After Borodino, the Tsar had made up his mind to sacrifice his capital city. Since his field marshal had failed to hold back the French advance, he would deliver Moscow to the flames. The city would not fall into the hands of the Corsican Antichrist. He reluctantly ordered the fire, thereby giving History the largest pyre a monarch ever produced. Moscow would be torched so that the Russian Empire might survive. Rostopchin, the city’s governor, was charged with the task. He freed all common law prisoners and ordered them to start the fire. All the water pumps were removed from the city to stop the invaders from using them, and the ex-prisoners started setting ablaze the bazaar of Kitay-gorod, the warehouses, the timber churches, and the houses of the nobility! The first wind-swept sparks were seen during the night of September 14th to 15th. Day and night, the city burned with a raging fire. On September 16th, installed in the Kremlin, Napoleon was nearly trapped by the fire. The Emperor owed his life to an open alley behind the rampart and a hidden flight of steps that led him to the Moskva River. The fire was mirrored in the waters, and the Old Guard, who’d seen it all, from Egypt to Spain, from the pyramids to Jena, thought they were looking at hell. The bulbs turned red, buildings crashed down in the rustle of charcoaled timber, the air burned their throats, and the heat melted the bells. Before the blood-stained sky and burning palaces, Napoleon realized he had underestimated the sacrificial rage of the Russians, Alexander’s determination, and that Slav ability to go to the bitter end which would, a hundred and fifty years later, make thousands of human waves run aground in Stalingrad, on the allegedly invincible reefs of the Wehrmacht.
The Grande Armée had ventured into a swamp, pursued an army of ghosts, and obtained half a victory.
All that for a heap of ashes.
Why had Napoleon dug his heels in while in Moscow? Why had he allowed the jaws of winter to close on him? He had thought that, by occupying the economic capital, the Tsar would be cornered and end up pleading for a peace treaty. The French emperor had already harbored such illusions by the River Neman. In the smoking rubble of Moscow, he kept feeding on his own hopes. Misled by his self-confidence, he did not listen to General de Caulaincourt, who was urging him to leave.
While the King of Kings procrastinated, in Saint Petersburg Alexander remained inflexible. You do not negotiate with the devil. He was no longer the French sovereign’s friend, but then had he ever been that? Napoleon had overlooked something: that Saint Petersburg, the spiritual capital, was more important in Alexander’s eyes than the secular capital. Moscow could fall, burn down, vanish from the map, but Russia would remain.
So time passed in the soot dust. From September 15th to October 19th, eating his heart out, drawing up plans, ruling the Empire from a distance through a system of express mail and dispatch riders organized by Caulaincourt, Napoleon waited, hoped, and convinced himself. He lost a month. The troops of General Winter had time to get ready for attack.
So, we backfired along Kutuzov Avenue. Moscow, the large capital of iron, steel, tears, and stars, was pushing us out through the West Gate, the name of which is associated with all the woes of the Grande Armée.
On the avenue, a car brushed past us, the window opened, and a young Russian with a pointy nose shouted, “Tired of life, are you, guys?”
“Shut up, you jerk,” I said. Driving does not raise the standard of your thoughts.
Russians have paved the path of their history with glorious monuments and compelling statues. We came across one of Kutuzov the Fat and one of Gagarin. Then there was a war plane during take-off on a pedestal. Then we reached the suburbs: we were on the road to Moyjak when a notice appeared that confirmed that our journey no longer belonged just to the realm of dreams, pleasant distractions, or drunken projects: “Borodino, fifty-five miles.”
The bike was rocking terribly, with Goisque too heavy at the back; Gras, asleep in the sidecar, wasn’t counterbalancing the profile shift. It was like being on an unmaneuverable raft with my two friends. Both were imperturbable. For years they had been traveling around the world in the worst possible conditions without a single complaint.
Gras, 30, had kept his childish habits. He drank nearly a gallon of pineapple juice a day, swam in the pool for two hours, fed on chocolate, and looked like a high-strung hockey champion. He’d been living in the old Soviet Empire for eight years, learned Russian in Omsk, and stayed in Vladivostok for four. He enjoyed silence and had found Siberia to match his melancholy disposition. Later, he had become the director of the Alliance Française in Donetsk, in the Ukrainian Donbas region. His Russian friends considered him one of their own. His female students were secretly in love with him. His work superiors envied his detachment. The old fogies at the Embassy slightly dreaded this ironic young hussar who felt so at ease in the country’s society. He was preparing a thesis in Geography on the borders of empires. He would quite happily never have left mountain peaks, deep forests, and this desolate geography which, just by itself, suited his sadness. He channelled his love for Russia into beautiful books his blond students read in full in the hope of attracting a look from their teacher. His black hair and dark skin never failed to attract the favor of Slav girls, while cops would frequently check on him because they mistook him for a Chechen. Once, in Pakistan, he broke a leg on a mountain wall and had to wait twenty-four hours for help, hanging off a piton at an altitude of sixteen thousand five hundred feet without worrying too much. Whenever we went walking in the forest or tackled a summit climb, he made it a point of honor not to carry enough equipment. He considered foresight vulgar. Soon enough, the situation would turn critical and then Gras, feeling in his element, would double his efforts to get out of the tight spot. The rest of the time, he was bored and couldn’t care less.
Goisque was earthier. He wouldn’t have been out of place in a Soissons trench in 1914. He was from Picardy, and attached to his land like a boot to clay. After visiting a hundred countries, he still considered a field of beets exhausted by the drizzle the most beautiful spectacle the planet could offer. His Antwerp stevedore build was at odds with his fine hands. A pair of piercing blue eyes shielded by Neanderthal eyebrows completed his paradoxical look, as though nature had refused to grant him any gradation between brutality and finesse. He’d been taking photos of the world for the French press for twenty-five years. His style was eclectic. He would accompany the minister to Afghanistan one day, jump above the Volga with Russian parachutists the next, then spend two weeks on board the Charles-de-Gaulle before going off to report on masseuses in the Mekong delta. We’d camped together in the Gobi Desert, the Siberian Taiga, by the Caspian Sea, in Tibet and Afghanistan, and by the fire he’d tell me about his time as a UN Peacekeeper, his years as a humanitarian volunteer in the Cambodian jungle, crossing the ocean on a Vietnamese junk boat, traveling to Kapisa, Sudan, and the Caucasus. He’d conclude, much to my annoyance, that none of these memories was a patch on spending a spring morning in a farmhouse full of children’s shrieks. Goisque had one obsession in his reports: the light. It was his passion, his obsession. If the sky had been clear that day, he could go to sleep on the ground, in the cold, with a bone to chew on, and a blissful smile on his face. But if the light had been scarce, not even the most luxurious hotel or the friendliest company could distract him from his rambling: “It’s all screwed, this shitty report.” I therefore had beside me a pessimistic dandy and a photon monomaniac. A fine combination.