So, on October 25, Alexander arrived in the capital of Prussia. He was received with enthusiasm by the Queen, the Prince, and the party of war with France. The King of Prussia, himself attacked on every side, allowed himself to be persuaded, but with the condition, suggested by the old Prince of Brunswick and Count von Haugwitz, that his army should not take the field until it was seen how the war on the Danube turned out. This partial adhesion did not satisfy either the Emperor Alexander or the Queen of Prussia, but they could not for the moment obtain anything more definite. A melodramatic scene was played at Potsdam when the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Russia, descending by torchlight into the sepulchral vaults of the palace, in presence of the whole Court, swore eternal friendship on the tomb of Frederick the Great, which did not prevent Alexander, eighteen months afterwards, from accepting and incorporating in the Russian Empire a Prussian province, which Napoleon gave him by the treaty of Tilsit, and that in presence of his unfortunate friend, Frederick William. After this ceremony the Emperor of Russia repaired to Moravia, to place himself at the head of his armies; while Napoleon advanced by great strides towards, and soon took possession of, the capital of Austria.

On learning the vacillation of the King of Prussia, and the nature of the treaty of Potsdam, Napoleon, wishing to get the Russians off his hands before the Prussians could make up their minds, marched to meet the former at Brunn, to which place we will now return.

It has long been said, and truly, that ambassadors are chartered spies. The King of Prussia, as news of fresh victories won by Napoleon came in every day, and it was desirable to know what view he might safely take with regard to the superior position of the belligerents, thought proper to send his minister, Von Haugwitz, to the French head-quarters, that he might judge for himself of the state of affairs. But as some pretext was necessary for this, he commissioned him to bear an answer to the letter which Napoleon had written to him, complaining of the treaty entered into at Potsdam between Prussia and Russia. Herr von Haugwitz arrived at Brunn some days before the battle of Austerlitz, and would have liked very well to be able to stay until the great battle which was impending had been decided, so as to be in a position to advise his sovereign to stay still or to attack us, according as we were the winner or the losers. It needs no military training to see by the map what a Prussian army, starting from Breslau in Silesia, might have done, if it had marched through Bohemia and fallen on our rear towards Ratisbon. The Emperor, knowing that Von Haugwitz sent a messenger to Berlin every day, wished to let the news of the defeat and capture of Jellachich's army get there through him, which, owing to the rapid march of events, was not likely yet to have reached Prussia.

He took the following means to attain this end.

Duroc, the marshal of the household, after giving us notice of what we were expected to do, had all the Austrian colours which Massy and I had brought from Bregenz replaced privately in the quarters which we were occupying. Some hours afterwards, when the Ernperor was talking in his study with Herr von Haugwitz, we repeated the ceremony of presentation in precisely the same manner as the first time. The Emperor, on hearing music in the court of his house, feigned astonishment, and went to the window followed by the ambassador. Seeing the trophies borne by the sergeants, he called the aide-de-camp on duty and asked what it all meant. The answer was that there were two aides-de-camp of Marshal Augereau, who were coming to bring the Emperor the colours of Jellachich's Austrian army which had been captured at Bregenz. We were ordered to enter, and there, without winking, and as if he had never seen us, Napoleon received the letter of Augereau, which had been sealed up, and read it, although he had known the contents for four days. Then he questioned us, making us enter into the minutest details. Duroc had cautioned us to speak loud, because the Prussian ambassador was a little deaf. This was unlucky for my comrade and superior, Massy, since he had lost his voice and could hardly speak; so it was I who had to answer the Emperor, and, seeing his plan, I depicted in the most vivid colours the defeat of the Austrians, their dejection and the enthusiasm of the French troops. Then, presenting the trophies one after another, I named all the regiments to which they had belonged, laying especial stress upon two, the capture of which was likely to produce the greatest effect upon the Prussian ambassador. 'Here,' said I, 'are the colours of the Emperor of Austria's own regiment of infantry; there is the standard of his brother's, the Archduke Charles, Uhlans.' Napoleon's eyes sparkled, and seemed to say 'Well done, young man.' Then he dismissed us, and as we went out we heard him say to the ambassador, 'You see, count, my armies are winning at all points; the Austrian army is annihilated, and very soon the Russian army will be so.' Von Haugwitz appeared greatly upset, and as soon as we were out of the room, Duroc said to us, 'This evening the diplomat will write to Berlin to inform his Government of the destruction of Jellachich's army. This will somewhat calm the minds of those who are keen for war with us, and will give the King of Prussia fresh reasons for temporising which is what the Emperor ardently desires.'

