The old Field Marshal Kutuzov had halted the Russian army at Tarutino, strategizing that time and the coming Russian winter would defeat Napoleon who would inevitably have to retreat west to Paris on the old Kaluga road. As hard as it was to wait, each day he delayed direct battle to protect his Russian soldiers. On a hot September afternoon like any other, after lunch Kutuzov was in the small house that had been taken over and made his quarters. He lay on his side near an icon—a sacred painting of the Virgin—resting on an elbow and fixing his one good eye on a page of the novel Les Chevaliers du Cygne by Madame de Genlis, which he was reading, and not for the first time.

Under the bright afternoon sun that came through the window, he began to daydream about Charlemagne, losing the distinction between the Genlis narrative and his own imagined story. A knock at the door broke his dream state and, he hoped, as he did with every knock, that it would be news from his staff that Napoleon had begun to retreat. But it was instead news of Prince Andrei. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky had not died at Borodino. He was alive, and with a family, with a young woman. And the Field Marshal felt such happiness that he quickly wrote a letter filled with joy and gave it to an adjutant, ordering him to take it to Prince Andrei at Mytishchi.