16

I SAW HER BY THE side of the road. She lay across a dented silver samovar and a rolled-up oriental rug. She had fallen face-up and, as the carriage passed alongside her, I felt the desire to possess her well up within me. We were going so slowly that, handing the reins to Petit, I jumped to the ground and rescued her from that luxurious garbage heap.

“What are you doing?” shouted Petit from the coachbox. “It’s too big to take with us. It’ll just slow us down,” he added, urging the horses forward.

“This is my business. Stop the carriage for a moment,” I said, approaching with the painting balanced atop my astrakhan cap.

“The last thing in the world we need is a painting,” he growled.

I opened the door, lay her across some bundles of provisions, and returned to the coachbox.

“If its owner threw it away, it’s because it isn’t worth anything,” said Petit, handing me the reins. “They should have left it back in Moscow!”

“Just yesterday you grabbed a box full of obscene novels.”

“That’s true, but I’m not planning to keep them. After I’ve read them, I’ll throw them away. Not exactly the case with you.”

“¡Vete al carajo!”

“If you start speaking Spanish to me again I’ll stop speaking to you altogether!”

Lieutenant Belliard’s heavy Russian wagon came to a halt halfway up a hill and I had to pull back suddenly on the reins. The Lieutenant’s skeletal horses had given out. I tried to merge with the line of wagons passing to my left, but they were huge Intendance box wagons, each pulled by six horses, so I stayed where I was.

“That cretin! He’s stopped again! Doesn’t he realize his wagon’s too heavy?” whined Petit. “Well, I’m not helping him this time! What kind of idiot travels with a piano?”

Belliard was coming over to us. “I’ll have to relieve myself of a few sacks of flour. Would you like them?”

“No, thank you,” I said.

“If I were you, I’d relieve myself of the piano,” said Petit.

“It’s the last thing I’ll part with, “said Belliard. “It’s for my wife.”

“Your horses can’t go on,” insisted Petit.

“It’s because we’re going uphill,” said Belliard, throwing open one of the bolts that secured the wooden plank across the rear of his wagon. Seeing the look of disgust on Petit’s face, he added: “I’m not holding anyone up. All the wagons in this line have stopped.”

We had left Moscow on October 19th. Carrying out their orders, the Commissaries had set fire to their famed winter storehouses. Millions of rations of hay and wheat had burned, leaving me with the bitter knowledge that the hunger my horse and I had suffered during the previous week had been pointless. First we marched to the South, toward Kaluga, but the Russians cut us off and attacked near a village with an unpronounceable name. As always, they abandoned the battlefield after killing more than two thousand of our men. Knowing that it would be pointless to pursue them, Napoleon decided to turn north and to make our retreat along the road to Smolensk. Uncle Charles and Larrey marched with his retinue, alongside the Dutch Lancers of the Imperial Guard and the officers of the General Staff. When we’d parted, they’d left us with one of the carriages assigned to the medical corps, an elegant two-horse coupe, to the rear of which Petit and I had hitched our own horses.

“He should have jettisoned the piano,” said Petit, watching Belliard carefully place, as though it were a beloved object, the fourth bag of flour by the side of the road.

“I’m tired, Petit. I’m going to sleep a bit. When you get tired, wake me up,” I told him. The truth was, I wanted to go inside the coach so I could look at the painting. There was something irresistible about it, something not meant for Petit or for anyone else but me.

Were I to describe the painting, I’d say there was nothing spectacular about it. Certainly, it was a fine piece of work and there could be no doubt that the artist had been a true professional, but it had that domestic yet remote quality that one sees in family portraits, those paintings that hang in palaces and castles alongside those of mild-mannered old women with white coiffures, rigid prelates, and sanguine military men encrusted with medals. In any event, she was a beautiful woman of about my age. She was wearing a red jacket embellished with a bearskin collar. On her head she wore a black shako, similar to the ones the Prussians wore, except with a cockade of the most unlikely colors—orange, green, and purple—certainly of the painter’s own invention, affixed by a chain of hammered gold. She was shown in profile, facing to my right, and the distant expression on her face, accentuated by the Byzantine line of her nose, contrasted with the deliberateness of her military attire. Her eyes, intensely green, appeared to be witnessing events yet to come, but they kept these secret from me. The artist had painted her, life-sized, only from the shoulders up, but it was easy to imagine her slender and well-proportioned body. The frame had been finished in red Chinese lacquer—a common Russian predilection—dulling somewhat the red of her jacket and the lavishly colored insignia. In the right-hand corner of the canvas there was a brief inscription written in Cyrillic script, incomprehensible to me.

