The general set out, and reached the advanced posts on the 5th of October. Hostilities were instantly suspended, the interview granted; but Wolkonsky, aide-de-camp to Alexander, and Beningsen were there without Kutusoff. Wilson asserts, that the Russian generals and officers, suspecting their commander, and accusing him of weakness, had raised a cry of treason, and that the latter had not dared to leave his camp.

Lauriston's instructions purported that he was to address himself to no one but Kutusoff. He therefore peremptorily rejected any intermediate communication, and seizing, as he said, this occasion for breaking off a negotiation which he disapproved, he retired, in spite of all the solicitations of Wolkonsky, and determined to return to Moscow. In that case, no doubt, Napoleon, exasperated, would have fallen upon Kutusoff, overthrown him and destroyed his army, as yet very incomplete, and have forced him into a peace. In case of less decisive success, he would at least have been able to retire without loss upon his reinforcements.

Beningsen unfortunately desired an interview with Murat. Lauriston paused. The chief of the Russian staff, an abler negotiator than soldier, strove to charm the new king by demonstrations of respect; to seduce him by praises; to deceive him with smooth words, breathing nothing but a weariness of war and the hope of peace: and Murat, tired of battles, anxious respecting their result, and as it is said, regretting his throne, now that he had no hope of a better, suffered himself to be charmed, seduced and deceived.

Beningsen was equally successful in persuading his own commander, and the leader of our vanguard; he sent in great haste for Lauriston, and had him conducted to the Russian camp, where Kutusoff was waiting for him at midnight. The interview began ill. Konownitzin and Wolkonsky wished to be present. This shocked the French general: he insisted that they should retire, and they complied.

As soon as Lauriston was alone with Kutusoff, he explained his motives and his object, and applied for a safe-conduct to Petersburg. The Russian general replied, that a compliance with this demand exceeded his powers; but he immediately proposed to send Wolkonsky with the letter from Napoleon to Alexander, and offered an armistice till the return of that officer. He accompanied these proposals with pacific protestations, which were repeated by all his generals.

"According to their account," they all deplored the continuance of the war. And for what reason? Their nations, like their Emperors, ought to esteem, to love, and to be allies of one another. It was their ardent wish that a speedy peace might arrive from Petersburg. Wolkonsky could not make "haste enough." They pressed round Lauriston, drawing him aside, taking him by the hand, and lavishing upon him those caressing manners which they have inherited from Asia.

It was soon demonstrated that the chief point in which they were all agreed was to deceive Murat and his Emperor; and in this they succeeded. These details transported Napoleon with joy. Credulous from hope, perhaps from despair, he was for some moments dazzled by these appearances; eager to escape from the inward feeling which oppressed him, he seemed desirous to deaden it by resigning himself to an expansive joy. He summoned all his generals; he triumphantly "announced to them a very speedy peace. They had but to wait another fortnight. None but himself was acquainted with the Russian character. On the receipt of his letter, Petersburg would be full of bonfires."

But the armistice proposed by Kutusoff was unsatisfactory to him, and he ordered Murat to break it instantly; but notwithstanding, it continued to be observed, the cause of which is unknown.

This armistice was a singular one. If either party wished to break it, three hours notice was to be sufficient. It was confined to the fronts of the two camps, but did not extend to their flanks. Such at least was the interpretation put upon it by the Russians. We could not bring up a convoy, or send out a foraging party, without fighting; so that the war continued everywhere, excepting where it could be favourable to us.

In the first of the succeeding days, Murat took it into his head to show himself at the enemy's advanced posts. There, he was gratified by the notice which his fine person, his reputation for bravery, and his rank procured him. The Russian officers took good care not to displease him; they were profuse of all the marks of respect calculated to strengthen his illusion. He could give his orders to their vedettes just as he did to the French. If he took a fancy to any part of the ground which they occupied, they cheerfully gave it up to him.

Some Cossack chiefs even went so far as to affect enthusiasm, and to tell him that they had ceased to acknowledge any other as Emperor but him who reigned at Moscow. Murat believed for a moment that they would no longer fight against him. He went even farther. Napoleon was heard to exclaim, while reading his letters, "Murat, King of the Cossacks! What folly!" The most extravagant ideas were conceived by men on whom fortune had lavished all sorts of favours.