The comedy having been played, the Emperor wished to get rid of an awkward witness who might report the positions if his army, and so hinted to the ambassador that to stay between two armies all ready for an engagement might be a little unsafe for him. He bade him go to Vienna to M. de Talleyrand, his Minister for Foreign Affairs--advice which Herr von Haugwitz followed that same evening. The next day the Emperor said nothing to us about yesterday's performance, but, wishing no doubt to evince his satisfaction at the way in which we had seized his idea, he asked tenderly after Major Massy's cold, and pinched my ear, which was with him a sort of caress.

Meanwhile the great drama was approaching its final scene, and both sides were preparing to fight their stoutest. Most military authors are apt to confuse the reader's mind by overcrowding their story with details. So much is this the case that, in the greater part of the works published on the wars of the Empire, I have been utterly unable to understand the history of many battles at which I was present, and of which all the phases were well known to me. In order to preserve due clearness in relating a military action, I think one ought to be content with indicating the respective conditions of the two armies before the engagement, and reporting only such facts as affected the decision. That is what I shall try to do in order to give you an idea of the battle of Austerlitz, as it is called, though it took place short of the village of that name. On the eve of the battle, however, the Emperors of Austria and Russia had slept at the chateau of Austerlitz, and when Napoleon drove them from this, he wished to heighten his triumph by giving that name to the battle.

You will see on the map that the Goldbach brook, which rises on the other side of the Olmütz road, falls into the small lake of Mönitz. This stream, flowing at the bottom of a little valley with pretty steep sides, separated the two armies. The Austro-Russian right rested on a hanging wood in rear of the Posoritz post-house beyond the Olmütz road; their centre occupied Pratzen and the wide plateau of that name; their left was near the pools of Satschan and the swampy ground in their neighbourhood. The Emperor Napoleon rested his left on a hillock difficult of access, to which the Egyptian soldiers gave the name of the 'Santon,' because it had on the top a little chapel with a spire like a minaret. The French centre was near the marsh of Kobelnitz, the right, was at Telnitz. But at this point the Emperor had placed very few people, in order to draw the Russians on to the marshy ground, where he had arranged to defeat them by concealing Davout's corps at Gross Raigern, on the Vienna road.

On the 1st of December, the day before the battle, Napoleon left Brünn early in the morning, spent the whole day in inspecting the positions, and in the evening fixed his head-quarters in rear of the French centre, at a point whence the view took in the bivouacs of both sides, as well as the ground which was to be their field of battle the next day. There was no other building in the place than a poor barn. The Emperor's tables and maps were placed there, and he established himself in person by an immense fire, surrounded by his numerous staff and his guard. Fortunately there was no snow, and, though it was very cold, I lay on the ground and went soundly to sleep. But we were soon obliged to remount and go the rounds with the Emperor. There was no moon, and the darkness of the night was increased by a thick fog which made progress very difficult. The chasseurs of the escort had the idea of lighting torches made of pine branches and straw, which proved very useful. The troops, seeing a group of horsemen thus lighted come towards them, had no difficulty in recognising the imperial staff, and in an instant, as if by enchantment, we could see along the whole line all our bivouac fires lighted up by thousands of torches in the hands of the soldiers. The cheers with which, in their enthusiasm, they saluted Napoleon, were all the more animated for the fact that the morrow was the anniversary of his coronation, and the coincidence seemed of good omen. The enemies must have been a good deal surprised when, from the top of a neighbouring hill, they saw in the middle of the night 60,000 torches lighted, and heard a thousand times repeated the cry of 'Long live the Emperor!' accompanied by the sound of the many bands of the French regiments. In our camp all was joy, light, and movement, while, on the side of the Austrians and Russians, all was gloom and silence.