It was not the first time I’d been attracted to an object, such as the cuckoo clock I’d bought in Munich, a certain hat, or even the cashmere shawl I’d bought in Moscow, despite its distinct odor of herring, to replace the tattered sash I used to flatten my breasts. But this was different; very different. I had the impression that the painting had once belonged to me, if only in dreams; that it was something very dear to my heart that I’d lost without even realizing it and that now had come back to me, making it known that her destiny and mine were in lockstep. But what destiny might await us on that monumental retreat which, ten times longer than Xenophon’s Anabasis, could well have been called The Retreat of a Hundred Thousand, a retreat that, in its Biblical proportions, had made of Napoleon a new Moses, certainly quite worse for wear in his gray cloak, his Swiss hat sideways over his thick, circumspect face, a meager caricature of the Prophet, who, in place of the Ark, was custodian of Ivan the Great’s celebrated cross, along with whatever gold and other treasures he had found in the Kremlin, his nation a vast and disorganized caravan of dirty and ragged souls, on horseback and on foot, in wagons, coaches, carriages, artillery trains, and all manner of carts, large and small, that crawled at a snail’s pace along the road to Smolensk?

The carriage stopped and Petit’s large crooked nose appeared in the door. “I’m freezing. Come out of there so I can warm up a bit.”

I turned the painting face down and said: “Don’t you dare touch it, or I swear to God you’ll regret it!”

I climbed up to the coachbox and took the reins. It must have been about three in the afternoon but the sky had clouded over and a cold wind was blowing from the north. As if that weren’t enough, it began to drizzle and the road, already trodden by countless shoes, hooves, and wheels, soon became impassible. Belliard’s wagon came to a stop. I huddled inside my fur. Leaves were falling from the birch trees on both sides of the road, denuding their branches and white trunks, leaving them sad and stripped, like rows of spinal columns cleaved to the earth.

The sound of a nearby explosion ripped me from a dream in which Maryse and Robledo were offering me tastes of delicious, animal-shaped fruits. The little yellow cow was a mamey, the mamoncillo, a green kitten. . . .

“What’s going on?’ I asked, startled. It was already nighttime.

“The powder wagons have been exploding for a while now. I don’t know how you could have slept through it,” said Petit, at my side. “Look!” he added, pointing to the carriage window, through which a thunderous flash briefly illuminated the steppe. “I’ve counted more than ten,” he grumbled. “They could just as easily have blown them up in the daytime.”

“Let’s move!” a gendarme shouted, passing us on horseback. “Come on, to your feet, it’s after five o’clock! It’ll be light soon!”

In keeping with my plan to conserve our provisions, I chewed one voluptuous spoonful of caviar while Petite made short work of a hard-boiled egg. I drank a bit of cold tea, tossed back a shot of rum and, taking advantage of the predawn dark, stepped off the road to relieve myself.

“Let’s move, let’s move!” shouted another gendarme.

I climbed up into the coachbox, allowing Petit a few more hours of sleep. Stretching like a long worm of iron and wood, the convoy began to move with a great creaking, crunching, and neighing, accompanied by the occasional distant howl of wolves on the steppes. The sun rose at our backs and Belliard’s covered wagon began to roll forward. What might the woman in the painting’s name be? Why had she chosen to be portrayed as a soldier? What did the inscription say? Her name? The painter’s? And what if it were some kind of message, a message meant especially for me? But who could translate those words into French? Well, somewhere in the convoy were Madame Fusil and the theater troupe, and those Jewish Muscovites and merchants who, fearing retaliation, had decided to join us, and also the girls who’d taken up with the officers and, of course, the interpreters with the General Staff. As soon as Petit woke up, I’d copy the characters into my notebook and saddle my horse. I’d see what opportunity might present itself.

Belliard’s wagon came to a halt at mid-morning. The sky, now covered by dense, grayish clouds, foretold of snow. To entertain myself, I started reading one of the novels Petit kept under the seat. It was about five French prisoners guarded by a sturdy and abundantly fleshed Austrian woman. My reading was interrupted by Belliard, shouting furiously. One of his weakened horses had collapsed and two gendarmes were using their sabers to poke at the remaining horses’ haunches. Six other gendarmes and a captain joined them.

“Push the wagon off the road,” yelled the captain.

Belliard, without thinking, put his hand on the hilt of his saber.

