l win. That's right. But if three days pass, then after that, well,
then that same battle will not soon be over."

Lelorgne d'Ideville smilingly interpreted this speech to Napoleon thus:
"If a battle takes place within the next three days the French will
win, but if later, God knows what will happen." Napoleon did not smile,
though he was evidently in high good humor, and he ordered these words
to be repeated.

Lavrushka noticed this and to entertain him further, pretending not to
know who Napoleon was, added:

"We know that you have Bonaparte and that he has beaten everybody in
the world, but we are a different matter..."--without knowing why or how
this bit of boastful patriotism slipped out at the end.

The interpreter translated these words without the last phrase, and
Bonaparte smiled. "The young Cossack made his mighty interlocutor
smile," says Thiers. After riding a few paces in silence, Napoleon
turned to Berthier and said he wished to see how the news that he was
talking to the Emperor himself, to that very Emperor who had written his
immortally victorious name on the Pyramids, would affect this enfant du
Don. *

* "Child of the Don."

The fact was accordingly conveyed to Lavrushka.

Lavrushka, understanding that this was done to perplex him and that
Napoleon expected him to be frightened, to gratify his new masters
promptly pretended to be astonished and awe-struck, opened his eyes
wide, and assumed the expression he usually put on when taken to be
whipped. "As soon as Napoleon's interpreter had spoken," says Thiers,
"the Cossack, seized by amazement, did not utter another word, but rode
on, his eyes fixed on the conqueror whose fame had reached him across
the steppes of the East. All his loquacity was suddenly arrested and
replaced by a naive and silent feeling of admiration. Napoleon, after
making the Cossack a present, had him set free like a bird restored to
its native fields."

Napoleon rode on, dreaming of the Moscow that so appealed to his
imagination, and "the bird restored to its native fields" galloped to
our outposts, inventing on the way all that had not taken place but that
he meant to relate to his comrades. What had really taken place he did
not wish to relate because it seemed to him not worth telling. He
found the Cossacks, inquired for the regiment operating with Platov's
detachment and by evening found his master, Nicholas Rostov, quartered
at Yankovo. Rostov was just mount