War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [464]
“They even say,” said l’homme de beaucoup de mérite, who did not yet have courtly tact, “that his excellency laid down as an absolute condition that the sovereign himself not come to the army.”
As soon as he said it, Prince Vassily and Anna Pavlovna turned away from him in an instant and looked at each other sadly, with a sigh at his naïveté.
VII
While this was going on in Petersburg, the French had already passed Smolensk and were moving closer and closer to Moscow. Napoleon’s historian Thiers, like his other historians, says, trying to justify his hero, that Napoleon was lured to the walls of Moscow involuntarily. He is right, as all historians are right who seek explanations of historical events in the will of one man; he is right, just as the Russian historians are right who maintain that Napoleon was lured to Moscow by the skill of the Russian commanders. Here, besides the law of retrospection, which presents all the past as a preparation for the accomplished fact, there is also a reciprocity that confuses the whole matter. A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced that he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at every step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more complex is the game of war, which takes place in certain conditions of time and where no single will is guiding lifeless mechanisms, but everything is the result of numberless collisions of various wills?
After Smolensk, Napoleon sought a battle beyond Dorogobuzh at the Vyazma, then at Tsarevo-Zaimishche; but it turned out that, owing to numberless collisions of circumstances, the Russians could not accept battle before Borodino, seventy-five miles from Moscow. From the Vyazma Napoleon gave orders to move directly upon Moscow.
Moscou, la capitale asiatique de ce grand empire, la ville sacrée des peuples d’Alexandre, Moscou avec ses innombrables églises en forme de pagodes chinoises!*443 This Moscou gave Napoleon’s imagination no rest. On the march from Vyazma to Tsarevo-Zaimishche, Napoleon rode on his bobtailed light bay ambler, accompanied by his guards, bodyguard, pages, and adjutants. The chief of staff, Berthier, had dropped behind in order to interrogate a Russian prisoner his cavalry had taken. Accompanied by his translator, Lelorgne d’Ideville, he galloped to catch up with Napoleon and with a merry face reined in his horse.
“Eh bien?” said Napoleon.
“Un cosaque de Platow says that Platov’s corps is marching to join the main army, that Kutuzov has been appointed commander in chief. Trés intelligent et bavard!”*444
Napoleon smiled and told them to give this Cossack a horse and bring him to him. He wanted to talk with him personally. Several adjutants galloped off, and an hour later, Lavrushka, Denisov’s serf, whom he had let go to Rostov, in an orderly’s jacket, on a French cavalry saddle, with a sly and drunken, merry face, rode up to Napoleon. Napoleon told him to ride beside him and began to ask:
“You’re a Cossack?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“Le cosaque ignorant la compagnie dans laquelle il se trouvait, car la simplicité de Napoléon n’avait rien qui put révéler, à une imagination orientale la présence d’un souverain, s’entretenait avec la plus extrême familiarité des affaires de la guerre actuelle,”†445 says Thiers, recounting this episode.12 In fact, Lavrushka had received a whipping the day before for getting drunk and leaving his master without dinner, and had been sent to a village to get some chickens, and there, carried away by pillaging, had been taken prisoner by the French. Lavrushka was one of those coarse, insolent lackeys who had been around, who considered it their duty to do everything with meanness and cunning, who were ready to perform any service for their master, and who cunningly guess their master’s bad thoughts, especially the vain and paltry ones.
Finding himself in the company of