This came to us as a very great surprise.
It is true that we had had a terrible time in the city, which was now become a ruin, the convicts having burned down a great part of it; but we had learned to make the best of affairs and what with our plunder and our pleasures the time went merrily enough. I myself was perhaps the hardest-worked man in the regiment. So many people were burned by the fires in Moscow, so many were injured in the street brawls, that the hospitals were quite full, and I rarely knew a moment of leisure.
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.
II
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.