'But, you don't understand! The Emperor will be obliged to do something. He can't clutter himself with prisoners on the road back to Paris.'

'And what makes you think he is going back to Paris?'

Marianne was so startled that she stopped crying and stared at her friend with disbelieving eyes.

'Isn't he?'

'Certainly not. His Majesty has decided to winter here. Count Dumas and your humble servant have precise instructions concerning the victualling of the army. General Durosnel has his for the movement of troops and Marshal Mortier is settling into his role as governor. Even the company of actors who were here when we came are to hold themselves in readiness to perform, as a means of maintaining French morale.'

'But he can't! Spend the winter here? I'd like to know what his Majesty's staff think of it.'

'Nothing good. I never saw so many long faces. None of them have ever wintered out of France except during the Polish campaign. According to what I've been told, the Emperor has two opposite ideas in mind. Either Alexander will agree to discuss terms and we'll think about going home as soon as the peace treaty is signed, or else we'll spend the winter here, bring the army up to strength with the reinforcements that have been sent for and then, in the spring, we march on Petersburg.'

"What? Another campaign – after the disasters of this one?'

'It may not happen. An envoy has been sent to the Tsar. He is carrying a letter from General Tutolmin, the director of the Foundling Hospital, witnessing that the French did their utmost to save Moscow, and another from the Emperor to the Tsar, assuring him of his goodwill and brotherly feelings.'

'Brotherly feelings! But this is absurd! It cannot work!'

'That is Caulaincourt's opinion and he knows Alexander. But the Emperor, thinks he's being unduly pessimistic and won't speak to him. The fact is that Murat is still flirting with Platov's cossacks and doing his best to persuade Napoleon that the Tsar will be only too happy to fall into his arms. Oh, it's a bad business altogether! I don't know what the outcome of it all will be, but I do know one thing – I've no hope of seeing Milan this year!'

That night, Marianne could not sleep. She lay searching feverishly for some way of reaching her friends but, short of finding the cardinal and giving herself up, there was none. There could be no thought of entering the Kremlin unofficially. The old fortress had been placed on a war footing. Regiments of the Old Guard, under the command of Generals Michel, Gros and Tindal, were on duty night and day, with a hundred men at each of the five gates still in use, while the remaining four were stoutly barricaded and watched by a sergeant and eight men. Entry into that stronghold, bristling with arms, was out of the question. She must wait, then, but for how long? Until when? If Napoleon was determined to spend the winter in Moscow, that might mean six months locked up in the house. It was enough to drive her mad.

True, there was also Constant's theory, as reported by Beyle, that they should allow time for the Emperor's anger to calm down and then he, Constant, would undertake gently to plead the rebels' cause. But Marianne put little faith in this. Napoleon's rage might be short-lived, but he was more than capable of bearing a grudge.

The days that followed were gloomy ones for Marianne, in spite of the lovely weather prevailing out of doors. She gazed out at it despairingly, killing time by sharing Barbe's sewing, but she lived entirely for the hour when her companion in misfortune would come home, bringing with him the day's news.

For the most part, it was dismally monotonous. Nothing had come from St Petersburg and preparations were still going ahead for going into winter quarters. The Emperor was delighted with his courier service, which was working wonderfully, thanks to the brilliant organization of the director of Posts, the Comte de la Valette. The mail arrived every day, with the regularity of clockwork, after a journey of fifteen days and fourteen hours. It had reached the point where the Emperor grew anxious and displayed a degree of tetchiness if one of the couriers was an hour after his time. This apart, he was in high good humour, amusing himself frequently at the expense of the wretched Caulaincourt and his dire pictures of the Russian winter, and for ever remarking that, in autumn at any rate, it was finer than at Fontainebleau.

This imperial jollity found no echo in Marianne, nor indeed in Beyle, who was spending exhausting days inventorying the victuals which were still coming to light in the cellars of the ruined houses.

Beyle, too, was depressed. He had met a man in Moscow, one Auguste Fecel, a harpist by profession, from whom he had at last been able to get news of his old flame, Melanie de Barcoff. What he heard had distressed him greatly. According to the harpist, the lady had left Moscow for St Petersburg some days before the fire, among the last fugitives to leave the city, and against the wishes of her husband, with whom she was on the point of separating, although about to bear his child. She was, moreover, wholly without money.

