residents who had
fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the
ruined houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could
to their camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other
houses and moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.

But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third
contingent, and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more
difficult and assumed more definite forms.

The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses,
market stalls, granaries--for the most part still stocked with
goods--and there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy
houses filled with luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices,
churches, and cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these
forms of town life perished, until finally all was merged into one
confused, lifeless scene of plunder.

The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the
wealth of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But
plundering by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city
began, had an opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater
the number of people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth
of the city and its regular life restored.

Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity,
some by official duties, some by self-interest--house owners, clergy,
officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants--streamed into
Moscow as blood flows to the heart.

Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off
plunder were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses
out of the town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades'
discomfiture, came to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down
one another's prices to below what they had been in former days. Gangs
of carpenters hoping for high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on
all sides logs were being hewn, new houses built, and old