ives, and
to fatten a foreign soil with their blood?" They added that "this was a
robbery of their native land, which while living it is our duty to
cultivate, to defend, and to embellish; and to which, after our death,
we owe our bodies, which we received from it, which it has fed, and
which, in their turn, ought to feed it."

The emperor was not ignorant of these warnings, but he would not suffer
his resolution to be shaken by them. The uneasiness which had again
seized him betrayed itself in angry orders. It was then that he caused
the churches of the Kremlin to be stripped of everything that could
serve for a trophy to the Grand Army. These objects, devoted to
destruction by the Russians themselves, belonged, he said, to the
conquerors, by the double right conferred by victory and by the
conflagration.

It required long efforts to remove the gigantic cross from the steeple
of Ivan the Great, to the possession of which the Russians attached the
salvation of their empire. The emperor determined that it should adorn
the dome of the Invalides[159] at Paris. During the work it was remarked
that a great number of ravens kept flying round this cross, and that
Napoleon, weary of their hoarse croaking, exclaimed that "it seemed as
if these flocks of ill-omened birds meant to defend it." We cannot
pretend to tell all that he thought in this critical situation, but it
is well known that he was accessible to every kind of presentiment.

His nights, in particular, became irksome to him. He passed part of them
with Count Daru. It was then only that he admitted the danger of his
situation. "From Wilna to Moscow, what submission, what point of
support, of rest, or of retreat, marked his power? It was a vast, bare,
and desert field of battle, in which his diminished army was
imperceptible, insulated, and, as it were, lost in the horrors of an
immense void. In this country of foreign manners and religion he had not
conquered a single individual: he was, in fact, master only of the
ground on which he stood. That which he had just quitted and left
behind him was no more his than that which he had not reached.
Insufficient for these vast deserts, he was lost, as it were, in their
immense space."

He then reviewed the different resolutions of which he still had the
choice. "People imagined," he said, "that he had nothing to do but
march, without considering that it would take a month to refit his army
and to evacuate his hospitals;