“Recall that for once, this is our trap, not his,” Laurence said, “and we can only be grateful that he seems to be walking into it.” The grass of the field was yet wet with dew and left streaks upon his Hessian boots as he strode across it towards the gathering Russian party.
Napoleon was altered still further from the last occasion Laurence had seen him, in the Incan capital city of Cusco: older, fatter, and more tired; his voice was thick with a bad cold, and he pressed a handkerchief often to his face, coughing. He showed all the ill-effects of the strain which he had placed upon himself, by flying at such frequency from one part of his army to the next. Standing to greet him, Tsar Alexander was the taller by a head, his face set in stern lines and handsome, though his curling hair drew back a little already from his high brow; young and vital and with an intensity in his looks, romantic in flavor, and a flush on his pale cheeks that stood stark against the high black collar which he wore. The contrast they offered to the eye only increased the impression, looking upon the French Emperor, of fatigue, of a man past the days of his youth, and perhaps his prime.
And yet somehow when Napoleon entered the pavilion he diminished his company, rather than the reverse: a subtle and yet sensible movement traveled around him, a shifting of weight, eyes turning towards him, which made him somehow the center of the stage.
He discarded formality: reached out his arms and embraced the Tsar and kissed him upon both cheeks, though Alexander received the gesture only stiffly, and with a set mouth. “Mon cher,” Napoleon said to him, and keeping a hand upon his arm spoke to him directly of his regret, disregarding quite all other men in the room: all sorrowful familiarity, nearly paternal. “You have desired this war, I think,” he said, “as little as I have. I know the love you have for your people and your country; no less than mine for France, and so dreadfully have both suffered from our disagreements, and to what end? To whose satisfaction?”
He turned and beckoned forward one of his young aides-decamp, who carried a long, thin draped package forward. “I have the honor,” Napoleon said, “to return this to you: a token, if you will take it as such, that we would gladly be not your enemies, trespassers and thieves in your land, but your guests, cherishing your possessions as dearly as those of any well-loved host.”
It was indeed the icon of Smolensk, the frame a little blackened with smoke, carefully laid on a bed of white velvet. “It was saved from the fire by Murat himself,” Napoleon said, “who ran into the cathedral to snatch it from the smoke and amidst the falling timbers: a scene of such destruction I yet am anguished to recall, and had no power to prevent; God forbid another such occasion.”
The threat, standing as they did not a hundred miles from Moscow, could not have been more pointedly delivered nor received, and Alexander, though handling the icon reverently, gave only short thanks; he had it swiftly removed from the tent, when an aide had been sent out to bring a Russian priest to carry it away. “I think you know Mikhail Illarionovich,” the Tsar then said, meaning Marshal Kutuzov, and made punctilious introductions to every other officer of the general staff present, even through the ranks of brigadiers: at once serving to make a greater delay, and to deflect Napoleon’s attentions from himself.
Napoleon addressed Kutuzov with a jovial note, congratulating him on his recent appointment to the command, and a little slyly saying, “It is a long while since we met, you and I, on the field outside Austerlitz,” an unnecessary reminder of that devastating victory, which had first established him as the master of Europe.
He had for nearly every man there a word of recognition, most without any malicious flavor behind them. He knew their battles and their decorations, and when a brigadier general named Tzvilenev was presented to him, he said thoughtfully, “Ah! I hope you will permit me to congratulate you, young man,” and kissing him added, “You have a son. Your wife was in St. Petersburg when it fell to us, for her time came upon her and she could not flee; I am happy to be able to tell you they were both in excellent health, and under the protection of Marshal Oudinot there.”