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By Root 3881 0

with the sovereign, Chichagov, who considered himself Kutuzov’s benefactor, because, when he was sent in the year eleven to conclude a peace with the Turks, over Kutuzov’s head, and found out that peace had already been concluded, he acknowledged before the sovereign that the merit of having concluded the peace belonged to Kutuzov—this same Chichagov was the first to meet Kutuzov in Vilno, at the castle where Kutuzov was to stay. Chichagov, in a naval undress uniform, with a dagger, holding his peaked cap under his arm, handed Kutuzov a formal report and the keys to the city. That contemptuously respectful attitude towards the senile old man expressed itself in the highest degree in the whole manner of Chichagov, who already knew the accusations made against Kutuzov.

While talking with Chichagov, Kutuzov told him, by the way, that the carriages with sets of dishes captured from him in Borisov were safe and would be returned to him.

“C’est pour me dire que je n’ai pas sur quoi manger…Je puis au contraire vous fournir de tout dans le cas même où vous voudriez donner des dîners,”*744 Chichagov said, flushing, with each of his words wishing to prove his rightness, and therefore supposing that Kutuzov was concerned with the same thing. Kutuzov smiled his subtle, perceptive smile and, shrugging his shoulders, replied:

“Ce n’est que pour vous dire ce que je dis.”†745

Contrary to the will of the sovereign, Kutuzov stationed the greater part of the troops in Vilno. Kutuzov, as those around him said, went extraordinarily to seed and became weaker physically during this stay in Vilno. He was reluctant to occupy himself with army matters, leaving everything to his generals and, awaiting the sovereign, gave himself up to a dissipated life.

Leaving Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite—Count Tolstoy, Prince Volkonsky, Arakcheev, and others—the sovereign arrived in Vilno on the eleventh of December and drove straight to the castle in his traveling sleigh. At the castle, despite the severe frost, stood several hundred generals and staff officers in full dress uniform and the honor guard of the Semyonovsky regiment.

A courier, galloping up to the castle with a sweating troika ahead of the sovereign, shouted: “He’s coming!” Konovnitsyn rushed to the front hall to report to Kutuzov, who was waiting in the porter’s little lodge.

A minute later the old man’s large, fat figure, in full dress uniform, with all his regalia covering his chest, and a sash tied tightly around his belly, came waddling out to the porch. Kutuzov put on his service cap, took his gloves in his hand, and, negotiating the steps with difficulty, went sideways down the stairs and took in his hand the report prepared for presentation to the sovereign.

Scurrying about, whispers, another troika desperately flying by, and all eyes turned to the jolting sleigh in which the figures of the sovereign and Volkonsky could already be seen.

From a habit of fifty years, all this had a physically agitating effect on the old general; he patted himself all over with anxious haste, straightened his cap, and, just as the sovereign, stepping out of the sleigh, raised his eyes to him, he at once braced himself, stood to attention, handed over the report, and began speaking in his measured, ingratiating voice.

The sovereign looked Kutuzov up and down with a quick glance, frowned momentarily, but then, getting the better of himself at once, went up and, spreading his arms, embraced the old general. Again, from an old, habitual impression and in relation to his innermost thoughts, this embrace, as usual, affected Kutuzov: he sobbed.

The sovereign greeted the officers, the Semyonovsky guard, and, shaking the old man’s hand once more, went with him into the castle.

Left alone with the field marshal, the sovereign voiced to him his displeasure with the slowness of the pursuit, with the mistakes at Krasnoe and the Berezina, and informed him of his considerations about the future campaign abroad. Kutuzov made no objections or comments. The same submissive and vacant expression