X

A woman’s dress rustled in the next room. As if he had just woken up, Prince Andrei shook himself and his face assumed the expression it had worn in Anna Pavlovna’s drawing room. Pierre lowered his feet from the divan. The princess came in. She was wearing a different dress, more homely but just as elegant and fresh. Prince Andrei stood up and courteously moved up an armchair for her by the fireplace, but there was such intense boredom on his face as he did so, the princess would surely have taken offence, had she been able to see it.

“Why, I often wonder,” she began, as always in French, as she hastily seated herself in the armchair, “why did Annette never marry? How foolish you all are, gentlemen, for not marrying her. Forgive my saying so, but you understand nothing at all about women.”

Pierre and Prince Andrei involuntarily exchanged glances and said nothing. But neither their glance nor their silence embarrassed the princess in the least. She carried on prattling in the same way as before.

“What a wrangler you are, Monsieur Pierre,” she said to the young man. “What a wrangler you are, Monsieur Pierre,” she repeated, fussily settling herself into the large armchair.

Folding her little hands over the mound of her waist, she stopped talking, evidently intent on listening. Her face assumed that distinctive, serious expression in which the eyes seem to be gazing inwards – an expression that only pregnant women have.

“I keep arguing with your husband as well; I cannot understand why he wants to go to war,” said Pierre, addressing the princess without a trace of the inhibition so usual in relations between a young man and a young woman.

The princess started. Apparently Pierre’s words had touched a sore spot.

“Ah, that is just what I say!” she said with her society smile. “I do not understand, I absolutely do not understand, why men cannot live without war. Why is it that we women do not want anything, do not need anything? Why you, you can be the judge. I keep telling him: here he is my uncle’s adjutant, a most brilliant position. Everybody knows him so well and appreciates him so. The other day at the Apraksins’ I heard one lady ask: ‘Is that the famous Prince Andrei?’ On my word of honour.”

She laughed.

“He is asked everywhere. He could quite easily be an aide-de-camp … Do you know that only two days ago His Majesty spoke to him most graciously? Annette and I were saying how very easy it would be to arrange. What do you think?”

Pierre looked at Prince Andrei and, noticing that his friend did not like this conversation, made no reply.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“Oh, don’t talk of our leaving, don’t even mention it! I don’t wish to hear of it,” said the princess in the same skittish, capricious manner in which she had spoken with Hippolyte in the drawing room, and which was so obviously unsuited to a family circle of which Pierre was ostensibly a member.

“Today, when I thought about having to break off all these dear, precious connections … And then, you know, Andrei.”

She blinked significantly at her husband.

“I’m afraid, I’m so afraid!” she whispered, quivering all the way down her back.

Her husband looked at her as though he were surprised to have noticed that there was someone else apart from Pierre and himself in the room; however, he enquired of the princess with cold civility:

“What are you afraid of, Lise? I can’t understand it,” he said.

“See what egoists all men are! All, all of them egoists! Out of nothing but his own whimsy, God only knows why, he is abandoning me, shutting me away alone in the country.”

“With my father and sister, do not forget,” Prince Andrei said quietly.

“All the same alone, without my friends … And he does not want me to be afraid.” Her tone was peevish now, her short little lip was raised, lending her face an expression that was not joyful, but feral, squirrel-like. She stopped speaking, as if she found it improper to talk of her future delivery in front of Pierre, while this was in fact the very essence of the matter.

“Even so, I do not understand what you are afraid of,” Prince Andrei enunciated slowly, keeping his eyes fixed on his wife.

The princess blushed and fluttered her hands in despair.

“No, Andrei, it’s just as I said: you have changed so much, so very much.”

“Your doctor says you should go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrei. “You ought to go to bed.”

The princess said nothing, and suddenly her short lip with the faint moustache began trembling. Prince Andrei stood up and, with a shrug of his shoulders, began pacing around the room.

Pierre gazed through his spectacles in naïve surprise, first at one, then at the other and began fidgeting on the spot, as if he kept wanting to get up and then changing his mind.

“What does it matter to me that Monsieur Pierre is here,” the little princess said suddenly, and her pretty face suddenly dissolved into a tearful, unlovely grimace. “I have wanted to ask you for a long time, Andrei: What has made you change so much towards me. What have I done to you? You are going to the army, you have no pity for me. Why?”

“Lise!” was all that Prince Andrei said, but the word expressed both supplication and threat and also, above all, the assurance that she would regret what she had said; but she continued hastily:

“You treat me like a sick woman or a child. I see everything. You were not like this six months ago, were you?”

“Lise, will you please stop this,” said Prince Andrei even more emphatically.

Pierre, who had become more and more agitated in the course of this conversation, stood up and walked across to the princess. He seemed unable to bear the sight of her tears and was ready to start crying himself.

“Calm down, princess. It only seems like that to you, because, I assure you, I myself have experienced … the reason … because … No, I beg your pardon, this is no place for an outsider … Please, calm down … Goodbye … Please excuse me …”

He bowed, preparing to leave. Prince Andrei took his arm and stopped him.

“No, wait, Pierre. The princess is so kind, she would not wish to deprive me of the pleasure of spending the evening with you.”

“Yes, he thinks only of himself,” said the princess, making no effort to restrain her angry tears.

“Lise,” Prince Andrei said coldly, raising his tone of voice to a level that indicated his patience had been exhausted.

Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression on the princess’s beautiful little face was replaced by an expression of fearful appeal that aroused compassion; she cast her husband a sullen glance out of her lovely eyes, and her face assumed the timid expression of a dog rapidly but feebly wagging its lowered tail in a confession of guilt.

