The same day we arrived before Brienne.  The Emperor’s march had been so secret and so rapid that the Prussians had heard nothing of it until he suddenly appeared before their eyes.  A few general officers were made prisoners; and Blucher himself, who was quietly coming out of the chateau, had only time to turn and fly as quickly as he could, under a shower of balls from our advance guard.  The Emperor thought for a moment that the Prussian general had been taken, and exclaimed, “We have got that old swash-buckler.  Now the campaign will not be long.”  The Russians who were established in the village set it on fire, and an engagement took place in the midst of the flames.  Night arrived, but the combat still continued; and in the space of twelve hours the village was taken and retaken many times.  The Emperor was furious that Blucher should have escaped.  As he returned to headquarters, which had been established at Mezieres, his Majesty narrowly escaped being pierced through with the lance of a Cossack; but before the Emperor perceived the movement of the wretch, the brave Colonel Gourgaud, who was marching behind his Majesty, shot the Cossack dead with his pistol.

The Emperor had with him only fifteen thousand men, and they had waged an equal struggle with eighty thousand foreign soldiers.  At the close of the combat the Prussians retreated to Bar-sur-Aube; and his Majesty established himself in the chateau of Brienne, where he passed two nights.  I recalled during this stay the one that I had made ten years before in this same chateau of Brienne, when the Emperor was on his way to Milan with the intention of adding the title of King of Italy to that of Emperor of the French.  “To-day,” I said to myself, “not only is Italy lost to him, but here in the center of the French Empire, and a few leagues from his capital, the Emperor is defending himself against innumerable enemies!” The first time I saw Brienne, the Emperor was received as a sovereign by a noble family who fifteen years before had welcomed him as a protege.  He had there revived the happiest remembrances of his childhood and youth; and in comparing himself in 1805 with what he had been at the Ecole Militaire had spoken with pride of the path he had trod.  In 1814, on the 31st of January, the end to which this path was tending began to be seen.  It is not that I wish to announce myself as having foreseen the Emperor’s fall, for I did not go so far as that.  Accustomed to see him trust to his star, the greater part of those who surrounded him trusted it no less than he; but nevertheless we could not conceal from ourselves that great changes had taken place.  To delude ourselves in this respect it would have been necessary to close our eyes that we might neither see nor hear this multitude of foreigners, whom we had until now seen only in their own country, and who, in their turn, were now in our midst.