be shaken by them. The uneasiness which had again
seized him betrayed itself in angry orders. It was then that he caused
the churches of the Kremlin to be stripped of every thing that could
serve for a trophy to the grand army. These objects, devoted to
destruction by the Russians themselves, belonged, he said, to the
conquerors by the two-fold right conferred by victory, and still more by
the conflagration.

It required long efforts to remove the gigantic cross from the steeple
of Ivan the Great, to the possession of which the Russians attached the
salvation of their empire. The Emperor determined that it should adorn
the dome of the invalids, at Paris. During the work it was remarked that
a great number of ravens kept flying round this cross, and that
Napoleon, weary of their hoarse croaking, exclaimed, that "it seemed as
if these flocks of ill-omened birds meant to defend it." We cannot
pretend to tell all that he thought in this critical situation, but it
is well known that he was accessible to every kind of presentiment.

His daily excursions, always illumined by a brilliant sun, in which he
strove himself to perceive and to make others recognize his star, did
not amuse him. To the sullen silence of inanimate Moscow was superadded
that of the surrounding deserts, and the still more menacing silence of
Alexander. It was not the faint sound of the footsteps of our soldiers
wandering in this vast sepulchre, that could rouse our Emperor from his
reverie, and snatch him from his painful recollections and still more
painful anticipations.

His nights in particular became irksome to him. He passed part of them
with Count Daru. It was then only that he admitted the danger of his
situation. "From Wilna to Moscow what submission, what point of support,
rest or retreat, marks his power? It is a vast, bare and desert field of
battle, in which his diminished army is imperceptible, insulated, and as
it were lost in the horrors of an immense void. In this country of
foreign manners and religion, he has not conquered a single individual;
he is in fact master only of the ground on which he stands. That which
he has just quitted and left behind him is no more his than that which
he has not yet reached. Insufficient for these vast deserts, he is lost
as it were in their immense space."

He then reviewed the different resolutions of which he still had the
choice. "People imagined," he said, "that he had nothing to do but
march, wi