cane he had his hair elegantly dressed, and powdered
with the nicest care, amusing himself in this manner with all our
calamities, and with the fury of the elements which assailed him.

Near him were officers of scientific corps, still finding subjects for
discussion. Imbued with the spirit of an age which a few discoveries
have encouraged to hope for explanations of everything, these
individuals, amid the acute sufferings we were enduring from the north
wind, were seeking to divine the cause of its unvarying direction. The
theory was advanced that, since his departure for the antarctic pole,
the sun, by heating the southern hemisphere, had rarefied all its
currents of air, elevated them, and left on the surface of that zone a
vacuum, into which the currents of air of ours, which were lower on
account of being more dense, were violently rushing. That thus the
northern pole, loaded with these denser vapors, which had been
collecting and cooling since the preceding summer, was discharging them
by an impetuous and icy current, which swept over the Russian territory,
and stiffened or destroyed everything it encountered in its course.

Others of these officers were remarking with curious attention the
regular six-sided crystallization of each one of the flakes of snow
which covered their garments.

The phenomena of the simultaneous appearance of several distinct images
of the sun, reflected to the eye by means of the icy particles suspended
in the atmosphere, was also a subject for observation, and several times
momentarily diverted their thoughts from their sufferings.

Sec. 22. Napoleon abandons the Grand Army and sets out for Paris.

On the 29th the emperor quitted the banks of the Berezina, pushing on
before him the crowd of disbanded soldiers, and marching with the ninth
corps, which was already disorganized. The day before, the second and
ninth corps and Dombrowski's division presented a total of fourteen
thousand men; and now, with the exception of about six thousand, they
had no longer any form of division, brigade, or regiment.

Night, hunger, cold, the fall of many of their officers, the loss of the
baggage on the other side of the river, the example of such a number of
runaways, and the much more revolting sight of the wounded abandoned on
both sides of the river, and left weltering in despair on the snow,
which was dyed with their blood: everything, in short, contributed to
discourage them; and they were n