“Unsheathe that goddamned blade and you’re a dead man!” said the captain, aiming his pistol at Belliard’s head. “Come on, help push the wagon!”

“You there, stop staring and give us a hand!” said a gendarme, pointing at me with his saber.

“There are two of us,” I said, and climbed down from the coachbox. “My friend is inside the carriage,” I added, so that Petit would also do his part.

Fifteen minutes later, we were moving again. Belliard had been left behind with his toppled wagon and useless horses, his piano just one more piece of junk in the cemetery of castoffs that lined both sides of the road.

Now we were traveling behind a coupe almost identical to ours. As had been the case with Belliard, the coupe had no extra horses in tow. When the convoy was stopped for the third time, I went to introduce myself to our new neighbor. (I already knew that the carriage behind us, driven by an orderly, carried the belongings of an artillery major with the Young Guard.) It turned out to be the tenor Tarquinio, whom Napoleon had invited to the Kremlin so he could hear some music in Italian. He was traveling alone, surrounded by boxes covered in swathes of gold brocade fabric. But, since he couldn’t read Russian, I saddled my horse and headed out cross-country. I was immediately reminded of my ride on Jeudi alongside Lannes’ column. But no matter how my memory might have amplified the number of wagons traveling with the 5th Corps, that number paled in comparison with the dense tide of vehicles that, the road too narrow to accommodate them—and they were three, and even four abreast—spilled over onto the plain, scattering into lines as far as the eye could see, mixing with cavalry squadrons and entire regiments whose faded colors could now scarcely be distinguished from the sparse, yellowing grass of the countryside. Resisting the urge to spur my horse into a gallop, I held him at a trot until we reached one of the groups of gendarmes who were in charge of the road. I learned from them that Napoleon had ordered that a great deal of powder and munitions be exploded in order to use the horses to transport artillery.

“The Emperor doesn’t want to leave the Russians even a single cannon that he might show off as a trophy,” one of the men told me. I also learned that, during the previous night, the Cossacks had attacked several wagons that had fallen behind, taking a fair number of prisoners.

“Always have your pistol at the ready, doctor. Don’t allow the Cossacks to capture you.”

“You’d be better off blowing your brains out,” said another. “The Cossacks would sell you to the peasants. You don’t even want to know the horrors they’d inflict upon you before they killed you.”

“The Emperor is too kind,” commented another gendarme. “Instead of setting fire to the villages with those dogs inside, we’re required to drag them out of their huts first. Why treat beasts with such consideration?”

“I’m with the medical service of the Imperial General Staff and I need to see Barron Larrey,” I said, to change that disagreeable topic.

“Ah, Baron Larrey, the one who’d recommend I blow my brains out,” he said reverently. “He cured me of a lance wound in Aboukir. He’s sure to be traveling with the Emperor’s retinue, about two leagues ahead.”

I was surprised by the distance that now separated us from Larrey and Uncle Charles. They must have driven on through the night, sleeping in their carriages. Four leagues was too far for my emaciated horse. It was necessary to conserve his strength for the weeks ahead. As they had given him to me without a name, I simply called him Cheval.

“Have you seen the wagon carrying the theater troupe that came to Moscow?” I asked. They looked at one another in silence.

“The woman who sang Plaisir d’amour?” asked the eldest among them.

“Yes, Madame Fusil,” I replied.

“She’s quite near. Perhaps half a league from here,” he said, pointing down the road. “She’s traveling in a dormeuse in the farthest right-hand column.”

Thanking him for the information, I set off in the direction the gendarme had indicated.

It was easy to find Madame Fusil, since there were very few dormeuses—as the narrow, elongated carriages that allowed one to stretch out on a folding bed were called—in the column. I began by telling her how much I’d enjoyed the performance at the Posniakov Palace. Although she couldn’t have been much older than thirty, I asked her if she knew Maryse Polidor.

“Maryse Polidor . . . Polidor,” she repeated. “I heard of her when I was a child, but I never heard her sing. Do you know her, monsieur?”

“Well, yes. She’s married to an uncle of mine who lives in Havana.”

“You’re from Havana? Who’d ever have guessed! Your French is excellent.”

“Thank you, madame. I had a very good teacher,” I said, realizing that it had been some time since I’d bothered to imitate the Spanish accent. “But, speaking of languages, perhaps you might do me a favor. You see, in Moscow I acquired a painting with an inscription in Russian. I’ve copied it here,” I added, taking out my notebook. “Do you speak Russian?”

