or
was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his guest,
whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if either of the
two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he not bear alone
the burden of their dreadful sorrow?

After the colonel's departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had formed
a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his darling.
Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in preparing for
his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park and inundated
during the winter the marshes on either side of it, giving it some
resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the heights
above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror. The colonel
collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of his memory, he
copied in his park the shore where General Eble destroyed the bridge.
He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned them, leaving their
charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water from shore to shore.
Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like those of which the raft
was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and clothing of every grade,
and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them; he erected huts and cabins
for the purpose of burning them. In short, he forgot nothing that might
recall that most awful of all scenes, and he succeeded.

Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the Beresina.
This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of his army
comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once. Monsieur
de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic imitation,
which was talked of in several Parisian circles as a proof of insanity.

Early in January, 1820, the colonel drove in a carriage, the very
counterpart of the one in which he had driven the Comte and Comtesse de
Vandieres from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses, too, were like those he
had gone, at the peril of his life, to fetch from the Russian outposts.
He himself wore the soiled fantastic clothing, the same weapons, as on
the 29th of November, 1812. He had let his beard grow, also his hair,
which was tangled and matted, and his face was neglected, so that
nothing might be wanting to represent the