The count nodded affirmatively, and Natásha, at the rapid pace at which

she used to run when playing at tag, ran through the ballroom to the

anteroom and downstairs into the yard.

The servants gathered round Natásha, but could not believe the strange

order she brought them until the count himself, in his wife’s name,

confirmed the order to give up all the carts to the wounded and take the

trunks to the storerooms. When they understood that order the servants

set to work at this new task with pleasure and zeal. It no longer seemed

strange to them but on the contrary it seemed the only thing that could

be done, just as a quarter of an hour before it had not seemed strange

to anyone that the wounded should be left behind and the goods carted

away but that had seemed the only thing to do.

The whole household, as if to atone for not having done it sooner, set

eagerly to work at the new task of placing the wounded in the carts. The

wounded dragged themselves out of their rooms and stood with pale but

happy faces round the carts. The news that carts were to be had spread

to the neighboring houses, from which wounded men began to come into the

Rostóvs’ yard. Many of the wounded asked them not to unload the carts

but only to let them sit on the top of the things. But the work of

unloading, once started, could not be arrested. It seemed not to matter

whether all or only half the things were left behind. Cases full of

china, bronzes, pictures, and mirrors that had been so carefully

packed the night before now lay about the yard, and still they went on

searching for and finding possibilities of unloading this or that and

letting the wounded have another and yet another cart.

“We can take four more men,” said the steward. “They can have my trap,

or else what is to become of them?”

“Let them have my wardrobe cart,” said the countess. “Dunyásha can go

with me in the carriage.”

They unloaded the wardrobe cart and sent it to take wounded men from a

house two doors off. The whole household, servants included, was bright

and animated. Natásha was in a state of rapturous excitement such as she

had not known for a long time.

“What could we fasten this onto?” asked the servants, trying to fix a

trunk on the narrow footboard behind a carriage. “We must keep at least

one cart.”

“What’s in it?” asked Natásha.

“The count’s books.”

“Leave it, Vasílich will put it away. It’s not wanted.”

The phaeton was full of people and there was a doubt as to where Count

Peter could sit.

“On the box. You’ll sit on the box, won’t you, Pétya?” cried Natásha.

Sónya too was busy all this time, but the aim of her efforts was quite

different from Natásha’s. She was putting away the things that had to

be left behind and making a list of them as the countess wished, and she

tried to get as much taken away with them as possible.

CHAPTER XVII

Before two o’clock in the afternoon the Rostóvs’ four carriages, packed

full and with the horses harnessed, stood at the front door. One by one

the carts with the wounded had moved out of the yard.

The calèche in which Prince Andrew was being taken attracted Sónya’s

attention as it passed the front porch. With the help of a maid she was

arranging a seat for the countess in the huge high coach that stood at

the entrance.

“Whose calèche is that?” she inquired, leaning out of the carriage

window.

“Why, didn’t you know, Miss?” replied the maid. “The wounded prince: he

spent the night in our house and is going with us.”

“But who is it? What’s his name?”

“It’s our intended that was—Prince Bolkónski himself! They say he is

dying,” replied the maid with a sigh.

Sónya jumped out of the coach and ran to the countess. The countess,

tired out and already dressed in shawl and bonnet for her journey,

was pacing up and down the drawing room, waiting for the household to

assemble for the usual silent prayer with closed doors before starting.

Natásha was not in the room.

“Mamma,” said Sónya, “Prince Andrew is here, mortally wounded. He is

going with us.”

The countess opened her eyes in dismay and, seizing Sónya’s arm, glanced

around.

“Natásha?” she murmured.

At that moment this news had only one significance for both of them.

They knew their Natásha, and alarm as to what would happen if she heard

this news stifled all sympathy for the man they both liked.

“Natásha does not know yet, but he is going with us,” said Sónya.

“You say he is dying?”

Sónya nodded.

The countess put her arms around Sónya and began to cry.

“The ways of God are past finding out!” she thought, feeling that the

Almighty Hand, hitherto unseen, was becoming manifest in all that was

now taking place.

“Well, Mamma? Everything is ready. What’s the matter?” asked Natásha, as

with animated face she ran into the room.

“Nothing,” answered the countess. “If everything is ready let us start.”

And the countess bent over her reticule to hide her agitated face. Sónya

embraced Natásha and kissed her.

Natásha looked at her inquiringly.

“What is it? What has happened?”

“Nothing... No...”

“Is it something very bad for me? What is it?” persisted Natásha with

her quick intuition.

Sónya sighed and made no reply. The count, Pétya, Madame Schoss, Mávra

Kuzmínichna, and Vasílich came into the drawing room and, having closed

the doors, they all sat down and remained for some moments silently

seated without looking at one another.

The count was the first to rise, and with a loud sigh crossed himself

before the icon. All the others did the same. Then the count embraced

Mávra Kuzmínichna and Vasílich, who were to remain in Moscow, and while

they caught at his hand and kissed his shoulder he patted their backs

lightly with some vaguely affectionate and comforting words. The

countess went into the oratory and there Sónya found her on her knees

before the icons that had been left here and there hanging on the wall.

(The most precious ones, with which some family tradition was connected,

were being taken with them.)

In the porch and in the yard the men whom Pétya had armed with swords

and daggers, with trousers tucked inside their high boots and with belts

and girdles tightened, were taking leave of those remaining behind.

As is always the case at a departure, much had been forgotten or put in

the wrong place, and for a long time two menservants stood one on

each side of the open door and the carriage steps waiting to help the

countess in, while maids rushed with cushions and bundles from the house

to the carriages, the calèche, the phaeton, and back again.

“They always will forget everything!” said the countess. “Don’t you know

I can’t sit like that?”

And Dunyásha, with clenched teeth, without replying but with an

aggrieved look on her face, hastily got into the coach to rearrange the

seat.

“Oh, those servants!” said the count, swaying his head.

Efím, the old coachman, who was the only one the countess trusted to

drive her, sat perched up high on the box and did not so much as glance

round at what was going on behind him. From thirty years’ experience

he knew it would be some time yet before the order, “Be off, in God’s

name!” would be given him: and he knew that even when it was said

he would be stopped once or twice more while they sent back to fetch

something that had been forgotten, and even after that he would again

be stopped and the countess herself would lean out of the window and beg

him for the love of heaven to drive carefully down the hill. He knew

all this and therefore waited calmly for what would happen, with more

patience than the horses, especially the near one, the chestnut Falcon,

who was pawing the ground and champing his bit. At last all were

seated, the carriage steps were folded and pulled up, the door was shut,

somebody was sent for a traveling case, and the countess leaned out

and said what she had to say. Then Efím deliberately doffed his hat and

began crossing himself. The postilion and all the other servants did the

same. “Off, in God’s name!” said Efím, putting on his hat. “Start!” The

postilion started the horses, the off pole horse tugged at his collar,

the high springs creaked, and the body of the coach swayed. The footman

sprang onto the box of the moving coach which jolted as it passed out

of the yard onto the uneven roadway; the other vehicles jolted in

their turn, and the procession of carriages moved up the street. In the

carriages, the calèche, and the phaeton, all crossed themselves as they

passed the church opposite the house. Those who were to remain in Moscow

walked on either side of the vehicles seeing the travelers off.

Rarely had Natásha experienced so joyful a feeling as now, sitting in

the carriage beside the countess and gazing at the slowly receding

walls of forsaken, agitated Moscow. Occasionally she leaned out of the

carriage window and looked back and then forward at the long train of

wounded in front of them. Almost at the head of the line she could see

the raised hood of Prince Andrew’s calèche. She did not know who was

in it, but each time she looked at the procession her eyes sought that

calèche. She knew it was right in front.

In Kúdrino, from the Nikítski, Présnya, and Podnovínsk Streets came

several other trains of vehicles similar to the Rostóvs’, and as they

passed along the Sadóvaya Street the carriages and carts formed two rows

abreast.

As they were going round the Súkharev water tower Natásha, who was

inquisitively and alertly scrutinizing the people driving or walking

past, suddenly cried out in joyful surprise:

“Dear me! Mamma, Sónya, look, it’s he!”

“Who? Who?”

“Look! Yes, on my word, it’s Bezúkhov!” said Natásha, putting her head

out of the carriage and staring at a tall, stout man in a coachman’s

long coat, who from his manner of walking and moving was evidently

a gentleman in disguise, and who was passing under the arch of the

Súkharev tower accompanied by a small, sallow-faced, beardless old man

in a frieze coat.

“Yes, it really is Bezúkhov in a coachman’s coat, with a queer-looking

old boy. Really,” said Natásha, “look, look!”

“No, it’s not he. How can you talk such nonsense?”

“Mamma,” screamed Natásha, “I’ll stake my head it’s he! I assure you!

Stop, stop!” she cried to the coachman.

But the coachman could not stop, for from the Meshchánski Street came

more carts and carriages, and the Rostóvs were being shouted at to move

on and not block the way.

