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By Root 3740 0

of the French emperor. He mentally appointed a governor who would be able to attract the populace to him. Having learned that there were many charitable institutions in Moscow, he decided in his imagination that all those institutions would be showered with his favors. He thought that, as in Africa he had had to sit in a burnous in a mosque, so in Moscow he had to be merciful like the tsars. And, so as to definitively touch the hearts of the Russians, he, like all Frenchmen, who could not imagine anything sentimental without mentioning ma chère, ma tendre, ma pauvre mère, he decided that he would write in large letters on all those institutions: Établissement dédié à ma chère Mère. “No, simply: Maison de ma Mère,”*545 he decided to himself. “But can it be that I’m in Moscow? Yes, there she is in front of me. But why is the deputation from the city so long in appearing?” he thought.

Meanwhile at the back of the emperor’s suite a worried debate was going on in whispers among his generals and marshals. Those sent for the deputation had come back with the news that Moscow was empty, that everyone had left. The faces of the debating men were pale and worried. They were frightened not by the fact that Moscow had been abandoned by its inhabitants (important as that event might seem), but by how to announce it to the emperor, how, without putting his majesty into that dreadful position known to the French as le ridicule, to announce to him that he had been awaiting the boyars so long for nothing, that there were crowds of drunken men and nothing else. Some said that at least some sort of deputation had to be assembled; others argued against that opinion and insisted that they had to prepare the emperor cautiously and intelligently and tell him the truth.

“Il faudra le lui dire tout de même…” said the gentlemen of the suite. “Mais, messieurs†546 …” The situation was the more difficult in that the emperor, thinking over his plans for magnanimity, was patiently walking up and down in front of the map, occasionally glancing from under his hand at the road to Moscow, and smiling cheerfully and proudly.

“Mais c’est impossible…”‡547 the gentlemen of the suite said, shrugging their shoulders, not daring to utter the terrible word in their minds: le ridicule…

Meanwhile the emperor, tired of vainly waiting and sensing with his actor’s intuition that the majestic moment, having gone on too long, was beginning to lose its majesty, made a sign with his hand. The solitary shot of a signal gun rang out, and the troops that surrounded Moscow on all sides moved into the city through the Tver, Kaluga, and Dorogomilovo gates. Quicker and quicker, overtaking each other, the troops moved at a rapid walk or at a trot, disappearing in the clouds of dust they raised, and filling the air with the merging noise of their cries.

Drawn along by the movement of the troops, Napoleon went with them as far as the Dorogomilovo gate, but there stopped again and, getting off his horse, paced for a long time by the Kamerkollezhsky rampart, awaiting the deputation.

XX

Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, there was still a fiftieth part of all the former inhabitants left in it, but it was empty. It was empty as a dying-out, queenless beehive is empty.

There is no life in a queenless beehive, but to a superficial glance it seems as alive as the others.

In the hot rays of the noonday sun, the bees hover just as merrily around a queenless hive as around the other living hives; from afar it has the same smell of honey; bees fly in and out of it in the same way. But we need only take a closer look at it to realize that there is no longer any life in this hive. The bees do not fly in the same way as in a living hive, the smell is not the same, it is not the same sound that strikes the beekeeper’s ear. To the beekeeper’s tapping on the wall of an ailing hive, instead of the former instantaneous, concerted response, the hissing of tens of thousands of bees, menacingly tucking their behinds under and producing this vital, airy sound by the rapid