Read Online The Retreat by Patrick Rambaud - Free Book Online

him to wear, the diamonds, the emeralds and the equerries’ silver axes which he would gladly have squeezed into his bags.
    In a corner of the reception room crowded with officers and uniformed administrators, his hands behind his back, he then listened to reports. He learnt that two nights previously, Governor Rostopchin had had horses put to all the fire engines, a hundred or so, to take them out of thecity. The wind was spreading the fire, and water was in short supply.
    â€˜Find the wells, divert the river, draw water from the lakes!’ the Emperor ordered. ‘I’ve come from the Foundling Hospital which I visited with Dr Larrey and what was there in the main courtyard? A fountain with a storage tank that supplied water from the river to the whole building! What else?’
    â€˜From foreign merchants, sire, we know that a chemist, a Dutchman, or an Englishman …’
    â€˜An Englishman, if the aim is do me harm!’
    â€˜An Englishman then, Smidt or Schmitt, was preparing an incendiary balloon …’
    â€˜Oh, what rot!’
    â€˜On board, a crew of fifty people would launch projectiles at Your Majesty’s tent …’
    â€˜What utter bloody rot!’
    â€˜An Italian, a dentist in Moscow, has informed us of the whereabouts of Smidt’s hideout, six versts from the city.’
    â€˜Well, go and have a look! What else?’
    â€˜It appears that the Russian nobility would like to stop the war,’ said a Polish colonel. ‘And Rostopchin and Kutuzov loathe one another.’
    â€˜That’s more like it!’
    â€˜This is what Russian prisoners claim, sire; we don’t know it for certain.’
    â€˜Berthier! Killjoy! I tell you that Alexander will sign the peace!’
    â€˜Otherwise?’
    â€˜Our quarters are secure. When the fires have been put out, we will winter in this capital, surrounded by enemies, like a ship caught in the ice, and we will wait for thesummer months to resume the war. To our rear, in Poland, in Lithuania, we have left more than two hundred and fifty thousand men in garrison who will resupply us and secure communications with Paris; this winter we will levy fresh contingents to reinforce us and then we will march on St Petersburg.’ Napoleon closed his eyes and added, ‘Or India.’
    His audience stiffened, some were open-mouthed with astonishment, but no one dared heave a sigh.
    *
    There wasn’t a street at the back of the Kalitzin residence, as d’Herbigny had thought, but a high-walled courtyard of stables, without straw or horses, and outhouses where the carriages were kept. The captain posted himself there after discovering the wick hanging from a hole in the low window; he planned to catch the incendiary in the act, make him talk, and then kill him. His troopers had gone through the house room by room, or so they said, but no luck; the major-domo had vanished. There must be nooks, hiding places, secret compartments in the walls like in Paris, in the days of Fouquier-Tinville’s tribunal, those double partition walls behind which aristos and their spies used to escape the Terror.
    When day broke, d’Herbigny continued his surveillance hiding in the shadow of the stables. Worn out by an agitated, watchful night, he sat on a stone corner post by the gate; he hadn’t taken off his red fox-fur-lined coat. All of a sudden he saw a parish priest in a soutane coming out of the house, very calm, his face hidden by a woman’s mantilla, and a second, taller figure whom he thought he recognized as the famous major-domo by the powdered wig and livery. He gripped one of the pistols stuck in hissword-belt. The gawky pair were casually strolling about, passing a bottle back and forth between them and drinking from it in turn: one of them must be about to produce his tinderbox and light the wick snaking across the ground, mustn’t he? But no. They walked past it without paying it any