In fact, however, though now much farther off than before, the Rostóvs

all saw Pierre—or someone extraordinarily like him—in a coachman’s coat,

going down the street with head bent and a serious face beside a small,

beardless old man who looked like a footman. That old man noticed a

face thrust out of the carriage window gazing at them, and respectfully

touching Pierre’s elbow said something to him and pointed to the

carriage. Pierre, evidently engrossed in thought, could not at first

understand him. At length when he had understood and looked in the

direction the old man indicated, he recognized Natásha, and following

his first impulse stepped instantly and rapidly toward the coach. But

having taken a dozen steps he seemed to remember something and stopped.

Natásha’s face, leaning out of the window, beamed with quizzical

kindliness.

“Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognized you! This is

wonderful!” she cried, holding out her hand to him. “What are you doing?

Why are you like this?”

Pierre took her outstretched hand and kissed it awkwardly as he walked

along beside her while the coach still moved on.

“What is the matter, Count?” asked the countess in a surprised and

commiserating tone.

“What? What? Why? Don’t ask me,” said Pierre, and looked round at

Natásha whose radiant, happy expression—of which he was conscious

without looking at her—filled him with enchantment.

“Are you remaining in Moscow, then?”

Pierre hesitated.

“In Moscow?” he said in a questioning tone. “Yes, in Moscow. Good-by!”

“Ah, if only I were a man! I’d certainly stay with you. How splendid!”

said Natásha. “Mamma, if you’ll let me, I’ll stay!”

Pierre glanced absently at Natásha and was about to say something, but

the countess interrupted him.

“You were at the battle, we heard.”

“Yes, I was,” Pierre answered. “There will be another battle

tomorrow...” he began, but Natásha interrupted him.

“But what is the matter with you, Count? You are not like yourself....”

“Oh, don’t ask me, don’t ask me! I don’t know myself. Tomorrow... But

no! Good-by, good-by!” he muttered. “It’s an awful time!” and dropping

behind the carriage he stepped onto the pavement.

Natásha continued to lean out of the window for a long time, beaming at

him with her kindly, slightly quizzical, happy smile.

CHAPTER XVIII

For the last two days, ever since leaving home, Pierre had been living

in the empty house of his deceased benefactor, Bazdéev. This is how it

happened.

When he woke up on the morning after his return to Moscow and his

interview with Count Rostopchín, he could not for some time make out

where he was and what was expected of him. When he was informed that

among others awaiting him in his reception room there was a Frenchman

who had brought a letter from his wife, the Countess Hélène, he felt

suddenly overcome by that sense of confusion and hopelessness to which

he was apt to succumb. He felt that everything was now at an end, all

was in confusion and crumbling to pieces, that nobody was right or

wrong, the future held nothing, and there was no escape from this

position. Smiling unnaturally and muttering to himself, he first sat

down on the sofa in an attitude of despair, then rose, went to the door

of the reception room and peeped through the crack, returned flourishing

his arms, and took up a book. His major-domo came in a second time to

say that the Frenchman who had brought the letter from the countess

was very anxious to see him if only for a minute, and that someone from

Bazdéev’s widow had called to ask Pierre to take charge of her husband’s

books, as she herself was leaving for the country.

“Oh, yes, in a minute; wait... or no! No, of course... go and say I will

come directly,” Pierre replied to the major-domo.

But as soon as the man had left the room Pierre took up his hat which

was lying on the table and went out of his study by the other door.

There was no one in the passage. He went along the whole length of this

passage to the stairs and, frowning and rubbing his forehead with

both hands, went down as far as the first landing. The hall porter was

standing at the front door. From the landing where Pierre stood there

was a second staircase leading to the back entrance. He went down that

staircase and out into the yard. No one had seen him. But there were

some carriages waiting, and as soon as Pierre stepped out of the gate

the coachmen and the yard porter noticed him and raised their caps to

him. When he felt he was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich

which hides its head in a bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head

and quickening his pace went down the street.

Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Joseph

Bazdéev’s books and papers appeared to him the most necessary.

He hired the first cab he met and told the driver to go to the

Patriarch’s Ponds, where the widow Bazdéev’s house was.

Continually turning round to look at the rows of loaded carts that were

making their way from all sides out of Moscow, and balancing his bulky

body so as not to slip out of the ramshackle old vehicle, Pierre,

experiencing the joyful feeling of a boy escaping from school, began to

talk to his driver.

The man told him that arms were being distributed today at the Krémlin

and that tomorrow everyone would be sent out beyond the Three Hills

gates and a great battle would be fought there.

Having reached the Patriarch’s Ponds Pierre found the Bazdéevs’ house,

where he had not been for a long time past. He went up to the gate.

Gerásim, that sallow beardless old man Pierre had seen at Torzhók five

years before with Joseph Bazdéev, came out in answer to his knock.

“At home?” asked Pierre.

“Owing to the present state of things Sophia Danílovna has gone to the

Torzhók estate with the children, your excellency.”

“I will come in all the same, I have to look through the books,” said

Pierre.

“Be so good as to step in. Makár Alexéevich, the brother of my late

master—may the kingdom of heaven be his—has remained here, but he is in

a weak state as you know,” said the old servant.

Pierre knew that Makár Alexéevich was Joseph Bazdéev’s half-insane

brother and a hard drinker.

“Yes, yes, I know. Let us go in...” said Pierre and entered the house.

A tall, bald-headed old man with a red nose, wearing a dressing gown and

with galoshes on his bare feet, stood in the anteroom. On seeing Pierre

he muttered something angrily and went away along the passage.

“He was a very clever man but has now grown quite feeble, as your honor

sees,” said Gerásim. “Will you step into the study?” Pierre nodded. “As

it was sealed up so it has remained, but Sophia Danílovna gave orders

that if anyone should come from you they were to have the books.”

Pierre went into that gloomy study which he had entered with such

trepidation in his benefactor’s lifetime. The room, dusty and untouched

since the death of Joseph Bazdéev was now even gloomier.

Gerásim opened one of the shutters and left the room on tiptoe. Pierre

went round the study, approached the cupboard in which the manuscripts

were kept, and took out what had once been one of the most important,

the holy of holies of the order. This was the authentic Scotch Acts

with Bazdéev’s notes and explanations. He sat down at the dusty writing

table, and, having laid the manuscripts before him, opened them out,

closed them, finally pushed them away, and resting his head on his hand

sank into meditation.

Gerásim looked cautiously into the study several times and saw Pierre

always sitting in the same attitude.

More than two hours passed and Gerásim took the liberty of making a

slight noise at the door to attract his attention, but Pierre did not

hear him.

“Is the cabman to be discharged, your honor?”

“Oh yes!” said Pierre, rousing himself and rising hurriedly. “Look

here,” he added, taking Gerásim by a button of his coat and looking down

at the old man with moist, shining, and ecstatic eyes, “I say, do you

know that there is going to be a battle tomorrow?”

“We heard so,” replied the man.

“I beg you not to tell anyone who I am, and to do what I ask you.”

“Yes, your excellency,” replied Gerásim. “Will you have something to

eat?”

“No, but I want something else. I want peasant clothes and a pistol,”

said Pierre, unexpectedly blushing.

“Yes, your excellency,” said Gerásim after thinking for a moment.

All the rest of that day Pierre spent alone in his benefactor’s study,

and Gerásim heard him pacing restlessly from one corner to another and

talking to himself. And he spent the night on a bed made up for him

there.

Gerásim, being a servant who in his time had seen many strange things,

accepted Pierre’s taking up his residence in the house without surprise,

and seemed pleased to have someone to wait on. That same evening—without

even asking himself what they were wanted for—he procured a coachman’s

coat and cap for Pierre, and promised to get him the pistol next day.

Makár Alexéevich came twice that evening shuffling along in his galoshes

as far as the door and stopped and looked ingratiatingly at Pierre. But

as soon as Pierre turned toward him he wrapped his dressing gown around

him with a shamefaced and angry look and hurried away. It was when

Pierre (wearing the coachman’s coat which Gerásim had procured for him

and had disinfected by steam) was on his way with the old man to buy the

pistol at the Súkharev market that he met the Rostóvs.

CHAPTER XIX

Kutúzov’s order to retreat through Moscow to the Ryazán road was issued

at night on the first of September.

The first troops started at once, and during the night they marched

slowly and steadily without hurry. At daybreak, however, those nearing

the town at the Dorogomílov bridge saw ahead of them masses of soldiers

crowding and hurrying across the bridge, ascending on the opposite side

and blocking the streets and alleys, while endless masses of troops were

bearing down on them from behind, and an unreasoning hurry and alarm

overcame them. They all rushed forward to the bridge, onto it, and

to the fords and the boats. Kutúzov himself had driven round by side

streets to the other side of Moscow.

By ten o’clock in the morning of the second of September, only the rear

guard remained in the Dorogomílov suburb, where they had ample room. The

main army was on the other side of Moscow or beyond it.