Next day, December 2nd, the sound of cannon was heard at daybreak. As we have seen, the Emperor had shown but few troops on his right; this was a trap for the enemy, with the view of allowing them to capture Telnitz easily, to cross the Goldbach there, then to go on to Gross Raigern and take possession of the road from Brünn to Vienna, and so to cut off our retreat. The Austrians and Russians fell into the snare perfectly, for, weakening the rest of their line, they clumsily crowded considerable forces into the bottom of Telnitz, and into the swampy valleys bordering on the pools of Satschan and Maoris. But as they imagined, for some not very apparent reason, that Napoleon had the intention of retreating without delivering battle, they resolved, by way of completing their success, to attack us on our left towards the 'Santon,' and also on our centre before Pandas. By this means our defeat would be complete when we had been forced back on these two points, and found the road to Vienna occupied in our rear by the Russians. As it befell, however, on our left Marshal Lannes not only repulsed all the attacks of the enemy upon the 'Santon,' but drove him back on the other side of the Olmüz road as far as Blasiowitz. There the ground became more level, and allowed Murat's cavalry to execute some brilliant charges, the results of which were of great importance, for the Russians were driven out of hand as far as the village of Austerlitz.

While this splendid success was being won by our left wing, the centre, consisting of the troops under Soult and Bernadotte, which the Emperor had posted at the bottom of the Goldbach ravine, where it was concealed by a thick fog, dashed forwards towards the hill on which stands the village of Pratzen. This was the moment when that brilliant sun of Austerlitz, the recollection of which Napoleon so delighted to recall, burst forth in all its splendour. Marshal Soult carried not only the village of Pratzen, but also the vast tableland of that name, which was the culminating point of the whole country, and consequently the key of the battle-field. There, under the Emperor's eyes, the sharpest of the fighting took place, and the Russians were beaten back. But one battalion, the 4th of the line, of which Prince Joseph, Napoleon's brother, was colonel, allowing itself to be carried too far in pursuit of the enemy, was charged and broken up by the Noble Guard and the Grand Duke Constantine's cuirassiers, losing its eagle. Several lines of Russian cavalry quickly advanced to support this momentary success of the guards, but Napoleon hurled against them the Mamelukes, the mounted chasseurs, and the mounted grenadiers of his guard, under Marshal Bessieres and General Rapp. The melee was of the most sanguinary kind; the Russian squadrons were crushed and driven back beyond the village of Austerlitz with immense loss. Our troopers captured many colours and prisoners, among the latter Prince Repnin, commander of the Noble Guard. This regiment, composed of the most brilliant of the young Russian nobility, lost heavily, because the swagger in which they had indulged against the French having come to the ears of our soldiers, these, and above all the mounted grenadiers, attacked them with fury, shouting as they passed their great sabres through their bodies: 'We will give the ladies of St. Petersburg something to cry for!'

The painter Gérard, in his picture of the battle of Austerlitz, has taken for his subject the moment when General Rapp, coming wounded out of the fight, and covered with his enemies' blood and his own, is presenting to the Emperor the flags just captured and his prisoner, Prince Repnin. I was present at this imposing spectacle, which the artist has reproduced with wonderful accuracy. All the heads are portraits; even that of the brave chasseur who, making no complaint, though he had been shot through the body, had the courage to come up to the Emperor, and fell stone dead as he presented the standard which he had just taken. Napoleon, wishing to honour his memory, ordered the painter to find a place for him in his composition. In the picture may be seen also a Mameluke, who is carrying in one hand an enemy's flag and holds in the other the bridle of his dying horse. This man, named Mustapha, was well known in the guard for his courage and ferocity. During the charge he had pursued the Grand Duke Constantine, who only got rid of him by a pistol-shot, which severely wounded the Mameluke's horse. Mustapha, grieved at having only a standard to offer to the Emperor, said in his broken French as he presented it: 'Ah, if me catch Prince Constantine, me cut him head off and bring it to Emperor!' Napoleon, disgusted, replied 'Will you hold your tongue, you savage?' But to finish the account of the battle. While Marshals Lannes, Soult, and Murat, with the Imperial Guard, were beating the right and centre of the allied army, and driving them back beyond the village of Austerlitz, the enemy's left, falling into the trap laid by Napoleon when he made a show of keeping close to the pools, threw itself on the village of Telnitz, captured it, and, crossing the Goldbach, prepared to occupy the road to Vienna. But the enemy had taken false prognostic of Napoleon's genius when they supposed him capable of committing such a blunder as to leave undefended a road by which, in the event of disaster, his retreat was secured; for our right was guarded by the divisions under Davout, concealed in the rear in the little town of Gross Reigen. From this point Davout fell upon the allies at the moment when he saw their masses entangled in the defiles between the lakes of Telnitz and Mönitz, and the stream.

