A Yale lecture from the course Let This Be a Lesson examines Ary Scheffer's Romantic painting of Napoleon's retreat from Russia, a new acquisition by the Yale Art Gallery. The speaker reads the canvas as a meditation on the collapse of the Grande Armee, the greatest defeat in military history up to that point, and asks how Scheffer stages heroism amid catastrophe rather than triumph. Close attention goes to composition, figures, and gesture within the scene, and to how the painting departs from conventional battle imagery to focus on suffering stragglers instead of generals. The lecture situates the work within Romantic painting's shifting idea of the hero, using this lesser known picture to raise questions about how art assigns meaning and dignity to defeat. It runs about an hour and treats the painting as a historical argument in itself.