doctor was horrified when he saw the effect he had produced upon his
guest, whom he now began to love when he saw him thus. Surely, if
either of the two lovers were worthy of pity, it was Philippe; did he
not bear alone the burden of their dreadful sorrow?

After the colonel's departure the doctor kept himself informed about
him; he learned that the miserable man was living on an estate near
Saint-Germain. In truth, the baron, on the faith of a dream, had
formed a project which he believed would yet restore the mind of his
darling. Unknown to the doctor, he spent the rest of the autumn in
preparing for his enterprise. A little river flowed through his park
and inundated during the winter the marshes on either side of it,
giving it some resemblance to the Beresina. The village of Satout, on
the heights above, closed in, like Studzianka, the scene of horror.
The colonel collected workmen to deepen the banks, and by the help of
his memory, he copied in his park the shore where General Eble
destroyed the bridge. He planted piles, and made buttresses and burned
them, leaving their charred and blackened ruins, standing in the water
from shore to shore. Then he gathered fragments of all kinds, like
those of which the raft was built. He ordered dilapidated uniforms and
clothing of every grade, and hired hundreds of peasants to wear them;
he erected huts and cabins for the purpose of burning them. In short,
he forgot nothing that might recall that most awful of all scenes, and
he succeeded.

Toward the last of December, when the snow had covered with its thick,
white mantle all his imitative preparations, he recognized the
Beresina. This false Russia was so terribly truthful, that several of
his army comrades recognized the scene of their past misery at once.
Monsieur de Sucy took care to keep secret the motive for this tragic