15
WE SAW THE MOSKVA RIVER directly beneath us as we reached the top of the rise. Just beyond a large, hook-shaped bend, we could make out the golden towers, the fortresses, and rooftops of the Russians’ venerable capital. The sun was setting at our backs, bathing the domes of the city’s innumerable churches in a russet glow. For a few moments, the city sparkled like an enormous, twinkling, jewel-encrusted, golden crown, captivating us. But when the sun disappeared beyond the road to Smolensk, a blast of cold air blew in and, like a magic spell, Moscow was transformed into an ashen shadow in the dusk.
“A breathtaking spectacle,” said Uncle Charles, turning to me.
“Peace, at last,” I said, fed up with pursuing an enemy who, defeated over and over again, always found a way to double back upon itself, drawing us ever farther into the interior of that vast country, sinking deeper and deeper into the mud of autumn, forcing us to leave large detachments of troops as a rearguard to watch over cities, towns, villages, bridges, crossroads, provisions depots, ammunition stores, prisoners, hospitals; and, worse yet, detachments of the dead, wounded, sick, stragglers, deserters, bogged-down wagons, broken carriages, lame horses. . . . I was fed up with riding exposed to the sun and the rain, with the abusive stinginess of the Intendance that, instead of providing us with ligature, bandages, and medicine, denied us the weapons of our trade. The exhausting march to Königsberg was still fresh in my memory, me in my bicorn hat displaying the colors of Joseph Bonaparte’s Regiment, Spanish Volunteers, Almeras’ Brigade, Broussier’s Division, 4th Corps, Prince Eugène, attempting to combat the tedium by copying down in my notebook the irreverent oaths of our colonel whose foul-mouth went unrivaled among the troops: “I shit on God. I shit on the Virgin. I shit on the whore who gave birth to him.” Still fresh as well were the river crossings at the Neiman and the Viliya. Napoleon had fallen from his horse at the former, and, at the latter, two Polish squadrons were dragged under by the current, horses and all, shouting “Vive l’Empereur!” before their heads disappeared beneath the water. Still with me was the occupation at Vilna, where the diplomatic retinue, representing twenty nations and adorned with gold braid and medals, had remained, deciding to await the overthrow of Czar Alexander while attending balls, banquets, and salons, while we slogged ahead with empty rucksacks under interminable downpours. I could still see the siege of Vitebsk, where I’d reunited with Uncle Charles and, my transfer arranged, entered into service with the General Staff under the orders of Baron Larrey, and where, for two weeks, I’d visited the hospitals along the Dvina, the sick wracked with fever and diarrhea from influenza and bad water, among them a young girl from Burdeos who’d enlisted as a drummer-boy. Still present for me was the battle of Smolensk, where I saw a single cannonball level a line of twenty-two soldiers, where we’d counted our casualties in the thousands, only to discover a deserted city, reduced to smoking ruins. Still with me was the terrible battle of Valutina-Gora that would claim the life of General Gudin, leaving his decimated troops, shattered men with torn-off limbs and scorched faces, standing in proud formation among disemboweled horses in order to receive Napoleon’s crosses and promotions and useless words such as “You have fought for the glory of France like no other army before you.” With me still was my return to Smolensk with the ambulances brimming with men pleading and moaning, and the horror of finding the only hospitals still remaining filled with thousands of unattended men lying in their own excrement, crying out to be seen by the few doctors who had remained there. I could still see the formidable battle of Borodino, an endless battle that dragged though hours and hours of savage attacks led by Ney, Murat, Poniatowski, and Prince Eugène, and hear the incessant sound of cannon fire against the strongholds, against the stubborn left