B009YBU18W EBOK (51 page)

Although he may have turned his nose up at them, there were in fact plenty of women to choose from in Moscow. For one thing, most of the whores seem to have stayed. ‘This class of person was the only one which drew some profit from the sack of Moscow, as everyone, in their eagerness to have a woman, welcomed these creatures with pleasure, and once they had been introduced into our dwellings, they straightaway became the mistresses of the house, and squandered everything the flames had spared,’ according to Jean-Pierre Barrau, quartermaster of Prince Eugène’s corps. ‘There were others who really deserved consideration on account of their birth, their upbringing, and above all their misfortune; hunger and poverty forced their mothers to bring them to us.’
⁶

Louis Joseph Vionnet de Maringoné, a senior officer in the Grenadiers of the Guard, was shocked to see young women reduced to the extremity of selling their sexual favours to French officers in order to be able to feed themselves, and indeed to protect themselves from the attentions of unruly soldiers. ‘I often found during my walks through the city old men weeping to see this awful immorality,’ he wrote. ‘I did not know their language well enough to be able to console them, but I would point to the heavens and then they would come and kiss my hands and conduct me to where their families were huddled in the ruins, moaning from hunger and misery.’
⁷

The worst disorders had largely died down with the fire. Looting became a clandestine activity, carried on at night or in out-of-the-way burnt-out quarters of the city. The frenzied need to save things from the flames had given way to more methodical rummaging. The French soldiers carried it on jointly with abject locals who found a role for themselves as guides and procurers. Violence against citizens and rape also declined, and in several Russian accounts there are instances of young girls pushing away would-be molesters with impunity.
⁸
Moscow was a huge and sprawling city, and parts of it remained dangerous, particularly at night. Yet a somewhat
bizarre
modus vivendi
had evolved between the various groups living side by side in the ruined city.

The best guarantee of safety for the inhabitants was to have a high-ranking officer in residence. One servant girl recalled that there was no trouble of any sort while a French officer took up quarters in the house, but the moment he left the place was looted thoroughly by Russians. Another Muscovite would send a servant to alert the aides of a French marshal who had quarters nearby whenever a gang tried to loot his house, and an armed patrol would immediately be despatched to arrest the miscreants.
⁹

G.A. Kozlovsky, the son of a landowner from Kaluga who was stranded in Moscow when the French arrived, made friends with some French officers, ate and played chess with them. The only risks he ran were at the hands of the city’s inhabitants who had stayed behind. ‘In those days, one feared the Russian peasants more than the French,’ he recalled. ‘In almost all the houses we went into there were still women, children and old people, mostly servants it is true, as the masters had left,’ remembered Jean Michel Chevalier. ‘Not only were they respected and protected by us, but even fed, for we shared with them anything we could get.’ The painter Albrecht Adam moved in with a Russian whom he treated politely, and they made common cause of finding food and the other necessities of life. A group of Italian soldiers became so fond of their ‘hosts’ that when the time came for leavetaking, there were tears on both sides. One French soldier who found a poor Russian woman squatting in some ruins about to give birth, brought her to his lodgings and fed her. And the hardly belligerent Stendhal actually drew his sword against a drunken French soldier who was mistreating a Russian civilian.
¹⁰

A mounted grenadier of the Guard named Braux came across a great visitors’ book of the city council, and wrote in it, in such bad French that it would be impossible to reproduce its tone: ‘There is not one Frenchman who is not desperately saddened by the misfortune which has befallen your lovely Moscow. I can assure you that as far as
I am concerned, I weep for it and regret it, for it was worthy of being preserved. If you had stayed at home it would have been preserved. Weep, weep, Russians, over the misfortune of your country. You alone are the author of all the ills that it endures.’
¹¹

