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I build not for myself, but for the Russians. I hate Moscow, which smells of the Khan of the Tartars, and would prefer to live in the country. That is no one else's affair. Drink, old man! We have the whole day before us till five o'clock. Then I must be sober." The old man drank cautiously, and did not know exactly how to behave in this grand society, which was at the same time so nautical.
But the conflagration of Moscow illuminated my mind, and the judgment of the Lord on the ice-fields filled my heart with a fervor of faith which it had never felt until then.
On the 14th. the criminals in the prisons, with one-half of their heads shaved, were set at liberty that they might participate in the burning and pillaging. Before leaving Moscow Rostopchine uncovered his head and said to his son, "Salute Moscow for the last time; in half an hour it will be on fire." Quite a literature has developed on the question: who has burned Moscow?
Here the foremost halted without a word, and the others grouped about him or, stopping short when their leader did so, threw themselves on the wet ground reckless of cold or rheumatism, as spiritless a squad as frontier warfare could well develop. Valley Forge knew nothing like it. The retreat from Moscow might have furnished a parallel.
I will devote farther on an entire chapter to our itinerary from Paris to Moscow. A short time before the battle of La Moskwa, a man was brought to the camp dressed in the Russian uniform, but speaking French; at least his language was a singular mixture of French and Russian.
Amid unprecedented pomp he celebrates the coronation of his faithful and devoted wife, to whom he also has been faithful. It is she only who understands and can carry out his imperial policy. He himself at Moscow, 1724, amid unusual solemnities, placed the imperial crown upon her brow, and proudly and yet humbly walked before her in the gorgeous procession as a captain of her guard.
After first incensing the hearse, themselves and all around, further prayers were said and chanted: then a signal was given and all moved on again, only, however, to again pause on the route, for at every church we passed and we must have encountered at least thirty or forty, if not more, seeing that such sacred edifices rise upon one's view in Moscow at wellnigh every three or four minutes' space the ceremony was repeated.
They are scarcely possessed of arms. They have no recruits in readiness. Alexander will require more time to collect them than he will take to reach Moscow.
Here, however, he seemed to bend under the weight of his grief. He admitted that "this wound was deep and could never be effaced;" but soon recovering himself, he added, that "the loss of Moscow made but one city less in the empire, that it was the sacrifice of a part for the salvation of the whole. It is said that on the receipt of this intelligence Alexander was thunderstruck.
The pressures had been great, and the pendulum of political weight had swung far in an opposite direction. In fact, man had achieved that which he would deny in a reach for freedom, he had made the first turn in the coil that would bind him in the coil that would bind the mass of the many to the will of the very few. In school in Moscow, these things touched Bessandra's life only remotely.
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