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however, the French were in full retreat down the road from Châlons to Bergères which passes near Fère-Champenoise. By now they were surrounded not only by Korff’s men but also by the much more formidable Ilarion Vasilchikov. In all, the Russians had 4,000 cavalry and three batteries of horse artillery. The French generals abandoned their baggage train in mid-afternoon but even this did not save them. Already having exhausted themselves and suffered heavy casualties against Korff and Vasilchikov, their position became hopeless when their retreat took them straight into the arms of the main army’s cavalry and horse artillery at Fère-Champenoise. In the end the entire column was killed or taken prisoner.

The battle of Fère-Champenoise is often described as a tale of French heroism. At one level this is entirely just. Pacthod and Amey’s National Guardsmen showed a courage, discipline and endurance of which veterans would have been proud. Not all of Marmont and Mortier’s regiments did as well, however. Moreover, the achievement of the allied cavalry was also remarkable. Sixteen thousand horsemen, of whom three-quarters were Russian, had defeated 23,000 French troops, most of them infantry, killing or capturing half of them and taking almost all their guns. The battle of Fère-Champenoise is well compared to Dmitry Neverovsky’s desperate fight against Marshal Murat at Krasnyi in August 1812, though the numerical odds against Neverovsky were much greater. Like the French at Fère-Champenoise, a large proportion of Neverovsky’s men had been new recruits who showed great courage and discipline during their first battle. The Russian generals succeeded at Fère-Champenoise where Murat failed at Krasnyi partly because, unlike him, they got their horse artillery to the battlefield. They also coordinated their attacks and adapted their tactics to the terrain much more skilfully.28

With Marmont and Mortier in flight, the road to Paris was open. The only real chance of defending the capital was if Napoleon and his army could return in time. Even if the emperor arrived on his own he was likely to galvanize and coordinate the defence, and overawe potential traitors in the city. Not until 27 March, however, was Napoleon aware of the fact that he had been tricked and that the enemy armies were advancing on Paris. By now the allies had three days’ march on him. After consulting with Caulaincourt, Bassano and his marshals he decided that he must abandon his assault on the allied rear and race back to save his capital, but it was too late. By the time he approached the city in the late evening of 30 March the battle of Paris had been lost and his capital was on the point of surrender. Worse still, Napoleon’s enemies in Paris were stirring. On the emperor’s orders his wife, son and government left Paris on the eve of the battle so as not to be captured. With all the key figures in the Bonapartist regime gone and the allies on the point of occupying Paris, the moment had arrived for Napoleon’s opponents to seize the initiative. Along with all other top officials, Talleyrand had been ordered to leave Paris but he contrived to evade these orders without seeming openly to flout Napoleon’s authority.29

On the other side of the lines, now only a few kilometres away, was Karl Nesselrode, to whom Talleyrand had slipped so much secret advice and information in the years before 1812. When Napoleon launched his assault on allied communications on 22 March, almost all the allied diplomats had been cut off from headquarters and had scuttled southwards to safety, to the undisguised glee of many of the generals, who were glad to be rid of them. The one exception was Nesselrode, who had got away just in time from Chaumont to find his way back to Alexander’s side. On 28 March, the very day that it was decided that Napoleon’s empress, son and government should leave the capital, Nesselrode wrote to his wife from a village near Paris that he was enjoying ‘an exquisite capon’, which Marshal Ney’s wife had sent to her husband from Paris along with some bottles of