shoulders soon, contemptuously;
"This, then is how Muscovy fights!" cries he.

Meanwhile Murat has reached the Kremlin gates,
And finds them closed against him. Battered these,
The fort reverberates vacant as the streets
But for some grinning wretches gaoled there.
Enchantment seems to sway from quay to keep,
And lock commotion in a century's sleep.

[NAPOLEON, reappearing in front of the city, follows MURAT, and is
again lost to view. He has entered the Kremlin. An interval.
Something becomes visible on the summit of the Ivan Tower.]

CHORUS OF RUMOURS [aerial music]

Mark you thereon a small lone figure gazing
Upon his hard-gained goal? It is He!
The startled crows, their broad black pinions raising,
Forsake their haunts, and wheel disquietedly.

[The scene slowly darkens. Midnight hangs over the city. In
blackness to the north of where the Kremlin stands appears what at
first seems a lurid, malignant star. It waxes larger. Almost
simultaneously a north-east wind rises, and the light glows and
sinks with the gusts, proclaiming a fire, which soon grows large
enough to irradiate the fronts of adjacent buildings, and to show
that it is creeping on towards the Kremlin itself, the walls of
that fortress which face the flames emerging from their previous
shade.

The fire can be seen breaking out also in numerous other quarters.
All the conflagrations increase, and become, as those at first
detached group themselves together, one huge furnace, whence
streamers of flame reach up to the sky, brighten the landscape
far around, and show the houses as if it were day. The blaze
gains the Kremlin, and licks its walls, but does not kindle it.
Explosions and hissings are constantly audible, amid which can be
fancied cries and yells of people caught in the combustion. Large
pieces of canvas aflare sail away on the gale like balloons.
Cocks crow, thinking it sunrise, ere they are burnt to death.]

SCENE VIII

THE SAME. THE INTERIOR OF THE KREMLIN

[A chamber containing a bed on which NAPOLEON has been lying. It
is not yet daybreak, and the flapping light of the conflagration
without shines in at the narrow windows.

NAPOLEON is discovered dressed, but in disorder and unshaven. He
is walking up and down the room in a