Vilna lies all down a slope--a city built upon several hills--and
the Vilia runs at the bottom. That Way of Sorrow, the Smolensk
Road, runs eastward by the river bank, and here the rearguard held
the Cossacks in check while Murat hastily decamped, after dark,
westwards to Kowno. The King of Naples, to whom Napoleon gave the
command of his broken army quite gaily--"a vous, Roi de Naples," he
is reported to have said, as he hurried to his carriage--Murat
abandoned his sick and wounded; did not even warn the stragglers.
D'Arragon entered the city by the narrow gate known as the Town
Gate, through which, as through that greater portal of Moscow, every
man must pass bareheaded.
"The Emperor is here," were the first words spoken to him by the
officer on guard.
But the streets were quiet enough, and the winner in this great game
of chance maintained the same unostentatious silence in victory as
that which, in the hour of humiliation, had baffled Napoleon.
It was almost night, and D'Arragon had been travelling since
daylight. He found a lodging, and, having secured the comfort of
the horse provided by the lame shoemaker of Konigsberg, he went out
into the streets in search of information.
Few cities are, to this day, so behind the times as Vilna. The
streets are still narrow, winding, ill-paved, ill-lighted. When
D'Arragon quitted his lodging, he found no lights at all, for the
starving soldiers had climbed to the lamps for the sake of the oil,
which they had greedily drunk.
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