soon threatened with starvation. This campaign more than any other undertaking of his life, reveals the despicable character of Napoleon as a man; even as a commander he seemed to have lost grip of the serious situation of his troops: he, who at one time could never make a mistake now only happened on the right thing by accident, and that rarely. In an impoverished province, amidst a famished population, he could not possibly winter his army, but acted as though he intended to do so. He made stupid speeches respecting the career of Peter the Great; read up the proclamations of Pugatchev, hoping to find in them something which would enable him to incite the people to rebel; tried even to make allies of the Tartars, and failed; at the same time he sent again and again to Alexander professing warm personal friendship and readiness to conclude peace. Alexander heard his overtures with silent contempt. The Russian generals were mercilessly harassing the divisions of the Great Army in the provinces, and armed bands of peasants sought revenge on those invaders who had violated women and children, and desecrated the churches. On October the 6th, Napoleon decided to begin his retreat on the morrow, and that same evening drew up a scheme for the visit of a Parisian theatrical company to Moscow and its installation there. Of precious metal from the churches of the Kremlin, nearly five tons of silver and four and a half hundredweights of gold had been melted into ingots. The great wooden cross, thirty feet in length, which surmounted Ivan Veliki, had been regilt at great cost but the year before, and the French, thinking it solid gold, threw it down. Like all the crosses, it was of worthless material, but contained a small cross of pure gold, which these disgusted pillagers failed to find. When the time came for Napoleon to leave Moscow he was unwilling that any should know his intention. "Perhaps I shall return to Moscow," he said to one of his company, but as he had already given orders to Lariboisiere, the chief of artillery, to destroy the Kremlin, he doubtless, better than anyone else, knew that this could not be. Napoleon thought to destroy everything of value left standing in the town; walls, towers, palaces, churches, convents, monasteries--all were ruined. "The defeat of Murat at Tarutin forced Napoleon to hurry away earlier than he intended, and to Marshal Mortier was left the task of destruction. He having made the requisite preparations left during the night of the 11-12th October, and, not far from Fili, gave the signal by cannon for the firing of the mines. It was a terrible explosion in the darkness and stillness of night; it killed some and wounded many, and was followed quickly by minor explosions at different points."