"We'll start, Bichette, we'll start! There's none but you, my beauty,
who can save Stephanie. Ha! by and bye you and I may be able to rest
--and die," he added.

Philippe, wrapped in a fur pelisse, to which he owed his preservation
and his energy, began to run, striking his feet hard upon the frozen
snow to keep them warm. Scarcely had he gone a few hundred yards from
the village than he saw a blaze in the direction of the place where,
since morning, he had left his carriage in charge of his former
orderly, an old soldier. Horrible anxiety laid hold of him. Like all
others who were controlled during this fatal retreat by some powerful
sentiment, he found a strength to save his friends which he could not
have put forth to save himself.

Presently he reached a slight declivity at the foot of which, in a
spot sheltered from the enemy's balls, he had stationed the carriage,
containing a young woman, the companion of his childhood, the being
most dear to him on earth. At a few steps distant from the vehicle he
now found a company of some thirty stragglers collected around an
immense fire, which they were feeding with planks, caisson covers,
wheels, and broken carriages. These soldiers were, no doubt, the last
comers of that crowd who, from the base of the hill of Studzianka to
the fatal river, formed an ocean of heads intermingled with fires and
huts,--a living sea, swayed by motions that were almost imperceptible,
and giving forth a murmuring sound that rose at times to frightful
outbursts. Driven by famine and despair, these poor wretches must have
rifled the carriage before de Sucy reached it. The old general and his
young wife, whom he had left lying in piles of clothes and wrapped in
mantles and pelisses, were now on the snow, crouching before the fire.
One door of the carriage was already torn off.