green veil. The route was easy to follow: he could see drops of blood on the grass. Margont joined him, armed with a pistol and a sword. When the two men next saw Knerkes, he was wading into the Danube. The water was already up to his chest and the current was strong, swelled by the thawing snow. Margont aimed at him. ‘Drop your pistol!’ he commanded.
Knerkes raised his left hand and ostentatiously let his weapon drop; it sank like a stone. He did not need it any more. He smiled and continued to advance into the river. The current began to carry him off
‘He’s getting away from us!’ cried Relmyer. ‘Fire!’
Margont could not bring himself to do it.
‘He’s unarmed, it would be murder,’ he replied. ‘Let’s follow him along the riverbank.’
‘If he knows how to swim, he’ll find his feet on one of the little islands and we’ll lose him for ever! Fire! I don’t care if it’s the correct procedure, fire!’
Margont was still threatening Knerkes, who was getting further and further away. Relmyer flung himself on Margont’s weapon and took it from him. Margont wanted to take it back, but Relmyer stabbed him with his sabre, exactly as he had wounded Knerkes. Margont stared with disbelief at his bloody, painful wrist.
‘Don’t force me to kill you,’ warned Relmyer. ‘It would pain me immensely, but I would do it.’
Margont stood stock-still. Relmyer aimed in his turn at Knerkes. Now he was only a head moving away on the current. He was laughing at the sight of his pursuers arguing. It was inevitable that Relmyer would fire at him. It was the last hurdle he had to cross; after that the current would carry him out of range.
To put Relmyer off, he shouted: ‘Until next time, little Lukas!’
The bullet shattered his skull.
CHAPTER 35
RELMYER went back to the 8th Hussars. He had just parted from Margont and Lefine, who were on their way back to their own regiment. His profuse apologies to Margont had done little to lessen the latter’s anger. Relmyer was eaten up with guilt but told himself that Margont somehow understood and would in the end forgive him. After the campaign ended, the soldiers would be given leave of absence. Relmyer would ask Luise to receive him and Margont. The Viennese, in their joy at the newfound peace, would throw balls and parties, and organise plays. Everyone would be reconciled in the sparkling of crystal glasses. Until the next outbreak of war...
Relmyer was radiant. He was finally free! It was only today that he was coming out of that cellar. Life would go back to normal. At the end of his period of enlistment, he would leave the army. He would work as ... as ... He did not know as what, but at the moment that mattered little. He would like to start a family. He would go often to Vienna. The city was no longer cursed in his eyes. He would go and work for the French administration! A former officer of the hussars would not be refused a post. In Paris! Where he would teach German to rich people. But first he was going to travel. He wanted to go to Italy. His head was buzzing with plans. Life was magnificent because everything was possible.
Relmyer floated along in such a state of happiness that he had failed to notice the trooper who had been following him for a while now. The man attracted his attention by calling out loudly. 'Lieutenant Relmyer, it seems that you have forgotten me.’
Relmyer turned round. The man talking to him wore dark blue breeches, a scarlet dolman and a pelisse of the same blue as the breeches. His shako was decorated with a white crest. The trooper introduced himself.
‘Adjutant Grendet, fencing master of the 9th Hussars. Captain Margont must have let you know previously that I was looking for you. Tomorrow the Emperor is going to send us galloping after the Austrians, and we will chase them into hell if necessary! So we don’t have much time. Let’s settle this now and fight our duel straight away.’
Relmyer looked at him as if he were a being from the distant past, an old ghost forgotten in a corner.
‘It’s just that I’ve given up fencing, Adjutant Grendet.’
Grendet looked askance. ‘What did you say? That makes no sense to me. Can you give up your soul?’
‘Please leave me alone. I wish to rejoin my regiment.’
‘Good God, you will unsheathe your sword, Monsieur, or I will have your guts for garters! If you’re in such a hurry, let’s fight without dismounting.’
Grendet pointed his sabre, his elbow bent. His horizontal blade indicated that he wanted to run Relmyer through between the ribs and not merely to injure him lightly in a sabre contest. It signified a duel to the death.
Relmyer had no choice but to unsheathe his sabre. He had thought his past definitively dead and buried, but here was a part of it rising up again in the shape of this trooper.
The two hussars charged towards each other. Relmyer never took his eyes off Grendet’s sabre while directing his own blade to the right of the adjutant’s chest, covered by its blood-red dolman. Grendet was struck full in the heart by the metal flash. Relmyer also fell to the ground, his lung perforated. He took several minutes to die.
EPILOGUE
NAPOLEON expected further combat. But Austria, shaken by its defeat, capitulated. The Emperor imposed tough conditions. The Austrian Empire lost several provinces that were divided between the kingdom of Bavaria, the Grand-Duchy ofVarsovia and Russia. Three and a half million people were thus forced to change nationality. What was more, Austria had to pay heavy war indemnities and its army was reduced to a hundred and fifty thousand men. It was the end of Archduke Charles’s military career and his brother John was banished from political life because of his inexcusable lateness in joining the battle. Austria rapidly became a friend and ally of France, to the point that less than a year later, Napoleon divorced Josephine de Beauharnais and married Marie-Louise of Habsburg-Lorraine, Francis I’s daughter. The Emperor wanted in this way to secure Austria’s support definitively.
Napoleon always awarded titles linked to the arenas of battle. General Mouton was thus made Comte de Lobau, Marshal Berthier,
Napoleon’s confidant and chief of staff, became Prince de Wa-gram, and Massena, Prince de Essling. The Emperor also promoted Macdonald, Oudinot and Marmont to the rank of marshal. This flood of rewards could not hide the fact that the campaign had been much more difficult than previous ones. However, Napoleon had triumphed again. It was the end of the European insurrection against him. Now only England, Spain and Portugal continued to be at war with him.
Luise refused to see Margont again. In her mind, Relmyer and he were indissolubly linked and as a result Margont’s face would always be spattered with the blood of her dear Lukas. In a way, the death of one of them signified the death of the other.
Margont found the separation from Luise most painful.
But in one respect at least, the investigation had wrought a positive change in him. Relmyer had proved that one could triumph over one’s past, even if, for him, the triumph had only lasted a couple of hours. He had finally succeeded in escaping his cellar, not only bodily but in spirit as well, and this allowed Margont to escape his own cell. It was Relmyer’s deliverance that allowed Margont to free himself completely from the grip of the memories of his childhood years spent sequestered in the Abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Desert.