“A little, monsieur. A barbarous language, to tell you the truth. Nothing like French, although after four years, I have learned some. Let me take a look.”

I handed her my notebook through the carriage window.

“Woman . . . ,” she said right away. “You see, I can read something at least. And this word could mean several things: dress, garb, suit . . . and this one means . . . battle. Now let’s add the prepositions.”

“Woman . . . in . . . battle . . . dress,” I said.

“Voilà! Woman in Battle Dress. That’s the title! Is the woman dressed as a soldier?”

I nodded, smiling, for the painting’s title filled me with joy. The column came to a halt and I stopped Cheval. The air began to fill with snowflakes, small as fish scales.

“It would never have occurred to me to have my portrait done dressed as a soldier. And it’s not that I’ve never dressed as a man, either. But the theater is the theater. Why don’t you come inside, monsieur? It’s snowing. There’s plenty of room and I’d love to know what moved you to buy that painting. Perhaps you’re drawn to fierce women?”

This last Madame Fusil said in a dangerously flirtatious tone and, insisting that I needed to see Baron Larrey, I bid her farewell, promising that I’d take her up on her offer sometime soon.

It’s never ceased to amaze me how the snow can render unrecognizable a street or landscape that ought to be familiar. And so I didn’t realize that we were crossing the battlefield at Borodino until I saw, half-covered by that vast white cloak, the countless bodies of the men and horses we’d left unburied. So they had fallen by the tens of thousands on the 8th and 9th of September, and so we would find them seven weeks later. The low temperatures had staved off the process of decomposition to such an extent that it was still possible to see individual features on some of the faces, except that the skin had turned brick red, save for the cheeks, which were now blue. Many of them had been half-eaten by wolves and dogs before freezing, and crows could yet be seen trying to peck some scrap of cold-hardened bloody flesh. Despite my training at the Practical School, the spectacle nauseated me. I was able to avoid retching, but the tenor Tarquino wasn’t as lucky. Coming to the bridge, I saw Genlis, one of the assistants who’d worked with us during the battle. He was opening and closing his arms, trying to stay warm. I assumed he was there waiting for me and Petit, and I called out his name. Recognizing us, he spurred his horse in our direction.

“The baron needs you at Kolotskoië. When you reach the fork, take the road toward the abbey. I’ve been waiting for you a long time in this cold,” he complained.

I guessed that Larrey and my uncle had gone to the abbey to arrange for the evacuation of the twenty thousand wounded we’d left behind with the monks.

“And our wounded?” I asked.

“A terrible thing,” said Genlis, grimacing as he moved away.

When we arrived at the great compound of walls and towers that formed the abbey, we found a train of ambulances in the yard. Almost all the wagons were overflowing with cadaverous men, and my uncle was personally instructing the orderlies into which wagon to deposit each man.

“Where have you been?” he asked when he saw us. “You should travel closer to the General Staff,” he scolded. “A terrible tragedy has occurred here. The monks left a month ago, abandoning our men to their fate. Go to the stable and tell the orderlies which of those wretched men are still alive! One out of every three they bring out is dead,” he said, indicating two long lines of motionless bodies behind the wagons. “Hurry, it will be getting dark any minute.”

The stable looked like a rotting garbage heap. The stench was unbearable. The living and the dead shared the same roof, the same straw, blackened with blood and diarrhea. Larrey had secured Napoleon’s permission to enlist two companies of the Württemberg light infantry to assist in transporting the survivors. The soldiers, irritated by the extra effort being required of them, carried out their work without showing the least modicum of compassion. Petit and I, at opposite ends of the stable, indicated not only which men were still alive, but also those who had any hope of recovering. Even so, the ambulances were soon completely full. Just when it seemed we would have to leave more than a thousand unlucky souls behind, Larrey arrived, leading a train of wagons, carriages, and supply carts. By Napoleon’s order, they had been diverted from the main road so as to transport at least one or two of the wounded per vehicle. Seeing that a chance at survival had arrived, those unfortunate men began to joke and sing. Buoyed by their mirth, some on stretchers and others supporting themselves on a comrade’s shoulder, they made their way toward the men they took for friends. Days later, we found out that almost all of them, over the nights that followed, had been tossed into the road and crushed under wagon wheels. Napoleon, enraged, ordered several of those responsible shot.

