the evening entertainments of the Tuileries. By
such means Napoleon expected to dupe a government which the habit of
reigning over ignorance and error had rendered an adept in all these
delusions.

He was himself sensible of the inadequacy of these means, and yet
September was past, and October had begun. Alexander had not deigned to
reply! it was an affront! he was exasperated. On the 3d of October,
after a night of restlessness and irritation, he summoned his marshals.
"Come in," said he, as soon as he perceived them; "hear the new plan
which I have conceived: Prince Eugene, read it." They listened. "We must
burn the remains of Moscow, and march by Twer to St. Petersburg, where
we shall be joined by Macdonald. Murat and Davoust will form the rear
guard." The emperor, all animation, fixed his sparkling eyes on his
generals, whose rigid and silent countenances expressed nothing but
astonishment.

Then exalting himself in order to rouse them, "What!" said he, "and are
_you_ not inflamed by this idea? Was there ever so great a military
achievement? Henceforth this conquest is the only one that is worthy of
us! With what glory shall we be covered, and what will the whole world
say when it learns that in three months we have conquered the two great
capitals of the North!"

But Davoust, as well as Daru, objected to him "the season, the want of
supplies, a sterile desert, and artificial road, that from Twer to St.
Petersburg runs for a hundred leagues through morasses, and which three
hundred peasants might in a single day render impassable. Why keep
proceeding north? Why go to meet, to provoke, and to defy the winter? it
was already too near; and what was to become of the six thousand wounded
still in Moscow? Were they then to be left to the mercy of Kutusoff?
That general would not fail to follow close at our heels. We should have
at once to attack and to defend, thus marching to a conquest as though
we were in flight."

These officers have declared that they themselves then proposed various
plans: a useless trouble with a prince whose genius outstripped all
other imaginations, and whom their objections would not have stopped,
had he been fully determined to march on St. Petersburg. But that idea
was in him only a sally of anger, an inspiration of despair, on finding
himself obliged in the face of Europe to give way, to relinquish his
conquest and to fall back.

It was more especially a threat to frighten his officer