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Updated: June 24, 2025
It still depends on Your Majesty to preserve humanity from the calamity of another war. I am, etc., At two in the morning of the fourteenth of June, the Emperor, having sent for Balashev and read him his letter to Napoleon, ordered him to take it and hand it personally to the French Emperor.
Balashev, who was on the alert all through the dinner, replied that just as "all roads lead to Rome," so all roads lead to Moscow: there were many roads, and "among them the road through Poltava, which Charles XII chose."
"But a large number of monasteries and churches is always a sign of the backwardness of a people," said Napoleon, turning to Caulaincourt for appreciation of this remark. Balashev respectfully ventured to disagree with the French Emperor. "Every country has its own character," said he. "But nowhere in Europe is there anything like that," said Napoleon.
"I do not, and did not, desire war," he continued, "but it has been forced on me. And he began clearly and concisely to explain his reasons for dissatisfaction with the Russian government. Judging by the calmly moderate and amicable tone in which the French Emperor spoke, Balashev was firmly persuaded that he wished for peace and intended to enter into negotiations.
"What I can't understand," he went on, "is that the Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal enemies. That I do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may do the same?" and he turned inquiringly to Balashev, and evidently this thought turned him back on to the track of his morning's anger, which was still fresh in him.
The uninterested and perplexed faces of the marshals showed that they were puzzled as to what Balashev's tone suggested. "If there is a point we don't see it, or it is not at all witty," their expressions seemed to say. So little was his rejoinder appreciated that Napoleon did not notice it at all and naively asked Balashev through what towns the direct road from there to Moscow passed.
Is it true that Moscow is called 'Holy Moscow'? How many churches are there in Moscow?" he asked. And receiving the reply that there were more than two hundred churches, he remarked: "Why such a quantity of churches?" "The Russians are very devout," replied Balashev.
In the figure in which he had to choose two ladies, he whispered to Helene that he meant to choose Countess Potocka who, he thought, had gone out onto the veranda, and glided over the parquet to the door opening into the garden, where, seeing Balashev and the Emperor returning to the veranda, he stood still. They were moving toward the door.
Balashev noticed that his left leg was quivering faster than before and his face seemed petrified in its stern expression. This quivering of his left leg was a thing Napoleon was conscious of. "The vibration of my left calf is a great sign with me," he remarked at a later date. "Such demands as to retreat beyond the Vistula and Oder may be made to a Prince of Baden, but not to me!"
He took Balashev by the arm and crossed the room with him, unconsciously clearing a path seven yards wide as the people on both sides made way for him. Boris noticed Arakcheev's excited face when the sovereign went out with Balashev. Arakcheev looked at the Emperor from under his brow and, sniffing with his red nose, stepped forward from the crowd as if expecting the Emperor to address him.
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