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” said the princess and, gathering up the folds of her dress in one hand, she went up to her husband and kissed him on his brown forehead.

“Bon soir, Lise,” said Prince Andrei, rising and kissing her hand courteously, as though it were a stranger’s.

XI

The friends were silent. Neither said a word. Pierre kept glancing at Prince Andrei; Prince Andrei rubbed his forehead with his small hand.

“Let’s go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, getting up and moving towards the door.

They entered a dining room newly decorated in an elegant and rich style. Everything, from the napkins to the silver, porcelain and crystal, bore the special imprint of that newness and elegance which distinguish the household of a young married couple. In the middle of supper Prince Andrei leaned his elbows on the table and, like a man who has held something in his heart for a long time and suddenly decides to speak out, he began talking with an air of nervous irritation that Pierre had never seen in his friend before.

“Never, never marry, my friend, that is my advice to you, do not marry until you can tell yourself that you have done everything that you could, and until you have stopped loving the woman that you have chosen, until you can see her clearly, or you will commit a grievous and fatal error. Marry as an old man no longer good for anything … Or everything that is fine and exalted in you will be destroyed. It will all be frittered away on trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Do not look at me with such amazement. If you expect anything of yourself in the future, then you will feel at every step that for you everything is over, all doors are closed, except to the drawing room, where you will stand on the same level as the household flunkey and the idiot … I tell you!”

He gestured emphatically with his hand.

Pierre removed his spectacles, which changed the expression of his face, making his kindness even more obvious, and looked at his friend in surprise.

“My wife,” continued Prince Andrei, “is a lovely woman. She is one of those rare women with whom one need not be concerned for one’s honour; but, my God, what would I not give now not to be married! You are the only person I have told about this, because I am so fond of you.”

As he said this Prince Andrei resembled even less than before the gentleman who had sprawled in Anna Pavlovna’s armchair, narrowing his eyes as he pronounced French phrases through clenched teeth. Every muscle in his lean, brownish face was quivering in nervous animation; his eyes, in which the fire of life had earlier seemed extinguished, now glowed brightly, glinting and glittering. It was clear that the more listless he seemed at ordinary times, the more intensely energetic he was at such moments of almost morbid agitation.

“You don’t understand why I say that,” he went on. “It’s an entire life story. You talk about Bonaparte and his career,” he said, although Pierre had not even mentioned Bonaparte. “You talk about Bonaparte, but Bonaparte graduated from a course at the artillery college and went out into the world when there was war and the road to glory was open to everyone.”

Pierre looked at his friend, clearly prepared in advance to agree with whatever he might say.

“Bonaparte went out into the world and immediately found the place he was meant to occupy. And who were his friends? Who was Josephine Beauharnais? My five years of life since I left the Corps de Pages have been nothing but drawing rooms, balls, illicit affairs, idleness. Now I am setting out to war, to the greatest war that there has ever been, and I know nothing and am good for nothing. I am amiable and sharp-tongued, and I am listened to at Anna Pavlovna’s, but I have forgotten what I used to know. I have only just begun to read, but it is all a jumble. And there can be no soldier without knowledge of military history, mathematics and fortifications. And this stupid society, without which my wife cannot live, and these women … I have known success in high society. The most exquisite of women have flung themselves at me. But if you could only know what all these exquisite women are like, and women in general! My father is right. He says that nature is not all-wise, because she was unable to devise a means for the propagation of humankind without woman. Egotism, vanity, stupidity, pettiness in all things – that is all women for you when they show themselves as they are. Look at them in society and there seems to be something to them, but there is nothing, nothing, nothing! No, do not marry, my dear friend, do not marry,” Prince Andrei concluded, and he shook his head as emphatically as if everything he had said were a truth that no one could possibly doubt.

“I think it is funny,” said Pierre, “that you regard yourself, yourself as unqualified, and your life as a spoiled life. You have everything, everything ahead of you. And you …”

He did not say what it was Andrei did, but his tone alone revealed how highly he thought of his friend and how much he expected from him in the future.

In the very best, the most friendly and direct of relationships, flattery or compliments are necessary, as grease is needed to make wheels turn.

“I’m a failure,” said Prince Andrei, but from the proud way in which he raised his handsome head so high and the bright gleam in his eyes, it was clear how little he believed in what he had said. “But why bother talking about me? Let’s talk about you,” he said, pausing for a moment and smiling at his own consoling thoughts. That smile was instantly reflected on Pierre’s face.

“Why bother talking about me?” said Pierre, extending his mouth into a carefree, jolly smile. “What am I? I am an illegitimate son.”

And suddenly, for the first time in the whole evening, he blushed a deep crimson. It had obviously cost him a great effort to say that. “With no name and no fortune. But what of it, it is really …”

But he did not say what it really was.

“I am free for the time being, and I like it. I simply do not know what I ought to start doing. I wanted to ask your serious advice.”

Prince Andrei looked at him with kindly eyes. But even so his friendly and affectionate glance expressed an awareness of his own superiority.

“You are dear to me, especially because, in the whole of our high society, you are the only person who is alive. You’re fortunate. Choose whatever you like, it doesn’t matter. You will always fit in anywhere, but just one thing: stop going to see these Kuragins, leading that kind of life. It doesn’t suit you at all: all this bingeing and playing the hussar, and all the rest of it.”

“Do you know what,” said Pierre, as if a happy thought had just occurred to him, “seriously, I’ve been thinking that for a long time. Living like that I cannot make decisions, or think anything through. My head hurts, I have no money. He invited me today, I shan’t go.”

“Give me your word, your word of honour, that you won’t go!”

“Word of honour.”

“Make sure, now.”

“Of course.”

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