flank, against the stubborn right flank, against the stubborn center, that battle in which, through flashes of artillery fire and clouds of smoke, we glimpsed Kutuzov surrounded by patriarchs and orthodox priests, like furious bearded saints, hoisting standards, holding aloft huge icons with images of madonnas, crosses, censers, crosiers covered in gold and silver and gems and dark offerings of old Russia, his troops bleeding piteously but refusing to surrender, defending their territory inch by inch while a lethargic, sallow, irresolute Napoleon dragged his feet back and forth in front of his tent as though mourning the dozens of his generals who’d fallen, dead or wounded, and, not far from him, just ahead of the Imperial Guard regiments, Larrey and my Uncle and me and every other able-bodied surgeon incessantly amputating an arm at the elbow, an arm at the shoulder, a leg at the knee, a leg at the hip, a Cuirassier’s foot, a Hussar’s hand, cutting and cutting through flesh, sawing and sawing through bone, sewing and sewing up stumps, bandaging and bandaging wounds, seeing the repulsive heaps of human scraps accumulate around us like piles of garbage, and all of that thankless work done without sleep, without food, sticky and encrusted with blood, and at sunrise on the third day, the battlefield deserted, the same story as always, the silent nocturnal retreat that left us victors without victory, without truce, without armistice, without pronouncements, without prisoners, with nothing else to do but count up the more than seventy thousand dead, thirty thousand of them ours, and fill the Kolotskoië abbey with the wounded so as to begin the cutting and sawing and sewing and bandaging all over again, leaving the most gravely wounded there and loading the rest into whatever ambulances and wagons could be found and then, only then, close our eyes for a few minutes, drink a slug of vodka, and chew a mouthful of stale bread before continuing on. All of this was still with me that evening as the sun set over Moscow, and as I stood there, sick of the war, exhausted, numb, hungry, dirty, no longer moved by the suffering of others, I cursed the day when, passing myself off as a volunteer from Havana, I’d surrendered my body and intellect to Napoleon’s ambition, and all for Fauriel, and I shit on her mother and her father and their poverty and the northern mines and the “state students,” and all for the Café Procope, and I shit on every one of its tables and chairs and on the “Night of the Napkin,” and all for Bousquet, and I shit on his whore of a mother and on his son of a bitch father, and all for having pressed my ear to that accursed wall, and I shit on its bricks and on the miserable mortar that held them together, and all for that damned picture of Apollo, and I shit on Zeus and on Leto and on Mount Olympus too, what the hell, because only a signed peace treaty with Russia and my return to Paris, safe and sound, would persuade me to stop cursing the entire world.
We entered Moscow the following night. It was true what people were saying: save for a few bands of thieves and commoners, almost all of them drunk and boisterous, and a handful of Frenchmen and foreigners who’d remained behind, hidden, the city had been completely abandoned. Riding slowly through the deserted streets, we could see, illuminated by torchlight and perfectly intact, the beautiful wooden houses, humble thatched-roofed huts, businesses and brick storehouses, churches and stone palaces. I was tempted to leave the General Staff retinue in order to kneel before an altar and thank God for the good fortune of having come across that abundance of habitable houses. The thought of spending two or three weeks there, well-bundled and well-fed, as we awaited the peace accord, brought the first smile to cross my lips for many days.
“Thank God, Surgeon Major,” I said to my uncle, addressing him as would any other assistant. “The campaign is over.”
“Perhaps,” he grunted. “It makes me uneasy that the city should have been evacuated. It’s the same thing that’s been happening all along.”
