hmere
shawls, the rarest furs of Siberia, the gold stuffs of Persia, and
silver plates, off which they had nothing to eat but a black dough baked
in the ashes, and half broiled and bloody horse-flesh. Singular
assemblage of abundance and want, of riches and filth, of luxury and
wretchedness!

Between the camp and the city were met troops of soldiers dragging along
their booty, or driving before them, like beasts of burden, Muscovites
bending under the weight of the pillage of their capital; for the fire
brought to view nearly twenty thousand inhabitants, previously
unobserved in that immense city. Some of these Muscovites of both sexes
were well dressed; they were tradespeople. They came with the wreck of
their property to seek refuge at our fires. They lived pell-mell with
our soldiers, protected by some, and tolerated, or rather scarcely
remarked by others.

About ten thousand of the enemy's troops were in the same predicament.
For several days they wandered about among us free, and some of them
even still armed. Our soldiers met these vanquished enemies without
animosity, or without thinking of making them prisoners; either because
they considered the war as at an end, from thoughtlessness, or from
pity, and because when not in battle the French delight in having no
enemies. They suffered them to share their fires; nay, more, they
allowed them to pillage in their company. When some degree of order was
restored, or rather when the officers had organized this marauding as a
regular system of forage, the great number of these Russian stragglers
then attracted notice. Orders were given to secure them; but seven or
eight thousand had already escaped. It was not long before we had to
fight them.

On entering the city, the Emperor was struck by a sight still more
extraordinary: a few houses scattered among the ruins were all that was
left of the mighty Moscow. The smell issuing from this colossus,
overthrown, burned, and calcined, was horrible. Heaps of ashes, and at
intervals, fragments of walls or half demolished pillars, were now the
only vestiges that marked the site of streets.

The suburbs were sprinkled with Russians of both sexes, covered with
garments nearly burned. They flitted like spectres among the ruins;
squatted in the gardens, some of them were scratching up the earth in
quest of vegetables, while others were disputing with the crows for the
relics of the dead animals which the army had left behind. Far