"For eight years I found my pleasure in embellishing this country retreat. I lived here in perfect happiness, within the bosom of my family; and those around me largely partook of my felicity. But you approach and lo! the peasantry of this domain, to the number of 1,720 human beings, have fled far away. As for my house, it is burnt to the ground! We abandon all, we consume all, that neither ourselves nor our habitations may be polluted by your presence. "Frenchmen, I left at the mercy of your avarice two of my houses in Moscow full of furniture and valuables to the amount of half a million of roubles. Here, you will find nothing but ashes. "(Signed) FEDOR, COUNT ROSTOPCHIN." No sooner did the news reach the Russian Commander-in-Chief, old Kootoozof, that Moscow had been abandoned by the invaders, than he issued the following address to his army and the Empire generally:-- "ORDER ISSUED TO THE ARMIES, 31ST OCTOBER. "The following Declaration is given for the Instruction of all the Troops under my Command:-- "At the moment in which the enemy entered Moscow he beheld the destruction of those preposterous hopes by which he had been flattered; he expected to find there Plenty and Peace, and on the contrary he saw himself devoid of every necessary of life. Harassed by the fatigue of continued marches; exhausted for want of provisions; wearied and tormented by ever active soldiers who intercept his slender reinforcements; losing, without the honour of battle, thousands of his troops, cut off by our provincial detachments, he found no prospect before him but the vengeance of an armed nation, threatening annihilation to the whole of his army. In every Russian he beheld a hero, equally disdainful and abhorrent of his deceitful promises; in every state of the empire he met an additional and insurmountable rampart opposed to his strongest efforts. After sustaining incalculable losses by the attacks of our brave troops, he recognised at last the madness of his expectations, that the foundations of the empire would be shaken by his occupation of Moscow. Nothing remained for him but a precipitate flight; the resolution was no sooner taken than it was executed; he has departed, abandoning nearly the whole of his sick to the mercy of an outraged people, and leaving Moscow on the 11th of this month completely evacuated. "The horrible excesses which he committed while in that city are already well known, and have left an inexhaustible sentiment of vengeance in the depths of every Russian heart; but I have to add, that his impotent rage exercised itself in the savage attempt to destroy a part of the Kremlin, where, however, by a signal interposition of Divine Providence, the sacred temples and cathedrals have been saved.