Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

264 author's motive for not attending.

recollections ? Why this bold evocation of so many mute and forgotten spectres ? It is the last judgment of the conscripts of 1812. If they wished to make a satire upon military life, they could not take a better course: it лгав thus that Holbein, iu his Dance of Death, caricatured human life. Numbers of these men, awakened out of their sleep on the brink of their graves, have not mounted a horse for many years ; and here they are obliged, in order to please a master whom they have never seen, again to play over their long-forgotten parts. They have so much dread of not satisfying the expectations of the capricious sovereign who thus troubles their old age, that they say the representation of the battle is more terrible to them than was the reality. This useless ceremony, this fanciful war, will make an end of the soldiers whom the real event spared : it is a cruel pleasure, worthy of one of the successors of the czar who caused living bears to be introdiiced in the masquerade that he gave on the nuptials of his buffoon : that czar was Peter the Great. All these diversions have their source in the same feeling — contempt for human life.

The emperor had permitted me — which means to say that he commanded me — to be present at Borodino. It is a favour of which I feci myself to have become unworthy. I did not at the time reflect upon the extreme difficulty of the part a Frenchman would have to perform in this historical comedy; and I also had not seen the monstrous work of the Kremlin, which he wTould expect me to praise; above all, I was then ignorant of the history of the Princess Troubctzkoï, which I have the greater difficulty in