The next horror awaited us a bit further down the road, as we entered the village of Ghjat. We found several hundred dead in the middle of the road. They were Russian prisoners. The Portuguese who’d been escorting them had forced them to lie down in the snow and had dispatched each of them with a bullet to the head. The crows that had been following us began immediately to peck at their remains. “This is a bad sign, Larrey,” said my uncle.

“Yes, and this is only the beginning,” sighed Larrey somberly, recording something in his notebook. Then, turning to Petit and me, he said the same thing Uncle Charles had told us: “Don’t let anyone get ahead of you on the road. March directly behind us, as though you were our aides-de-camp. Petit, give this message to Gourgaud, the Emperor’s chief orderly! We must bring this to his attention. If discipline continues to deteriorate, we’ll never even make it to Smolensk. The true test of a soldier lies not in conquering his fear before a battle, but rather in resisting the demoralization of retreat.”

I remembered the morning I went to the hospital in Passau, where Robert was convalescing. When I’d asked him how he’d been wounded, he said: “The Prussians were retreating and we were ordered to go after them with our sabers. It was a bloodbath. They had flung down their muskets and their rucksacks and were running ahead of our horses. I must have left ten or twelve of them lying in the dirt, but when I turned Patriote to finish off an officer who’d fallen to his knees, the rascal took advantage of the fact that I had my saber raised and he slashed my right thigh. It was a moment of carelessness. I’d taken it for granted that he’d lost the will to fight. Out of every hundred men in retreat, only two or three return blows. The others allow their throats to be slit like geese.”

This was what worried Larrey.

It was already well into the night when Petit returned from his assignment. He said he was frozen near to death and, while he drank one of his bottles of wine, he told me that he’d seen Napoleon, wrapped in animal skins, mounted on his gray horse. “The first thing he asked me was if his orders with regard to the transport of the wounded had been carried out, and then he asked if it were true that a company from Baden had killed the Russian prisoners. I told him that the culprits were not from Baden, but from Portugal. He said: ‘Well, then that was a different incident,’ then dismissed me.”

We’d just tied Petit’s horse to the coupe when we were surprised by a series of explosions. To our right, the wooden houses of Ghjat began to burn, the flames cutting off our passage. We veered off the road, hoping to find a place to ford the river so we could rejoin Larrey and my uncle, but our wheels got bogged down in the mud.

“We’ll have to wait for daylight,” said Petit.

For once, I agreed with him.

We awoke at mid-morning. The horses were calmly grazing the still frost-covered grass. We cut a good deal of chaff with our sabers and allowed them to eat their fill. Taking advantage of our proximity to a small stream, we watered them from a bucket and filled all of our water vessels. Then we made a fire with the wood we’d stockpiled, comprised mainly of broken pieces of furniture, and we heated tea and oatmeal. Finally, with the help of our extra horses, we freed the coupe and entered what remained of the village of Ghjat. We could see a large number of charred bodies among the ashes and cinders. Still in the village, we heard sustained cannon-fire from the direction of the abbey and we guessed that the Cossacks were attacking the rearguard, in which Field Marshall Davout’s battalion was conveying thousands of vehicles—ambulances, convoys of ammunition and provisions, artillery trains, and wagons filled with women and Russian refugees. The sound of the battle lasted for some time. I thought that, were I a Cossack, I’d limit myself to attacking those convoys, whose wagons were too numerous to be well defended. Apparently, Petit was thinking the same: “Let’s get moving. I don’t want to become part of the rearguard.”

The road was now overflowing with stragglers. Almost all were sick or limping because of a frostbitten foot or a poorly healed wound. It was rarely possible to determine to which regiment they belonged, since they had layered other clothes over their uniforms, sometimes even women’s clothes, or they had wrapped themselves in wool blankets or brocaded cloths that covered them from head to toe. The most prudent among them had acquired overcoats and fur caps back in Moscow. Almost all of them walked without muskets, some carried a chunk of horsemeat, the only food they could find, under their arms or slung over their shoulders—every so often a horse head and a smattering of tripe and bones would appear along the road. There were also men sitting or lying down. Seeing us pass, they would raise their hand, begging us to take them along; the majority of them appeared to be suffering from the stupor brought on by extreme fatigue. Since it was only possible to fit one other person in the coupe, and even this was difficult, we had agreed that we’d only pick up someone we knew or who inspired our trust. We picked up a recruit who still had his musket. I had been moved by his smooth, hairless face, and by his youth. He was so weak that when we lay him down across our luggage, he let out a sigh and fainted. Near sunset, a band of Germans descended upon us, intent on stealing our horses and carriage. One of them managed to grab Cheval’s tail, but the horse kicked him with both hooves and I saw him fall, twisting in pain, while his cohorts cursed us in German. After this incident, we decided not to stop again until we found one of our battalions. We had no idea in which order they were marching. We knew only, from the occasional explosion of an ammunitions wagon, that they were not bivouacked far from where we were.