At that very time, at ten in the morning of the second of September,

Napoleon was standing among his troops on the Poklónny Hill looking at

the panorama spread out before him. From the twenty-sixth of August

to the second of September, that is from the battle of Borodinó to the

entry of the French into Moscow, during the whole of that agitating,

memorable week, there had been the extraordinary autumn weather that

always comes as a surprise, when the sun hangs low and gives more heat

than in spring, when everything shines so brightly in the rare clear

atmosphere that the eyes smart, when the lungs are strengthened and

refreshed by inhaling the aromatic autumn air, when even the nights

are warm, and when in those dark warm nights, golden stars startle and

delight us continually by falling from the sky.

At ten in the morning of the second of September this weather still

held.

The brightness of the morning was magical. Moscow seen from the Poklónny

Hill lay spaciously spread out with her river, her gardens, and her

churches, and she seemed to be living her usual life, her cupolas

glittering like stars in the sunlight.

The view of the strange city with its peculiar architecture, such as

he had never seen before, filled Napoleon with the rather envious and

uneasy curiosity men feel when they see an alien form of life that has

no knowledge of them. This city was evidently living with the full force

of its own life. By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance,

distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklónny

Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the

breathing of that great and beautiful body.

Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every

foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the

mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it.

“Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables églises, Moscou la sainte. La

voilà donc enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il était temps,” * said he, and

dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and

summoned Lelorgne d’Ideville, the interpreter.

* “That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy

Moscow! Here it is then at last, that famous city. It was

high time.”

“A town captured by the enemy is like a maid who has lost her honor,”

thought he (he had said so to Túchkov at Smolénsk). From that point of

view he gazed at the Oriental beauty he had not seen before. It seemed

strange to him that his long-felt wish, which had seemed unattainable,

had at last been realized. In the clear morning light he gazed now at

the city and now at the plan, considering its details, and the assurance

of possessing it agitated and awed him.

“But could it be otherwise?” he thought. “Here is this capital at my

feet. Where is Alexander now, and of what is he thinking? A strange,

beautiful, and majestic city; and a strange and majestic moment! In what

light must I appear to them!” thought he, thinking of his troops.

“Here she is, the reward for all those fainthearted men,” he reflected,

glancing at those near him and at the troops who were approaching and

forming up. “One word from me, one movement of my hand, and that ancient

capital of the Tsars would perish. But my clemency is always ready to

descend upon the vanquished. I must be magnanimous and truly great. But

no, it can’t be true that I am in Moscow,” he suddenly thought.

“Yet here she is lying at my feet, with her golden domes and crosses

scintillating and twinkling in the sunshine. But I shall spare her. On

the ancient monuments of barbarism and despotism I will inscribe great

words of justice and mercy.... It is just this which Alexander will

feel most painfully, I know him.” (It seemed to Napoleon that the chief

import of what was taking place lay in the personal struggle between

himself and Alexander.) “From the height of the Krémlin—yes, there

is the Krémlin, yes—I will give them just laws; I will teach them the

meaning of true civilization, I will make generations of boyars remember

their conqueror with love. I will tell the deputation that I did not,

and do not, desire war, that I have waged war only against the false

policy of their court; that I love and respect Alexander and that in

Moscow I will accept terms of peace worthy of myself and of my people.

I do not wish to utilize the fortunes of war to humiliate an honored

monarch. ‘Boyars,’ I will say to them, ‘I do not desire war, I desire

the peace and welfare of all my subjects.’ However, I know their

presence will inspire me, and I shall speak to them as I always do:

clearly, impressively, and majestically. But can it be true that I am in

Moscow? Yes, there she lies.”

“Qu’on m’amène les boyars,” * said he to his suite.

* “Bring the boyars to me.”

A general with a brilliant suite galloped off at once to fetch the

boyars.

Two hours passed. Napoleon had lunched and was again standing in the

same place on the Poklónny Hill awaiting the deputation. His speech to

the boyars had already taken definite shape in his imagination. That

speech was full of dignity and greatness as Napoleon understood it.

He was himself carried away by the tone of magnanimity he intended to

adopt toward Moscow. In his imagination he appointed days for assemblies

at the palace of the Tsars, at which Russian notables and his own would

mingle. He mentally appointed a governor, one who would win the

hearts of the people. Having learned that there were many charitable

institutions in Moscow he mentally decided that he would shower favors

on them all. He thought that, as in Africa he had to put on a burnoose

and sit in a mosque, so in Moscow he must be beneficent like the Tsars.

And in order finally to touch the hearts of the Russians—and being like

all Frenchmen unable to imagine anything sentimental without a reference

to ma chère, ma tendre, ma pauvre mère * —he decided that he would

place an inscription on all these establishments in large letters:

“This establishment is dedicated to my dear mother.” Or no, it should

be simply: Maison de ma Mère, *(2) he concluded. “But am I really in

Moscow? Yes, here it lies before me, but why is the deputation from the

city so long in appearing?” he wondered.

* “My dear, my tender, my poor mother.”

* (2) “House of my Mother.”

Meanwhile an agitated consultation was being carried on in whispers

among his generals and marshals at the rear of his suite. Those sent to

fetch the deputation had returned with the news that Moscow was empty,

that everyone had left it. The faces of those who were not conferring

together were pale and perturbed. They were not alarmed by the fact

that Moscow had been abandoned by its inhabitants (grave as that fact

seemed), but by the question how to tell the Emperor—without putting

him in the terrible position of appearing ridiculous—that he had been

awaiting the boyars so long in vain: that there were drunken mobs left

in Moscow but no one else. Some said that a deputation of some sort must

be scraped together, others disputed that opinion and maintained that

the Emperor should first be carefully and skillfully prepared, and then

told the truth.

“He will have to be told, all the same,” said some gentlemen of the

suite. “But, gentlemen...”

The position was the more awkward because the Emperor, meditating upon

his magnanimous plans, was pacing patiently up and down before the

outspread map, occasionally glancing along the road to Moscow from under

his lifted hand with a bright and proud smile.

“But it’s impossible...” declared the gentlemen of the suite, shrugging

their shoulders but not venturing to utter the implied word—le

ridicule....

At last the Emperor, tired of futile expectation, his actor’s instinct

suggesting to him that the sublime moment having been too long drawn out

was beginning to lose its sublimity, gave a sign with his hand. A single

report of a signaling gun followed, and the troops, who were already

spread out on different sides of Moscow, moved into the city through the

Tver, Kalúga, and Dorogomílov gates. Faster and faster, vying with

one another, they moved at the double or at a trot, vanishing amid the

clouds of dust they raised and making the air ring with a deafening roar

of mingling shouts.

Drawn on by the movement of his troops Napoleon rode with them as far as

the Dorogomílov gate, but there again stopped and, dismounting from his

horse, paced for a long time by the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart, awaiting

the deputation.

CHAPTER XX

Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a

fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty.

It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.

In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it

seems as much alive as other hives.

The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday

sun as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of

honey like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way. But one

has only to observe that hive to realize that there is no longer any

life in it. The bees do not fly in the same way, the smell and the sound

that meet the beekeeper are not the same. To the beekeeper’s tap on the

wall of the sick hive, instead of the former instant unanimous

humming of tens of thousands of bees with their abdomens threateningly

compressed, and producing by the rapid vibration of their wings an

aerial living sound, the only reply is a disconnected buzzing from

different parts of the deserted hive. From the alighting board, instead

of the former spirituous fragrant smell of honey and venom, and the warm

whiffs of crowded life, comes an odor of emptiness and decay mingling

with the smell of honey. There are no longer sentinels sounding the

alarm with their abdomens raised, and ready to die in defense of the

hive. There is no longer the measured quiet sound of throbbing activity,

like the sound of boiling water, but diverse discordant sounds of

disorder. In and out of the hive long black robber bees smeared with

honey fly timidly and shiftily. They do not sting, but crawl away from

danger. Formerly only bees laden with honey flew into the hive, and they

flew out empty; now they fly out laden. The beekeeper opens the lower

part of the hive and peers in. Instead of black, glossy bees—tamed by

toil, clinging to one another’s legs and drawing out the wax, with a

ceaseless hum of labor—that used to hang in long clusters down to the

floor of the hive, drowsy shriveled bees crawl about separately in

various directions on the floor and walls of the hive. Instead of a

neatly glued floor, swept by the bees with the fanning of their wings,

there is a floor littered with bits of wax, excrement, dying bees

scarcely moving their legs, and dead ones that have not been cleared

away.

The beekeeper opens the upper part of the hive and examines the super.

