That night the theatre was destroyed by
fire, with a loss of three hundred lives.
We may add to this the prevision of the Battle of Borodino, to
which I have already alluded, I will give the story in fuller
detail, as told in the journal of Stephen Grellet the Quaker.
About three months before the French army entered Russia, the
wife of General Toutschkoff dreamt that she was at an inn in a
town unknown to her and that her father came into her room,
holding her only son by the hand, and said to her, in a pitiful
tone:
"Your happiness is at an end. He"--meaning Countess Toutschkoff's
husband--"has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino."
The dream was repeated a second and a third time. Her anguish of
mind was such that she woke her husband and asked him:
"Where is Borodino?" They looked for the name on the map and did
not find it.
Before the French armies reached Moscow, Count Toutschkoff was
placed at the head of the army of reserve; and one morning her
father, holding her son by the hand, entered her room at the inn
where she was staying. In great distress, as she had beheld him
in her dream, he cried out:
"He has fallen. He has fallen at Borodino."
Then she saw herself in the very same room and through the
windows beheld the very same objects that she had seen in her
dreams. Her husband was one of the many who perished in the
battle fought near the River Borodino, from which an obscure
village takes its name.
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