Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by Franz Ludwig Catel, Carl Blechen and Vasily Vereshchagin. An officer sees, at a country house in 1819, the woman he lost at the crossing of the Berezina seven years before — and she does not know him, or anything, and has not spoken since. What he does about it is one of the coldest ideas in French fiction. Balzac worked at night on fifty cups of coffee a day; this short story takes the Retreat from Moscow and puts it in a country park outside Paris. Sixty plates by painters including Géricault and Suchodolski follow the retreat's horses, parks and riders across a century of war and its aftermath.