Each of the individuals collected by chance around this fire maintained a silence that was almost horrible, and did nothing but what he judged necessary for his own welfare.  Their misery was even grotesque.  Faces, discolored by cold, were covered with a layer of mud, on which tears had made a furrow from the eyes to the beard, showing the thickness of that miry mask.  The filth of their long beards made these men still more repulsive.  Some were wrapped in the countess’s shawls, others wore the trappings of horses and muddy saddlecloths, or masses of rags from which the hoar-frost hung; some had a boot on one leg and a shoe on the other; in fact, there were none whose costume did not present some laughable singularity.  But in presence of such amusing sights the men themselves were grave and gloomy.  The silence was broken only by the snapping of the wood, the crackling of the flames, the distant murmur of the camps, and the blows of the sabre given to what remained of Bichette in search of her tenderest morsels.  A few miserable creatures, perhaps more weary than the rest, were sleeping; when one of their number rolled into the fire no one attempted to help him out.  These stern logicians argued that if he were not dead his burns would warn him to find a safer place.  If the poor wretch waked in the flames and perished, no one cared.  Two or three soldiers looked at each other to justify their own indifference by that of others.  Twice this scene had taken place before the eyes of the countess, who said nothing.  When the various pieces of Bichette, placed here and there upon the embers, were sufficiently broiled, each man satisfied his hunger with the gluttony that disgusts us when we see it in animals.

“This is the first time I ever saw thirty infantrymen on one horse,” cried the grenadier who had shot the mare.

It was the only jest made that night which proved the national character.

Soon the great number of these poor soldiers wrapped themselves in what they could find and lay down on planks, or whatever would keep them from contact with the snow, and slept, heedless of the morrow.  When the major was warm, and his hunger appeased, an invincible desire to sleep weighed down his eyelids.  During the short moment of his struggle against that desire he looked at the young woman, who had turned her face to the fire and was now asleep, leaving her closed eyes and a portion of her forehead exposed to sight.  She was wrapped in a furred pelisse and a heavy dragoon’s cloak; her head rested on a pillow stained with blood; an astrakhan hood, kept in place by a handkerchief knotted round her neck, preserved her face from the cold as much as possible.  Her feet were wrapped in the cloak.  Thus rolled into a bundle, as it were, she looked like nothing at all.  Was she the last of the “vivandieres”?  Was she a charming woman, the glory of a lover, the queen of Parisian salons?  Alas! even the eye of her most devoted friend could trace no sign of anything feminine in that mass of rags and tatters.  Love had succumbed to cold in the heart of a woman!