Instead of serried rows of bees sealing up every gap in the combs and

keeping the brood warm, he sees the skillful complex structures of the

combs, but no longer in their former state of purity. All is neglected

and foul. Black robber bees are swiftly and stealthily prowling about

the combs, and the short home bees, shriveled and listless as if they

were old, creep slowly about without trying to hinder the robbers,

having lost all motive and all sense of life. Drones, bumblebees, wasps,

and butterflies knock awkwardly against the walls of the hive in their

flight. Here and there among the cells containing dead brood and honey

an angry buzzing can sometimes be heard. Here and there a couple of

bees, by force of habit and custom cleaning out the brood cells, with

efforts beyond their strength laboriously drag away a dead bee or

bumblebee without knowing why they do it. In another corner two old bees

are languidly fighting, or cleaning themselves, or feeding one another,

without themselves knowing whether they do it with friendly or hostile

intent. In a third place a crowd of bees, crushing one another, attack

some victim and fight and smother it, and the victim, enfeebled or

killed, drops from above slowly and lightly as a feather, among the heap

of corpses. The keeper opens the two center partitions to examine

the brood cells. In place of the former close dark circles formed by

thousands of bees sitting back to back and guarding the high mystery

of generation, he sees hundreds of dull, listless, and sleepy shells of

bees. They have almost all died unawares, sitting in the sanctuary they

had guarded and which is now no more. They reek of decay and death. Only

a few of them still move, rise, and feebly fly to settle on the enemy’s

hand, lacking the spirit to die stinging him; the rest are dead and fall

as lightly as fish scales. The beekeeper closes the hive, chalks a mark

on it, and when he has time tears out its contents and burns it clean.

So in the same way Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, uneasy, and

morose, paced up and down in front of the Kámmer-Kollézski rampart,

awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, if but formal, observance of

the proprieties—a deputation.

In various corners of Moscow there still remained a few people aimlessly

moving about, following their old habits and hardly aware of what they

were doing.

When with due circumspection Napoleon was informed that Moscow was

empty, he looked angrily at his informant, turned away, and silently

continued to walk to and fro.

“My carriage!” he said.

He took his seat beside the aide-de-camp on duty and drove into the

suburb. “Moscow deserted!” he said to himself. “What an incredible

event!”

He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomílov

suburb.

The coup de théâtre had not come off.

CHAPTER XXI

The Russian troops were passing through Moscow from two o’clock at night

till two in the afternoon and bore away with them the wounded and the

last of the inhabitants who were leaving.

The greatest crush during the movement of the troops took place at the

Stone, Moskvá, and Yaúza bridges.

While the troops, dividing into two parts when passing around the

Krémlin, were thronging the Moskvá and the Stone bridges, a great many

soldiers, taking advantage of the stoppage and congestion, turned back

from the bridges and slipped stealthily and silently past the church of

Vasíli the Beatified and under the Borovítski gate, back up the hill

to the Red Square where some instinct told them they could easily take

things not belonging to them. Crowds of the kind seen at cheap sales

filled all the passages and alleys of the Bazaar. But there were no

dealers with voices of ingratiating affability inviting customers to

enter; there were no hawkers, nor the usual motley crowd of female

purchasers—but only soldiers, in uniforms and overcoats though without

muskets, entering the Bazaar empty-handed and silently making their way

out through its passages with bundles. Tradesmen and their assistants

(of whom there were but few) moved about among the soldiers quite

bewildered. They unlocked their shops and locked them up again, and

themselves carried goods away with the help of their assistants. On the

square in front of the Bazaar were drummers beating the muster call.

But the roll of the drums did not make the looting soldiers run in the

direction of the drum as formerly, but made them, on the contrary, run

farther away. Among the soldiers in the shops and passages some men were

to be seen in gray coats, with closely shaven heads. Two officers, one

with a scarf over his uniform and mounted on a lean, dark-gray horse,

the other in an overcoat and on foot, stood at the corner of Ilyínka

Street, talking. A third officer galloped up to them.

“The general orders them all to be driven out at once, without fail.

This is outrageous! Half the men have dispersed.”

“Where are you off to?... Where?...” he shouted to three infantrymen

without muskets who, holding up the skirts of their overcoats, were

slipping past him into the Bazaar passage. “Stop, you rascals!”

“But how are you going to stop them?” replied another officer. “There is

no getting them together. The army should push on before the rest bolt,

that’s all!”

“How can one push on? They are stuck there, wedged on the bridge, and

don’t move. Shouldn’t we put a cordon round to prevent the rest from

running away?”

“Come, go in there and drive them out!” shouted the senior officer.

The officer in the scarf dismounted, called up a drummer, and went with

him into the arcade. Some soldiers started running away in a group. A

shopkeeper with red pimples on his cheeks near the nose, and a calm,

persistent, calculating expression on his plump face, hurriedly and

ostentatiously approached the officer, swinging his arms.

“Your honor!” said he. “Be so good as to protect us! We won’t grudge

trifles, you are welcome to anything—we shall be delighted! Pray!...

I’ll fetch a piece of cloth at once for such an honorable gentleman,

or even two pieces with pleasure. For we feel how it is; but what’s all

this—sheer robbery! If you please, could not guards be placed if only to

let us close the shop....”

Several shopkeepers crowded round the officer.

“Eh, what twaddle!” said one of them, a thin, stern-looking man. “When

one’s head is gone one doesn’t weep for one’s hair! Take what any of you

like!” And flourishing his arm energetically he turned sideways to the

officer.

“It’s all very well for you, Iván Sidórych, to talk,” said the first

tradesman angrily. “Please step inside, your honor!”

“Talk indeed!” cried the thin one. “In my three shops here I have a

hundred thousand rubles’ worth of goods. Can they be saved when the army

has gone? Eh, what people! ‘Against God’s might our hands can’t fight.’”

“Come inside, your honor!” repeated the tradesman, bowing.

The officer stood perplexed and his face showed indecision.

“It’s not my business!” he exclaimed, and strode on quickly down one of

the passages.

From one open shop came the sound of blows and vituperation, and just

as the officer came up to it a man in a gray coat with a shaven head was

flung out violently.

This man, bent double, rushed past the tradesman and the officer. The

officer pounced on the soldiers who were in the shops, but at that

moment fearful screams reached them from the huge crowd on the Moskvá

bridge and the officer ran out into the square.

“What is it? What is it?” he asked, but his comrade was already

galloping off past Vasíli the Beatified in the direction from which the

screams came.

The officer mounted his horse and rode after him. When he reached the

bridge he saw two unlimbered guns, the infantry crossing the bridge,

several overturned carts, and frightened and laughing faces among the

troops. Beside the cannon a cart was standing to which two horses were

harnessed. Four borzois with collars were pressing close to the wheels.

The cart was loaded high, and at the very top, beside a child’s chair

with its legs in the air, sat a peasant woman uttering piercing and

desperate shrieks. He was told by his fellow officers that the screams

of the crowd and the shrieks of the woman were due to the fact that

General Ermólov, coming up to the crowd and learning that soldiers were

dispersing among the shops while crowds of civilians blocked the bridge,

had ordered two guns to be unlimbered and made a show of firing at the

bridge. The crowd, crushing one another, upsetting carts, and shouting

and squeezing desperately, had cleared off the bridge and the troops

were now moving forward.

CHAPTER XXII

Meanwhile, the city itself was deserted. There was hardly anyone in the

streets. The gates and shops were all closed, only here and there round

the taverns solitary shouts or drunken songs could be heard. Nobody

drove through the streets and footsteps were rarely heard. The

Povarskáya was quite still and deserted. The huge courtyard of the

Rostóvs’ house was littered with wisps of hay and with dung from the

horses, and not a soul was to be seen there. In the great drawing

room of the house, which had been left with all it contained, were

two people. They were the yard porter Ignát, and the page boy Míshka,

Vasílich’s grandson who had stayed in Moscow with his grandfather.

Míshka had opened the clavichord and was strumming on it with

one finger. The yard porter, his arms akimbo, stood smiling with

satisfaction before the large mirror.

“Isn’t it fine, eh, Uncle Ignát?” said the boy, suddenly beginning to

strike the keyboard with both hands.

“Only fancy!” answered Ignát, surprised at the broadening grin on his

face in the mirror.

“Impudence! Impudence!” they heard behind them the voice of Mávra

Kuzmínichna who had entered silently. “How he’s grinning, the fat mug!

Is that what you’re here for? Nothing’s cleared away down there and

Vasílich is worn out. Just you wait a bit!”

Ignát left off smiling, adjusted his belt, and went out of the room with

meekly downcast eyes.

“Aunt, I did it gently,” said the boy.

“I’ll give you something gently, you monkey you!” cried Mávra

Kuzmínichna, raising her arm threateningly. “Go and get the samovar to

boil for your grandfather.”

Mávra Kuzmínichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and

with a deep sigh left the drawing room and locked its main door.

Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go

next—to drink tea in the servants’ wing with Vasílich, or into the

storeroom to put away what still lay about.

She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone

stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.

Mávra Kuzmínichna went to the gate.

“Who do you want?”

“The count—Count Ilyá Andréevich Rostóv.”

“And who are you?”

“An officer, I have to see him,” came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred

Russian voice.

Mávra Kuzmínichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the

round face of a Rostóv, entered the yard.

“They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vespertime,” said

Mávra Kuzmínichna cordially.

The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to

enter or not, clicked his tongue.

