en, the peasantry.

Although I was driven along with great rapidity, it seemed to me
that I did not advance a step, the country was so extremely
monotonous. Plains of sand, forests of birch tree, and villages at a
great distance from each other, composed of wooden houses all built
upon the same plan: these were the only objects that my eyes
encountered. I felt that sort of nightmare which sometimes seizes
one during the night, when you think you are always marching and
never advancing. The country appeared to me like the image of
infinite space, and to require eternity to traverse it. Every
instant you met couriers passing, who went along with incredible
swiftness; they were seated on a wooden bench placed across a little
cart drawn by two horses, and nothing stopped them for a moment. The
jolting of their carriage sometimes made them spring two feet above
it, but they fell with astonishing address, and made haste to call
out in Russian, forward, with an energy similar to that of the
French on a day of battle. The Sclavonian language is singularly
echoing; I should almost say there is something metallic about it;
you would think you heard a bell striking, when the Russians
pronounce certain letters of their alphabet, quite different from
those which compose the dialects of the West.

We saw passing some corps de reserve approaching by forced marches
to the theatre of war; the Cossacks were repairing, one by one, to
the army, without order or uniform, with a long lance in their hand,
and a kind of grey dress, whose ample hood they put over their head.
I had formed quite another idea of these people; they live behind
the Dnieper; there their way of living is independent, in the manner
of savages; but during war they allow themselves to be governed
despotically. One is accustomed to see, in fine uniforms of
brilliant colors, the most formidable armies. The dull colors of the
Cossack dress excite another sort of fear; one might say that they
are ghosts who pounce upon you.

Half way between Kiow and Moscow, as we were already in the vicinity
of the armies, horses became more scarce. I began to be afraid of
being detained in my journey, at the very moment when the necessity
of speed became most urgent; and when I had to wait for five or six
hours in front of a post-house, (as there was seldom an apartment
into which I could enter) I thought with trembling of that army
which might overtake me at the extremity of Europe, a