Chapter 20 Chapter Twenty

Moscow at this time has become a ghost city.People are still there, and one fiftieth of the former inhabitants remains, and it is empty.It is empty, like a decaying hive that has lost its queen. A hive that has lost its queen is lifeless inside, but outwardly it is still alive, like the rest of the hive. In the hot noonday sun the bees still danced merrily around the hive that had lost its queen, as bees circle the rest of the living hive; .But if you look inside carefully, you will see that there is no life in this hive.The bees no longer fly like bees in a live hive, the scent, the sound no longer moves the beekeeper.The beekeeper knocks on the outer wall of a diseased hive, and what he hears is no longer the immediate unison: Thousands of bees hum, their bellies clenched mightily, their wings flapping rapidly in a burst of life. The sound of the blast; and what answered him now was a fragmented, dull hiss from somewhere in the empty nest.There is no longer the intoxicating fragrance of honey and venom from the manholes as before, and no longer steaming steam, but a smell of decay and decay is mixed in the fragrance of honey.Next to the entrance and exit, there are no more soldier bees ready to defend themselves to the death with their high-tailed vertebrae sounding the alarm.There is no longer the even, peaceful vibration of labor—no more bubbling of boiling water, but only the chaotic, disorderly noise.Flying in and out of the manholes timidly and cunningly are black oval robber bees sticky with honey.Bees that used to fly in with nectar and fly out empty, now fly out with nectar.The beekeeper opens the bottom nest and looks at the bottom of the hive.Gone are the rows of black, shiny, hard-working bees that used to hang down to the bottom, hugging each other's legs, humming labor songs uninterruptedly, and extracting beeswax. Bees, vacantly crawling up and down the bottom and walls of the hive.There is no more waxed floor and fanned clean by the bee's wings, but only fragments of the hive, excrement, the occasional half-dead bee stretching its legs and the bees that come after death to eliminate them.

A beekeeper opens the top nest to look at the upper end of the hive.There should have been dense rows of bees clinging to the hive to keep the pupa warm, but the delicate and complex masterpiece of the hive he saw no longer looked as clean as when the pupa existed.Everything is empty and dirty.The black bees, as bee thieves, scurry secretly and quickly on these masterpieces; those where the bees at home appear shriveled, short, and withered are called vitality in the world; "Heaven and earth, vitality, seem to be old, crawling slowly, not disturbing anyone, wanting nothing, losing consciousness of survival. Drones, wasps, pill bees and butterflies hit the hive wall in vain. Now and then, here and there, between the base and the honey, where the chrysalises were dead, there was a whining murmur of resentment; The bee and the pill bee were dragged out of the nest, not knowing why they did it. In another corner, the other two old bees were fighting slowly, or cleaning their bodies, or feeding each other, not knowing why they were doing this. Hate or Friendship. In the third place, a swarm of bees crushes each other, attacks a victim, beats it, squeezes it, and the dying or dead bee falls from above like a downy pile of bee carcasses. Beekeeping One turns the middle two hives to look at the hives. He no longer sees circles of vibrant, greasy bees squatting back to back in the hive, keeping the top secret of reproduction, and what he sees are desolate half-dead sleeping They are almost all dead, just unconsciously, in the holy places they guarded and now no longer exist. They exude the smell of rotting death. Among them, only some can still Move, stand upright, fly powerlessly, land on the enemy's hand, and then die after being powerless to sting the enemy, and the rest of the dead, like fish scales, gently fall to the bottom of the nest. The beekeeper closes the beehive, uses Mark it with chalk, smash it and burn it when the time comes.

Such was Moscow, empty, and now Napoleon, weary and irritable, frowning, walked up and down by the earthen walls of the branch, waiting for the arrival of a delegation, an event he considered superficial but indispensable. etiquette-- In all corners of Moscow, there are still people who are irrationally trying to keep things as they used to be, and they don't know why. When Napoleon was told with great care that Moscow had become an empty city, he cast an angry look at the teller, turned his back and continued walking up and down in silence, "Carriage." He said, and together with the adjutant on duty, he boarded a carriage and drove to the suburbs.

"Moscondeserte. QuelevenementinvraisemBblable!" ① he said to himself. He did not go to the city, but stayed at a hotel on the outskirts of Dorogomilov. Le coup de theater evaitrate ②. -------- ①Moscow is empty.It's impossible! ②The ending of this scene was unsuccessful.