cipitated from the highest summit of glory
to the deepest abyss of misfortune; but now that nothing remains for me
to retrace but the most frightful miseries, why should we not spare
ourselves, you the pain of reading them, and myself that of tasking a
memory which has now only to rake up embers, nothing but disasters to
reckon, and which can no longer write but upon tombs?

But as it was our fate to push bad as well as good fortune to the utmost
verge of improbability, I will endeavour to keep the promise I have made
you to the conclusion. Moreover, when the history of great men relates
even their last moments, how can I conceal the last sighs of the grand
army when it was expiring? Every thing connected with it appertains to
renown, its dying groans as well as its cries of victory. Every thing in
it was grand; it will be our lot to astonish future ages with our glory
and our sorrow. Melancholy consolation! but the only one that remains to
us; for doubt it not, comrades, the noise of so great a fall will echo
in that futurity, in which great misfortunes immortalize as much as
great glory.

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 Mameluke, and Wonsowitch, captain of
his guard, occupied the box; Duroc and Lobau followed in a sledge.

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
entirely in that short passage; the winter was its only adversary. That
very night the Russians surprised and afterwards abandoned Youpranoui,
(or, as others say, Osmiana,) a town through which the escort had to
pass. Napoleon was within an hour of falling into that affray.

He met the Duke of Bassano at Miedniki. 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 Maret replying, b