Against Napoleon’s four hundred thousand men, including sixty thousand cavalry and twelve hundred guns, the Russians could line up six hundred thousand men … on paper. In reality, after deducting the auxiliaries, and the phantom soldiers, who existed only for the purpose of embezzling their pay, there were just over four hundred thousand men. And these were very scattered: facing the invading army in Finland, in Moldavia, on the Turkish border, on the Dvina and the Dnieper, in the garrisons, in the interior of the country … The immediately available forces amounted to two hundred thousand men but the crowning misfortune for the Russians was that they were divided in two: the western army, commanded by General Prince Barclay de Tolly, consisting of fifty thousand men, and the southern army, under the orders of General Prince Bagration. Napoleon had attacked with bewildering speed and since then he had been urging his troops on in order to defeat these two armies separately, a tactic he had employed brilliantly in the past. So the Russians were pulling back hurriedly in order to link up before deciding on a possible confrontation on favourable ground.
The monotony and inaction of the interminable days of marching preyed on Margont’s mind. What was worse was that his investigation was advancing as laboriously as this campaign. He had been obliged to go back to the 84th to avoid arousing suspicion with his repeated absences. He had given Lefine the task of using any pretext to recruit a handful of reliable soldiers to gather information discreetly about all the colonels in IV Corps. There were about forty of them. None, of course, was called Acosavan. No witnesses could be found to a brawl involving a tall, ginger-haired soldier and a civilian, or to the sighting of a colonel in civilian clothes in Tresno. The investigation had quickly eliminated any who were too small, too tall, left-handed, invalids (of which there were plenty, since a colonel was duty-bound to lead his regiment into battle, which inevitably brought down a hail of bullets on him) and those who were known to have spent the night of 28 June in the company of such and such a person.
By 15 July, Lefine had been able to draw up a preliminary list of a dozen or so names. It included two that Margont would have preferred not to see: Colonel Pégot, who was in charge of the 84th of the Line, and Colonel Delarse, one of General Huard’s aides-de-camp. Delarse commanded the 1st Brigade of the Delzons Division, which included the 84th, together with the 8th Regiment of Light Infantry and the 1st Croat Regiment.
Lefine and his men had then begun to reconstruct the movements of the suspects on the night of the murder. The fact that Margont had always been exasperated by the question of shoes in the French army had given him an idea. One of a French soldier’s best weapons was indeed his shoes. The imperial troops were second to none in their ability to cover long distances in record time. Napoleon had brilliantly incorporated this advantage of speed into his strategic calculations when launching his infantrymen on frenzied, crazed, hellish marches. As a result, in 1805, on the way to Austerlitz, Margont had seen soldiers literally die of exhaustion. Others fell into such a deep sleep that the officers could not wake them, even by prodding them with the points of their sabres. They had nevertheless continued to advance with the result that, thanks to some skilful manoeuvres, Napoleon had succeeded in preventing the Austrian army of General Mack from linking up with the bulk of his forces. The Austrian army had finally been encircled in the city of Ulm. The Austrians had lost twenty-five thousand men, whom they sorely missed a few days later during the battle of Austerlitz …
Yet, despite the obvious importance of mobility for the regiments, the shoes used by the Grande Armée were very badly designed. There was no difference between right or left: the soldiers’ feet shaped the shoes during the march. There were only three sizes: small, medium and large, so it was hard for feet of other lengths. The shoes were supposed to last for five hundred miles, but many of the suppliers swindled the army and often, if you set off from Paris with new shoes, you ended up in Brussels barefoot.
Margont had decided to take advantage of this paradox. He had suggested that Jean-Quenin should write a letter asking the regimental cobblers to answer a list of questions. The medical officer claimed he wanted to do some research into the shoes in order to rethink their design. Lefine met the cobblers, read them the letter and immediately drowned them in a sea of words. He talked on and on. Sometimes his slick talk endeared him to them and he obtained all the information he wanted; other times he infuriated them and people said all they knew just to get rid of this wretched sergeant. Casually slipped in among the questions was one about the shoe sizes of the senior officers …
But this painstaking task proved to be unbearably slow.
The complete translation of the private diary had taught Margont nothing new. Maria Dorlovna suffered from loneliness. Being of a sensitive and dreamy disposition, she fed her hopes by reading romantic literature. Her writing was steeped in poetic melancholy, a feature that was all the more remarkable given that few women of her class had the opportunity to learn to read and write. She had believed that a miracle was possible. What had her murderer done to seduce her so quickly? What, then, could a Prince Charming possibly be like?
July 21 started badly for Margont as that morning bore an annoying resemblance to the preceding ones. How ironic to be constantly singing the praises of freedom and yet to be himself a prisoner! Where was the freedom to go where you liked? He had to continue advancing in this cloud of dust that the road to Moscow had turned into. Where was freedom of speech? Tiredness often made it impossible to talk. The laborious progress of the Grande Armée reminded Margont of his years spent in the abbey of Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert. The old stone walls had been replaced by vast plains. Certain moments from his life there came back to him as if linked to the present by a common thread of hopelessness. He pictured himself again scraping away night after night at a stone hidden under the bed of his monastic cell. He had never succeeded in dislodging it. He remembered the obdurate expression of certain monks when he pleaded with them to let him accompany them on visits outside the monastery.
As a child his mind had been an empty vessel in an empty, locked room. Then he had discovered books and had feasted on words, dreams and the promise of travel. But even today he still retained this searing memory of emptiness. He still needed to fill himself up: with food, with any kind of learning, with reading … So he had devised all sorts of strategies for warding off boredom, this nothingness that threatened to swallow him up. He had learnt the rudiments of Russian; recited to himself entire monologues from plays, throwing himself into the roles; written articles for the newspaper he wanted to launch; scribbled notes and sketches in a notebook in the hope of having his memoirs published … And, to that end, he said to himself, in order to give an accurate idea of this long march in a work about the Russian campaign, he would have to leave dozens of pages blank. He had read all the books he had been able to bring with him: Candide, Hamlet, Macbeth, a treatise on ants – creatures whose ingenuity and tenacity fascinated him – and accounts of travels in Russia. He had been compelled to lighten his load by leaving these works by the wayside, hoping that they would be picked up by someone else. No soldier in his company had wanted them. Many of them could not read, and in any case with a kitbag containing three shirts, three pairs of socks, three pairs of gaiters, two pairs of trousers, dress uniform and the regulation ten kilos of rations … He frequently listened to the soldiers recounting their life stories, whilst being careful not to tell his own. Lastly, like the other captains, he spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to maintain order.