town. He attended to army affairs reluctantly, left everything to his generals, and while awaiting the Emperor’s arrival led a dissipated life.
Having left Petersburg on the seventh of December with his suite—Count Tolstóy, Prince Volkónski, Arakchéev, and others—the Emperor reached Vílna on the eleventh, and in his traveling sleigh drove straight to the castle. In spite of the severe frost some hundred generals and staff officers in full parade uniform stood in front of the castle, as well as a guard of honor of the Semënov regiment.
A courier who galloped to the castle in advance, in a troyka with three foam-flecked horses, shouted “Coming!” and Konovnítsyn rushed into the vestibule to inform Kutúzov, who was waiting in the hall porter’s little lodge.
A minute later the old man’s large stout figure in full-dress uniform, his chest covered with orders and a scarf drawn round his stomach, waddled out into the porch.
He put on his hat with its peaks to the sides and, holding his gloves in his hand and walking with an effort sideways down the steps to the level of the street, took in his hand the report he had prepared for the Emperor.
There was running to and fro and whispering; another troyka flew furiously up, and then all eyes were turned on an approaching sleigh in which the figures of the Emperor and Volkónski could already be descried.
From the habit of fifty years all this had a physically agitating effect on the old general. He carefully and hastily felt himself all over, readjusted his hat, and pulling himself together drew himself up and, at the very moment when the Emperor, having alighted from the sleigh, lifted his eyes to