e their
infamous booty, profiting by the general condition, an obscure name, a
uniform no longer distinguishable, and night, in short, by all kinds of
obscurities, favourable to cowardice and guilt. If works already
published had not exaggerated these horrors, I should have passed in
silence details so disgusting; for these atrocities were rare, and
justice was dealt to the most criminal.

The Emperor arrived on the 9th of November, amid this scene of
desolation. He shut himself up in one of the houses in the new square,
and never quitted it till the 14th, to continue his retreat. He had
calculated upon fifteen days' provisions and forage for an army of one
hundred thousand men; there was not more than half the quantity of
flour, rice, and spirits, and no meat at all. Cries of rage were set up
against one of the persons appointed to provide these supplies. The
commissary saved his life only by crawling for a long time on his knees
at the feet of Napoleon. Probably the reasons which he assigned did more
for him than his supplications.

"When he arrived," he said, "bands of stragglers, whom, when advancing,
the army left behind it, had, as it were, involved Smolensk in terror
and destruction. The men died there of hunger as upon the road. When
some degree of order had been restored, the Jews alone had at first
offered to furnish the necessary provisions. More generous motives
subsequently engaged the aid of some Lithuanian noblemen. At length the
foremost of the long convoys of provisions collected in Germany
appeared. These were the carriages called _comtoises_, and were the only
ones which had traversed the sands of Lithuania; they brought no more
than two hundred quintals of flour and rice; several hundred German and
Italian bullocks had also arrived with them.

"Meanwhile the accumulation of dead bodies in the houses, courts, and
gardens, and their unwholesome effluvia, infected the air. The dead were
killing the living. The civil officers as well as many of the military
were attacked: some had become to all appearance idiots, weeping or
fixing their hollow eyes stedfastly on the ground. There were others
whose hair had become stiff, erect, and ropy, and who, amidst a torrent
of blasphemies, a horrid convulsion, or a still more frightful laugh,
had dropped down dead.

"At the same time it had been found necessary to kill without delay the
greatest part of the cattle brought from Germany and Italy. These
animals w