Every warehouse had, it
seemed, been ransacked and its contents thrown out into the streets.
The first-comers had hurried on, seeking something more valuable,
more portable, leaving the later arrivals to turn over their garbage
like dogs upon a dust-heap.
The Petrovka is a long street of great houses, and was now deserted.
The pillagers were nervous and ill at ease, as men must always be in
the presence of something they do not understand. The most
experienced of them--and there were some famous robbers in Murat's
vanguard--had never seen an empty city abandoned all standing, as
the Russians had abandoned Moscow. They felt apprehensive of the
unknown. Even the least imaginative of them looked askance at the
tall houses, at the open doors of the empty churches, and they kept
together for company's sake.
Charles's rooms were in the Momonoff Palace, where even the youngest
lieutenant had vast apartments assigned to him. It was in one of
these--a lady's boudoir, where his dust-covered baggage had been
thrown down carelessly by his orderly on a blue satin sofa--that he
sat down to write to Desiree.
His emotions had been stirred by all that he had passed through--by
the first sight of Moscow, by the passage beneath the Gate of the
Redeemer, where every man must uncover and only Napoleon dared to
wear a hat; by the bewildering sense of triumph and the knowledge
that he was taking part in one of the epochs of man's history on
this earth.
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