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“Everything must end,” Louis XV used to say. God grant that he hasn’t forgotten it. — And so ended the battle of Montereau. For a good night greeting two more Wittemburgian shells flew over somewhere high above our heads and fell into rows of hornbeam trees like blades of straw in spring. All these shots fired à toute volée were always addressed to the camp servants and were a more severe plague for our people than Marshal Lefèbvre himself.⁷ If somewhere in a tight place or on a narrow little bridge the passage remained obstructed and Lefèbvre came up to it — from atop a massive Spanish bay stallion he mercilessly clobbered with an equally massive reed cane les villains brosseurs and canteen attendants whom he also didn’t spare any epithets. The servants also knew him and so did the effeminate cavalry. At his first sacrrr… a throng unwound like thread from a ball and often even the head of a column of the Old Guard was unable to contain it.

Everywhere there are archdukes and bishops. In Galicia there is even an arch pantry-master;⁸ but there is never an arch camp servant. But my Onufry should be par droit de conquête et par droit de naissance. Tall, broad-shouldered, greedy for booty, as quick for the bottle as he was for the battle, whenever he received orders he became taut like the string of an instrument, stomach sucked in, chest out, and stood leaning over like the tower of Pisa. His answer was always: “At your service!” He was afraid of the Cossacks like the devil is afraid of holy water. All this led one to believe with some certainty that sometime he had been in Russian service and that he did not fulfill all the required formalities in the execution of his resignation. If someone, bent over some captain or warrant officer who will never see his native home again, extracts from him what his own comrades were unable to extract, or syllabizes along the seams and pleats of the smallest piece of clothing until he reads out where the sewn up ducat or thaler is, then it’s certainly Onufry. If someone looks for forage not in a stable or in a barn, but in trunks and cupboards, then it’s certainly Onufry. I took him on in Dresden and a week didn’t pass without his becoming the source of no small trouble for me.