"On the 9th November, the troops at length reached Smolensko. An order of Buonaparte forbade any one to enter before the posts had been intrusted to the Imperial Guard. The soldiers on the outside were grouped in great numbers round the foot of the walls: those within were under cover. The air resounded with the imprecations of those who were shut out. Clothed in dirty Cossack cloaks, horse-cloths, and worn-out blankets, with their heads covered with old carpets, broken helmets, ragged shakos, for the most part torn by shot, stained with blood, or hacked in pieces by sabre-cuts--with haggard and yet ferocious countenances, they looked up to the top of the ramparts gnashing their teeth, with the expression of those prisoners who, under Louis the Fat, bore in their right hand their left cut off: you would have taken them for infuriated _masques_, or famished madmen escaped from Bedlam. At length the Old and Young Guard arrived, they were quickly admitted into the place which had been wasted by conflagration on occasion of our first passage. Loud cries of indignation were immediately raised against the privileged corps. 'Is the army to be left nothing but what it leaves?' was heard on all sides. Meanwhile the household troops, who had been admitted, rushed in tumultuous crowds to the magazines like an insurrection of spectres: the guards at the doors repulsed them; they fought in the streets: the dead, the wounded encumbered the pavements, the women, the children, the dying filled the waggons. The air was poisoned by the multitude of dead bodies; even old soldiers were seized with idiocy or madness; some whose hair stood on end with horror, blasphemed, or laughed with a ghastly air and fell dead. Napoleon let his wrath exhale in imprecations against a miserable commissary, none of the orders given to which had been executed. "The army, a hundred thousand strong when it left Moscow, now reduced to thirty thousand, was followed by a band of fifty thousand stragglers; there were not eighteen hundred horsemen mounted. Napoleon gave the command of them to M. de Latour Maubourg. That officer, who had led the cuirassiers to the assault of the great redoubt of Borodino, had had his head almost cleft asunder by the stroke of a sabre; he afterwards lost a leg at Dresden. Perceiving his servant in tears when the operation was over, he said to him, 'Why do you weep? you will have only one boot to clean.' That general, who remained faithful to misfortune, became the preceptor of Henry V. in the first years of the exile of that prince. I lift my hat in his presence, as in that of the Incarnation of Honour."--_Memoirs_, vi. p. 116, 118.