MARIE LOUISE
And are they terrible?
NAPOLÉON
Have you not read the last-sent bulletin,
Dear friend?
MARIE LOUISE
No recent bulletin has come.
NAPOLÉON
Ah—I must have outstripped it on the way!
MARIE LOUISE
And where is the Grand Army?
NAPOLÉON
Oh—that’s gone.
MARIE LOUISE
Gone? But—gone where?
NAPOLÉON
Gone all to nothing, dear.
MARIE LOUISE [incredulously]
But some six hundred thousand I saw pass
Through Dresden Russia-wards?
NAPOLÉON [flinging himself into a chair]
Well, those men lie—
Or most of them—in layers of bleaching bones
’Twixt here and Moscow.... I have been subdued;
But by the elements; and them alone.
Not Russia, but God’s sky has conquered me!
[With an appalled look she sits beside him.]
From the sublime to the ridiculous
There’s but a step!—I have been saying it
All through the leagues of my long journey home—
And that step has been passed in this affair!...
Yes, briefly, it is quite ridiculous,
Whichever way you look at it.—Ha, ha!