"Write and tell your brother to wait till I am dead.... It won`t be longI shall soon set him free."

Rostopchin`s broadsheets, headed by woodcuts of a drink shop, a potman, and a Moscow burgher called Karpushka Chigirin, "whohaving been a militiaman and having had rather too much at the pubheard that Napoleon wished to come to Moscow, grew angry, abused the French in very bad language, came out of the drink shop, and, under the sign of the eagle, began to address the assembled people," were read and discussed, together with the latest of Vasili Lvovich Pushkin`s bouts rimes.