“Ah, how annoying!” he muttered. “I should have come yesterday.... Ah,

what a pity.”

Meanwhile, Mávra Kuzmínichna was attentively and sympathetically

examining the familiar Rostóv features of the young man’s face, his

tattered coat and trodden-down boots.

“What did you want to see the count for?” she asked.

“Oh well... it can’t be helped!” said he in a tone of vexation and

placed his hand on the gate as if to leave.

He again paused in indecision.

“You see,” he suddenly said, “I am a kinsman of the count’s and he has

been very kind to me. As you see” (he glanced with an amused air and

good-natured smile at his coat and boots) “my things are worn out and I

have no money, so I was going to ask the count...”

Mávra Kuzmínichna did not let him finish.

“Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment,” said she.

And as soon as the officer let go of the gate handle she turned and,

hurrying away on her old legs, went through the back yard to the

servants’ quarters.

While Mávra Kuzmínichna was running to her room the officer walked about

the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint

smile on his lips. “What a pity I’ve missed Uncle! What a nice old

woman! Where has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way

to overtake my regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogózhski

gate?” thought he. Just then Mávra Kuzmínichna appeared from behind

the corner of the house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a

rolled-up check kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from

the officer she unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white

twenty-five-ruble assignat and hastily handed it to him.

“If his excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course...

but as it is...”

Mávra Kuzmínichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not

decline, but took the note quietly and thanked her.

“If the count had been at home...” Mávra Kuzmínichna went on

apologetically. “Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!” said

she, bowing as she saw him out.

Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself, the officer ran

almost at a trot through the deserted streets toward the Yaúza bridge to

overtake his regiment.

But Mávra Kuzmínichna stood at the closed gate for some time with moist

eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected flow of

motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer.

CHAPTER XXIII

From an unfinished house on the Varvárka, the ground floor of which was

a dramshop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches round the tables

in a dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. Tipsy and perspiring,

with dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were all laboriously singing

some song or other. They were singing discordantly, arduously, and with

great effort, evidently not because they wished to sing, but because

they wanted to show they were drunk and on a spree. One, a tall,

fair-haired lad in a clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His

face with its fine straight nose would have been handsome had it not

been for his thin, compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed

eyes. Evidently possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were

singing, and solemnly and jerkily flourished above their heads his white

arm with the sleeve turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread

out his dirty fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he

always carefully rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it were

most important that the sinewy white arm he was flourishing should be

bare. In the midst of the song cries were heard, and fighting and blows

in the passage and porch. The tall lad waved his arm.

“Stop it!” he exclaimed peremptorily. “There’s a fight, lads!” And,

still rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.

The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the leadership of

the tall lad were drinking in the dramshop that morning, had brought the

publican some skins from the factory and for this had had drink served

them. The blacksmiths from a neighboring smithy, hearing the sounds of

revelry in the tavern and supposing it to have been broken into, wished

to force their way in too and a fight in the porch had resulted.

The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when the

workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern

keeper, fell face downward on the pavement.

Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the publican

with his chest.

The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the face and

cried wildly: “They’re fighting us, lads!”

At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised

face to make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice: “Police! Murder!...

They’ve killed a man, lads!”

“Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death—killed!...” screamed a woman

coming out of a gate close by.

A crowd gathered round the bloodstained smith.

“Haven’t you robbed people enough—taking their last shirts?” said a

voice addressing the publican. “What have you killed a man for, you

thief?”

The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from the

publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he ought to

fight now.

“Murderer!” he shouted suddenly to the publican. “Bind him, lads!”

“I daresay you would like to bind me!” shouted the publican, pushing

away the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head he

flung it on the ground.

As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the

workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision.

“I know the law very well, mates! I’ll take the matter to the captain

of police. You think I won’t get to him? Robbery is not permitted to

anybody nowadays!” shouted the publican, picking up his cap.

“Come along then! Come along then!” the publican and the tall young

fellow repeated one after the other, and they moved up the street

together.

The bloodstained smith went beside them. The factory hands and others

followed behind, talking and shouting.

At the corner of the Moroséyka, opposite a large house with closed

shutters and bearing a bootmaker’s signboard, stood a score of thin,

worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long tattered

coats.

“He should pay folks off properly,” a thin workingman, with frowning

brows and a straggly beard, was saying.

“But he’s sucked our blood and now he thinks he’s quit of us. He’s been

misleading us all the week and now that he’s brought us to this pass

he’s made off.”

On seeing the crowd and the bloodstained man the workman ceased

speaking, and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the moving

crowd.

“Where are all the folks going?”

“Why, to the police, of course!”

“I say, is it true that we have been beaten?” “And what did you think?

Look what folks are saying.”

Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage of the

increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern.

The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his

bare arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention

to himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, expecting

answers from him to the questions that occupied all their minds.

“He must keep order, keep the law, that’s what the government is there

for. Am I not right, good Christians?” said the tall youth, with a

scarcely perceptible smile. “He thinks there’s no government! How can

one do without government? Or else there would be plenty who’d rob us.”

“Why talk nonsense?” rejoined voices in the crowd. “Will they give

up Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed it!

Aren’t there plenty of troops on the march? Let him in, indeed! That’s

what the government is for. You’d better listen to what people are

saying,” said some of the mob pointing to the tall youth.

By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered round

a man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand.

“An ukáse, they are reading an ukáse! Reading an ukáse!” cried voices in

the crowd, and the people rushed toward the reader.

The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31. When

the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the demand

of the tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a rather

tremulous voice to read the sheet from the beginning.

“Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness,” he read (“Sirin

Highness,” said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his lips and

a frown on his brow), “to consult with him to act, and to aid the army

to exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part...” the reader

went on, and then paused (“Do you see,” shouted the youth victoriously,

“he’s going to clear up the whole affair for you....”), “in destroying

them, and will send these visitors to the devil. I will come back to

dinner, and we’ll set to work. We will do, completely do, and undo these

scoundrels.”

The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The tall

lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had understood

the last part. In particular, the words “I will come back to dinner,”

evidently displeased both reader and audience. The people’s minds

were tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple and needlessly

comprehensible—it was what any one of them might have said and therefore

was what an ukáse emanating from the highest authority should not say.

They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his lips and

swayed from side to side.

“We should ask him... that’s he himself?”... “Yes, ask him indeed!...

Why not? He’ll explain”... voices in the rear of the crowd were

suddenly heard saying, and the general attention turned to the police

superintendent’s trap which drove into the square attended by two

mounted dragoons.

The superintendent of police, who had gone that morning by Count

Rostopchín’s orders to burn the barges and had in connection with that

matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his

pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to

stop.

“What people are these?” he shouted to the men, who were moving singly

and timidly in the direction of his trap.

“What people are these?” he shouted again, receiving no answer.

“Your honor...” replied the shopman in the frieze coat, “your honor, in

accord with the proclamation of his highest excellency the count, they

desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any kind of

riot, but as his highest excellence said...”

“The count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued

concerning you,” said the superintendent of police. “Go on!” he ordered

his coachman.

The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the

superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap.

The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a scared

look, said something to his coachman, and his horses increased their

speed.

“It’s a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!” shouted the tall

youth. “Don’t let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!” shouted

different people and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap.

Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the crowd went

in the direction of the Lubyánka Street.

“There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to

perish. Do they think we’re dogs?” voices in the crowd were heard saying

more and more frequently.

CHAPTER XXIV

On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with

Kutúzov, Count Rostopchín had returned to Moscow mortified and offended

because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, and

because Kutúzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in the

defense of the city; amazed also at the novel outlook revealed to him

at the camp, which treated the tranquillity of the capital and its

patriotic fervor as not merely secondary but quite irrelevant and

unimportant matters. Distressed, offended, and surprised by all this,

Rostopchín had returned to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa

without undressing, and was awakened soon after midnight by a courier

bringing him a letter from Kutúzov. This letter requested the count to

send police officers to guide the troops through the town, as the army

was retreating to the Ryazán road beyond Moscow. This was not news to

Rostopchín. He had known that Moscow would be abandoned not merely since

his interview the previous day with Kutúzov on the Poklónny Hill but

ever since the battle of Borodinó, for all the generals who came to

Moscow after that battle had said unanimously that it was impossible to

fight another battle, and since then the government property had been

removed every night, and half the inhabitants had left the city

with Rostopchín’s own permission. Yet all the same this information

astonished and irritated the count, coming as it did in the form of a

simple note with an order from Kutúzov, and received at night, breaking

in on his beauty sleep.

When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchín explained his actions at

this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated by two important

considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow and expedite the

departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this twofold aim all

Rostopchín’s actions appear irreproachable. “Why were the holy relics,

the arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of corn not removed? Why

were thousands of inhabitants deceived into believing that Moscow would

not be given up—and thereby ruined?” “To preserve the tranquillity

of the city,” explains Count Rostopchín. “Why were bundles of useless

papers from the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other

articles removed?” “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín.