Sometime after three in the morning, we came across some artillery carts. When we stopped the coupe, we saw that the recruit had died and we left him by the side of the road. We spoke to the men standing guard, a corporal and a soldier, and I made tea for everyone over their fire. They belonged to the 3rd Corps, under the command of Field Marshall Ney. They had crossed the Niemen with forty thousand men, and now scarcely numbered eight thousand.

“We left four garrison battalions in Kovno, three in Vilna, and we lost the rest at Borodino and in the battles along the road,” lamented the corporal, a fierce-faced veteran named Grenelle. “Your ambulances must be overflowing with our men.”

“We aren’t traveling with the ambulances,” said Petit. “We’re with the General Staff.”

“With Baron Larrey,” I added, knowing that his name was well known throughout the Grande Armée.

“I’ve heard of him,” muttered Grenelle.

“The Emperor is far ahead of us,” said the soldier.

“We’d be farther ahead as well were it not for Davout,” protested Grenelle, with a gesture of irritation. “His men march with lead feet.”

“They are being attacked by the Cossacks,” I said, by way of excusing them.

“So are we. When a horse dies, we blow up the wagon so that they can’t take advantage of it.”

“If your carriage is captured, you’d be better off shooting yourselves,” advised the soldier.

“We’ve got our pistols at the ready,” replied Petit.

“So much the better. If you’re taken prisoner, they’ll strip your clothes and turn you over to the peasants.”

“The word for peasant in Russian is moujik,” said Petit with his customary pedantry.

“Whatever you want to call them, they’ll put out your eyes and cut off your tongues and your hands. And then they’ll leave you in the fields, at the mercy of the wolves and dogs,” the soldier assured us.

“We will not allow ourselves to be taken alive,” I said. “Do you know which troops are up ahead?”

“The Old Guard.”

“A true disgrace,” lamented Grenelle. “A plague of rats who eat and drink everything they find, without a thought to those marching at their backs.”

When we entered Viazma at dawn, I saw that the old artilleryman had been right. Despite the fact that they already had food enough for five days, the Guard had sacked the storehouses of provisions being saved for the wounded, disobeying Napoleon’s orders.

The village had also been burned and, while we were talking with a light cavalry officer, a powerful artillery blast exploded from the rearguard.

“The Cossacks!” shouted Petit, frightened.

“If only it were!” said the officer. “That’s forty or fifty cannons. It’s the Russian army attacking Davout. Soon enough they’ll be attacking us, since we’ve been given orders to support Davout. They’ve chosen a fine moment, too; my horse is on its last legs,” he added with disgust, before turning the emaciated animal around.

We fled Viazma in a frenzy of whips and spurs. The stragglers also picked up their pace, leaving anything they’d been carrying behind. Suddenly, in the distance, we saw a cavalry formation heading toward us. Terrified, thinking they were Russians, we got off the road. Since the terrain was covered in brambles, we abandoned the coupe and climbed up a ravine, dragging our beleaguered horses by the bridles. From the highest rock outcropping we could see the battle that Ney, on the outskirts of Viazma, and Davout, further to the East, were waging. Turning my head in the opposite direction, I saw that the cavalry troop advancing along the road was the Italian Guard of the 4th Corps, easily recognizable by their white uniforms. From the looks of it, they were coming to prevent the rearguard from being cut off. Other cavalry troops could be seen in the distance. Presently, Ney’s cannons began firing at the Russian artillerymen from a small wooded area. Nevertheless, the latter continued bombarding Davout’s wagons. From our perch, it was possible to see the entire battle unfolding, almost as though it were a game or a field exercise devoid of cruelty and blood. I would happily have stayed right there but Petit, quite rightly, insisted that we return to the coupe. Except when we climbed back down, it wasn’t there. The stragglers had appropriated it, taking everything we owned—or almost everything: they’d left our muskets, cartridges, and firewood, the indecent novels, and my painting. Petit, disconsolate at the loss of our food and clothes, began blaming me.

“It was you who said the Russians were coming!” he reproached me for the third time.

“And you who said we should run!” I said, furious and, not looking at him, I cut the canvas from the frame, folded it in quarters, and put in under my coat. Then I mounted Cheval and set off without a word.

