The Memoirs of General Baron de Marbot

The Memoirs of General Baron de Marbot, credited to Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin Marbot, lists in its table of contents Origins of my family, My father joins the bodyguard and Life at Lariviere. The narrator wakes at school to find that someone has removed his beautiful clothes, his fine stockings and his pretty shoes and replaced them with the coarse garments and heavy footwear of the school, and says he wept with rage.

The table of contents also includes The marsh at Sebej, The advance of the Grande Armee, Capture of Smolensk, The battle for Moscow and The fire of Moscow. The narrator reports about 2000 Frenchmen, most of them without clothes and nearly all wounded, who had escaped death only by jumping into the river and swimming across, with Marshal Macdonald among them. The narrator adds that Marshal Macdonald owed his life to his physical strength and his ability as a swimmer, and that he quickly found some clothes for him and lent him the spare horse which always came with him.