But in spite of all her efforts, she found it impossible to push her way through the solid mass of vehicles and men, all struggling to get to those few gates which the fire had not yet reached. She heard someone shouting in French that the Tver road was the only one still open but it meant nothing to her. She did not want to go with these people. She only wanted to find her godfather.
Suddenly, she gave a joyful cry. The crowd had parted for a moment, thrust aside by a platoon of soldiers emerging from a side street, and she had caught a lightning glimpse of a figure that made her heart beat faster: a grey-haired man wrapped in a long, dark cloak, just such a cloak as she had thrown round the cardinal's shoulders a short while before. He was there, ahead of her.
After that, instead of fighting against the tide, she let herself be carried along with it. In any case, to have tried to cut across it would have been to court certain death under the wheels of the carriages and the hooves of the maddened horses, many of which were barely under control. Instead, she directed all her efforts to catching up with the man in the black cloak.
All at once, what had been a narrow street seemed to open out. They were crossing a wide boulevard lined with fine, large houses.
Just then, the man in front stepped out of the main stream and hurried down the boulevard, although that, too, was blocked by fire at the far end. Marianne darted after him, calling at the top of her voice but without making herself heard above the roaring of the fire and the howling wind. She began to run, oblivious of everything about her and not even aware that all those gracious houses were at that moment given over to plunder by the drunken soldiery.
The man ahead – she was sure that it was the cardinal when the wind blew aside a fold of his cloak and revealed the black soutane – was running now, like a man pursued, so fast that Marianne had the greatest difficulty in following.
She was gaining on him, even so, when all of a sudden he vanished. At the place where she had last seen him there was nothing but a high, gilded iron gate and beyond it a bit of stunted shrubbery. Desperately, she hurled herself against it. It gave out a metallic clang but held as firm as if it had never been made to open. Catching sight of a bell, Marianne hung onto it with all her strength but there was no answer. No one came. The man had vanished as completely as if a trapdoor had opened suddenly and swallowed him up.
Marianne sank down despondently on a stone block that stood beside the gate and looked about her. Everywhere were yelling voices, the crash of broken bottles and the strains of drunken singing. The city was burning, the flames coming closer every minute, and still there were men capable of breaking into cellars and revelling in their contents rather than flying for their lives.
From two or three of the adjacent streets, small groups of scantily clad women and children were running out into the still empty boulevard, weeping and shrieking aloud with terror. It was at this point that Marianne first noticed a big woman, dressed in much the same fashion as the vivandière she had met earlier but with the difference that instead of a bearskin this one sported on her head a policeman's cap with a long red silken tassel. This creature's conduct was so revolting that it roused Marianne from her own misery. She was armed with a cavalryman's sabre and was using it to hold up the fugitives who were trying to make their way out of one of the side streets, letting them pass only when she had searched and stripped them of all that they were carrying. Already she had a heap of jewels and valises on the ground beside her, for the wretched people, terrified of the fire at their backs, suffered themselves to be robbed without protest.
The next group to appear consisted of an old man leaning on a stick, a young girl, two children and two men bearing between them a stretcher on which was a woman, evidently very ill. Before any of them could make a move to stop her, the harpy had rushed at the stretcher and begun to search the sick woman with such unfeeling roughness that Marianne could bear it no longer.
She sprang forward, spurred on by a fury that crystallized all her loathing and disgust, and fell upon the woman, grasping her by the grey hair that straggled from under her cap and jerking her backwards with a force that sent her sprawling on the ground, then throwing herself down on her and pummelling her with her fists. Never before had she felt such need to bite and rend and kill. She was ashamed, bitterly ashamed that people like this were her own fellow-countrymen and, somehow or other, she had to show them what she felt.
The woman, meanwhile, was yelling like a stuck pig and in another moment three or four half-drunken soldiers came lurching to her rescue.
'Hold on, Ma!' one of them bawled out. 'We're coming!' Marianne saw that she was lost. The party to whose aid she had so rashly gone had taken the opportunity to make good their escape as soon as their assailant was laid low. She was alone now, face to face with four angry men who were already dragging her bodily away from her victim. The woman herself had staggered to her feet, cursing venomously, with blood pouring from her nose. Reeling slightly, she made for the sword she had dropped.
'Ta, lads,' she wheezed. 'Now you keep a 'old on 'er, acos I'm a goin' ter carve out one o' them there ogles. Jest to larn 'er!'
Holding the sword unsteadily at arm's length, she was advancing on Marianne when she jerked and fell headlong at the feet of the startled girl. A long whiplash had curled around her knees and cut the legs from under her. At the same time a mocking, nasal voice spoke brusquely.
'All right, my lads! That will do! Be off with you, unless you want a taste of my whip – or a noose! And take this doxy with you!'
The men did not wait to be told twice and in another moment Marianne found herself alone with her rescuer, who was even then descending from a kind of open carriage which, at that instant, looked more like a removal van than a respectable conveyance.
'You are not hurt?' the young man asked her as she began automatically brushing down her skirts and pushing back her long, dishevelled hair.
'No, I don't think so. I owe you my thanks, Sir. But for you—'
'Please. It was the least I could do. It is bad enough to have been driven out of every successive refuge by this confounded fire without being forced to realize that one belongs to a race of savages into the bargain. But—' He broke off and, studying Marianne attentively, said suddenly: 'But I know you! Good Lord, this is certainly fated to be the most fantastic night of my whole life! Who would have thought that I should have the luck to run across one of the prettiest women in Paris amid the flames of Moscow?'
'You know me?' Marianne said uneasily, thinking that this was the last thing she wanted after all that had happened at the Kremlin. 'You have the advantage of me, Sir.'
'De Beyle, at your service, Princess. Auditor 1st Class, Council of State, at present attached to the staff of Comte Mathieu Dumas, Assistant Quartermaster-General of the Imperial Army. My name will mean nothing to you, of course, because I have never had the privilege of being introduced to you, but I saw you one night at the Comédie Française. The play was Britannicus and you were escorted by that damned scoundrel Chernychev. You were dressed all in red and looked like one of those flames there – only infinitely sweeter! But we must not stay here. The fire is gaining on us. Allow me to offer you – I can hardly call it a seat, but at least a perch in my carriage?'
'The fact is – I don't know where I am going. I was making for St Louis-des-Français—'
'Well, you will never get there. Indeed, one might say that none of us knows where he is going. What matters is to get out of the city through such roads as are still open to us.'