Stripped and bleeding, Roderick crawled to a barn where superstitious peasants, mistaking his groans for those of a devil or murdered man, refused him aid. He was passed from door to door through an entire Sussex village, the parson threatening excommunication against anyone who helped him, until a recluse suspected of witchcraft—Mrs. Sagely—took him in and dressed his wounds. Her own history proved that ruin could fall on any station: she had been an heiress who secretly married a penniless lieutenant, been disowned by her parents, and widowed at the Battle of the Wood in Flanders, after which she and her officer’s widow companion had lived in poverty on a small army pension. Now widowed a second time, she counseled Roderick against returning to his ship, where he would face charges as deserter and mutineer, and recommended him as footman to a single lady of her acquaintance.
Roderick entered service under the alias John Brown with a forty-year-old “female virtuoso” who professed Rosicrucian principles, neglected her person, kept her own segregated apartment, and believed the earth, sea, and air to be inhabited by invisible beings. Her household included her beautiful seventeen-year-old niece Narcissa, whose appearance immediately captivated Roderick, and her fox-hunting nephew, the young squire. Roderick learned that the wealthy Sir Timothy Thicket had been slated by Narcissa’s brother to marry Narcissa in an exchange marriage, though Narcissa despised him. Despite his servile position, Roderick composed verses celebrating Narcissa’s beauty and tried to insinuate himself into both ladies’ favor through diligence. When the mistress tested him on an obscure passage from Tasso, his perfect reading and demonstrated knowledge of French, Latin, and Greek astonished both women. The mistress, eager for a learned auditor, then recited her own violent and “unnatural” poetic fragments, which Roderick praised out of self-preservation; Narcissa, more discreetly, privately requested copies of his verses and approved of them warmly. While his thoughts aspired to Narcissa, Roderick inadvertently made conquests of the cookwench and dairymaid, whose jealous brawls and resentful lovers earned him the title “Gentleman John.”
After eight months of service, Roderick’s position was destroyed by violence. While walking home from a visit, Narcissa was assaulted by Sir Timothy in a solitary field. Hearing her cries, Roderick flew to her rescue, struck away the knight’s hanger, and beat him to the ground with a cudgel. As Narcissa regained consciousness in his arms, Roderick could not refrain from declaring his love, kneeling, kissing her hand, and vowing to fly from her presence forever. Mrs. Sagely, recognizing the danger from Sir Timothy’s magistrate’s warrants and local influence, gave him two guineas and urged him to escape. Fleeing to the seaside by night, Roderick was captured by a smuggling cutter; when a customs yacht gave chase, the smugglers debated throwing him overboard as a suspected spy but voted instead to set him ashore in France, robbing him of his hat, wig, and visible money in the process.
Arriving destitute at Boulogne, Roderick entered a public house and discovered his uncle, Lieutenant Bowling, in equally desperate circumstances—shipwrecked five days earlier near Lisieux, his money exhausted, unfed for two days. Bowling recounted his wanderings: enlisted as a common foremast man on a French king ship after his funds ran out at Port Louis; served two years and rose to quartermaster aboard a vessel of the D’Antin squadron; joined the English ship where he had encountered Roderick; quit at conscience over fighting against his own country; worked his passage to Curacoa and then to Holland; and was finally cast away on the French coast. Roderick pressed five guineas upon him, which the proud lieutenant reduced to two. Bowling resolved to petition the Admiralty in London for restoration and the removal of the “R” from his name, intending to appeal through a chain of clerks and officials he named with great confidence despite Roderick’s private doubts.
CHAPTER XLIII / CHAPTER XLV
The narrator’s progress through France ends abruptly near Amiens, where he lodges in a flea-ridden garret. While he sleeps, his mendicant companion Balthazar, recommended by an old priest, steals his cash and departs four hours before dawn, leaving a false message that he awaits the narrator at the Coq d’Or in Noyons. Arriving exhausted at Noyons, the narrator learns no such man has been there. The innkeeper offers him no aid beyond the recommendation of patience, an indifference the narrator takes as confirmation that innkeepers are “the same sordid animal all the world over.” A richly dressed young gentleman, asked for help, responds with cold courtesy, “Well, monsieur, what would you have me to do?” The rebuff drives the narrator into the fields, where rage and hunger reduce him to despair beneath a tree, reviewing his misfortunes and lamenting that he lacks even a friend to close his eyes in a foreign land.
The turning point comes when the narrator hears a violin and discovers a party of soldiers with their wives and children, dancing to refresh themselves after a march. Despite their “meagre and gaunt looks” and “squalid and ragged attire,” he joins their revelry, shares a meal of onions, coarse bread, and poor wine spread upon a manteau, and is persuaded by the sergeant to enlist. He joins the Regiment of Picardy, said to be the oldest corps in Europe, is fitted with clothes, arms, and accoutrements, sells his livery suit, and quickly masters the exercise. The regiment is ordered to march into Germany to reinforce Mareschal Duc de Noailles, encamped on the river Main to watch the Earl of Stair’s allied forces of English, Hanoverians, Austrians, and Hessians.
The march itself proves a brutal education: heat and friction strip the skin from the narrator’s thighs, and he envies the withered wretches around him whose bodies are immune to such chafing. During a halt, an old French comrade consoles him, calling him “my child” and boasting of having received wounds in the service of Louis the Great. The narrator’s riposte, a bitter critique of soldiering as servitude to “the vicious ambition of a prince,” provokes the Frenchman to defend the sacredness of royal character and denounce the rebellious principles of the English. The quarrel escalates, and the pair fight a duel in which the narrator, despite his opponent being “a poor little shivering creature, decrepit with age, and blind of one eye,” is wounded in the sword hand and disarmed, then humiliate him by demanding he ask pardon for affronting his king.
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