Adieu

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 Normandy park.