The Retreat Read Online Free PDF Page B

were dying of starvation. In Rouen, the only bread to be found was made from pease-meal flour, and in Paris the Emperor spent extravagant sums to keep the price down to sixteen sous for four pounds to avoid unrest; financiers speculated on grain, exacerbating the famine to make themselves rich. The most confirmed optimists had believed it would be a quick war and that the Grande Armée would enter St Petersburg in July, but it hadn’t turned out that way, and at times the weary men had longed for defeat so that they could be done with it all. Now they were taking their revenge on Moscow.
    The cortège of Imperial staff finally passed through thefortress’s pseudo-gothic gate, amidst a tide of soldiers lugging furniture to set up their quarters. Behind its high red walls, the Kremlin was an amalgam of monumental styles: cathedrals with minarets and bulbous towers, monasteries, palaces, barracks and an arsenal where they had just discovered forty thousand English, Austrian and Russian muskets, a hundred-odd cannon, and lances, sabres, medieval armour and other trophies recently seized from the Turks and Persians in which the soldiers were dressing up around their bivouacs on the great esplanade.
    Prefect Bausset, hands on hips, face as pale as if it was powdered, had started up the stone staircase that stretched the length of the palace’s facade ahead of his staff: ‘Those gentlemen in His Majesty’s personal service, follow me.’ He climbed the Venetian-style staircase to a vast terrace over-looking all of Moscow, onto which the Tsars’ apartments opened their shutterless and curtainless French windows. Sebastian Roque, Masquelet the chef and sundry valets and upholsterers entered what were to be the Emperor’s quarters as if paying a visit, removing their hats. They walked through an interminable reception room, which was divided in two by pillars and three-legged braziers, before reaching the bedchamber, a long rectangle with windows directly over the Moskova, tarnished gilt mouldings, a baldachin and French and Italian paintings from previous centuries. There were logs in the fireplaces. The clocks were working.
    â€˜The valets will take the next-door room, there, to the left. The dividing wall is very thin, His Majesty will not have to raise his voice to call you.’
    â€˜The secretaries?’ asked Sebastian.
    â€˜They could set up their office in the adjoining receptionroom, but the Tsar’s apartments are the only ones that are furnished – everyone must shift for themselves.’
    It was the same old story. They often slept on the floor, in the open, on stairs, in antechambers, barns, anywhere, always fully dressed and ready to respond immediately.
    â€˜The kitchens?’
    â€˜In the basement, I think.’
    â€˜The Emperor loathes his dinner being cold,’ the chef complained. ‘If I have to climb three flights of stairs, then walk three leagues of corridors, he’ll throw his fricassée in my face!’
    â€˜You’ll find a solution, Monsieur Masquelet, Tsar Alexander doesn’t exist on cold food either.’
    Everyone set to. Sebastian asked about a desk, Masquelet a stove; one bright spark brought in wolf skins he’d purchased from a corporal to make up a bed on the parquet floor; on Bausset’s orders, a valet took down the portraits of the Tsar and his family, which would have irritated the Emperor. A small, silent group on the terrace were casting an eye over the city and the white marble statues of the Pascov Palace by the ramparts.
    â€˜There’s a whole stack of furniture in the cellars,’ a valet said to the Intendant. ‘A grenadier has just passed it on.’
    â€˜Well, what are you waiting for?’ said Bausset.
    â€˜Coming?’ Masquelet suggested to Sebastian. ‘You’re bound to find your desk down there.’
    Striding briskly along the corridors so as not to waste time, the