care the real
nature of the hostile organism, he would certainly never have ventured
beyond Smolensk in the present year. But he had now merged the thinker
in the conqueror, and--sure sign of coming disaster--his mind no
longer accurately gauged facts, it recast them in its own mould.

By long manipulation of men and events, it had framed a dogma of
personal infallibility. This vice had of late been growing on him
apace. It was apparent even in trifles. The Countess Metternich
describes how, early in 1810, he persisted in saying that Kaunitz was
her brother, in spite of her frequent disclaimers of that honour; and,
somewhat earlier, Marmont noticed with half-amused dismay that when
the Emperor gave a wrong estimate of the numbers of a certain corps,
no correction had the slightest effect on him; his mind always
reverted to the first figure. In weightier matters this peculiarity
was equally noticeable. His clinging to preconceived notions, however
unfair or burdensome they were to Britain, Prussia, or Austria, had
been the underlying cause of his wars with those Powers. And now this
same defect, burnt into his being by the blaze of a hundred victories,
held him to Moscow for five weeks, in the belief that Russia was
stricken unto death, and that the facile Czar whom he had known at
Tilsit would once more bend the knee. An idle hope. "I have learnt to
know him now," said the Czar, "Napoleon or I; I or Napoleon; we cannot
reign side by side." Buoyed up by religious faith and by his people's
heroism, Alexander silently defied the victor of Moscow and rebuked
Kutusoff for receiving the French envoy.

At last, on October 18th, the Russians threw away the scabbard and
surprised Murat's force some forty miles south of Moscow, inflicting a
loss of 3,000 men. But already, a day or two earlier, Napoleon had
realized the futility of his hope of peace and had resolved to
retreat. The only alternative was to winter at Moscow, and he judged
that the state of French and Spanish affairs rendered such a course
perilous. He therefore informed Maret that the Grand Army would go
into winter quarters between the Dnieper and the Dwina.[272]

There is no hint in his letters that he anticipated a disastrous
retreat. The weather hitherto had been "as fine as that at
Fontainebleau in September," and he purposed retiring by a more
southerly route which had not been exhausted by war. Full of
confidence, then, he set out on the 19th, with 115,000