An idle hope.

"I have learnt to know him now," said the Czar, "Napoleon or I; I or Napoleon; we cannot reign side by side." Buoyed up by religious faith and by his people's heroism, Alexander silently defied the victor of Moscow and rebuked Kutusoff for receiving the French envoy.
At last, on October 18th, the Russians threw away the scabbard and surprised Murat's force some forty miles south of Moscow, inflicting a loss of 3,000 men.

But already, a day or two earlier, Napoleon had realized the futility of his hope of peace and had resolved to retreat.

The only alternative was to winter at Moscow, and he judged that the state of French and Spanish affairs rendered such a course perilous.

He therefore informed Maret that the Grand Army would go into winter quarters between the Dnieper and the Dwina.[272] There is no hint in his letters that he anticipated a disastrous retreat.