As for the Emperor, who could scarcely be deceived, he had but a few moments of a factitious joy. He soon complained "that an annoying warfare of partizans hovered around him; that notwithstanding all these pacific demonstrations, he was sensible that bodies of Cossacks were prowling on his flanks and in his rear. Had not one hundred and fifty dragoons of his old guard been surprised and routed, by a number of these barbarians? And this two days after the armistice, on the road to Mojaisk, on his line of operation, that by which the army communicated with its magazines, its reinforcements, its depÔts, and himself with Europe!"

In fact two convoys had just fallen into the enemy's hands on that road: one through the negligence of its commander, who put an end to his life in despair; and the other through the cowardice of an officer, who was about to be punished when the retreat commenced. To the destruction of the army he owed his escape.

Our soldiers, and especially our cavalry, were obliged every morning to go to a great distance in quest of provisions for the evening and the next day; and as the environs of Moscow and Vinkowo became gradually more and more drained, they were daily necessitated to extend their excursions. Both men and horses returned worn out with fatigue, that is to say such of them as returned at all; for we had to fight for every bushel of rye, and for every truss of forage. It was a series of incessant surprises, skirmishes, and losses. The peasantry took a part in it. They punished with death such of their number as the prospect of gain had allured to our camp with provisions. Others set fire to their own villages, to drive our foragers out of them, and to give them up to the Cossacks whom they had previously summoned, and who kept us there in a state of siege.

It was the peasantry also who took VereÏa, a town in the neighbourhood of Moscow. One of their priests is said to have planned and executed this coup-de-main. He armed the inhabitants, obtained some troops from Kutusoff; then on the 10th of October, before daybreak, he caused the signal of a false attack to be given in one quarter, while in another he himself rushed upon our palisades, destroyed them, penetrated into the town, and put the whole garrison to the sword.

Thus the war was every where; in our front, on our flanks and in our rear: the army was weakening, and the enemy becoming daily more enterprising. This conquest was destined to fare like many others, which are won in the mass, and lost in detail.

Murat himself at length grew uneasy. In these daily skirmishes he saw half of the remnant of his cavalry melted away. At the advanced posts, or on meeting with our officers, those of the Russians, either from weariness, vanity, or military frankness carried to indiscretion, exaggerated the disasters which threatened us. They showed us those "wild-looking horses, scarcely at all broken in, whose long manes swept the dust of the plain. Did not this tell us that a numerous cavalry was joining them from all quarters, while ours was gradually perishing? Did not the continual discharges of fire-arms within their line apprise us that a multitude of recruits were there training under favour of the armistice?"

And in fact, notwithstanding the long journies which they had to make, all these recruits joined the army. There was no occasion to defer calling them together as in other years, till deep snows, obstructing all the roads excepting the high road, rendered their desertion impossible. Not one failed to obey the national appeal; all Russia rose: mothers, it was said, wept for joy on learning that their sons had been selected for soldiers: they hastened to acquaint them with this glorious intelligence, and even accompanied them to see them marked with the sign of the Crusaders, to hear them cry, 'Tis the will of God!

The Russian officers added, "that they were particularly astonished at our security on the approach of their mighty winter, which was their natural and most formidable ally, and which they expected every moment: they pitied us and urged us to fly. In a fortnight, your nails will drop off, and your arms will fall from your benumbed and half-dead fingers."

The language of some of the Cossack chiefs was also remarkable. They asked our officers, "if they had not, in their own country, corn enough, air enough, graves enough—in short, room enough to live and die? Why then did they come so far from home to throw away their lives and to fatten a foreign soil with their blood?" They added, that "this was a robbery of their native land, which, while living, it is our duty to cultivate, to defend and to embellish; and to which after our death we owe our bodies, which we received from it, which it has fed, and which in their turn ought to feed it."

