"And the weakened or dead bee slowly, lightly, like a bit of fluff, falls from above into the heap of corpses. The beekeeper opens two central frames so as to see into the next. Where formerly the entire space was covered by the black circles of thousands of bees sitting tightly back to back, guarding the lofty mysteries of generations, he now sees hundreds of dejected, half-alive and somnolent husks of bees. They are almost all dead, not knowing it themselves, sitting over the sacred thing they were guarding, which is no longer there...
So Moscow was empty when Napoleon, weary, restless, and scowling, paced back and forth by the Kamerkollezhsky rampart..." p 875 in P/V
from page 337-338, volume 2 of original text
collage, masking tape
made 6/3/11
Pevear/Volokhonsky translation page 875-876
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