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Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchn grew physically calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The thought which tranquillized Rostopchn was not a new one. Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.
To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And Rostopchn now knew it.
Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done, but he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.
“Vereshchgin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchn (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchgin to hard labor), “he was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim and at the same time punished a miscreant.”
Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.
Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the Soklniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering what was to come. He was driving to the Yaza bridge where he had heard that Kutzov was. Count Rostopchn was mentally preparing the angry and stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutzov for his deception. He would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all the calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the ruin of Russia (as Rostopchn regarded it) would fall upon his doting old head. Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutzov, Rostopchn turned angrily in his calche and gazed sternly from side to side.
The Soklniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white and others like them walking singly across the field shouting and gesticulating.
One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchn’s carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and especially at the one running toward them.
Swaying from side to side on his long, thin legs in his fluttering dressing gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on Rostopchn, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow whites moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.
“Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.
Coming abreast of the calche he ran beside it.
“Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They stoned me, crucified me... I shall rise... shall rise... shall rise. They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown... Thrice will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his voice higher and higher.
Count Rostopchn suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed in on Vereshchgin. He turned away. “Go fas... faster!” he cried in a trembling voice to his coachman. The calche flew over the ground as fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchn still heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained face of “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.
Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchn already felt that it had cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear the sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it....”
“Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them.... I need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own sake. I was bound to act that way.... The mob, the traitor... the public welfare,” thought he.
Troops were still crowding at the Yaza bridge. It was hot. Kutzov, dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his whip in the sand when a calche dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutzov and said something in French. It was Count Rostopchn. He told Kutzov that he had come because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army remained.
“Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this would not have happened,” he said.
Kutzov looked at Rostopchn as if, not grasping what was said to him, he was trying to read something peculiar written at that moment on the face of the man addressing him. Rostopchn grew confused and became silent. Kutzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating gaze from Rostopchn’s face muttered softly:
“No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”
Whether Kutzov was thinking of something entirely different when he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be meaningless, at any rate Rostopchn made no reply and hastily left him. And strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchn, took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge where he began with shouts to drive on the carts that blocked the way.
Toward four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Wrttemberg hussars and behind them rode the King of Naples himself accompanied by a numerous suite.
About the middle of the Arbt Street, near the Church of the Miraculous Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le Kremlin.
Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander dressed up in feathers and gold.
