nce again. The doctor was alarmed by the effect that his words made
upon his guest; his niece's lover became as dear to him as his niece. If
either of them deserved to be pitied, that one was certainly Philip; did
he not bear alone the burden of an appalling sorrow?

The doctor made inquiries, and learned that the hapless colonel had
retired to a country house of his near Saint-Germain. A dream had
suggested to him a plan for restoring the Countess to reason, and the
doctor did not know that he was spending the rest of the autumn in
carrying out a vast scheme. A small stream ran through his park, and in
winter time flooded a low-lying land, something like the plain on the
eastern side of the Beresina. The village of Satout, on the slope of
a ridge above it, bounded the horizon of a picture of desolation,
something as Studzianka lay on the heights that shut in the swamp of the
Beresina. The colonel set laborers to work to make a channel to resemble
the greedy river that had swallowed up the treasures of France and
Napoleon's army. By the help of his memories, Philip reconstructed on
his own lands the bank where General Eble had built his bridges. He
drove in piles, and then set fire to them, so as to reproduce the
charred and blackened balks of timber that on either side of the river
told the stragglers that their retreat to France had been cut off. He
had materials collected like the fragments out of which his comrades in
misfortune had made the raft; his park was laid waste to complete
the illusion on which his last hopes were founded. He ordered ragged
uniforms and clothing for several hundred peasants. Huts and bivouacs
and batteries were raised and burned down. In short, he omitted
no device that could reproduce that most hideous of all scenes. He
succeeded. When, in the earliest days of December, snow covered the
earth with a thick white mantle, it seemed to him that he saw the
Beresina itself. The mimic Russia was so startlingly real, that several
of his old comrades recognized the scene of their past sufferings. M.
de Sucy kept the secret of the drama to be enacted with this tragical
background, but it was looked upon as a mad freak in several circles of
society in Paris.

In the early days of the month of January 1820, the colonel drove over
to the Forest of l'Isle-Adam in a carriage like the one in which M.
and Mme. de Vandieres had driven from Moscow to Studzianka. The horses
closely resembled that other pair