After a stay in Milan he received permission, in 1812, to take part in the Russian campaign. His love of adventure had been more than satisfied by his previous campaigns; he had been sickened and pained by the sight of corpses, and whilst his carriage wheels passed over and mutilated them, he had tried to divert his mind by poetic fancies. But war always attracted him anew. We see the man whose books, written at a later period in his career, contain such store of delicate and profound insight into national psychology, studying, during the passage of the Niemen, the appearance and temperament of the soldiers of all lands who composed the Grand Army. But by the time Smolensk was reached he had had enough. From that town he writes:-- "How man changes! My old longing for novelty is quite gone. Since I have seen Milan and Italy, everything else repels me by its coarseness. Would you believe it? without any personal reason I am sometimes on the point of shedding tears. In this ocean of barbarism there is not a sound which finds its echo in my soul. Everything is coarse, foul, stinking, both literally and metaphorically. My one pleasure has been hearing a fellow, who is about as musical as I am pious, play a little on a piano which is terribly out of tune. Ambition has no longer any power over me; the most gorgeous order would be no compensation for what I am enduring. I represent to myself the summits on which my spirit dwells (planning books, listening to Cimarosa and loving Angela in a perfect climate) as beautiful heights; far below them on the plain lie the fetid marshes in which I am now sunk.... You will hardly believe it, but what really gives me pleasure is to attend to any Italian official business there is to transact. There has been some lately, and even though it is over, it continues to occupy my imagination like a romance." In the diary he kept at Moscow we find traces of the same duality in his nature--the craving to occupy his imagination, and the desire to act and to be in the midst of action. During the great fire he writes: "The fire soon reached the house we had left. Our carriages stood for five or six hours on the boulevard. Tired of this inaction, I went to look at the fire, and spent an hour or two with Joinville ... we drank a bottle of wine, which restored us to life. I read a few lines of an English translation of _Paul et Virginie_ which restored me to a feeling of intellectual life in the midst of the universal barbarism."