l with our
soldiers, protected by some, and tolerated, or, rather, scarcely
remarked by others.

About ten thousand of the enemy's troops were in the same predicament.
For several days they wandered about among us, free, and some of them
even still armed. Our soldiers met these vanquished Russians without the
slightest animosity, and without thinking of making them prisoners;
either that they considered the war at an end, or from thoughtlessness
or pity, or because, when not in battle, the French delight in having no
enemies. They suffered them to share their fires; nay, more, they
allowed them to pillage in their company. But when some degree of order
was restored, or, rather, when the officers had organized this marauding
as a regular system of forage, the great number of these Russian
stragglers attracted notice, and orders were given to secure them; but
seven or eight thousand had already escaped. It was not long before we
had to fight them.

On entering the city the emperor was struck by a sight still more
extraordinary: a few houses scattered here and there among the ruins
were all that was left of the mighty Moscow. The smell issuing from this
vast city, overthrown, burned, and calcined, was horrible. Heaps of
ashes, and, at intervals, fragments of walls or half-demolished pillars,
were now the only vestiges that marked the sites of streets.

In the suburbs were found a few Russians of both sexes, covered with
garments scorched and blackened by the fire. They flitted like spectres
among the ruins; some of them were scratching up the earth in gardens in
quest of vegetables, while others were disputing with the crows for the
relics of the dead animals which their army had left behind. Farther on,
others again were seen plunging into the Moskwa to bring out some of the
grain which had been thrown into it by command of Rostopchin, and which
they devoured without preparation, soured and spoiled as it was.

Meanwhile the sight of the booty in the camps, where everything was yet
wanting, inflamed the soldiers, whom a sense of duty or stricter
officers had hitherto kept with their colors. They murmured. "Why were
they to be kept back? Why were they to perish by famine and want, when
everything was within their reach? Was it right to allow the enemy's
fires to destroy what might be saved? Why was such respect to be paid to
the conflagration?" They added, that "as the inhabitants of Moscow had
not only abandoned, but e