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By Root 3645 0

beating of their wings, there comes in response a scattered buzzing that resonates at various points of the empty hive. The entrance does not give out, as before, a spiritous, fragrant smell of honey and venom, no feeling of the warmth of fullness comes from it, but the smell of honey is mingled with a smell of emptiness and rot. At the entrance there are no more sentinels ready to defend it to the death, their behinds turned up, sounding the alarm. There is no longer that measured and quiet sound, the throb of work, like the sound of seething water, but one hears the discordant, scattered noise of disorder. Black, elongated, honey-smeared robber bees fly in and out of the hive, warily and shiftily; they do not sting, but slip away from danger. Formerly only laden bees flew in and empty bees flew out; but now laden bees fly out. The beekeeper opens the lower chamber and peers into the lower part of the hive. Instead of the black strands of juicy bees, pacified by labor, that formerly hung down to the very bottom, holding each other’s legs and drawing out the wax with an incessant whisper of labor—sleepy, dried-up bees wander absentmindedly in various directions over the bottom and sides of the hive. Instead of a floor neatly plastered with glue and swept by fanning wings, the bottom is covered with crumbs of wax, bee excrement, and bees, half-dead and barely moving their legs or completely dead and not cleared away.

The beekeeper opens the upper chamber and examines the superhive. Instead of solid rows of bees covering all the spaces between the combs and warming the brood, he sees the artful, complex workmanship of the combs, but no longer in the virginal form they used to have. Everything is neglected and dirty. Robbers—the black bees—dart swiftly and stealthily over the works; the native bees, dried-up, shrunken, sluggish, as if old, wander about slowly, hindering nothing, desiring nothing, having lost the awareness of life. Drones, hornets, bumblebees, butterflies beat senselessly against the walls of the hive in their flight. Here and there among the cells with their dead brood and honey, an angry grumbling is occasionally heard from different sides; in one place two bees, cleaning the nest by old habit and memory, assiduous, overstraining, drag away a dead bee or a bumblebee, not knowing themselves why they are doing it. In another corner, another two old bees fight lazily, or clean themselves, or feed each other, not knowing themselves whether they are doing it out of hostility or friendship. In a third place, a crowd of bees, crushing each other, attack some victim and beat and smother it. And the weakened or dead bee slowly, lightly, like a bit of fluff, falls from above into the heap of corpses. The beekeeper opens two central frames so as to see into the nest. Where formerly the entire space was covered by the black circles of thousands of bees sitting tightly back to back, guarding the lofty mysteries of generation, he now sees hundreds of dejected, half-alive and somnolent husks of bees. They are almost all dead, not knowing it themselves, sitting over the sacred thing they were guarding, which is no longer there. They smell of decay and death. Only some of them stir, rise, fly sluggishly, and land on the enemy’s hand, not strong enough to die stinging him—the rest, dead, sift down lightly, like fish scales. The beekeeper closes the frames, marks the hive with chalk, and, when he finds time, breaks it open and burns it out.

So Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, restless, and scowling, paced back and forth by the Kamerkollezhsky rampart, awaiting what to his mind was a necessary, though external, observance of propriety—a deputation.

In various corners of Moscow only a few people still stirred meaninglessly, keeping to old habits and not understanding what they were doing.

When with due caution it was announced to Napoleon that Moscow was empty, he glared angrily at the one who announced it and, turning away, went on pacing in silence.

“Bring my carriage,” he said. He got into the carriage beside the