The effect of the explosion was, however, insignificant as compared with what had been intended. A cold rain was falling. The first shock had all the effect of an earthquake. Buildings were shaken to their foundations, walls divided, roofs cracked, and threatened to crush all below them, and all furniture was broken or displaced. “A great number of the wretched inhabitants were wounded by fragments of glass, or the fall of heavy timber.... This awful night caused the death of many persons.” Madame Fusi states that the explosion was so tremendous that many women miscarried through fear; others went mad, and children died of fright and excitement.... The French wished to blow up the rest of the town, but happily they had not the time to do so. “On the day the French left,” says a Russian woman, “we were awakened in our cellar by a terrific report. The earth shook under our feet, and it seemed to me as if the walls of the cellar must fall in and bury us alive. At the second explosion a hailstorm of stones flew about in all directions; at the third the church was so shaken that it split from top to bottom. The walls of the Kremlin were destroyed, and a pile of ruins and bricks marked the spot where once the palace had stood. Not only the ground of the Kremlin, but the Polianka, and the far side of the river, were covered with plaster, bricks, and sheets of metal torn away from the roofs.” I copy from Ségur’s _Mémoires_ a description of the catastrophe—“On October 23, at half-past one in the morning, the air was shaken by a terrific explosion.... Mortier had obeyed his orders, the Kremlin existed no longer. Barrels of gunpowder had been placed in all the rooms of the Imperial palace, and one hundred and eighty-three thousand kilogrammes under the vaults that held them up. The Marshal, with three thousand men, remained on this volcano, that might have been exploded by any stray Russian shell. He covered the march of our army on Kaluga, and the retreat of our various convoys towards Mozjaisk.... “He had been ordered to defend the Kremlin, and when retiring, to blow it up, and set fire to the remainder of the town....