Kutusoff also played a waiting game.

Affecting a wish for peace, he was about secretly to meet Napoleon's envoy, Lauriston, when the Russian generals and our commissioner, Sir R.Wilson, intervened, and required that it should be a public step.

It seems likely, however, that Kutusoff was only seeking to entrap the French into barren negotiations; he knew that an answer could not come from the banks of the Neva until winter began to steal over the northern steppes.
Slowly the truth begins to dawn on Napoleon that Moscow is not _the heart of Russia_, as he had asserted to De Pradt that it was.
Gradually he sees that that primitive organism had no heart, that its almost amorphous life was widespread through myriads of village communes, vegetating apart from Moscow or Petersburg, and that his march to the old capital was little more than a sword-slash through a pond.[271] Had he set himself to study with his former care the real nature of the hostile organism, he would certainly never have ventured beyond Smolensk in the present year.

But he had now merged the thinker in the conqueror, and--sure sign of coming disaster--his mind no longer accurately gauged facts, it recast them in its own mould.
By long manipulation of men and events, it had framed a dogma of personal infallibility.

This vice had of late been growing on him apace.