The Emperor, whom we left on the plateau of Pratzen, having freed himself from the enemy's right and centre, which were in flight on the other side of Austerlitz, descended from the heights of Pratzen with a force of all arms, including Soult's corps and his guard, and went with all speed towards Telnitz, and took the enemy's columns in rear at the moment when Davout was attacking in front. At once the heavy masses of Austrians and Russians, packed on the narrow roadways which lead beside the Goldbach brook, finding themselves between two fires, fell into an indescribable confusion. All ranks were mixed up together, and each sought to save himself by flight. Some hurled themselves headlong into the marshes which border the pools, but our infantry followed them there. Others hoped to escape by the road that lies between the two pools; our cavalry charged them, and the butchery was frightful. Lastly, the greater part of the enemy, chiefly Russians, sought to pass over the ice. It was very thick, and five or six thousand men, keeping some kind of order, had reached the middle of the Satschan lake, when Napoleon, calling up the artillery of his guard, gave the order to fire on the ice. It broke at countless points, and a mighty cracking was heard. 'The water, oozing through the fissures, soon covered the floes, and we saw thousands of Russians, with their horses, guns, and wagons, slowly settle down into the depths. It was a horribly majestic spectacle which I shall never forget. In an instant the surface of the lake was covered with everything that could swim. Men and horses struggled in the water amongst the floes. Some--a very small number--succeeded in saving themselves by the help of poles and ropes, which our soldiers reached to them from the shore, but the greater part were drowned.

The number of combatants at the Emperor's disposal in this battle was 68,000 men; that of the allied army amounted to 82,000 men. Our loss in killed and wounded was about 8,000 men; our enemies admitted that theirs, in killed, wounded, and drowned, reached 14,000. We had made 18,000 prisoners, captured 150 guns, and a great quantity of standards and colours. After giving the order to pursue the enemy in every direction, the Emperor betook himself to his new head-quarters at the post-house of Posoritz on the Olmütz road. As may be imagined, he was radiant, but frequently expressed regret that the very eagle we had lost should have belonged to the 4th regiment of the line, of which his brother Joseph was colonel, and should have been captured by the regiment of the Grand Duke Constantine, brother of the Emperor of Russia. The coincidence was, in truth, rather quaint, and made the loss more noticeable. But Napoleon soon received great consolation. Prince John of Lichtenstein came from the Emperor of Austria to request an interview, and Napoleon understanding that this would result in a peace and would deliver him from the fear of seeing the Prussians march on his rear before he was clear of his present enemy, granted it.

Of all the divisions of the French imperial guard, it was the mounted chasseurs who suffered the heaviest loss in their great charge against the Russian guard on the Pratzen plateau. My poor friend, Captain Fournier, had been killed, and General Morland too. The Emperor, always on the look-out for anything that might kindle the spirit of emulation among the troops, decided that General Morland's body should be placed in the memorial building which he proposed to erect on the Esplanade des Invalides at Paris. The surgeons, having neither the time nor the materials necessary to embalm the general's body on the battle-field, put it into a barrel of rum, which was transported to Paris. But subsequent events having delayed the construction of the monument destined for General Morland, the barrel in which he had been placed was still standing in one of the rooms of the School of Medicine when Napoleon lost the Empire in 1814. Not long afterwards the barrel broke through decay, and people were much surprised to find that the rum had made the general's moustaches grow to such an extraordinary extent that they fell below his waist. The corpse was in perfect preservation, but, in order to get possession of it, the family was obliged to bring an action against some scientific man who had made a curiosity of it. Cultivate the love of glory and go and get killed, to let some oaf of a naturalist set you up in his library between a rhinoceros horn and a stuffed crocodile!

