On the evening of the first of September, after his interview with Kutuzov, Count Rostopchin returned to Moscow mortified and offended. He had not been invited to the council of war. The camp had treated the capital's tranquillity and patriotic fervour as irrelevant. He lay down after supper without undressing and was woken soon after midnight by a courier with a letter from Kutuzov, asking him to send police officers to guide the troops through the town because the army was retreating to the Ryazan road beyond Moscow. This was not news. He had known since Borodino, and since yesterday on Poklonny Hill, that Moscow would be abandoned. Government property had been removed by night; half the inhabitants had left with his own permission. Yet the order in a simple night note, breaking in on his sleep, astonished and irritated him.
Later, in his memoirs, he would say he had two aims: to keep tranquillity and to speed the inhabitants' departure. Accept those aims and every contradiction finds a cover: relics, powder, and corn left behind to preserve calm; useless papers and Leppich's balloon removed to leave the town empty. Tolstoy answers that nothing like an insurrection occurred when the enemy entered a Russian town. More than ten thousand people were still in Moscow on the first and second of September, and except for a mob in the governor's courtyard, gathered at his bidding, nothing happened. Plain speech after Borodino, and the removal of holy things, munitions, and money, would have given still less cause for riot.
Rostopchin was sanguine and impulsive, used to the highest administrative circles, and had no understanding of the people he supposed he was guiding. Since Smolensk he had played, in imagination, the director of popular feeling in the heart of Russia. His coarse broadsheets pleased him more than they reached anyone. He knew with his intellect that Moscow would be given up, but he did not believe it in his heart and did not prepare. When the whole population streamed out, abandoning their belongings, the role collapsed. He felt ridiculous, weak, and alone. All night people came for orders from the Registrar, the Consistory, the Senate, the University, the Foundling Hospital, the fire brigade, the prison, the lunatic asylum. He answered briefly and angrily, as if somebody else had ruined a plan he had ready. The fire brigade should go to Vladimir with their horses. The lunatics should be let out into the town: when lunatics command armies, God evidently means these other madmen to be free. The convicts should be released; there were no battalions for a convoy. When the governor named political prisoners, Meshkov and Vereshchagin, Rostopchin shouted whether Vereshchagin had not been hanged yet, and ordered him brought.
Coming Up in Chapter 254
Toward nine o'clock in the morning, with troops already moving through Moscow, nobody comes to Count Rostopchin for instructions. Those who can get away go of their own accord. He orders his carriage for Sokolniki and sits in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.
