The French ascribed the burning of Moscow au patriotisme jeroce de Rastoptchine; the Russians to the savagery of the French. In reality, explanations of the fire of Moscow, in the sense of the conflagration being brought home to the door of any one person or group of persons, there have never been, and never could be. Moscow was burned because she was placed in conditions in which any town built of wood was bound to be burned, quite apart from the question whether there were or were not one hundred and thirty inefficient fire-engines in the town. Moscow was sure to be burned, because her inhabitants had gone away, as inevitably as a heap of straw is sure to be burned where sparks are scat-
;ered on it for several days in succession. A town of wooden houses, in which when the police and the inhabitants owning the houses are in >ossession of it, fires are of daily occurrence, cannot escape being burned vhen its inhabitants are gone and it is filled with soldiers smoking pipes, naking fires in Senate-house Square of the Senate-house chairs, and :ooking themselves meals twice a day. In times of peace, whenever troops ire quartered on villages in any district, the number of fires in the dis- rict at once increases. How greatly must the likelihood of fires be increased in an abandoned town, built of wood, and occupied by foreign •oldiers! Le patriotisme jeroce de Rastoptchine and the savagery of the French do not come into the question. Moscow was burned through the >ipes, the kitchen stoves, and camp-fires, through the recklessness of the ■nemy’s soldiers, who lived in the houses without the care of householders. Even if there were cases of incendiarism (which is very doubtful, because no one had any reason for incendiarism, and in any case such a rime is a troublesome and dangerous one), there is no need to accept ncendiarism as the cause, for the conflagration would have been inevi- able anyway without it.
Soothing as it was to the vanity of the French to throw the blame on the erocity of Rastoptchin, and to that of the Russians to throw the blame in the miscreant Bonaparte, or later on to place the heroic torch in the land of its patriot peasantry, we cannot disguise from ourselves that there ;ould be no such direct cause of the fire, since Moscow was as certain to >e burned as any village, factory, or house forsaken by its owners, and ised as a temporary shelter and cooking-place by strangers. Moscow ras burned by her inhabitants, it is true; but not by the inhabitants who lad lingered on, but by the inhabitants who had abandoned her. Moscow lid not, like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, escape harm while in the iccupation of the enemy, simply because her inhabitants did not receive he French with the keys, and the bread and salt of welcome, but aban- loned her.
XXVII
'he process of the absorption of the French into Moscow in a widening ircle in all directions did not, till the evening of the 2nd of September, each the quarter of the town in which Pierre was staying.
After the two last days spent in solitude and exceptional conditions, ’ierre was in a condition approaching madness. One haunting idea had omplete possession of him. He could not have told how or when it had ome to him, but that idea had now such complete possession of him that e remembered nothing in the past, and understood nothing in the resent; and everything he saw and heard seemed passing in a dream.
Pierre had left his own house simply to escape from the complicated ingle woven about him by the demands of daily life, which in his con- ition at that time he was incapable of unravelling. He had gone to Osip •lexyevitch’s house on the pretext of sorting out the books and papers
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