This ostensible inactivity of Napoleon at Wilna lasted twenty days.  Some thought that, finding himself in the centre of his operations with a strong reserve, he awaited the event, in readiness to direct his motions either towards Davoust, Murat, or Macdonald; others thought that the organization of Lithuania, and the politics of Europe, to which he was more proximate at Wilna, retained him in that city; or that he did not anticipate any obstacles worthy of him till he reached the Duena; a circumstance in which he was not deceived, but by which he was too much flattered.  The precipitate evacuation of Lithuania by the Russians seemed to dazzle his judgment; of this Europe will be the best judge; his bulletins repeated his words.

“Here then is that Russian empire, so formidable at a distance!  It is a desert, for which its scattered population is wholly insufficient.  They will be vanquished by its very extent, which ought to defend them.  They are barbarians.  They are scarcely possessed of arms.  They have no recruits in readiness.  Alexander will require more time to collect them than he will take to reach Moscow.  It is true that, from the moment of the passage of the Niemen, the atmosphere has been incessantly deluging or drying up the unsheltered soil; but this calamity is less an obstacle to the rapidity of our advance, than an impediment to the flight of the Russians.  They are conquered without a combat by their weakness alone; by the memory of our victories; by the remorse which dictates the restitution of that Lithuania, which they have acquired neither by peace nor war, but solely by treachery.”

To these motives of the stay, perhaps too protracted, which Napoleon made at Wilna, those who were nearest to his person have added another.  They remarked to each other, “that a genius so vast as his, and always increasing in activity and audacity, was not now seconded as it had been formerly by a vigorous constitution.  They were alarmed at finding their chief no longer insensible to the heat of a burning atmosphere; and they remarked to each other with melancholy forebodings, the tendency to corpulence by which his frame was now distinguished; the sure sign of a premature debility of system.”

Some of them attributed this to his frequent use of the bath.  They were ignorant, that, far from being a habit of luxury, this had become to him an indispensable relief from a bodily ailment of a serious and alarming character[17], which his policy carefully concealed, in order not to excite cruel expectations in his adversaries.

[Footnote 17:  The dysuria, or retention of urine.]

Such is the inevitable and unhappy influence of the most trivial causes over the destiny of nations.  It will be shortly seen, when the profoundest combinations, which ought to have secured the success of the boldest, and perhaps the most useful enterprise in a European point of view, come to be developed;—­how, at the decisive moment, on the plains of the Moskwa, nature paralysed the genius, and the man was wanting to the hero.  The numerous battalions of Russia could not have defended her; a stormy day, a sudden attack of fever, were her salvation.