y pressed
their hands, embraced them all--and departed.

Napoleon passed through the crowd of his officers, who were drawn up in
an avenue as he passed, bidding them adieu merely by forced and
melancholy smiles: their good wishes, equally silent, and expressed only
by respectful gestures, he carried with him. He and Caulaincourt shut
themselves up in a carriage.

His escort at first consisted only of Poles, afterwards of the
Neapolitans of the Royal Guard. This corps consisted of between six and
seven hundred men when it left Wilna to meet the emperor: it perished
almost entirely in that short passage, though the winter was its only
adversary. That very night the Russians surprised and afterward
abandoned a town through which the escort had to pass; and Napoleon was
within an hour of falling into that affray.

He met the Duke of Bassano at Miedniki, a village about thirty miles
west of Smorgoni. His first words to him were "that he had no longer an
army; that for several days past he had been marching in the midst of a
troop of disbanded men, wandering to and fro in search of subsistence;
that they might still be rallied by giving them bread, shoes, clothing,
and arms; but that the duke's military administration had anticipated
nothing, and his orders had not been executed." But upon Murat replying,
by showing him a statement of the immense stores of provisions and
clothing collected at Wilna, he exclaimed "that he gave him fresh life;
that he would forthwith give him an order to transmit to Murat and
Berthier, to halt for eight days in that capital, there to rally the
army, and infuse into it sufficient heart and strength to continue the
retreat less deplorably."

The remainder of Napoleon's journey was effected without molestation. He
went round Wilna by its suburbs, crossed Wilkoski, where he exchanged
his carriage for a sleigh, and stopped during the 10th at Warsaw, to ask
the Poles for a levy of ten thousand Cossacks, and to promise them that
he would speedily return at the head of three hundred thousand men. From
thence he rapidly traversed Silesia,[178] visited Dresden and its
monarch, and finally reached Paris, where he suddenly made his
appearance on the 19th of December, two days after the arrival of his
twenty-ninth bulletin.

From Malo-jaroslavetz to Smorgoni, this master of Europe had been no
more than the general of a dying and disbanded army; from Smorgoni to
the Rhine he was an unknown fugitive, tr