I learned an important lesson from Aunt Margot when I was a little girl. “What did Abbè Lachouque teach you today?” she’d asked me at dinnertime once, perhaps hoping to show me off to her guests. I responded, quite proudly, that I’d learned all about the solstices and equinoxes, knowledge that I aptly demonstrated with the aid of an apple and a grape I’d found on the table. The next day dawned cold and, while we had breakfast, she asked me what season it was. I said it was autumn, since the date of the winter solstice had yet to arrive.

“But it’s as cold as if it were winter, isn’t it?” she’d asked. I replied that yes, it was cold. “Do you know why?” she pressed. I tried in vain to come up with some geographical explanation.

“I don’t know, Aunt Margot,” I said.

“Well, neither do I, but it does seem that, this year, winter has arrived before your solstice.”

That day I learned that the seasons, marked by the equinoxes and solstices, expand and contract in accordance with the mysteries of nature.

I suspect that Aunt Margot’s intentions went beyond planetary considerations. But here I’ll take them literally: the winter of 1812, at least along the road to Smolensk, did not arrive on the last week of December, but rather at the beginning of November, and it did so amid great windstorms, fog, and ton upon ton of merciless snow.

It took only a few days for the Grande Armée to lose a third of its already much diminished numbers. It’s easier to understand this if one takes into account that it was an army exhausted by hundreds of kilometers of marching—thousands, in the case of the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians, and French from the South—an army that was retreating along the same route it had come two months before, burning towns and villages, killing the livestock and robbing the peasants of anything of value; a famished army, insufficiently dressed, forced to bivouac in the open air, continually harassed by the enemy, almost without ammunition or horses and, above all, on the verge of total demoralization.

What do I remember of that terrible march through the snow, wind, and ice? I was surprised that the road disappeared into the white of the steppe, that the wine froze in the bottles, that iron seemed to burn on contact with our hands. Many wagons and cannons were abandoned over those first few days. Those who were poorly shod—particularly among the light infantry—watched as their feet went purple, then blue, then turned from the color of tobacco to coal-black. It was not infrequent for a man to sit down to rest and, a few minutes later, to hear him cry out in fear because he couldn’t get up again. Others, possessed by a strange euphoria, began to laugh and to jump about like clowns before falling down lifeless a few steps later. Many died silently; they fell and got up again until the moment came when they refused to go on. It’s true that the pines provided firewood, but it was green wood; when its resin was burned, instead of flames, it emitted huge clouds of smoke that caused coughing and streaming eyes. In any event, the cold was so intense that even the dry wood from the wagons and the huts was of little use. It was common to find dead men clustered around the remains of a fire, their shoes charred and their heads and torsos frozen. The horses died just as easily, although perhaps not so much from the cold as from thirst, since the surfaces of all the creeks, ponds and wells were frozen and picks and hatchets were scarce. Further, it was necessary to melt a great deal of snow to yield a bucket of water. And, in any case, where were the buckets? No one had thought that they were irreplaceable objects, and most had been smashed to use for firewood or had simply been left behind with the wagons, along with everything else that was considered useless. A similar thing happened with the cooking pots, tossed along the road, together with the muskets and tools, because they were too heavy to carry. No one carrying a pot ever had to worry about eating. All he needed to do was to carry it on his back, in plain sight, and he’d receive dozens of invitations. A few still had the odd bottle of rum or cognac, or a bit of sugar, tea, or coffee, some flour or rice. But in order to enjoy these provisions one had to leave the road, go to a nearby forest, and make one’s own fire to eat in private. The only food at hand—and this not always—was horsemeat, and a piece of liver, or a repulsive-looking pudding made from boiling horse blood with a bit of flour, became truly gourmet meals. And so, when reveille sounded each morning, the first order of business was to slaughter the horses that had fallen during the night, even those that were not yet quite dead. When one died on the road, the nearest men would set upon it immediately; voracious as crows, they would disembowel it in the blink of an eye, looking for the precious liver, while others butchered the haunches, torso, and legs.

How did I survive those first few weeks of November? Purely by chance. After riding for two days, passing alongside scene after macabre scene, I came to the bivouac of a regiment of Polish lancers from the rearguard of the 5th Corps, Poniatowski. Dying of hunger and exhaustion, I asked to see an officer. Luckily, one of the lancers spoke some French. Faced with his sullen expression and his reluctance to offer me any help, I made up a fantastical story: “I’m carrying a message from the General Staff for Count Lubomirski,” I said firmly. I was certain that Alfred was in Spain, but I thought that perhaps his name would be familiar to someone in the regiment and that it might serve as an entré.

