Meanwhile, the Emperor was getting tired of waiting in vain, and his strong histrionic sense told him that the magnificent moment, by going on too long, was beginning to lose its magnificence, so he gave a sign to his men. A solitary cannon boomed out the signal, and the occupying army marched into Moscow from several sides at once, through the Tver, Kaluga and Dorogomilov gates. In they went, faster and faster, falling over each other, accelerating to a quick trot, occupying troops disappearing in their own clouds of dust and filling the air with their ringing, deafening shouts.
Drawn on by the forward movement of the army, Napoleon himself went as far as the Dorogomilov gate, but there he came to a halt, got off his horse and took a long stroll under the Kamer-Kollezhsky rampart, still waiting for the deputation to arrive.
CHAPTER 20
Meanwhile Moscow was empty. Some people were still there – up to one in fifty of the inhabitants had stayed behind – but in essence it was empty.
It was as empty as a dying beehive with no queen.
All life has gone from a hive without a queen. Yet a superficial glance at that kind of hive suggests it has as much life as any other.
Under the hot rays of the midday sun the bees circulate just as happily round a queenless hive as they do round other hives that still have life; at a distance it still smells of honey, and the bees fly in and out just the same. Yet you only have to watch it for a while to see there is no life there. The flight of the bees is not the same as in living hives; the beekeeper is met with a smell and sounds that are different. When the beekeeper taps on the wall of a sick hive, instead of getting an immediate and unanimous response in the ominous lifting of stings and the buzzing of bees in their tens of thousands as they fan their racing wings into a healthy, living roar, he is greeted by a desultory buzzing from odd corners of an empty hive. The entrance no longer gives off a heady whiff of sweet-smelling honey and venom; there is no smell of fulness from within. The scent of honey intermingles with an odour of emptiness and decay. There are no guards round the entrance raising their stings, sounding the alarm, ready to die in defence of the hive. Gone is the low, even tenor of toil that sounds like water on the boil; all you hear is the broken, desultory noisiness of nothing. Long, black, honey-smeared scavenger-bees fly in and out, timid and shifty; instead of stinging they sneak away at the first sight of danger. Where once they flew in with nectar and flew out empty, now they fly out with honey. The beekeeper opens the lowest section and peers into the bottom of the hive. Instead of clusters of fat black bees clinging to each other’s legs, subdued by their hard toil and hanging down to the floor while they work away with a ceaseless murmur to draw out the wax, sleepy, desiccated bees listlessly roam the roof and walls of the hive. What should have been a floor nicely polished with glue and swept clean by bees’ wings is now a spattering of wax, excrement, bees in their last throes waggling their legs, and dead bees that haven’t been cleared away.
