She remembered a scene. She had still been in the Louvre Museum of the twenty-first century when Hathor showed her an image: Bonaparte had just withdrawn from the Moscow front and was staying in a small inn.
He had not lit a fire, but kept pacing in circles and muttering, as if preparing a speech. Not long afterward, the Poles arrived. He gave them several million Francs, and they left fully satisfied, as though the defeat had never happened.
For people living two hundred years later, this was hard to imagine. It was precisely because of the "War of 1812" that immigration to America suddenly rose from five thousand a year to five hundred thousand. Pomona had been shocked when she saw those figures at a museum in Liverpool.
There had always been civilians fleeing war. At the time, Napoleon had seemed quite likely to unite Europe. Other than North America and Australia, places far from the European continent, where else could they go?
Sailors also risked being seized by the British Navy. In 1812, Britain and America were at war as well, while new immigrants drove Merino sheep westward into the interior.
Because of this disastrous defeat, Prussia's hopes were rekindled. Beginning with the king's sisters in 1813, women donated their jewelry. Some even gave away the gold ornaments from their weddings, receiving in exchange an iron token issued by the Prussian government that read, "I gave gold for iron in 1813." Such things could still be seen in museums.
Bismarck was called the Iron Chancellor, and Prussia the empire of steel, but people were still flesh and blood. Friedrich Nietzsche had said that every day without dancing was a betrayal of life.
A dance for two suddenly became a dance alone, and that was a bitter thing to