Henri de Talmont bore in mind Rougeard’s parting words, and determined at all hazards to try to reach the Beresina. He was strengthened in his belief that he was drawing near some point of general rendezvous by the constantly increasing crowds. At length, instead of a vast and solitary plain, he found himself traversing a broad high-road, frozen hard, and thronged with a disorderly rabble of soldiers and camp-followers, amongst whom vehicles of all kinds were moving with difficulty. Some of these were baggage-waggons, but the great majority contained women and children connected in various ways with the French army, and endeavouring with it to make their escape from a hostile country. Most pitiable was the fate of those unhappy fugitives. As Henri stumbled wearily along, the velvet cap of a little child dropped from one of the carriages and fell at his feet. He picked it up and restored it to its owner, a pretty fair-haired boy about four years old. “Thank you, poor soldier,” lisped the child in soft Italian, a language of which Henri had learned a little from his mother. “I think, Guido, we could make room for the poor soldier here,” said the child’s mother, a gentle-looking lady with an infant in her arms; “he seems very tired.” Most thankfully did Henri accept the proffered help. He soon ascertained that the lady was an Italian singer who had come to Russia, with the band of professional artists to which she belonged, in the train of the fantastic and pomp-loving King of Naples. These poor children of pleasure, dragged unawares into the midst of a horrible tragedy, seemed like butterflies caught in a thunderstorm. Madame Leone told Henri, with many tears, that her husband had been made prisoner by the Cossacks, and that she knew not whether he was alive or dead. Henri tried to console her, helped her to take care of the children, and defended her as well as he could from the rude assaults of the famishing soldiers who surrounded the carriage, begging for food, or rather demanding it. At last they reached the bank of the Beresina, but it was to find themselves in the midst of untold confusion and unutterable horror. The frozen marsh beside the river was thronged with an innumerable crowd, increasing in density as it neared the heads of the two bridges which had been thrown across the current. Hundreds of vehicles were there, vainly attempting to force a passage through the living mass. Oaths and shrieks, cries, groans, and entreaties resounded upon every side. To add to the terrors of the scene, the Russians were pouring a continuous fire upon the troops which were endeavouring to cross the river. In the midst of all this bewildering, maddening confusion, Henri found himself thinking dreamily of his mother’s stories of the terrible passage of the Loire by the defeated Vendéans. “It was like the day of judgment,” she used to say. “And what,” asked Henri, “would she have thought of _this_?”