If we may credit several of his countrymen, who were perhaps his enemies, it would appear that he had two motives.  In the first place, he wished not to shake, by disastrous intelligence, the little firmness which, in Russia, Alexander was generally, but erroneously thought to possess.  In the second, as he was anxious that his despatch should arrive on the very name-day of his Sovereign, it is added that his object was to obtain the rewards for which this kind of anniversaries furnishes occasion.

But at Moscow the erroneous impression was of short continuance.  The rumour of the destruction of half his army was almost immediately propagated in that city, from the singular commotion of extraordinary events, which has been known to spread almost instantaneously to prodigious distances.  Still, however, the language of the chiefs, the only persons who durst speak, continued haughty and threatening:  many of the inhabitants, trusting to it, remained; but they were every day more and more tormented by a painful anxiety.  Nearly at one and the same moment, they were transported with rage, elevated with hope, and overwhelmed with fear.

At one of those moments when, either prostrate before the altars, or in their own houses before the images of their saints, they had no hope but in heaven, shouts of joy suddenly resounded:  the people instantly thronged the streets and public places to learn the cause.  Intoxicated with joy, their eyes were fixed on the cross of the principal church.  A vulture had entangled himself in the chains which supported it and was held suspended by them.  This was a certain presage to minds whose natural superstition was heightened by extraordinary anxiety; it was thus that their God would seize and deliver Napoleon into their power.

Rostopchin took advantage of all these movements, which he excited or checked according as they were favourable to him or otherwise.  He caused the most diminutive to be selected from the prisoners taken from the enemy, and exhibited to the people, that the latter might derive courage from the sight of their weakness:  and yet he emptied Moscow of every kind of supplies, in order to feed the vanquished, and to famish the conquerors.  This measure was easily carried into effect, as Moscow was provisioned in spring and autumn by water only, and in winter by sledges.

He was still preserving with a remnant of hope the order that was necessary, especially in such a flight, when the effects of the disaster at Borodino appeared.  The long train of wounded, their groans, their garments and linen dyed with gore; their most powerful nobles struck and overthrown like the others—­all this was a novel and alarming sight to a city which had for such a length of time been exempt from the horrors of war.  The police redoubled its activity; but the terror which it excited could not long make head against a still greater terror.