One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action

finds a justification.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for

public tranquillity.

On what, then, was Count Rostopchín’s fear for the tranquillity of

Moscow based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability

of an uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the

retreating troops were filling it. Why should that cause the masses to

riot?

Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling an

insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than

ten thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of

September, and except for a mob in the governor’s courtyard, assembled

there at his bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would

have been even less reason to expect a disturbance among the people

if after the battle of Borodinó, when the surrender of Moscow became

certain or at least probable, Rostopchín instead of exciting the people

by distributing arms and broadsheets had taken steps to remove all

the holy relics, the gunpowder, munitions, and money, and had told the

population plainly that the town would be abandoned.

Rostopchín, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and

impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative circles

and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed himself to

be guiding. Ever since the enemy’s entry into Smolénsk he had in

imagination been playing the role of director of the popular feeling

of “the heart of Russia.” Not only did it seem to him (as to all

administrators) that he controlled the external actions of Moscow’s

inhabitants, but he also thought he controlled their mental attitude by

means of his broadsheets and posters, written in a coarse tone which the

people despise in their own class and do not understand from those in

authority. Rostopchín was so pleased with the fine role of leader of

popular feeling, and had grown so used to it, that the necessity of

relinquishing that role and abandoning Moscow without any heroic display

took him unawares and he suddenly felt the ground slip away from under

his feet, so that he positively did not know what to do. Though he knew

it was coming, he did not till the last moment wholeheartedly believe

that Moscow would be abandoned, and did not prepare for it. The

inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government offices were

removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to whom the count

yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had created

for himself. As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent

imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned he

knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and

did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.

All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful

and had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply

directed toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic

hatred of the French.

But when events assumed their true historical character, when expressing

hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it was not

even possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, when

self-confidence was of no avail in relation to the one question before

Moscow, when the whole population streamed out of Moscow as one man,

abandoning their belongings and proving by that negative action all

the depth of their national feeling, then the role chosen by Rostopchín

suddenly appeared senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself ridiculous,

weak, and alone, with no ground to stand on.

When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory note

from Kutúzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself

to blame. All that he had been specially put in charge of, the state

property which he should have removed, was still in Moscow and it was no

longer possible to take the whole of it away.

“Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?” he

ruminated. “Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow

firmly in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains!

Traitors!” he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and

traitors were, but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever

they might be who were to blame for the false and ridiculous position in

which he found himself.

All that night Count Rostopchín issued orders, for which people came to

him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the count

so morose and irritable.

“Your excellency, the Director of the Registrar’s Department has sent

for instructions.... From the Consistory, from the Senate, from the

University, from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent...

asking for information.... What are your orders about the Fire Brigade?

From the governor of the prison... from the superintendent of the

lunatic asylum...” All night long such announcements were continually

being received by the count.

To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that

orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully

prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that that somebody

would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.

“Oh, tell that blockhead,” he said in reply to the question from the

Registrar’s Department, “that he should remain to guard his documents.

Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They have

horses, let them be off to Vladímir, and not leave them to the French.”

“Your excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come:

what are your commands?”

“My commands? Let them go away, that’s all.... And let the lunatics

out into the town. When lunatics command our armies God evidently means

these other madmen to be free.”

In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count

Rostopchín shouted angrily at the governor:

“Do you expect me to give you two battalions—which we have not got—for a

convoy? Release them, that’s all about it!”

“Your excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkóv,

Vereshchágin...”

“Vereshchágin! Hasn’t he been hanged yet?” shouted Rostopchín. “Bring

him to me!”

CHAPTER XXV

Toward nine o’clock in the morning, when the troops were already moving

through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions.

Those who were able to get away were going of their own accord, those

who remained behind decided for themselves what they must do.

The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokólniki, and sat

in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it

is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is

kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every

administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the

sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark,

holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself

moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding

on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and

the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves

independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer

reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead

of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant,

useless, feeble man.

Rostopchín felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.

The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to

see him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that the

horses were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent of

police, after reporting that he had executed the instructions he had

received, informed the count that an immense crowd had collected in the

courtyard and wished to see him.

Without saying a word Rostopchín rose and walked hastily to his light,

luxurious drawing room, went to the balcony door, took hold of the

handle, let it go again, and went to the window from which he had a

better view of the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in front,

flourishing his arm and saying something with a stern look. The

blood-stained smith stood beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of

voices was audible through the closed window.

“Is my carriage ready?” asked Rostopchín, stepping back from the window.

“It is, your excellency,” replied the adjutant.

Rostopchín went again to the balcony door.

“But what do they want?” he asked the superintendent of police.

“Your excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your

orders, to go against the French, and they shouted something about

treachery. But it is a turbulent crowd, your excellency—I hardly managed

to get away from it. Your excellency, I venture to suggest...”

“You may go. I don’t need you to tell me what to do!” exclaimed

Rostopchín angrily.

He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.

“This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done

with me!” thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled up

within him against the someone to whom what was happening might be

attributed. As often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by

anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it. “Here is

that mob, the dregs of the people,” he thought as he gazed at the crowd:

“this rabble they have roused by their folly! They want a victim,”

he thought as he looked at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And this

thought occurred to him just because he himself desired a victim,

something on which to vent his rage.

“Is the carriage ready?” he asked again.

“Yes, your excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchágin? He is

waiting at the porch,” said the adjutant.

“Ah!” exclaimed Rostopchín, as if struck by an unexpected recollection.

And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out onto the balcony.

The talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, and all eyes

were raised to the count.

“Good morning, lads!” said the count briskly and loudly. “Thank you for

coming. I’ll come out to you in a moment, but we must first settle

with the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the ruin of

Moscow. Wait for me!”

And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed the door

behind him.

A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. “He’ll

settle with all the villains, you’ll see! And you said the French...

He’ll show you what law is!” the mob were saying as if reproving one

another for their lack of confidence.

A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door,

gave an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved

eagerly from the balcony toward the porch. Rostopchín, coming out there

with quick angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking someone.

“Where is he?” he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man coming

round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin

neck, and his head, that had been half shaved, was again covered by

short hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat

lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict

trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, trodden-down boots.

On his thin, weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute

movements.

“Ah!” said Rostopchín, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the young

man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the porch.

“Put him there.”

The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot

indicated, holding away with one finger the coat collar which chafed

his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and

submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.

For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step

the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were

all pressing toward the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling

of feet be heard.

While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchín

stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.

“Lads!” said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. “This man,

Vereshchágin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.”

The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a

submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young

face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At

the count’s first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if

wishing to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchín did

not look at him. A vein in the young man’s long thin neck swelled like a

cord and went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.

All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more

hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly

and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.

“He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to

Bonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name,

he has caused Moscow to perish,” said Rostopchín in a sharp, even voice,

but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchágin who continued to stand in

the same submissive attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his

arm and addressed the people, almost shouting:

“Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.”

The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to

one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling

atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown,

uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing

in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them, all

stood with wide-open eyes and mouths, straining with all their strength,

and held back the crowd that was pushing behind them.

“Beat him!... Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!”

shouted Rostopchín. “Cut him down. I command it.”

Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchín’s voice,

the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.

“Count!” exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchágin in the

midst of the momentary silence that ensued, “Count! One God is above us

both....” He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck

filled with blood and the color rapidly came and went in his face.

He did not finish what he wished to say.

“Cut him down! I command it...” shouted Rostopchín, suddenly growing

pale like Vereshchágin.

“Draw sabers!” cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.

Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the

front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall

youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood

beside Vereshchágin.

“Saber him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.

And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury,

struck Vereshchágin on the head with the blunt side of his saber.

“Ah!” cried Vereshchágin in meek surprise, looking round with a

frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A

similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!”

exclaimed a sorrowful voice.

But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin

he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier

of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in

check suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The

plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar

of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that

last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks,

carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was

about to repeat his blow. Vereshchágin with a cry of horror, covering

his head with his hands, rushed toward the crowd. The tall youth,

against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and,

yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling

crowd.

Some beat and tore at Vereshchágin, others at the tall youth. And the

screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to

rescue the tall lad only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long

time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten

almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with

which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were

hitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchágin were unable to kill

him, for the crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them

in the center and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or

let him go.

“Hit him with an ax, eh!... Crushed?... Traitor, he sold Christ....

Still alive... tenacious... serves him right! Torture serves a thief

right. Use the hatchet!... What—still alive?”

Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a

long-drawn, measured death rattle did the crowd around his prostrate,

bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came

up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and

astonishment pushed back again.

“O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?” voices

in the crowd could be heard saying. “Quite a young fellow too... must

have been a merchant’s son. What men!... and they say he’s not the right

one.... How not the right one?... O Lord! And there’s another has been

beaten too—they say he’s nearly done for.... Oh, the people... Aren’t

they afraid of sinning?...” said the same mob now, looking with pained

distress at the dead body with its long, thin, half-severed neck and its

livid face stained with blood and dust.