The French were very impressed by the city and its many fine buildings. Dr Larrey thought the hospitals ‘worthy of the most civilised nation on earth’, and was of the opinion that the foundling hospital was ‘without argument the grandest and the finest establishment of its kind anywhere in Europe’. And they all wrote admiringly of the fine palaces, many of which succumbed to the fire. ‘Even the French, so proud of their Paris, are surprised at the size of Moscow, of its magnificence, of the elegance of life here, of the wealth we have found here, even though the city was almost entirely evacuated,’ a Polish officer wrote to his wife. Louis Gardier, Adjutant Major in the 111th of the Line, also thought it very fine, but was shocked by Muscovite morals. ‘As an eyewitness, I can say that I have never seen so many indecent pictures and furnishings,’ he wrote, ‘and lewdness was on display in particularly disgusting ways in the houses of the great.’
¹²

Although a large part of the city had been destroyed, those troops stationed in Moscow itself managed to make themselves quite comfortable. ‘I found quarters in the palace of Prince Lobanov,’ recalled Dezydery Chlapowski of the Chevau-Légers of the Guard. ‘General Krasinski took up his quarters opposite, in the house of the merchant Barishnikov. Both of these houses were very well appointed, everything was in order, both upstairs and down there were very comfortable wide beds with morocco-covered mattresses. Behind the palace were outbuildings, haylofts, a garden with an orangery and, beyond, a field and a kitchen garden. The front of the palace was in town, the back seemed to be in the country. There were about a hundred Muscovites in the two ranges of outbuildings, including servants, craftsmen and peasants, whom we found very helpful in everything. Our soldiers gave them work, which they needed. The behaviour of these people towards us was very calm and civil.’
¹³

‘In spite of the disasters, the fire of Moscow and the flight of the inhabitants, the army is quite comfortable here and has found immense supplies of victuals and even wine,’ General Morand, who was recovering from the wound received as he stormed the Raevsky redoubt, wrote to his ‘
Émilie adorée
’. ‘My division is quartered in a very large building, and I have a very fine and very comfortable house nearby on a large square … I await with impatience news of your confinement, may the good Lord protect you as he has protected me in battle …’
¹⁴

Baron Paul de Bourgoing found billets in Rostopchin’s palace, and spent happy hours browsing in the Count’s magnificent library. One day he came across an edition of a book written by his father. ‘It is with real pleasure that the son of the author has found one of his father’s books so far from his fatherland,’ he wrote in the flyleaf. ‘He only regrets that it should be war that brought him here.’
¹⁵

B.T. Duverger, paymaster of the Compans division, installed himself in the house of some German inhabitants of Moscow, and lived quite happily, with the Italian Guard parading outside his windows to good regimental music in the mornings. ‘I was rich in furs and paintings; I was rich in cases of figs, in coffee, in liqueurs, in macaroons, in smoked fish and meats,’ he noted, ‘but of white bread, fresh meat and ordinary wine, I had none.’ There were twelve of them in the house altogether, and as they sat down to dinner they would drink a toast to next year’s campaign and their entry into St Petersburg.
¹⁶

‘The grenadiers went out and found us some table linen and household items; others furnished us with provisions of every kind; the flocks of cattle which have rejoined the army are providing us with meat; our bakers are making bread with flour found under the ashes; in a word, the army has everything it needs in spite of Rostopchin,’ wrote Captain Fantin des Odoards. In order to provide themselves with vitamins through the winter, the more provident set about making sauerkraut out of the cabbages in which the city’s numerous kitchen gardens abounded.
¹⁷

The soldiers employed the various cobblers and tailors left in the city to repair their uniforms or make new boots. They also stocked up on essentials at the markets that had sprung up, where they could buy things salvaged or looted by others. The Grenadiers of the Guard, who entered into the city early on and had had ample opportunity to lay hands on every manner of goods when they were detailed to extinguish the fire of the principal trading bazaar, had set up a market outside the Kremlin where an astonishing array of victuals and goods could be had. But although they had managed to corner the market in some types of commodity, stalls sprang up all over the city. ‘The streets which had been spared by the fire resembled real markets, with the peculiarity that all those taking part, merchants and customers, were all soldiers,’ noted Lubin Griois. Another peculiarity was that the troops found it more convenient to barter than to use money, so everyone involved was wandering about with an extraordinary array of objects and delicacies. Frenchmen could sample finer French wines and cognacs than they would ever be able to afford at home, and one had his first taste of a pineapple in Moscow.
¹⁸

