d keep me from
such a disgrace. Reply to Caulaincourt since you wish it, but tell him
that I reject this treaty. I prefer to run the uttermost risks of
war." He threw himself on his camp bed. Maret waited by his side, and
gained from him in calmer moments permission to write to Caulaincourt
in terms that allowed the negotiation to proceed. At dawn on the 9th
Maret came back hoping to gain assent to despatches that he had been
drawing up during the night. To his surprise he found the Emperor
stretched out over large charts, compass in hand. "Ah, there you are,"
was his greeting; "now it's a question of very different matters. I am
going to beat Bluecher: if I succeed, the state of affairs will
entirely change, and then we will see."

The tension of his feelings at this time, when rage and desperation
finally gave way to a fixed resolve to stake all on a blow at
Bluecher's flank, finds expression in a phrase which has been omitted
from the official correspondence.[412] In one of the five letters
which he wrote to Joseph on the 9th, he remarked: "Pray the Madonna of
armies to be for us: Louis, who is a saint, may engage to give her a
lighted candle." A curiously sarcastic touch, probably due to his
annoyance at the _Misereres_ and "prayers forty hours long" at Paris
which he bade his Ministers curtail. Or was it a passing flash of that
religious sentiment which he professed in his declining years?

He certainly counted on victory over Bluecher. A week earlier, he had
foreseen the chance that that leader would expose his flank: on the
7th he charged Marmont to occupy Sezanne, where he would be strongly
supported; on the afternoon of the 9th he set out from Nogent to
reinforce his Marshal; and on the morrow Marmont and Ney fell upon one
of Bluecher's scattered columns at Champaubert. It was a corps of
Russians, less than 5,000 strong, with no horsemen and but twenty-four
cannon; the Muscovites offered a stout resistance, but only 1,500
escaped.[413] Bluecher's line of march was now cut in twain. He himself
was at Vertus with the last column; his foremost corps, under Sacken,
was west of Montmirail, while Yorck was far to the north of that
village observing Macdonald's movements along the Chateau-Thierry
road.

The Emperor with 20,000 men might therefore hope to destroy these
corps piecemeal. Leaving Marmont along with Grouchy's horse to hold
Bluecher in check on the east, he struck westwards against Sacken's
Russians nea