I did not receive any wound at the battle of Austerlitz, though I was often in a very exposed position; notably at the time of the cavalry melee on the Pratzen plateau. The Emperor had sent me with orders to General Rapp, whom I succeeded with great difficulty in reaching in the middle of that terrible hurly-burly of slaughterers and slaughtered. My horse came in contact with that of one of the Noble Guard, and our sabres were on the point of crossing, when we were forced apart by the combatants, and I got off with a severe contusion. But the next day I incurred a much greater danger of a very different kind from those with which one ordinarily meets on the field of battle. It happened in this way. On the morning of the 3rd, the Emperor mounted and rode round the different positions where the fights of the day before had taken place. Having reached the shores of the Satschan lake, Napoleon dismounted, and was chatting with several marshals round a camp fire, when he saw floating a hundred yards from the embankment a large isolated ice floe, on which was stretched a poor Russian non-commissioned officer with a decoration. The poor fellow could not help himself, having got a bullet through his thigh, and his blood had stained the ice floe which supported him. It was a horrible sight. Seeing a numerous staff surrounded by guards, the man judged that Napoleon must be there; he raised himself as well as he could, and cried out that as soldiers of all countries became brothers when the fight was over, he begged his life of the powerful Emperor of the French. Napoleon's interpreter having translated this entreaty, he was touched by it, and ordered General Bertrand, his aide-de-camp, to do what he could to save the poor man. Straightway several men of the escort, and even two staff officers, seeing two great tree-stems on the bank, pushed them into the water, and then, getting astride of them, they thought that by moving their legs simultaneously they would drive these pieces of wood forward. But scarcely were they a fathom from the edge than they rolled over, throwing into the water the men who bestrode them. Their clothes were saturated in a moment, and as it was freezing very hard, the cloth of their sleeves and their trousers became stiff as they swam, and their limbs, shut up as it were in cases, could not move, so that several came near to being drowned, and they only got back to land with great difficulty, by the help of ropes which were thrown to them.

I bethought me then of saying that the swimmers ought to have stripped; in the first place, to preserve their freedom of movement, and secondly, to avoid having to pass the night in wet clothes. General Bertrand having heard this repeated it to the Emperor, who declared that I was right and that the others had shown more zeal than discretion. I do not wish to make myself out better than I am, so I will admit that just having taken part in a battle where I had seen thousands of dead and dying, the edge had been taken off my sensibility, and I did not feel philanthropic enough to run the risk of a bad cold by contesting with the ice floes the life of an enemy. I felt quite content with deploring his sad fate. But the Emperor's answer piqued me, and it seemed to me that I should be open to ridicule if I gave advice and did not dare to carry it into execution. So I leapt from my horse, and stripped myself naked and dashed into the water. I had gone fast in the course of the day and got hot, so that the chill struck me keenly, but I was young and vigorous, and a good swimmer; the Emperor's presence encouraged me, and I struck out towards the Russian sergeant. At the same time my example, and probably the praise given me by the Emperor, determined a lieutenant of artillery, by name Roumestain, to imitate me.

While he was undressing I was advancing, but with a good deal more difficulty than I had foreseen. The older and stronger ice, which had been smashed to pieces the day before, had almost entirely disappeared, but a new skin had formed some lines in thickness, the sharp edges of which scratched the skin of my arms, breast, and neck in a very unpleasant fashion. The artillery officer, who had caught me up half-way, had not perceived it at all, having profited by the path which I had opened in the new ice. He called my attention to this fact, and generously demanded to be allowed to take his turn of leading, to which I agreed, for I was cruelly cut up. At last we reached the huge floe of old ice on which the poor Russian was lying, and thought that the most laborious part of our enterprise was achieved. There we were quite wrong, for as soon as we began to push the floe forward the layer of new ice which covered the surface of the water, being broken by contact with it, piled itself up in front, so as in a short time to form a mass which not only resisted our efforts, but began to break the edges of the big floe. The bulk of this got smaller every moment, and we began to fear that the poor man whom we were trying to save would be drowned before our eyes. The edges, moreover, of the floe were remarkably sharp, so that we had to choose spots on which to rest our hands and our chests as we pushed. We were at our last gasp. Finally, by way of a crowning stroke, as we got near the bank the ice split in several places, and the portion on which the Russian lay was reduced to a slab only a few feet in breadth, quite insufficient to bear his weight. He was on the point of sinking when my comrade and I, feeling bottom at length, slipped our shoulders under the ice slab and bore it to the shore. They threw us ropes, which we fastened round the Russian, and he was at last hoisted on to the beach. We had to use the same means to get out of the water, for we were wearied, torn, bruised, and bleeding, and could hardly stand. My kind comrade Massy, who had watched me with the greatest anxiety throughout my swim, had been so thoughtful as to have his horse-cloth warmed before the camp fire, and as soon as I was out of the water he wrapped me in it. After a good rub down I put on my clothes and wanted to stretch out by the fire, but this Dr. Larrey forbad, and ordered me to walk about, to do which I required the help of two chasseurs. The Emperor came and congratulated the artillery lieutenant and me on our courage in undertaking and achieving the rescue of the wounded Russian, and calling his Mameluke Roustan, who always carried refreshments with him on his horse, he poured us out a glass of excellent rum, and asked us, laughing, how we had liked our bath. As for the Russian sergeant, the Emperor directed Dr. Larrey to attend to him, and gave him several pieces of gold. He was fed and put on dry clothes, and after being wrapped in warm rugs he was taken to a house in Telnitz which was used as an ambulance, and transferred the next day to the hospital at Brünn. The poor lad blessed the Emperor as well as M. Roumestain and me, and would kiss our hands. He was a Lithuanian, a native, that is, of a province of the old Poland now joined to Russia. As soon as he was well he declared that he would never serve any other than the Emperor Napoleon, so he returned to France with our wounded and was enrolled in the Polish legion. Ultimately he became a sergeant in the lancers of the guard, and whenever I came across him he testified his gratitude in broken, but expressive, language.

