In conclusion, “I leave the King of Naples to command the army.  I hope that you will yield him the same obedience as you would to myself, and that the greatest harmony will prevail among you.”

As it was now ten o’clock at night, he then rose, squeezed their hands affectionately, embraced them, and departed.

BOOK XII.

CHAP.  I.

Comrades!  I must confess that my spirit, discouraged, refused to penetrate farther into the recollection of so many horrors.  Having arrived at the departure of Napoleon, I had flattered myself that my task was completed.  I had announced myself as the historian of that great epoch, when we were precipitated from the highest summit of glory to the deepest abyss of misfortune; but now that nothing remains for me to retrace but the most frightful miseries, why should we not spare ourselves, you the pain of reading them, and myself that of tasking a memory which has now only to rake up embers, nothing but disasters to reckon, and which can no longer write but upon tombs?

But as it was our fate to push bad as well as good fortune to the utmost verge of improbability, I will endeavour to keep the promise I have made you to the conclusion.  Moreover, when the history of great men relates even their last moments, how can I conceal the last sighs of the grand army when it was expiring?  Every thing connected with it appertains to renown, its dying groans as well as its cries of victory.  Every thing in it was grand; it will be our lot to astonish future ages with our glory and our sorrow.  Melancholy consolation! but the only one that remains to us; for doubt it not, comrades, the noise of so great a fall will echo in that futurity, in which great misfortunes immortalize as much as great glory.

Napoleon passed through the crowd of his officers, who were drawn up in an avenue as he passed, bidding them adieu merely by forced and melancholy smiles; their good wishes, equally silent, and expressed only by respectful gestures, he carried with him.  He and Caulaincourt shut themselves up in a carriage; his Mameluke, and Wonsowitch, captain of his guard, occupied the box; Duroc and Lobau followed in a sledge.

His escort at first consisted only of Poles; afterwards of the Neapolitans of the royal guard.  This corps consisted of between six and seven hundred men, when it left Wilna to meet the Emperor; it perished entirely in that short passage; the winter was its only adversary.  That very night the Russians surprised and afterwards abandoned Youpranoui, (or, as others say, Osmiana,) a town through which the escort had to pass.  Napoleon was within an hour of falling into that affray.