ork skilfully
prepared, which a slow fire was already consuming; its progress was
minutely calculated; so that it was known at what hour the fire would
reach the immense heap of powder buried among the foundations of these
condemned palaces.

Mortier hastened his flight; but while he was rapidly retiring, some
greedy Cossacks and squalid Muscovites, allured probably by the prospect
of pillage, approached; they listened, and emboldened by the apparent
quiet which pervaded the fortress, they ventured to penetrate into it;
they ascended, and their hands, eager after plunder, were already
stretched forth, when in a moment they were all destroyed, crushed,
hurled into the air, with the buildings which they had come to pillage,
and thirty thousand stand of arms that had been left behind there: and
then their mangled limbs, mixed with fragments of walls and shattered
weapons, blown to a great distance, descended in a horrible shower.

The earth shook under the feet of Mortier. At Feminskoe, ten leagues
off, the Emperor heard the explosion, and he himself, in that tone of
anger in which he sometimes addressed Europe, published the following
day a bulletin, dated from Borowsk, to this effect, that "the Kremlin,
the arsenal, the magazines were all destroyed; that the ancient citadel,
which dated from the origin of the monarchy, and the first palace of the
Czars, no longer existed; that Moscow was now but a heap of ruins, a
filthy and unwholesome sink, without importance, either political or
military. He had abandoned it to Russian beggars and plunderers to march
against Kutusoff, to throw himself on the left wing of that general, to
drive him back, and then to proceed quietly to the banks of the Duena,
where he should take up his winter-quarters." Then, apprehensive lest he
should appear to be retreating, he added, that "there he should be
within eighty leagues of Wilna and Petersburg, a double advantage; that
is to say, twenty marches nearer to his resources and his object." By
this remark he hoped to give to his retreat the air of an offensive
march.

It was on this occasion that he declared, that "he had refused to give
orders for the destruction of the whole country which he was quitting;
he felt a repugnance to aggravate the miseries of its inhabitants. To
punish the Russian incendiary and a hundred wretches who make war like
Tartars, he would not ruin nine thousand proprietors, and leave two
hundred thousand serfs, innoc