some time longer, and received quiet, rational, somewhat timid replies. At last he went away shaking his head, evidently not knowing what to think of this singular woman, but he succeeded in having the handcuffs removed, and faithfully wrote the letter, as he had promised to do.
Panna was to be brought before the examining magistrate for the first time on the following morning. When the jailer opened the door of the cellar cell, he started back in horror. From the grating in the little window, high up in the stone wall, dangled a rigid human form. Panna had hung herself in the night by tying the strings of her skirt together.
PRINCE AND PEASANT.
The first regiment of dragoon-guards had been waiting idly behind a screen of low bushes in a shallow hollow for more than an hour, to receive the order to advance.
It was an interesting point in the spacious battle-field of Metz, and an important period in that day of August 16th, 1870, which paved the way for the ultimate prevention of Bazaine’s breaking through to Verdun. By rising in the stirrups, or ascending one of the numerous shallow ridges which intersected the meadow, a charming view appeared.
A few hundred paces in the rear lay the little village of Vionville with its slender church-steeple, from whose top floated the flag of the red cross. Several roads bordered with poplars diverged from the hamlet, crossing in straight lines the broad, undulating meadow. In the foreground was a tolerably steep declivity, which at this moment formed the boundary of the German lines. Northward and southward, as far as the eye could reach, extended a ravine several hundred feet wide, at whose bottom a little stream had worn a narrow, winding channel. The western slope was tolerably gentle, the opposite one, on the contrary, was somewhat steep. Beyond stretched a bare plain, with a few church steeples and white buildings, in the distant background. Here the French were apparently drawn up in considerable force.
On the crest of the German hill several batteries were mounted, which maintained a rapid fire with bombs. Small bodies of infantry lay on the ground a short distance in the rear of the artillery. Still farther back was the regiment of dragoons, each man with his horse’s bridle wound around his arm, waiting with weary, somewhat stolid faces, for orders. The battle had evidently been at this point some time. Nearly all the enemy’s shells fell into the ravine, few reached the level ground on the German side, and they, too, thus far, had effected no special injury. Only a broken gun-carriage and two or three holes in the earth which, surrounded by a loose wall of yellow clay, looked like new-made graves, lent the plain something of the character and local colouring of a battle-field. The ear had a larger share in the mighty work of the day than the eye. From the sides, the front, the rear, everywhere, cannon thundered, at a short distance on the right echoed the rattle of a sharp fire of musketry, while the terrible, ceaseless roar which filled the air alternately swelled and sank, like the rising and falling flood of melody of a vast orchestra, during the storm of the pastoral symphony.
A number of officers had assembled on a little mound in front of the regiment of dragoons, whence they were attentively watching the French. Among them a major stood smoking a cigarette and gazing dreamily into vacancy. He was a man a little under thirty, with a slender figure, somewhat above middle height, and a pale, narrow face, to which cold grey eyes, and a scornful expression resting upon the colourless lips shaded by a blond mustache inclining to red, lent a stern, by no means winning expression. In this environment of human beings, amid these excited young men with their healthful, sunburnt faces, he, with his impassive, reserved expression and somewhat listless bearing, looked strangely weary and worn. A woman’s eye gazing at the group of officers would scarcely have regarded him with favour; a man’s would have singled him out as the most intellectual of them all.
Removing his helmet and wiping the perspiration from his forehead with his handkerchief, he displayed a head on which the hair was already growing thin and, at the same time, a well-kept, aristocratic hand, with long, thin, bloodless fingers. His whole appearance, even in the levelling uniform, revealed a man of exalted rank. And, in fact, this officer was Prince Louis of Hochstein-Falkenburg-Gerau, the head of a non-reigning line of a German princely race.
Orphaned at an early age, he found himself at eighteen when, by the rules of his House, he attained his majority, in the unrestricted possession of a yearly income of several millions. From his mother, a very fine musician, he inherited artistic tastes and a keen appreciation of the beautiful; from his haughty and somewhat eccentric father a rugged, independent nature, which found every external constraint intolerable and wished to obey only the law of its own will.
It requires little power of imagination to picture how the world looks to the eyes of a young, immensely wealthy scion of royalty. The court treated Prince Louis with marked distinction, the ladies petted him, gentlemen showed him the most flattering attention.
Precocious, as people become in the hot-house atmosphere of aristocratic society, reflective and shy, as only children, who are reared among grown people, without intercourse with companions of their own age, almost always are, endowed, moreover, with a critical mind, which always confronted appearances sceptically and anxiously went to the bottom of everything, Prince Louis, unlike so many of his equals in rank, did not accept the tokens of consideration offered him on all sides as a matter of course, but constantly asked himself their cause. He was honest with himself and admitted that he owed his sovereign’s clasp of the hand, the wooing smiles of the ladies, the cordial advances of men of rank and distinction, not to his own personality, but to his title and his wealth.
"What do they all know about me?" he often said to himself, when he returned from an entertainment at court to his splendid palace, tenanted only by servants. "Nothing! They give me no chance to open my mouth, and if everything I said to-night had been written down and laid before a man who was capable of judging, that he might give an opinion of the person who made these remarks, he could not truthfully say anything except: The fellow is perhaps not actually a simpleton, but does not surpass mediocrity. Yet I am received as if I were some one of consequence. Yes, that’s just it: it is not I, Louis, who am treated so, for no one would trouble himself about me, but Prince Etc." He became really jealous of "Prince Etc.," whom he regarded almost as an enemy, who supplanted and cast into the shade his own individuality, and the noble ambition entered his mind to win esteem by his personality, not by the external advantages which chance had bestowed.
But this was no easy matter. "Prince Etc." everywhere stood intrusively in his way and would allow poor "Louis" no opportunity. He went to a university, less in order to study than to steep himself for a few terms in the poetry of student life. The members of his extremely aristocratic club formed in two ranks before him when he went to their tavern, and old professors whom, hitherto, he had admired for their works, blushed with joyous emotion when he introduced himself to them, and in the class-room appeared to address him alone. He soon had enough of this, and entered the army. The colonel thanked him for the compliment which he paid the regiment by choosing it, his superior officers showed him endless marks of consideration, and if some of them affected to make no distinction between him and other young officers, he detected in it an intention which also irritated him. As, moreover, he found no special pleasure in the conversations of his comrades, nor in the parades, watchwords, and other details of garrison life, he forthwith quitted active service, not without having been promoted, in rapid succession, to first-lieutenant, captain, and major in his regiment.