The Emperor was not ignorant of these warnings, but he would not suffer his resolution to be shaken by them. The uneasiness which had again seized him betrayed itself in angry orders. It was then that he caused the churches of the Kremlin to be stripped of every thing that could serve for a trophy to the grand army. These objects, devoted to destruction by the Russians themselves, belonged, he said, to the conquerors by the two-fold right conferred by victory, and still more by the conflagration.

It required long efforts to remove the gigantic cross from the steeple of Ivan the Great, to the possession of which the Russians attached the salvation of their empire. The Emperor determined that it should adorn the dome of the invalids, at Paris. During the work it was remarked that a great number of ravens kept flying round this cross, and that Napoleon, weary of their hoarse croaking, exclaimed, that "it seemed as if these flocks of ill-omened birds meant to defend it." We cannot pretend to tell all that he thought in this critical situation, but it is well known that he was accessible to every kind of presentiment.

His daily excursions, always illumined by a brilliant sun, in which he strove himself to perceive and to make others recognize his star, did not amuse him. To the sullen silence of inanimate Moscow was superadded that of the surrounding deserts, and the still more menacing silence of Alexander. It was not the faint sound of the footsteps of our soldiers wandering in this vast sepulchre, that could rouse our Emperor from his reverie, and snatch him from his painful recollections and still more painful anticipations.

His nights in particular became irksome to him. He passed part of them with Count Daru. It was then only that he admitted the danger of his situation. "From Wilna to Moscow what submission, what point of support, rest or retreat, marks his power? It is a vast, bare and desert field of battle, in which his diminished army is imperceptible, insulated, and as it were lost in the horrors of an immense void. In this country of foreign manners and religion, he has not conquered a single individual; he is in fact master only of the ground on which he stands. That which he has just quitted and left behind him is no more his than that which he has not yet reached. Insufficient for these vast deserts, he is lost as it were in their immense space."

He then reviewed the different resolutions of which he still had the choice. "People imagined," he said, "that he had nothing to do but march, without considering that it would take a month to refit his army and to evacuate his hospitals; that if he relinquished his wounded, the Cossacks would celebrate daily triumphs over his sick and his stragglers. He would appear to fly. All Europe would resound with the report! Europe, which envied him, which was seeking a rival under whom to rally, and which imagined that it had found such a rival in Alexander."

Then appreciating all the power which he derived from the notion of his infallibility, he shuddered at the idea of giving it the first blow. "What a frightful series of dangerous wars would date from his first retrograde step! Let not then his inactivity be censured! As if I did not know," added he, "that in a military point of view Moscow is of no value! But Moscow is not a military position, it is a political position. People look upon me as general there, when in fact I am Emperor!" He then exclaimed that "in politics a person ought never to recede, never to retrograde, never to admit himself to be wrong, as it lessened his consideration; that when mistaken, he ought to persevere, in order to give him the appearance of being in the right."

On this account he adhered to his own opinion with that tenacity which, on other occasions, was his best quality, but in this case his worst defect.

His distress meanwhile increased. He knew that he could not rely on the Prussian army: an intimation from too authentic a source, addressed to Berthier, extinguished his confidence in the support of the Austrians. He was sensible that Kutusoff was playing with him, but he had gone so far, that he could neither advance nor stay where he was, nor retreat, nor fight with honour and success. Thus alternately impelled and held back by all that can decide and dissuade, he remained upon those ashes, ceasing to hope, but continuing to desire.

The letter of which Lauriston was the bearer had been dispatched on the 6th of October; the answer to it could scarcely arrive before the 20th; and yet in spite of so many threatening demonstrations, the pride, the policy, and perhaps the health of Napoleon induced him to pursue the worst of all courses, that of waiting for this answer, and of trusting to time which was destroying him. Daru, like his other grandees, was astonished to find in him no longer that prompt decision, variable and rapid as the circumstances that called it forth; they asserted, that his genius could no longer accommodate itself to them; they placed it to the account of his natural obstinacy, which led to his elevation, and was likely to cause his downfall.

But in this extremely critical warlike position, which by its complication with a political position, became the most delicate which ever existed, it was not to be expected that a character like his, which had hitherto been so great from its unshaken constancy, would make a speedy renunciation of the object which he had proposed to himself ever since he left Witepsk.