Lastly, and above all, how relinquish a hope to which he had made so many sacrifices, when he knew that his letter to Alexander had just passed the Russian advanced posts; when eight days would be sufficient for receiving an answer so ardently desired; when he wanted that time to rally and re-organize his army, to collect the relics of Moscow, the conflagration of which had but too strongly sanctioned pillage, and to draw his soldiers from that vast infirmary!

Scarcely indeed a third of that army and of that capital now existed.  But himself and the Kremlin were still standing:  his renown was still entire, and he persuaded himself that those two great names, Napoleon and Moscow, combined, would be sufficient to accomplish every thing.  He determined, therefore, to return to the Kremlin, which a battalion of his guard had unfortunately preserved.

CHAP.  VIII.

The camps which he traversed on his way thither presented an extraordinary sight.  In the fields, amidst thick and cold mud, large fires were kept up with mahogany furniture, windows, and gilded doors.  Around these fires, on a litter of damp straw, imperfectly sheltered by a few boards, were seen the soldiers, and their officers, splashed all over with mud, and blackened with smoke, seated in arm-chairs or reclined on silken couches.  At their feet were spread or heaped Cashmere shawls, the rarest furs of Siberia, the gold stuffs of Persia, and silver plates, off which they had nothing to eat but a black dough baked in the ashes, and half broiled and bloody horse-flesh.  Singular assemblage of abundance and want, of riches and filth, of luxury and wretchedness!

Between the camp and the city were met troops of soldiers dragging along their booty, or driving before them, like beasts of burden, Muscovites bending under the weight of the pillage of their capital; for the fire brought to view nearly twenty thousand inhabitants, previously unobserved in that immense city.  Some of these Muscovites of both sexes were well dressed; they were tradespeople.  They came with the wreck of their property to seek refuge at our fires.  They lived pell-mell with our soldiers, protected by some, and tolerated, or rather scarcely remarked by others.

About ten thousand of the enemy’s troops were in the same predicament.  For several days they wandered about among us free, and some of them even still armed.  Our soldiers met these vanquished enemies without animosity, or without thinking of making them prisoners; either because they considered the war as at an end, from thoughtlessness, or from pity, and because when not in battle the French delight in having no enemies.  They suffered them to share their fires; nay, more, they allowed them to pillage in their company.  When some degree of order was restored, or rather when the officers had organized this marauding as a regular system of forage, the great number of these Russian stragglers then attracted notice.  Orders were given to secure them; but seven or eight thousand had already escaped.  It was not long before we had to fight them.