This unhappy tale sent the young man into something of a frenzy. He was trying desperately to find some way of reaching his former mistress and taking her back to France with him. He talked about her endlessly to Marianne, for comfort, praising her virtues so incessantly that Marianne found herself beginning to take the unknown Melanie in strong dislike. She grew almost as sick of his present mistress, Angelina Bereyter, although what Beyle had to say about her was more concerned with her charms than her virtues, which seemed to be non-existent. Poor Beyle seemed to have an incorrigible predilection for impossible women.

Only his sister, Pauline, won Marianne's approval. When he was not writing interminable letters to her – to be sent by the postal service the Emperor had been in such haste to re-establish – he was talking about her with an affection that touched Marianne because it was completely unselfconscious. Moreover, he would discuss her in French whereas, whenever he mentioned either of his two loves, he felt obliged to dot his conversation with snatches of English or Italian, a trick which Marianne soon found maddening.

It was only with Barbe that she felt able to relax at all. The Polish woman was comfortingly stolid and tranquil, while the plaintive songs she was in the way of singing as she worked seemed to Marianne to form an agreeable echo of her own melancholy mood. There was one she liked particularly:


Pace gently ere you leave these fields of ours,

My own bay steed, you will not come again,

Your hooves are treading our plains for the last time.


The mere mention of a steed was enough to set her pulses trembling. Oh, to be able to mount a horse and gallop away into the distance until the trees of France came into sight again! She had begun to hate the vastness of Russia. It had closed on her like a fist. She was stifling in the cramped house, with its wood-panelled walls and the ceiling pressing down on her, and in the daily round of life that went on inside it. Soon, she knew, the snow would begin to fall and bury them, herself and Beyle and all the others who were bound in that place by the will of one man only. The will to leave was becoming a palpable thing in all of them – all save Napoleon, who continued to believe that all was well.

By the end of September, however, the news was not so good. Some of the couriers were seriously delayed and one actually failed to arrive at all. Worse still, a convoy of artillery wagons coming from Smolensk with an escort of two squadrons of cavalry was ambushed, only twenty versts from Moscow, by a band of cossacks and the escort taken prisoner. Two days after that, eighty Dragoons of the Guard were taken at Prince Galitzine's estate of Malo Wiasma. But Napoleon continued to review his Guard on the parade ground at the Kremlin, every day precisely at twelve noon.

Beyle grew increasingly depressed as the news continued to come in and, although he did his best, his jokes became fewer and fewer.

'We've enough to feed the army for six months,' he told Marianne, 'but I find these new tactics of the Russians very alarming. How much longer will we be able to keep our line of retreat open? They say there are bands of armed peasants roaming the countryside around Moscow. The cossacks, too, seem to be getting bolder. If the Emperor continues to be obstinate we shall soon find ourselves cut off, with our communications cut, at the mercy of the Russian army, which is presumably refitting somewhere, since Alexander has not deigned to give a sign of life.'

'But can't anyone make the Emperor see sense?'

'Berthier and Davout have both tried but Napoleon promptly began working out a plan to march on St Petersburg at once, so that they climbed down smartly. As for Caulaincourt, he no longer dares to open his mouth. The rest go to the theatre. A stage has been fitted up in the Pozniakoff Palace and Madame Bursay's company are performing Le jeu de l'amour et du Hasard and L'Amant auteur et valet – when everyone is not listening to an effeminate fellow called Tarquinio warbling love songs! Really, I can't believe that any army ever committed suicide with a lighter heart.'

Early in October, Beyle fell ill of a bilious fever. Marianne was obliged to nurse him and found herself very soon out of patience with her patient. Like a great many men, he was a horrid invalid, moaning and grumbling, pleased with nothing, least of all his food. He lay in bed, looking as yellow as a quince and never opening his mouth except to complain, either of their treatment of him or his own intolerable sufferings. For in addition to the trouble with his liver, he was also a martyr to toothache. Marianne sat by him, finding it harder and harder to control the urge to dot him over the head with one of the innumerable pots of herb tea that Barbe concocted for him. Beyle's illness tried her hard, for in spite of his temporary absence from duty, news continued to arrive from the Kremlin, brought by the kindly Bonnaire, who was now recovered and came every evening to keep his colleague up to date with events.