There was room to spare in the deserted city, and Larrey assigned us a solid, two-story stone house near the Kremlin, where Napoleon had ensconced himself. We left our horses in the stable, where we found hay and water in the trough. Then, we broke open the lock with musket-shot and entered the mansion: everything was exactly as though the owners and servants hadn’t left, as if upon our arrival they had all become silent, invisible presences in the house. The candlesticks in the lamps and chandeliers had been carefully snuffed before burning themselves out and, when lit, they illuminated an enormous table set with solid silver, Sèvres china and etched Bohemian crystal, complete with a centerpiece of pears and apples, still good enough to eat; in the music room, decorated with cheerful paintings and porcelain figurines, it seemed as though we could still hear the echo of the final chord of the fugue for piano, violin, viola, and flute laid out on the music stand; in the library, lined up on dustless shelves, their white calf-skin spines imprinted in gold lettering, were volumes by Voltaire, Rousseau, and Raynal, Montesquieu’s L’Esprit des Lois, dramas by Molière, a history of Russia by de Clerc and Levesque, and many other books whose seriousness contrasted with the banal and incomplete shopping list, written in perfect French, left forgotten on the writing desk (taffeta and flannel, leather gloves, wool mittens, nightshirts for the servants); in the six upstairs bedrooms, nearly all belonging to women to judge by the dressing tables and the bedspreads, we found not a single portrait, nor any jewels, nor coins in the coffers—only some paper rubles—though the armoires were full of clothing for all seasons, including woolen vests and magnificent overcoats and fur caps made of sable, mink, and Siberian fox; the wine cellar was so well-stocked that it could have been the Café Procope’s—reds from Bordeaux and Burgundy, sparkling wines from the Rhine and the Don, tokay from the Danube, whites from the Costes de Moselle and Costes de Meuse, ports and sherries, and even a tower of champagne crates alongside barrels of beer from Prague and casks of vodka, cognac and rum; the larder, the door to which was flanked by an enormous earthen jug of fresh water, caused us to cry out in amazement, as the shelves and cupboards were filled with bags of sugar, salt and pepper, chili powder, cinnamon, cloves and bay leaves, bars of chocolate, biscuits, tins of tea and coffee, tempting, glossy fruit, cheese and eggs, crocks of butter, mustard and caviar, jars of pickled mushrooms and cucumbers and, up above, hanging among the pots and pans, a large ham, smoked bacon, a wineskin swollen with oil, and several strings of sausages and garlic; near the back wall were five barrels half-filled with white flour, rice, dried beans, noodles and brined fish, not to mention the piles of turnips, potatoes, beets, cabbages and golden onions that rose out of the corners of the room. That entire gastronomical treasure, which seemed straight out of A Thousand and One Nights, exuded a warm and appetizing vapor that made my mouth water and immediately brought to mind Aunt Margot’s beloved pantry. The only thing that prevented us from pouncing upon the ham or from snatching a pair of sausages or from sinking our hands into the brined fish or from biting off a corner off a bar of chocolate was Larrey’s imperious voice ordering that nothing be touched.
“You are intelligent people and, as such, you understand that the condition of our stomachs is hardly good. We shall eat and drink from all of this, but in moderation. Otherwise, we’ll fall ill, and you well know what the hospitals are like these days,” said Larrey pointedly. “Do any of you know how to cook?”
Antoine Petit, the other assistant, said that he did.
“I do, too,” I said, not intending to be separated from the provisions. It was, of course, only half-true, since, although I’d spent a fair part of my childhood helping in the kitchen, the only thing I’d ever actually cooked on the stove was water for tea.
“Prepare a light supper in an hour,” he ordered, before going off to take a bath.
“I’ll wager a napoleon that you don’t know how to cook,” said Petit, with his usual bitterness, a defect made even more insufferable by his nasal voice.
“I know some things, but I’m not betting anything. And what do you know?”
“I know how to fry, boil, and roast,” he responded smugly.
Limiting myself to working with the knife, we managed to prepare a plate of cold cuts and a thick ham, onion, and potato omelet, which we carried to the table before the appointed hour. Uncle Charles, a great lover of toasts, raised his glass to the peaceful conquest of Moscow, to the Grande Armée, and to our health. The food, though strictly portioned out by Larrey, tasted glorious to us.
“Very well, Fuenmayor. Have you learned anything from this campaign?” Larrey asked me.
“Yes, Surgeon General. In Borodino I learned that it’s possible to perform two hundred amputations in fewer than thirty hours,” I said to flatter him, although truth be told, his proficiency had amazed me, especially at night when, by the tremulous flicker of candlelight I’d seen him suture arteries with the same dexterity he’d displayed by day.
“It’s a matter of practice, Fuenmayor,” he said, downplaying his prowess. “I’ve been practicing for many years. You’ll do the same one day, although it would be better for the need never to arise. And you, Petit,” he added. “What have you learned?”
“An important lesson, Surgeon General. I have learned that the wounded should be treated according to the severity of their wounds, and not according to their rank.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not always done in this way,” said Larrey. “It was common practice in the armies of the Republic, isn’t that so, Cavent?” My uncle nodded and Petit, not taking into account the enormous gulf between himself and Larrey, a divide that ought to have precluded him from asking questions of a political nature, said: “Surgeon General, when will the Emperor make peace with the Russians?”
