My nephew, Captain Léon, was situated very differently. There was hardly a day that he did not tell me of some new adventure with a woman, and when I would reproach him he reminded me that I had been young myself and should know the habits of a soldier better.
This was in Moscow after Valerie St. Antoine had done us so great a service upon a memorable night. Though Léon watched for her and offered five hundred francs to any man who would tell him of her whereabouts, he never saw her again while we were in the city, and when we did meet her this great army of ours was but a skeleton.
How little we foresaw the doom awaiting us when we quitted Moscow on that sunny October day!
Everything went as merry as a marriage bell then. We knew that we were returning to our own France and we cared not a scudo for the reason. The Emperor, we said, had been too much for these wily Russians, and they had surrendered everything. The truth was far otherwise--it was the Russians who had been too clever for us, and burning down their beautiful city, had left us to a woeful fate. Of this I am now about to speak to you.
The story begins with a woman, as it began aforetime when we entered the city.
There had been three days of beautiful weather when we of the Guard rode in fine spirits toward our own country and gave no thought but to the plunder we were carrying out of Russia.
I myself had many a good thing in the wagon, and I remember well a great gold plate set with diamonds, which had been torn from Ivan's Cross when we tried to pull it down from the cathedral in the Kremlin.
The men themselves were loaded with pretty trinkets, and carried furs enough to clothe Paris. The costliest skins--ermine and sable and lion and bear--were used for every conceivable purpose; and it is no wonder that the army was followed by thousands of Jews, waiting to buy these treasures when their owners should be weary of them.
Truly would I say that such a scene as our exit from Moscow was never written before in the story of warfare, nor will ever be written again.
Imagine a great white wooded plain, a sandy road at the heart of it, and upon this road an interminable procession of carts and wagons to carry the baggage of the Grand Army.