I saw Brienne, the Emperor was
received as a sovereign by a noble family who fifteen years before had
welcomed him as a protege. He had there revived the happiest
remembrances of his childhood and youth; and in comparing himself in 1805
with what he had been at the Ecole Militaire had spoken with pride of the
path he had trod. In 1814, on the 31st of January, the end to which this
path was tending began to be seen. It is not that I wish to announce
myself as having foreseen the Emperor's fall, for I did not go so far as
that. Accustomed to see him trust to his star, the greater part of those
who surrounded him trusted it no less than he; but nevertheless we could
not conceal from ourselves that great changes had taken place. To delude
ourselves in this respect it would have been necessary to close our eyes
that we might neither see nor hear this multitude of foreigners, whom we
had until now seen only in their own country, and who, in their turn,
were now in our midst.

At each step, in fact, we found terrible proofs of the enemy's presence.
After taking possession of the towns and villages, they had arrested the
inhabitants, maltreated them with saber-strokes and the butt ends of
their guns, stripping them of their clothing, and compelling those to
follow them whom they thought capable of serving as guides on their
march; and if they were not guided as they expected they killed with the
sword or shot their unfortunate prisoners. Everywhere the inhabitants
were made to furnish provisions, drink, cattle, forage, in a word,
everything that could be useful to an army making enormous requisitions;
and when they had exhausted all the resources of their victims, they
finished their work of destruction by pillage and burning. The
Prussians, and above all the Cossacks, were remarkable for their brutal
ferocity. Sometimes these hideous savages entered the houses by main
force, shared among themselves everything that fell into their hands,
loaded their horses with the plunder, and broke to pieces what they could
not carry away. Sometimes, not finding sufficient to satisfy their
greed, they broke down the doors and windows, demolished the ceiling in
order to tear out the beams, and made of these pieces and the furniture,
which was too heavy to be carried away, a fire, which being communicated
to the roofs of neighboring houses consumed in a moment the dwellings of
the unhappy inhabitants, and forced them to take refuge in the woods