Larrey, taken aback, blinked and stiffened in his chair. Furrowing his brow, he looked at Petit in silence. Perhaps feeling compassion for that coarse peasants’ son whose studies in Strasbourg had been interrupted, he softened his gaze and replied: “That is something only the Emperor knows. Our job is to save lives. Tomorrow we’ll inspect the hospitals. I certainly hope we’ll find them in the same condition as this house!”
The conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door.
“Let’s all go answer it,” said Uncle Charles. “It’s likely someone hoping to stay here. If he sees us all together, surely he’ll look for a different house.”
When we opened the door we were met by an aide-de-camp from the General Staff and several grenadiers from the Imperial Guard. The aide said: “Baron Larrey, I’ve come to alert you that we’ve discovered fuses and explosives in several houses. Yesterday there was an explosion at the Exchange and several arsonists have been arrested. I advise you to inspect the stoves and chimneys.”
Once they had departed, we discovered a bundle of sulfur and tarred oakum fibers beneath the large stove in the dining room. After inspecting the entire house, Larrey asked if we felt comfortable staying there. We all said yes. Where would we find another house as comfortable as that one? Before he and my uncle went up to their beds, Larrey ordered that we stand guard until six the following morning, with me taking the first shift and Petit the second, and told us to wake him should any urgent matter arise.
After devouring half a bar of chocolate and three biscuits soaked in wine, I decided to stand lookout on the balcony, the only vantage point from which I could observe the goings-on in front of the house. Wearing my greatcoat and armed with a musket, I stepped out into the cold. Almost instantly, a reddish glow and a thunderous explosion forced me back inside. An arsenal must have blown up, because the explosions continued for three or four minutes and I could see the trails of flame coming from several rockets as they arced across the sky. The smell of gunpowder was thick in the air and, almost simultaneously, my uncle and Larrey appeared on the balcony, barefoot and wrapped in sheets. Other, smaller explosions reverberated from distant parts of the city, and suddenly we realized that we were surrounded by fires. In the reddish glare that now illuminated the street, we saw, to our surprise, people shouting and running out of houses we had supposed abandoned. They were Russian families, mostly women, children, and the elderly. They were carrying coffers, bundles, boxes, and valuables; they had been in hiding but were now running hither and thither like frightened barnyard fowl.
“We must get dressed, Cavent!” said Larrey. “We must put ourselves at the Emperor’s disposal!”
“Saddle the horses!” my uncle yelled to me, running toward his room.
On the first floor I knocked into Petit who, completely drunk, was coming out of the wine cellar with an oil lamp in his hand, and an idiotic smile on his face.
“What’s all the noise about?” he sputtered.
“¡Vete al carajo!” I said in furious Spanish. It had been over eighty days since I’d slept in a bed and I’d had my period for over a week. “Don’t you realize, you idiot, that the ball is over before it even started?”
When we arrived at the Kremlin, the soldiers guarding the rampart gate refused us entrance, despite having recognized us. “The Emperor is asleep, Baron Larrey,” the Captain told us. “We’re under orders not to disturb him.”
On the way back to the house, the sky now completely red, we witnessed several of our own soldiers in the act of looting. Despite the fact that only elite troops had been admitted into the city—the Imperial Guard and the Italian Royal Guard that served with Prince Eugène—certain officers looked the other way and allowed their men to take whatever they wanted from the palaces. Coming across a squadron of Italians, Larrey, indignant, confronted their commanding lieutenant: “Aren’t you ashamed to permit such chaos? What has become of discipline?”
“The city is lost, monsieur. Before fleeing, the Russians destroyed their fire trucks and hoses. If all of Moscow is to burn, we might at least take some small souvenirs with us.”
“Some souvenir!” said my uncle, watching a soldier carting off a giant basket full of wine.
“What can you do? These are the spoils of war,” said the lieutenant, shrugging his shoulders. Then, turning in his saddle, he indicated two men who stood, their hands tied to a sergeant’s horse, watching expressionlessly the scene unfolding around them. “They’re arsonists. So you see, we’re still doing what we can. We entertain ourselves with trifles here and there, but we always carry out our orders. Here you have them! They’ll be interrogated and strung up on a lamppost!” he shouted, surely hoping to frighten them.