The lancer, without saying a word, walked off toward a wagon at the side of the road. A short while later, he returned with an officer who adjusted his czapka as he approached.

“Josef Ostrowski,” he introduced himself.

“Surgeon Major Cavent, from the General Staff, invites Count Lubomirski to dinner tomorrow evening,” I said with the same naturalness as though we were in Paris. “I had a note from Baron Cavent with me, but I was attacked by some stragglers and I lost everything.”

“But Count Lubomirski is not with us,” said the Pole, in good French.

“Baron Cavent had understood that he was.”

“You’ve come from Headquarters looking for Count Lubomirski?” asked the Pole, finding it difficult to believe that anyone would have ridden an entire day to deliver a message of such little importance.

“That’s correct,” I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. “The Count is an old friend of the Baron’s, and mine as well. We cured him of a wound to his right shoulder when he was stationed in Paris. Tomorrow is the Baron’s birthday and—”

“But Count Lubomirski is with one of the Vistula regiments, assigned to the Imperial Guard, quite close to headquarters,” said the lieutenant, cutting me off.

“What?” I said, genuinely surprised.

“Well, yes,” smiled the lieutenant. “He’s right under the Baron’s nose, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“I’m speaking of Count Alfred Lubomirski, Legion of the Vistula, General Staff to Field Marshall Ney, Cross of Honor, wounded at Zaragoza,” I said, incredulously, thinking that perhaps the lieutenant was referring to a different Lubomirski.

“Yes, the very same. I see that you know him well. I do not have the honor of calling myself his friend, but there’s not a single officer in the Polish cavalry who doesn’t know his name. He is one of our heroes. He could be in his castle or traveling the world and instead, well, you know. . . . He’s sacrificed his life to our cause since he was a boy.”

“If only I’d known!” I said, thinking how close I’d been to him, of the opportunities I’d had to run into him in Moscow.

“Yes, it’s a pity you didn’t know. It would have spared you the exhaustion of all that riding. But, please, let’s go to my wagon. I have some good furs and something left to toast to Count Lubomirski’s health. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to the colonel.”

The time I spent with the Polish lancers was quite pleasant, under the circumstances. Accustomed as they were to the cold, I learned from them how to sleep in short intervals with the goal of moving all of the body’s bones and muscles every two or three hours, especially the legs, arms, and feet. They also taught me to sleep barefoot, with my feet, after a vigorous rub, wrapped in rags, while the frozen mud melted from my boots by the fire. Given Ostrowski’s generosity in sharing his wagon and its amenities, I availed myself of the opportunity to wash with hot water. Presented with the gift of clean clothes brought from Moscow, I removed the cashmere shawl and allowed my bruised nipples to breath, their raised forms now hidden by the thick winter uniform that had once belonged to a Russian footman. No one took better care of their horses than those lancers. They wrapped them up at night as though they were children, and they fed and watered them as best they possibly could. Before reveille had sounded in the other corps, they had already sent a squad armed with pickaxes to the nearest stream to break through the surface layer of ice. There, men and beast would drink before setting off on the day’s march. Because their well-cared for horses could travel farther than any others in the Grande Armée, the parties they sent ahead in search of food and forage visited villages far afield from the road, villages that had never been sacked, and they were able to make themselves understood by the villagers because of the similarities between Polish and Russian. Cheval, the object of all of those attentions, appeared completely rejuvenated within a matter of days.

At last we arrived in Smolensk. I say at last because the rumor running through the entire army was that we would set up winter barracks in Smolensk, the third largest city in Russia. There, receiving provisions from Poland, Prussia, and Germany, we would recover our strength and, with proper reinforcements and supplies, we would march to Saint Petersburg in the spring to put an end to the campaign. There is no question that this was, in fact, Napoleon’s plan, but in order to carry it out it was necessary to hold Vitebsk, a city to the west of Smolensk. In order to guarantee possession, Prince Eugène’s corps had received orders to leave the main road and march to Vitebsk, where it would unite with the troops garrisoned there. And so, for both the Poles and for me, when we saw the city walls of Smolensk and the tall tower of its cathedral through the mist, it was as though we were seeing the gates of heaven. Further, in my case, it was there I’d surely find not only Uncle Charles and Larrey, but also Alfred, to whom I hoped to give the surprise of his life.