Much of the mercantile activity was driven on the one hand by the need of soldiers to make some money or to provide themselves with objects that would be saleable back home, and on the other by the desire to find presents for wives, mistresses and sisters. What they all wanted was fine furs, for which Russia was famous, and the woven cashmere shawls imported from Persia and India that were a fashionable and indeed essential accessory to the high-waisted but low-cut empire-style dresses. The Continental System had sent the price of both rocketing in Paris. But furs and shawls were not normally stored in cellars, so a large part of the city’s stock had gone up in flames.

General Compans, who was recovering from the wound he received while leading his division’s attack on Bagration’s
flèches
at Borodino, was newly married and eager to shower his young wife with presents. But, as he wrote to her, he was finding it very difficult, even though he had several people on to the job. On 14 October he was at last able to write:

Here
, ma bonne amie,
is what I have been able to procure in the way of furs:

One large fur of black and red foxes, in alternating bands;

One large fur of blue and red foxes, in alternating bands;

That is how they assemble fox furs in this country, when they are not using them merely as trimming. These two furs are new and are considered to be very fine
.

One large collar of silver-grey fox;

One collar of black fox;

Both of them are very beautiful, but too small for you to make much use of for yourself, but I could not find anything else in that line;

Enough sable for two or three trimmings for furs as large as the one in chinchilla which you bought in Hamburg;

A large muff in grey-black fox made up of choice pieces sewn together in little bands of an inch and a half in width. This muff is highly regarded here; it must have taken quite a few fox furs, much silk and a great deal of work to make up such a muff. I think you could probably use it either as a trimming or as a cape. All of this, my dearest Louise, will be packed in a trunk, and I will seize the first possible opportunity to have it delivered to you
.
¹⁹

Whether the furs ever reached her is doubtful – the letter did not, as it was picked up by marauding cossacks after they attacked a courier.

Fur fever gripped men of every station. ‘I have made the acquisition of an extremely fine pelisse in fox fur backed with a very beautiful violet satin,’ Lieutenant Paradis of the 25th of the Line wrote to his mistress. ‘I would very much like to send it to you, but I do not know how to go about it. As you can imagine, the object is rather voluminous.’ Colonel Parguez, chief of staff to the 1st Division in Davout’s corps, suggested his wife send one of her maids over to collect the ‘six dozen fine sables, all ready and perfect to trim at least six pelisses’. The girl could be back in Paris with them by 1 January, in time for her to wear them in the New Year.
²⁰

Guillaume Peyrusse, paymaster to Napoleon’s household, encountered terrible difficulties in getting hold of any of the things his wife longed for. ‘Try as I might, I have been able to find neither piqué, nor muslin, nor cashmere shawl … Nothing delicate in the way of lady’s furs … Not a print, not a view of Moscow, not a medal, not the slightest curio of any sort.’ This was particularly galling, as he had been given a whole list of items by not only his wife, but his sister-in-law and various other members of his family. Many others, including Marshal Davout himself, complained of the difficulty of getting hold of good stuff for their womenfolk. ‘In Moscow, even at court, the conversation turned on nothing except foxes, rabbits and sables,’ as Eustachy Sanguszko put it.
²¹

The more culturally curious explored what was left of the city, visiting the Kremlin and the tombs of the Tsars, which had been ripped apart by looters. Vionnet de Maringoné found a functioning ‘
banya
’ which he frequented with much pleasure. Colonel Louis Lejeune met his sister, who had been living in Russia for twenty years. Others struck up acquaintance with the French residents of Moscow, though some old revolutionary soldiers sneered at them as ‘
émigrés
’, and with various other foreign residents, including Germans, Italians, and even some English, who did their best to entertain the invaders.
²²