“Have you seen any hospitals?” asked Larrey.
“Why yes, just around the corner, five or six hundred meters down the road. But I warn you, there’s a fire in that area.”
Following the lieutenant’s directions, we came to some wood and straw huts, now nothing but fuel for the flames, where we were met with a horrifying sight. Wounded men were hurling themselves out the windows of a large brick building on the other side of the street. They were Russian soldiers who had been abandoned in the sudden evacuation. Among them were five or six men who dragged themselves along with amputated arms or legs, their stumps open and bleeding.
“Let’s find a wagon,” said Larrey. “We must save those men.”
We returned to the Kremlin, again in vain. When we arrived, the guardsman assured us that Napoleon had been awakened and would be leaving any minute to take up residence in a palace on the outskirts of the city. Any wheeled vehicle was already spoken for. “If I were you, Baron Larrey, I’d join the Emperor’s entourage. From the looks of it, the city will burn to the ground.”
“We will stay. Stone does not burn,” said Larrey, darkly.
I was so exhausted that I gladly accepted Larrey’s mandate. I simply couldn’t go on, and I cared not a whit that Moscow was going up in flames around me. But it was destined that nothing was to turn out well that night. When we arrived at our house we saw that it had been looted and that the wine cellar had been reduced to a huge pool of wine and frothy beer, upon which floated empty bottles and barrel staves, and that the larder floor was now a trampled mat of flour, grains, herring, and macaroni, and that, in the armoires, there were no longer furs, and that in the dining room, not even the cloth remained on the table.
What none of France’s enemies had yet achieved, Napoleon accomplished in the five weeks he stayed in Moscow: the disintegration of the Grande Armée’s discipline and morale. A great deal has been written about the military disaster of 1812 and I’ve little to add, except to say that the majority are works intended to correct events by means of conditionals such as: If Napoleon hadn’t lost the initiative at Borodino. . . . If Napoleon had withdrawn from Moscow by the middle of September. . . . If Napoleon had set up winter barracks in Moscow. . . . If Napoleon had marched toward Saint Petersburg. . . . If Napoleon hadn’t believed himself invincible. . . . If Napoleon hadn’t so overextended his supply chains. . . . If Napoleon hadn’t waited until October 19th for an offer of peace that never arrived. . . . If Napoleon had retreated by a different route. . . . If Napoleon had launched the Grande Armée first against Wellington and then against Alexander. . . . If Napoleon this and if Napoleon that.
Not one of these speculations interests me, and I’m quite certain that they would be of no interest to the two hundred thirty three thousand soldiers that the Russian peasants found in the fields when the snow melted that spring, nor to the innumerable others who, devoured by wolves and dogs on the steppes, or lost in the forests, or fallen into the icy waters of rivers, or burned in the villages and hospitals, disappeared from this world without a trace.
