Rockets were noticed in the air, and soon wretches were seized carrying combustibles at the end of long poles. They were taken up; they were questioned with threats of death, and they revealed the frightful secret, the order given by the Count of Rostopchin to set fire to the city of Moscow, as if it had been the smallest village on the road from Smolensk. This news spread consternation through the army in an instant. To doubt was no longer possible, after the arrests made, and the depositions collected from different parts of the town. Napoleon ordered that in each quarter the corps fixt there should form military commissions to try, shoot, and hang on gibbets the incendiaries taken in the act. He ordered likewise that they should employ all the troops there were in the town to extinguish the fire. They ran to the pumps, but there were none to be found. This last circumstance would have left no doubt, if there had remained any, of the frightful design that delivered Moscow to the flames.... Napoleon, followed by some of his lieutenants, went out of that Kremlin which the Russian army had not been able to prevent him from entering, but from which the fire expelled him after four-and-twenty hours of possession, descended to the quay of Moskowa, found his horses ready there, and had much difficulty in crossing the town, which toward the northwest, whither he directed his course, was already in flames. The wind, which constantly increased in violence, sometimes caused columns of fire to bend to the ground, and drove before it torrents of sparks, smoke, and stifling cinders. The horrible appearance of the sky answered to the no less horrible spectacle of the earth. The terrified army went out of Moscow. The divisions of Prince Eugene and Marshal Ney, which had entered the evening before, turned back again on the roads of Zwenigorod and Saint Petersburg; those of Marshal Davoust returned by the road of Smolensk, and, except the guard left around the Kremlin to dispute its possession with the flames, our troops retired in haste, struck with horror, before this fire, which, after darting up toward the sky, seemed to bend down again over them as if it wished to devour them. A small number of the inhabitants who had remained in Moscow, and had hidden at first in their houses without daring to come out, now escaped from them, carrying away what was most dear to them--women their children, men their infirm parents. HONORÉ DE BALZAC Born in France in 1799, died in 1850; educated at Tours and Paris; became a lawyer's clerk; wrote short stories and novels anonymously and became seriously involved in a publishing venture; his first novel of merit, "Le Dernier Chonan ou la Bretagne," published in 1829, "Eugénie Grandet" in 1833, "Père Goriot" in 1835, "César Birotteau" in 1838; married in 1850 Madame Hanska of a noble Polish family. I THE DEATH OF PÉRE GORIOT[54]