"Your arrival has long been expected and wished for, Sire."
"I should have come sooner," he replied; "you must blame only French valour for my delay."
It is certain that, when crossing the Rhine, he had regretted that he was not able to retire in peace to the midst of his family.
At the Hôtel des Invalides, he found the maimed soldiers who had defeated him at Austerlitz: they were silent and gloomy; one heard nothing save the noise of their wooden legs in their deserted yard and their denuded church. Alexander was touched by this noise of brave men: he ordered that twelve Russian guns should be given back to them.
A proposal was made to him to change the name of the Pont d'Austerlitz:
"No," he said, "it is enough for me to have crossed the bridge with my army."
Alexander had something calm and sad about him. He went about Paris, on horse-back or on foot, without a suite and without affectation. He appeared astonished at his triumph; his almost melting gaze wandered over a population whom he seemed to regard as superior to himself: one would have said that he thought himself a Barbarian among us, even as a Roman felt shame-faced in Athens. Perhaps, also, he reflected that these same Frenchmen had appeared in his fired capital; that his soldiers, in their turn, were masters of Paris, in which he might have been able to find again some of those now extinguished torches by which Moscow was freed and consumed. This destiny, these changing fortunes, this common misery of peoples and of kings were bound to make a profound impression upon a mind so religious as his.
*
What was the victor of the Borodino doing? So soon as he had heard of Alexander's resolution, he had sent orders to Major Maillard de Lescourt of the Artillery to blow up the Grenelle powder-magazine: Rostopschin had set fire to Moscow, but he had first sent away the inhabitants. From Fontainebleau, to which he had returned, Napoleon marched to Villejuif; thence he threw a glance over Paris: foreign soldiers were guarding its gates; the conqueror remembered the days in which his grenadiers kept watch on the ramparts of Berlin, Moscow, and Vienna.
Events destroy other events; how poor a thing to-day appears to us the grief of Henry IV. learning of the death of Gabrielle at Villejuif, and returning to Fontainebleau! Bonaparte also returned to that solitude; he was awaited there only by the memory of his august prisoner: the captive of peace[134] had gone from the palace in order to leave it free for the captive of war, so swiftly does "misfortune" fill up its "places."