The campaign of 1812 was an irreversible fact and no politician or historian’s if will ever remedy it. Nor would it serve as an example or lesson so that nothing like it would ever happen again in the future—even the most immediate of futures, since any petty incident was all it took for France and Prussia to try, once again, to settle their rivalry by force of arms. The old refrain: “One can’t learn from another’s mistakes,” one of Aunt Margot’s favorite sayings, is most especially applicable to men of war. And so, I’ll limit myself to describing my memories of that campaign, and I’ll begin by saying that I’d suspected we were beaten even before we’d retreated from Moscow. Why did I suspect it? I could see it in myself, thinking of nothing but finding something to eat that wasn’t horsemeat and brown bread, and I could see it in the conduct of the Old Guard Grenadiers, Napoleon’s pride and the crème de la crème of the Grande Armée’s elite units. I’ll explain. The Imperial Guard was, for practical purposes, divided into two corps: the Old Guard and the Young Guard. The former was comprised of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd regiments of Foot Grenadiers, the 1st and 2nd regiments of Foot Chasseurs, the Mounted Grenadiers, the Mounted Chasseurs, the Mamelukes and the 1st and 2nd regiments of Light Cavalry. But most emblematic of the Old Guard were the Foot Grenadiers of the first two regiments, veterans with profuse gray mustaches, hair pulled back in a queue, and gold rings in their ears; men hand-picked from front-line battalions, who had fought in the revolutionary campaigns in the Wars of Liberation, at the Rhine, in Italy, in the Pyrenees, in Egypt. To be selected to join their ranks, a soldier was required to know how to read and write, to have served for more than ten years, and to have received decorations of valor during that time, to be no shorter than 1.84 meters, and to be in possession of a ruddy complexion. Their pay was double that of the other Grenadiers and it was customary to address them as “monsieur.” Their most distinguishing feature was a tall bearskin cap adorned with a gold badge embossed with an eagle; on the battlefield they wore wide trousers and blue greatcoats. They were men of few words who joked only among themselves and who carried themselves with a parsimonious deliberateness that contrasted sharply with the Hussars’ cheeky vanity and the Cuirassiers’ boisterous bravado. Their drums and bugles were the best in the entire Grande Armée and, with a serene and disdainful porte militar, as though in formation for an inspection, they marched to their rhythm onto the battlefield, singing On va leur percer le flanc in a single, unified voice.
In any event, with Napoleon now in retreat, I saw those venerable lions bivouacking in the muddy squares, beneath the pyramids of their muskets, their shoes torn open and their uniforms in tatters, roasting some bloody piece of horsemeat on their campfires, sitting on mahogany and satin armchairs, sheltered beneath improvised lean-tos cobbled together from doors, Chinese folding screens, windows and wall hangings, surrounded by bottles of wine, samovars, silver candelabras, violins, grandfather clocks, marble statues, fine porcelain, paintings, bolts of silk, and Oriental brocade. I saw them in the markets, their hands black from digging through the city’s charred remains, exchanging plunder for gold coins—easier to carry in a rucksack or ammunitions pouch—or buying half a kilo of coffee or sugar or Turkish tobacco at astronomical prices. Napoleon, no longer able to hold the disorder at bay, normalized it, granting one day of pillage to each regiment.
Certain grains were abundant during the first week and, above all, there were the enormous cabbages and beets that grew on the outskirts of the city. The regulation meal, dispensed in the canteens, was beet and cabbage soup, thickened with oats or rye. The horses also had food, as our commissaries forced the peasants to sell them their hay and fresh forage. Many believed, Larrey, Uncle Charles, and myself among them, that Napoleon would spend the winter in Moscow, as at least a fifth of its buildings had been spared from the flames: almost all of the churches and many houses and other structures built of stone or brick, including two of the city’s biggest hospitals. But almost from one day to the next, everything became scarce.
As always, work was the one thing I had plenty of. The first order of business was to get all of the wounded and sick that we had brought in the ambulances settled; then, to treat them. Fortunately, in addition to the Imperial Guard surgeons, we had the disinterested assistance of several Russian doctors who’d remained behind in the city. Since our stone house had lost its charms—the armoires, the wine cellar and the larder—we grew accustomed to sleeping at the hospitals, one of which was commanded by Larrey, the other by Uncles Charles. The number of patients, far from diminishing, grew day by day, and we soon had more than five thousand. This was because, despite the evacuation order, a substantial portion of the population had not left their homes. After these were destroyed by the fire, it took no more than a glance out the window to see entire families wandering the streets and not a soul offering to help them. Seeing this sad spectacle, I remembered Maryse’s story about the destruction of Cap-Français, especially the part about how the women, and even the girls, had begun to prostitute themselves in exchange for a crust of black bread and a swallow of wine. Although we did admit into the hospital all those who, faint with hunger or fever, had collapsed in the streets, soon enough there was no longer room for all of them. Despite our very best intentions, there was simply nothing we could do. We were military surgeons, after all, and our first responsibility was to attend to the Grande Armée.
