But gradually he came to see that the sacrifice of Moscow had saved his empire and lured Napoleon to his doom.  Kutusoff also played a waiting game.  Affecting a wish for peace, he was about secretly to meet Napoleon’s envoy, Lauriston, when the Russian generals and our commissioner, Sir R. Wilson, intervened, and required that it should be a public step.  It seems likely, however, that Kutusoff was only seeking to entrap the French into barren negotiations; he knew that an answer could not come from the banks of the Neva until winter began to steal over the northern steppes.

Slowly the truth begins to dawn on Napoleon that Moscow is not the heart of Russia, as he had asserted to De Pradt that it was.  Gradually he sees that that primitive organism had no heart, that its almost amorphous life was widespread through myriads of village communes, vegetating apart from Moscow or Petersburg, and that his march to the old capital was little more than a sword-slash through a pond.[271] Had he set himself to study with his former care the real nature of the hostile organism, he would certainly never have ventured beyond Smolensk in the present year.  But he had now merged the thinker in the conqueror, and—­sure sign of coming disaster—­his mind no longer accurately gauged facts, it recast them in its own mould.

By long manipulation of men and events, it had framed a dogma of personal infallibility.  This vice had of late been growing on him apace.  It was apparent even in trifles.  The Countess Metternich describes how, early in 1810, he persisted in saying that Kaunitz was her brother, in spite of her frequent disclaimers of that honour; and, somewhat earlier, Marmont noticed with half-amused dismay that when the Emperor gave a wrong estimate of the numbers of a certain corps, no correction had the slightest effect on him; his mind always reverted to the first figure.  In weightier matters this peculiarity was equally noticeable.  His clinging to preconceived notions, however unfair or burdensome they were to Britain, Prussia, or Austria, had been the underlying cause of his wars with those Powers.  And now this same defect, burnt into his being by the blaze of a hundred victories, held him to Moscow for five weeks, in the belief that Russia was stricken unto death, and that the facile Czar whom he had known at Tilsit would once more bend the knee.  An idle hope.  “I have learnt to know him now,” said the Czar, “Napoleon or I; I or Napoleon; we cannot reign side by side.”  Buoyed up by religious faith and by his people’s heroism, Alexander silently defied the victor of Moscow and rebuked Kutusoff for receiving the French envoy.

At last, on October 18th, the Russians threw away the scabbard and surprised Murat’s force some forty miles south of Moscow, inflicting a loss of 3,000 men.  But already, a day or two earlier, Napoleon had realized the futility of his hope of peace and had resolved to retreat.  The only alternative was to winter at Moscow, and he judged that the state of French and Spanish affairs rendered such a course perilous.  He therefore informed Maret that the Grand Army would go into winter quarters between the Dnieper and the Dwina.[272]