Liveblogging Napoleon's Russian Invasion: Stendahl Observes Moscow Aflame

Henri Beyle, later to be known as Stendhal, confronts the fire that destroyed Moscow with a curious jauntiness:

The conflagration was rapidly approaching the huse we had quitted., Our carriasge remained on the boulevard for five or six hours. Bored by this inaction, I went to see the fire and spent an hour or two with Joinville. I admired the voluptuosity of his house's furnishings: we drank there with Gillet and Busche, consuming three bottles of wine, which gave us new life.

While I was there I read a few lines of an English translation of Virginie, which, amidst all the general coarseness of existence here, turned me back, to some slight extent, into a moral being.

I went with Louis to look at the conflagration. We saw one Savoye, a mounted artilleryman, drunk, flogging a Guards officer with the flat of his sword and hurling silly abuse at him. He was in the wrong, and finally had to apologise. One of his comrades in pillage plunged down a blazing street, where he was probably roasted.

--Beyle to Félix Faure, 4 October 1812

[Letter 64 in To the Happy Few: Selected Letters 140-145, 141 (1986)]