A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in

his excellency’s courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away.

Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the

ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck

trailed twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.

At the moment when Vereshchágin fell and the crowd closed in with savage

yells and swayed about him, Rostopchín suddenly turned pale and, instead

of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went

with hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the

passage leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count’s face was

white and he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.

“This way, your excellency... Where are you going?... This way,

please...” said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.

Count Rostopchín was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in

the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his calèche. The

distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily

took his seat and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in

Sokólniki.

When they reached the Myasnítski Street and could no longer hear

the shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with

dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his

subordinates. “The mob is terrible—disgusting,” he said to himself

in French. “They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.”

“Count! One God is above us both!”—Vereshchágin’s words suddenly

recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this

was only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchín smiled disdainfully

at himself. “I had other duties,” thought he. “The people had to be

appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the

public good”—and he began thinking of his social duties to his family

and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore

Vasílyevich Rostopchín (he fancied that Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín

was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as governor,

the representative of authority and of the Tsar. “Had I been simply

Theodore Vasílyevich my course of action would have been quite

different, but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as

commander in chief.”

Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer

hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchín grew physically

calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil

his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The

thought which tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one. Since the

world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed

such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with

this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of

other people.

To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he

who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And

Rostopchín now knew it.

Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but

he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully

contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a

criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.

“Vereshchágin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchín

(though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchágin to hard labor), “he

was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have

killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim

and at the same time punished a miscreant.”

Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic

arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.

Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the

Sokólniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering

what was to come. He was driving to the Yaúza bridge where he had heard

that Kutúzov was. Count Rostopchín was mentally preparing the angry and

stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutúzov for his deception. He

would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all

the calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the

ruin of Russia (as Rostopchín regarded it) would fall upon his doting

old head. Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutúzov, Rostopchín

turned angrily in his calèche and gazed sternly from side to side.

The Sokólniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the

almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white

and others like them walking singly across the field shouting and

gesticulating.

One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchín’s

carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons

looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and

especially at the one running toward them.

Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering

dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on

Rostopchín, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him

to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with

its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with

saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.

“Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again

shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.

Coming abreast of the calèche he ran beside it.

“Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They

stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise.

They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice

will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his

voice higher and higher.

Count Rostopchín suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed

in on Vereshchágin. He turned away. “Go fas... faster!” he cried in a

trembling voice to his coachman. The calèche flew over the ground as

fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchín

still heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the

distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened,

bloodstained face of “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.

Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchín already felt that it had

cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that

the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that

the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more

cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear

the sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it....”

“Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them....

I need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have

happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon

who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the

fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own

sake. I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public

welfare,” thought he.

Troops were still crowding at the Yaúza bridge. It was hot. Kutúzov,

dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his

whip in the sand when a calèche dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s

uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutúzov and said something

in French. It was Count Rostopchín. He told Kutúzov that he had come

because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army remained.

“Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told

me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this

would not have happened,” he said.

Kutúzov looked at Rostopchín as if, not grasping what was said to him,

he was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the

face of the man addressing him. Rostopchín grew confused and became

silent. Kutúzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating

gaze from Rostopchín’s face muttered softly:

“No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”

Whether Kutúzov was thinking of something entirely different when

he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be

meaningless, at any rate Rostopchín made no reply and hastily left him.

And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchín,

took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts

to drive on the carts that blocked the way.

CHAPTER XXVI

Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering

Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Württemberg hussars and behind

them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.

About the middle of the Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous

Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced

detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le

Kremlin.

Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They

all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander

dressed up in feathers and gold.

“Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard

saying.

An interpreter rode up to the group.

“Take off your cap... your caps!” These words went from one to another

in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if

it was far to the Krémlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the

unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was

speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and

slipped behind the others.

Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian

army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several

voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer,

returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported

that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was

probably an ambuscade there.

“Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite,

ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat and advanced

up the Arbát. When they reached the end of the Vozdvízhenka Street they

halted and drew in the Square. Several French officers superintended the

placing of the guns and looked at the Krémlin through field glasses.

The bells in the Krémlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound

troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few

infantrymen ran to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been

put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as

an officer and men began to run toward it. A general who was standing

by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter

ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens

came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a

word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of

the French general, officers, and men changed to one of determined

concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from

the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not the Vozdvízhenka,

Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in

Moscow), but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary.

And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The

guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks,

and an officer gave the word “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling

sounds of canister shot, one after another. The shot rattled against

the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two

wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the

stone-built Krémlin had died away the French heard a strange sound above

their head. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the

air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound

came a solitary human cry from the gateway and amid the smoke appeared

the figure of a bareheaded man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket

and took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more,

and the reports of a musket and of two cannon shots were heard

simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers

and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and

four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall,

toward the Známenka.

“Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the

corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw

the corpses over the parapet.

Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said

of them, and they were thrown over the parapet and removed later on that

they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to

their memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having

supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the

wretches) “at the French. Some of them were sabered and the Krémlin was

purged of their presence.”

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered

the gates and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the

windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square

for fuel and kindled fires there.

Other detachments passed through the Krémlin and encamped along

the Moroséyka, the Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered

themselves along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and the Tverskóy

Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere, the French were

not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns but lived in it as

in a camp.

Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their

original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It

was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But

it remained an army only until its soldiers had dispersed into their

different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began

to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost

forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither

citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks

later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They

were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which

seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left

Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer, but merely to keep

what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow

neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its

fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the

French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they

carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as

impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let

go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow

district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms

and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows, laughing and

walking through the rooms. In cellars and storerooms similar men were

busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open

coach house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading

and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking; or frightening,

amusing, or caressing women and children. There were many such men both

in the shops and houses—but there was no army.

Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day

forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any

violence to the inhabitants or any looting, and announcing a roll call

for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had

till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted

city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of

cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out

of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich

pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water

percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all

directions from the Krémlin into which they had first marched. The

cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and

finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on,

all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of

them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and

quarreled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had

had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to

see the city and, hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed

to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers

followed to check the soldiers and were involuntarily drawn into doing

the same. In Carriage Row carriages had been left in the shops, and

generals flocked there to select calèches and coaches for themselves.

The few inhabitants who had remained invited commanding officers to

their houses, hoping thereby to secure themselves from being plundered.

There were masses of wealth and there seemed no end to it. All around

the quarters occupied by the French were other regions still unexplored

and unoccupied where, they thought, yet greater riches might be found.

And Moscow engulfed the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is

spilled on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and

mud results; and in the same way the entry of the famished army into the

rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction

of both the army and the wealthy city.

The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de

Rostopchíne, * the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality,

however, it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning

of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible

for it. Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which

any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it

had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines. Deserted

Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on

which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood,

where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners

are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when

its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke

pipes, make campfires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and

cook themselves meals twice a day. In peacetime it is only necessary to

billet troops in the villages of any district and the number of fires in

that district immediately increases. How much then must the probability

of fire be increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops

are quartered. “Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne” and the barbarity

of the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by

the soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and campfires, and by the carelessness of

enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any

arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the

houses—in any case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson

cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same thing would have happened

without any incendiarism.

* To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.

However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s

ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Bonaparte, or later

on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is

impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of the

fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house must

burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are allowed to

live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burned by its inhabitants, it

is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained

in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like

Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants

abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor

bring them the keys of the city.

CHAPTER XXVII

The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating starwise as it did,

only reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the evening of the

second of September.

After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances,

Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed

by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had

taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past,

understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to

him like a dream.

He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life’s demands

that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable

to unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexéevich’s house, on the plea of

sorting the deceased’s books and papers, only in search of rest from

life’s turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexéevich was

connected with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite

contrary to the restless confusion into which he felt himself being

drawn. He sought a quiet refuge, and in Joseph Alexéevich’s study he

really found it. When he sat with his elbows on the dusty writing table

in the deathlike stillness of the study, calm and significant memories

of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination,

particularly of the battle of Borodinó and of that vague sense of his

own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity,

and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When

Gerásim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking

part in the popular defense of Moscow which he knew was projected. And

with that object he had asked Gerásim to get him a peasant’s coat and

a pistol, confiding to him his intentions of remaining in Joseph

Alexéevich’s house and keeping his name secret. Then during the first

day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix his

attention on the Masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the idea

that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of

his name in connection with Bonaparte’s more than once vaguely presented

itself. But the idea that he, L’russe Besuhof, was destined to set a

limit to the power of the Beast was as yet only one of the fancies that

often passed through his mind and left no trace behind.

When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part among

the people in the defense of Moscow, Pierre had met the Rostóvs and

Natásha had said to him: “Are you remaining in Moscow?... How splendid!”

the thought flashed into his mind that it really would be a good thing,

even if Moscow were taken, for him to remain there and do what he was

predestined to do.

Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not lagging in

any way behind them, Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. But when he

returned to the house convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he

suddenly felt that what before had seemed to him merely a possibility

had now become absolutely necessary and inevitable. He must remain in

Moscow, concealing his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and

either perish or put an end to the misery of all Europe—which it seemed

to him was solely due to Napoleon.

Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Bonaparte’s life in 1809

by a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been shot.

And the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out his

design excited him still more.

Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this purpose.

The first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in

view of the common calamity, the same feeling that had caused him to go

to Mozháysk on the twenty-fifth and to make his way to the very thick

of the battle and had now caused him to run away from his home and, in

place of the luxury and comfort to which he was accustomed, to sleep

on a hard sofa without undressing and eat the same food as Gerásim.

The other was that vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for

everything conventional, artificial, and human—for everything the

majority of men regard as the greatest good in the world. Pierre had

first experienced this strange and fascinating feeling at the Slobóda

Palace, when he had suddenly felt that wealth, power, and life—all that

men so painstakingly acquire and guard—if it has any worth has so only

by reason of the joy with which it can all be renounced.

It was the feeling that induces a volunteer recruit to spend his last

penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no

apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he

possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from

an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal

power and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, nonhuman

criterion of life.

From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time

at the Slobóda Palace he had been continuously under its influence, but

only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover, at this moment Pierre

was supported in his design and prevented from renouncing it by what he

had already done in that direction. If he were now to leave Moscow like

everyone else, his flight from home, the peasant coat, the pistol, and

his announcement to the Rostóvs that he would remain in Moscow would all

become not merely meaningless but contemptible and ridiculous, and to

this Pierre was very sensitive.

Pierre’s physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded to his

mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he drank during

those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty unchanged linen,

two almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa without bedding—all

this kept him in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered

Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting he only thought about

his undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind. In his

fancy he did not clearly picture to himself either the striking of the

blow or the death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and

melancholy enjoyment imagined his own destruction and heroic endurance.

“Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!” he thought.

“Yes, I will approach... and then suddenly... with pistol or dagger?

But that is all the same! ‘It is not I but the hand of Providence that

punishes thee,’ I shall say,” thought he, imagining what he would say

when killing Napoleon. “Well then, take me and execute me!” he went on,

speaking to himself and bowing his head with a sad but firm expression.

While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to himself

in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold appeared

the figure of Makár Alexéevich, always so timid before but now quite

transformed.

His dressing gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He

was obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but

noticing embarrassment on Pierre’s face immediately grew bold and,

staggering on his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room.

“They’re frightened,” he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. “I say I

won’t surrender, I say... Am I not right, sir?”

He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it

with unexpected rapidity and ran out into the corridor.

Gerásim and the porter, who had followed Makár Alexéevich, stopped him

in the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, coming

out into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the half-crazy

old man. Makár Alexéevich, frowning with exertion, held on to the pistol

and screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic fancy in his head.

“To arms! Board them! No, you shan’t get it,” he yelled.

“That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness—please, sir, to

let go! Please, sir...” pleaded Gerásim, trying carefully to steer Makár

Alexéevich by the elbows back to the door.

“Who are you? Bonaparte!...” shouted Makár Alexéevich.

“That’s not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow me to

have the pistol.”

“Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?” shouted Makár

Alexéevich, brandishing the pistol. “Board them!”

“Catch hold!” whispered Gerásim to the porter.

They seized Makár Alexéevich by the arms and dragged him to the door.

The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle and of

a tipsy, hoarse voice.

Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated from

the porch and the cook came running into the vestibule.

“It’s them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!” she

cried.

Gerásim and the porter let Makár Alexéevich go, and in the now silent

corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front door could be

heard.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he would

disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood at the

half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as soon

as the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre did not

retire—an irresistible curiosity kept him there.

There were two of them. One was an officer—a tall, soldierly, handsome

man—the other evidently a private or an orderly, sunburned, short, and

thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull expression. The officer walked in

front, leaning on a stick and slightly limping. When he had advanced

a few steps he stopped, having apparently decided that these were good

quarters, turned round to the soldiers standing at the entrance, and in

a loud voice of command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done

that, the officer, lifting his elbow with a smart gesture, stroked his

mustache and lightly touched his hat.

“Bonjour, la compagnie!” * said he gaily, smiling and looking about him.

* “Good day, everybody!”

No one gave any reply.

“Vous êtes le bourgeois?” * the officer asked Gerásim.

* “Are you the master here?”

Gerásim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.

“Quartier, quartier, logement!” said the officer, looking down at the

little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. “Les français

sont de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fâchons pas, mon

vieux!” * added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerásim on the

shoulder. “Well, does no one speak French in this establishment?” he

asked again in French, looking around and meeting Pierre’s eyes. Pierre

moved away from the door.

* “Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good

fellows. What the devil! There, don’t let us be cross, old

fellow!”

Again the officer turned to Gerásim and asked him to show him the rooms

in the house.

“Master, not here—don’t understand... me, you...” said Gerásim, trying

to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.

Still smiling, the French officer spread out his hands before Gerásim’s

nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, and moved,

limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre wished to go

away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makár Alexéevich

appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his hand. With

a madman’s cunning, Makár Alexéevich eyed the Frenchman, raised his

pistol, and took aim.

“Board them!” yelled the tipsy man, trying to press the trigger. Hearing

the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment Pierre threw

himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and struck up the

pistol Makár Alexéevich at last got his fingers on the trigger, there

was a deafening report, and all were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The

Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.

Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre,

snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to the officer

and addressed him in French.

“You are not wounded?” he asked.

“I think not,” answered the Frenchman, feeling himself over. “But I have

had a lucky escape this time,” he added, pointing to the damaged plaster

of the wall. “Who is that man?” said he, looking sternly at Pierre.

“Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred,” said Pierre rapidly,

quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. “He is an unfortunate

madman who did not know what he was doing.”

The officer went up to Makár Alexéevich and took him by the collar.

Makár Alexéevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about to

fall asleep, as he leaned against the wall.

“Brigand! You shall pay for this,” said the Frenchman, letting go

of him. “We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon

traitors,” he added, with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine energetic

gesture.

Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold that

drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence with the

same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with a smile. For

a few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome face assumed a

melodramatically gentle expression and he held out his hand.

“You have saved my life. You are French,” said he.

For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman could

perform a great deed, and to save his life—the life of M. Ramballe,

captain of the 13th Light Regiment—was undoubtedly a very great deed.

But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer’s conviction

based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.

“I am Russian,” he said quickly.

“Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others,” said the officer, waving his

finger before his nose and smiling. “You shall tell me all about that

presently. I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well, and what are we

to do with this man?” he added, addressing himself to Pierre as to a

brother.

Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that loftiest

of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer’s look

and tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again explained who Makár

Alexéevich was and how just before their arrival that drunken imbecile

had seized the loaded pistol which they had not had time to recover from

him, and begged the officer to let the deed go unpunished.

The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with his

arm.

“You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant it

you. Lead that man away!” said he quickly and energetically, and taking

the arm of Pierre whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his

life, he went with him into the room.

The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage asking

what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish the culprits,

but the officer sternly checked them.

“You will be called in when you are wanted,” he said.

The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile had time

to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.

“Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen,” said he.

“Shall I serve them up?”

“Yes, and some wine,” answered the captain.

CHAPTER XXIX

When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter again

thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French and wished to

go away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so very polite,

amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre for saving his

life that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in

the parlor—the first room they entered. To Pierre’s assurances that he

was not a Frenchman, the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone

could decline so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and

said that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it

be so, but for all that he would be forever bound to Pierre by gratitude

for saving his life.

Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the

feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre’s feelings

were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man’s animated

obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed Pierre.

“A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito,” said the officer, looking

at Pierre’s fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his finger.

“I owe my life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never

forgets either an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That

is all I can say.”

There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French sense of the

word) in the officer’s voice, in the expression of his face and in

his gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling in response to the

Frenchman’s smile, pressed the hand held out to him.

“Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion

of Honor for the affair on the seventh of September,” he introduced

himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under

his mustache. “Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have

the honor of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance

with that maniac’s bullet in my body?”

Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing,

began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for

concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.

“Oh, please!” said he. “I understand your reasons. You are an officer...

a superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. That’s not

my business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am quite at

your service. You belong to the gentry?” he concluded with a shade of

inquiry in his tone. Pierre bent his head. “Your baptismal name, if you

please. That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say.... That’s all I

want to know.”

When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar and vodka

brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a Russian cellar

and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share his dinner, and

himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a healthy and hungry man,

munching his food rapidly with his strong teeth, continually smacking

his lips, and repeating—“Excellent! Delicious!” His face grew red and

was covered with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner

with pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan

and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvass,

taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known

to the French and had been given a special name. They called it limonade

de cochon (pig’s lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de

cochon he had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they

had taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and

applied himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up

to its neck in a table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for

Pierre. The satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain

still more lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.