Many priests had also stayed behind, perhaps with the intention of protecting their ornate churches. They would fare no better than the rest. Thrown into the streets, their altars looted and their sacred places converted into barracks and stables, they could be seen in slow procession with their icons and crosiers, intoning grave hymns and offering what meager consolation they could muster. I had no doubt that they prayed for us to be punished. Surely they damned us for our greed and for our paltry fear of God, beginning with Napoleon, who had ordered the dismantling of the enormous gold and silver cross that had crowned the Kremlin, right down to the Grenadier who, armed with an iron rod, had seen fit to pry the bas-reliefs depicting the stations of the cross off a church wall.
By this point, there was scarcely any food left in Moscow. Bands of Cossacks prowled the outskirts and, emboldened by their successful attacks on provisions wagons en route from Smolensk, they drew ever nearer to the city, drawing out our Dragoons and Chasseurs, only to turn and ride away on their little horses. What’s more, the nearby mills no longer had grain to grind and not a single blade of grass grew for several kilometers all around. Everyone’s ire turned toward the Intendance Commissaries, who, under the pretext of storing up provisions for the winter, sold the lion’s share of what they’d acquired or confiscated at many times its value. Noticing that the nights were growing ever colder, I went to buy an overcoat in the market that had sprung up in the vast square adjoining the Kremlin. With my own gold, I bought an astrakhan coat and matching hat, a pair of otter-skin gloves, felt boots, and a beautiful cashmere shawl that, judging by its odor, must have been previously used to wrap up fish. I also bought a kilo of Chinese tea, a box of dried figs, a tin of caviar, and two bottles of rum. The main customers were no longer the merchants, but rather the highest ranked officers who, paying in francs as I had, bought objects sold at high prices in France—pearl necklaces, pocket watches, diamond brooches—as well as provisions for the winter months. Silver was, by now, worth almost nothing, and I saw a Grenadier sell a sack of forks and spoons for a few scant napoleons. But, while the situation in Moscow grew worse by the hour, the immense majority of the Grande Armée was even worse off; the five infantry and four cavalry corps which, billeted in neighboring villages, or in pursuit of the elusive Russian army, or sent to reconnoiter this or the other route, lived almost exclusively off the land, met with nothing but hunger and ambushes, and would end up finishing off their already exhausted horses.
In the hospital where I worked with Larrey—he had preferred my services to Petit’s—things were going from bad to worse. An epidemic of dysentery had been unleashed, and we could scarcely take care of the sick. One afternoon, seeing me pale and exhausted to the point of near collapse, Larrey pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and held it out to me. “It’s an invitation from the General Staff. A French theater performance. I’ve decided not to go. It’s been four nights since I’ve written in my diary.”
I’d heard that part of a French acting troupe had stayed behind in Moscow, and that its members, living, by now, in the most complete indigence, had been taken in by certain well-accommodated officers. They’d been in Russia since the Treaties of Tilsit, in honor of which Napoleon had sent them to Czar Alexander, as a gesture of friendship. Reading the program, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I was familiar with both works from my time with Alfred: Le jeu d’amour et du hasard, an old comedy by Marivaux that had remained popular in many companies’ repertoires, and Amant, auteur et valet, a one-act play by Ceron. The performance was to take place at six in the evening on the Posniakov palace stage, the only theater that had survived. Thanking Larrey for his kindness, I washed up, put on my new astrakhan coat, and headed for the palace. An enormous chandelier of more than a thousand candles, brought in from some church or another, illuminated the refurbished theater, its luxury contrasting sharply with our filthy uniforms, reeking of smoke, as did everything in Moscow, from the flour used to make bread down to the writing paper used by the Intendance. Officials from every service occupied the two rows of box seats, and the finest soloists from the Imperial Guard’s marching band were featured in the orchestra. The actors’ lavish costumes had been furnished by Count Dumas, the Quartermaster General. The performance was excellent and the evening closed with Madame Louise Fusil performing multiple renditions of Plaisir d’amour to endless applause and tears of nostalgia. She was a still-beautiful woman, and her generosity and ease on stage reminded me of Maryse, back in the happy days of the Théâtre Nomade, days I’d let pass me by, never realizing that, amid Andrea and Piet’s flirtations, Kosti and the Pinelli Brothers’ acts, the roulette table in Baden-Baden, and the romances between Françoise and Claudette, and Maryse and Robledo, I’d left my youth, and the most carefree moments of my life, behind forever.