My icy bath, and the really superhuman efforts which I had to make to save the poor man, might have cost me dear if I had been less young and vigorous. M. Roumestain, who did not possess the latter advantage to the same extent as I, was seized that same evening with violent congestion of the lungs, and had to be taken to the hospital, where he passed several months between life and death. He never, indeed, recovered completely, and had to leave the service invalided some years later. As for myself, though I was very weak, I got myself hoisted on to my horse when the Emperor left the lake to go to the chateau of Austerlitz, where his head-quarters now were. Napoleon always went at a gallop, and in my shaken state this pace did not suit me; still, I kept up, because the night was coming on and I was afraid of straying; besides which, if I had gone at a walk the cold would have got hold of me. When I reached the chateau it took several men to help me to dismount, a shivering fit seized me, my teeth were chattering, and I was quite ill. Colonel Dahlmann, lieutenant-colonel of the mounted chasseurs, who had just been promoted to general in place of Morland, grateful doubtless for the service I had rendered his late chief, took me into one of the outbuildings of the chateau, where he and his officers were established. After having given me some very hot tea, his surgeon rubbed me all over with warm oil; they swaddled me in many rugs and stuck me into a great heap of hay, leaving only my face outside. Gradually a pleasant warmth penetrated my numbed limbs. I slept sound, and, thanks to all this kind care as well as to my twenty-three years, I found myself next morning fresh and in good condition, and was able to mount my horse and witness an extremely interesting spectacle.

The defeat which the Russians had undergone had thrown their army into such disorder that all who escaped the disaster of Austerlitz made haste to reach Galicia and get out of the victor's power. The rout was complete; we took many prisoners and found the roads covered with deserted cannon and baggage. The Emperor of Russia, who had made sure of victory, went away in hopeless grief, authorising his ally Francis II. to make terms with Napoleon. On the very evening of the battle, the Emperor of Austria, to save his country from utter ruin, begged an interview of the French Emperor, and Napoleon agreeing, had halted at the village of Nasiedlowitz. The interview took place on the 4th, near the mill of Poleny, between the French and Austrian line. I was present at this memorable meeting. Napoleon, starting very early from the chateau with his staff, was the first at the place of meeting. He dismounted and was strolling about when, seeing the Emperor of Austria approaching, he went towards him and embraced him cordially. A strange sight for the philosopher to reflect on! An Emperor of Germany come to humble himself by suing for peace to the son of a small Corsican family, not long ago a sub-lieutenant of artillery, whom his talents, his good fortune, and the courage of the French soldier had raised to the summit of power, and made the arbiter of the destinies of Europe!

Napoleon took no unfair advantage of the Austrian Emperor's position, so far as we could judge from the distance at which respect kept us. He was kind and courteous in the extrerne. An armistice was concluded, and it was arranged that plenipotentiaries should be sent by both parties to Brünn to negotiate a treaty of peace. The Emperors embraced again at parting, and returned to their respective quarters. During the next two days, Napoleon admitted Major Massy and myself to a farewell audience, charging us to report to Marshal Augereau what we had seen. At the same time the Emperor handed us despatches for the Bavarian Court which had returned to Munich, and informed us that Augereau had left Bregenz and that we should find him at Ulm. We got back to Vienna and continued our journey, travelling night and day in spite of the snow. which had begun to fall thickly.