‘That’s impossible. More than an hour elapsed between the moment Mademoiselle Lasquenet went to change and when the housekeeper knocked on the door. We do not know at what precise time the murderer stabbed her and it took only a few moments. His absence was probably not even noticed and, even if it had been, so many people were coming and going to the buffets, flitting from group to group or goodness knows what. In any case, who would care about someone’s absence in such a crush?’
‘Could General Triaire also do a sketch of the state of the bedroom: the position of the body, the—’
The prince gave a nervous laugh. ‘Are you mad? In any case, nobody entered the bedroom except the countess and the investigators.’
‘Do we know how the murderer got rid of any bloodstains that might have—’
‘I don’t know if any attention was given to those details. There was only one thing that struck the investigators. At one point they thought that the murderer had stolen the tongue because it was nowhere to be found but it had in fact been hidden in one of the pockets of the victim’s cloak.’
The prince’s furrowed brow and his tightly folded arms betrayed his tension. If he had hoped that Margont would dispel his doubts, he really did have cause for annoyance.
‘I think I’ve told you everything about this sad event,’ he concluded. His sentence had the ring of a funeral oration.
‘I am indebted to you, Your Highness. May I leave?’
‘Keep me regularly informed by sealed letter addressed to General Triaire. Ask to see me only if you have something new to tell me.’
Eugène then dived into the mass of messengers whilst Margont lingered in the grove. His thoughts were jumbled and incoherent. Could this affair be linked to his investigation or not? He was not at all convinced of the deranged man’s guilt but nor was he convinced of his innocence. On what basis could he assume that the person he was tracking had also killed the actress? What was the significance – if any – of cutting out her tongue? Unable to make up his mind and torn between various suppositions, Margont was struggling to find a connection between these disparate elements.
That same evening, as he was recounting his conversation with the prince to Lefine, he received the list of guests. Almost two hundred officers from IV Corps. And Triaire pointed out that this list was almost certainly incomplete. Predictably, the names of the four suspects were among them.
CHAPTER 17
THE march resumed its tedious course. The road to Moscow, attractively lined with birch trees, was so dusty that every breath was agony for the lungs. Sometimes they advanced laboriously in the unbearable heat, making a rush for any stagnant water hole, even if it meant suffering diarrhoea. Sometimes they were soaked to the skin by rain or bombarded by hailstones. At night they shivered with cold and got very little sleep. Everything in this country seemed to be on an excessive, inhuman scale. There was also the constant smell of putrefaction coming from the thousands of dead horses, a smell that was all the more abominable as it presaged the slaughter to come. More than a third of the army was sick or off foraging for food and three-quarters of the eighty thousand horses that had set off on the campaign had perished. But the French continued to move forward in the sweltering heat through a countryside that consisted of plains, hills, marshes, forests and charred remains.
Jérôme Bonaparte, the Emperor’s brother, King of Westphalia and a poor tactician who was well out of his depth as commander of VIII Corps, manoeuvred particularly badly. He let slip the opportunity of attacking Bagration’s army. Napoleon, furious that this mistake had allowed the Russian army to escape destruction, relieved him of his command. Out of pique, Jérôme left the army and returned home, taking with him his Royal Guard. The consequences of this error were very serious: the two Russian armies had almost linked up with each other and Barclay de Tolly and Bagration were able to meet up at Smolensk, one of the most important and beautiful cities in Russia. The Russians were determined to defend it, at whatever cost. ‘At last I’ve got them!’ exclaimed Napoleon. On 16 and 17 August the battle raged. The French had already seized a large part of the town when, during the night of 17 to 18 August, Barclay de Tolly once more ordered a retreat.
Bagration was appalled. The two generals were proving to be exact opposites. Barclay de Tolly had a cold disposition. A man of unfailing composure, he was polite, patient and methodical. He never got tired and frequently went without a meal. He was a very competent general and continued to implement a scorched-earth policy even though his general staff, his soldiers and the Russian people were unanimously against it. His unpopularity was growing as the French army progressed. Bagration seemed to have an aura of heroism about him and was fêted all the way from St Petersburg to Siberia. He was combative, courageous to the point of foolhardiness, and each step backwards by the Russian army mortified him. But Barclay de Tolly’s main objective was to protect his troops, and to continue fighting in Smolensk would have prejudiced any attempted retreat. The Russians would have been hindered by the congested streets and would probably have ended their withdrawal at the very bottom of the Dnieper, the river that ran through the city. So the Russian army abandoned its positions under cover of darkness, taking with it the icon of Our Lady of Smolensk and setting fire to the city.
IV Corps did not reach Smolensk until 19 August, too late to take part in the confrontation but early enough to witness the consequences.
Working separately, Lefine and Margont had each been gathering information about their suspects. Three days earlier they had decided they would pool the results of their investigations the moment they arrived in Smolensk. Since then Lefine had disappeared. Margont had organised a search for him but to no avail and he was becoming increasingly worried.
Three-quarters of Smolensk had been burnt but it was still a superb and fascinating city. It stretched out along the sides of a valley at the bottom of which flowed a river, the Borysthen. On the left bank stood the old town, surrounded by a red-brick wall with whitewashed battlements. These fortifications were twenty-four feet high, eighteen feet wide and included twenty-nine towers. On the other bank the dwellings were more recent and unfortified.
When the 84th entered the city, a deathly silence hung over it. Whole areas had been reduced to ashes. The column progressed through the smoking rubble among which lay bodies that were charred, shrunken and twisted like vines. In the streets strewn with wreckage and corpses, blood was mingled with mud. Here, a shell had torn a dozen or so Russian grenadiers to shreds. Death had taken them by surprise: they still had their muskets slung across their chests. There, a large shack had been the scene of fighting before collapsing in flames, killing the combatants on each side indiscriminately. No sooner had a fire been put out than fighting flared up again amongst the rubble. The fires had been so extensive that they had covered everything with a fine layer of dust, a sort of grey, warm shroud that disintegrated when touched.
Most of the inhabitants had fled with the Russian troops, but some had remained or were coming back. They were looking for relatives, begging for help in removing huge piles of wreckage, recovering anything that had escaped destruction. Although the dead were being tossed into carts and mass graves were being dug everywhere, some of the bodies had begun to decay and the air was contaminated by a vile, clinging odour. You had to press your sleeve against your nostrils to block out the smell of death. Hunger and confusion had unhinged the minds of most of the soldiers who were indulging in a frenzy of looting. They were storming grocers’ and butchers’ shops – or at least what was left of them – and smashing in the doors of houses that had withstood the flames with the aid of charred timbers.