Sylvain Tesson - Berezina: From Moscow to Paris Following Napoleons Epic Fail

To my late mother, Marie-Claude Tesson-Millet

Nevertheless, anything that breathed set forth.
S ERGEANT B OURGOGNE , Memoirs
Extreme abulia!
In order to escape from it, I sometimes read
the odd book about Napoleon.
Sometimes, other peoples courage acts like a tonic.
C IORAN , Cahiers, January 17, 1958
Im reading the recollections of Captain Coignet,
in which four Frenchmen often triumph
over ten thousand Cossacks. Times have changed.
P AUL M ORAND , Journal inutile, Volume II
To fight aloud is very brave,
But gallanter, I know,
Who charge within the bosom,
The cavalry of woe.
[...]
We trust, in plumed procession
For such the angels go,
Rank after rank, with even feet
And uniforms of snow.
E MILY D ICKINSON

BEREZINA: River in Belarus, a tributary of the Dnieper River, 349 miles long. It was the scene of one of Napoleons battles against the Tsars troops in 1812, during the famous French Retreat from Moscow.

In colloquial French, a brzina refers to a disastrous situation.

Its during a previous journey that the idea of a future one comes to mind. Imagination carries the traveler far from the trap where hes gotten stuck. While in the Negev desert, hell dream of a Scottish glen; in a monsoon, of the Hoggar Mountains; on the west side of the Aiguille du Dru, of a weekend in Tuscany. Man is never happy with his lot, but aspires to something else, cultivates the spirit of contradiction, propels himself out of the present moment. Dissatisfaction motivates his actions. What am I doing here? is the title of a book and the only question worth asking.

That summer, every day, we would brush against moaning icebergs. They drifted by, sad and lonely, suddenly appearing out of the fog, ice-cubes in our evening whisky. Our sailboat, La Poule, sailed from fjord to fjord. The summer light, clouded by steam, nourished the Baffin coastline night and day. Sometimes, we would draw alongside the bottom of a two-thousand-foot wall sticking out of the water. Then we would unwind our ropes and go climbing. The granite was compact, so you had to drive the pitons hard. For this we had Daniel Du Lac, the bravest among us. He was comfortable suspended over the watermore so than on the deck of the ship. In opening up the way, hed dislodge blocks. Rocks would come pouring down onto our backs and slam into the water with the sound of an uppercut into a guilty jaw.

Cdric Gras would follow, lifted by the virtue of indifference. As far as I was concerned, I dreaded coming back down. The atmosphere on board the ship was not cheerful. In the wardroom, everybody would lap up their soup without a word. The captain talked to us as if we were dogs and, in the evening, treated us as his audience. You had to endure his exploits, and listen to him go on with his opinions about the science in which hed become an expert: shipwrecks. There are such mini-Napoleons about; they generally end up on board ships, the only place where they can reign over empires. His was sixty feet long.

One evening, Gras and I happened to be on the foredeck. Whales were sighing at the prow, swimming lazily, rolling on their sides: the lifestyle of the large. We should start all over with a real trip, my friend, I said. Im fed up with this Mormon cruise.

And whats a real trip? he asked.

Its a madness we get obsessed with, that transports us into myth; a drift, a frenzy, with History and Geography running through it, irrigated with vodka, a Kerouac-style ride, something that, in the evening, will leave us panting, weeping by the side of a pit. Feverish...

Oh? he said.

Thats right. Next December, we have to go the Moscow Book Fair, you and I. Why dont we go back to Paris on a bike with a sidecar? On a beautiful, Russian-made Ural. Youll be nice and warm in the sidecar, so you can read all day long. Ill drive. We can leave from Red Square, go straight west toward Smolensk, Minsk, and Warsaw. And you know something else?

No, he said.

This year marks the two-hundredth anniversary of the Retreat from Moscow, I replied.

Youre kidding.

Why not give these twenty-five hundred miles as a tribute to Napoleons soldiers? To their ghosts. To their sacrifice. In France, nobody gives a damn about the Old Guard. Theyre all absorbed by the Mayan calendar. Theyre talking about the end of the world and dont realize the world is already dead.

Youre not wrong there.

I say its up to us to salute the Grande Arme. Two hundred years ago, there were guys who dreamed of something other than high-speed internet. They were ready to die just so they could see the Moscow domes sparkle.

Except that it turned out to be a slaughter! he said.

So? Itll be a journey to remember. I promise you, well also come very close to a few disasters.

Alright then.

A moment later, Priscilla joined us in the prow. She came on all our trips. With her cases of photos, essential oils, and yoga moves. We told her about our plan. A cyanotic sun was drifting on the horizon. The sea was made of steel. The tail of a large fin whale was whipping this expanse of mercury. Priscilla suddenly said, Why reconstruct the Retreat exactly?

On the port side, a whale breathed out a puff of steam. The cloud lingered in the light.

For the sheer glory of it, darling. For the sheer glory of it.

The Moscow Book Fair was a success. Why did the organizers call it a round-table debate when it was a meeting of people who were all in agreement and around a square table? I sat next to Maylis de Kerangal and was intimidated by the beauty of this author of Tangente vers lest. She spoke of her love for Russia with variety. She snatched away all I would have wanted to say. Her eyes were far apart, a sign of superior people. She was talking about her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway. I wished I could have been on the train with her, serving her tea, carrying her bags, reading her Boris Godunov in the evening to help her fall asleep.

Gras and I were trying to persuade our audience of the necessity to recreate the itinerary of the Retreat from Moscow. Petrified by Maylis, not quite knowing our stuff, we kept passing the buck to each other. We must have looked like Flauberts characters Bouvard and Pcuchet.

Napoleon may have been a bloodthirsty monster I began.

but we must admit that in terms of our administration, our land registry, our legal system Gras continued.

we owe him everything, I concluded authoritatively.

Not a day goes by in France when we dont come across regulations sprung out of his brain, Gras said.

Was he a madman? Or a genius? I said. Or an insular prophet who was inspired by Corsican clan divisions to long for unity

and even a fusion between East and West? Gras said.

This isnt really about our escapade, actually

Not at all, Gras continued, what we want

is to pay tribute to the memory of hundreds of thousands of poor soldiers, victims of having followed their leader, of having believed that a nation, I said.

could write a collective novel with each and everyones blood

and touch glory with the tip of its finger

and blend in with Napoleons soul, as Lon Bloy put it.