come for the old prince to get up, Tikhon came to call the
young prince to his father. The old man made a departure
from his usual routine in honor of his son’s arrival: he gave
orders to admit him to his apartments while he dressed
for dinner. The old prince always dressed in old-fashioned
style, wearing an antique coat and powdered hair; and when
Prince Andrew entered his father’s dressing room (not with
the contemptuous look and manner he wore in drawing
rooms, but with the animated face with which he talked to
Pierre), the old man was sitting on a large leather-covered
chair, wrapped in a powdering mantle, entrusting his head
to Tikhon.
‘Ah! here’s the warrior! Wants to vanquish Buonaparte?’
said the old man, shaking his powdered head as much as the
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tail, which Tikhon was holding fast to plait, would allow.
‘You at least must tackle him properly, or else if he goes
on like this he’ll soon have us, too, for his subjects! How are
you?’ And he held out his cheek.
The old man was in a good temper after his nap before
dinner. (He used to say that a nap ‘after dinner was silverbefore dinner, golden.’) He cast happy, sidelong glances at
his son from under his thick, bushy eyebrows. Prince Andrew went up and kissed his father on the spot indicated to
him. He made no reply on his father’s favorite topicmaking
fun of the military men of the day, and more particularly of
Bonaparte.
‘Yes, Father, I have come come to you and brought my
wife who is pregnant,’ said Prince Andrew, following every
movement of his father’s face with an eager and respectful
look. ‘How is your health?’
‘Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am
busy from morning till night and abstemious, so of course
I am well.’
‘Thank God,’ said his son smiling.
‘God has nothing to do with it! Well, go on,’ he continued, returning to his hobby; ‘tell me how the Germans have
taught you to fight Bonaparte by this new science you call
‘strategy.’’
Prince Andrew smiled.
‘Give me time to collect my wits, Father,’ said he, with a
smile that showed that his father’s foibles did not prevent his
son from loving and honoring him. ‘Why, I have not yet had
time to settle down!’
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‘Nonsense, nonsense!’ cried the old man, shaking his
pigtail to see whether it was firmly plaited, and grasping
his by the hand. ‘The house for your wife is ready. Princess
Mary will take her there and show her over, and they’ll talk
nineteen to the dozen. That’s their woman’s way! I am glad
to have her. Sit down and talk. About Mikhelson’s army I
understandTolstoy’s too… a simultaneous expedition…. But
what’s the southern army to do? Prussia is neutral… I know
that. What about Austria?’ said he, rising from his chair and
pacing up and down the room followed by Tikhon, who ran
after him, handing him different articles of clothing. ‘What
of Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?’
Prince Andrew, seeing that his father insisted, beganat
first reluctantly, but gradually with more and more animation, and from habit changing unconsciously from Russian
to French as he went onto explain the plan of operation for
the coming campaign. He explained how an army, ninety
thousand strong, was to threaten Prussia so as to bring her
out of her neutrality and draw her into the war; how part of
that army was to join some Swedish forces at Stralsund; how
two hundred and twenty thousand Austrians, with a hundred thousand Russians, were to operate in Italy and on the
Rhine; how fifty thousand Russians and as many English
were to land at Naples, and how a total force of five hundred
thousand men was to attack the French from different sides.
The old prince did not evince the least interest during this
explanation, but as if he were not listening to it continued
to dress while walking about, and three times unexpectedly
interrupted. Once he stopped it by shouting: ‘The white one,
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the white one!’
This meant that Tikhon was not handing him the waistcoat he wanted. Another time he interrupted, saying:
‘And will she soon be confined?’ and shaking his head
reproachfully said: ‘That’s bad! Go on, go on.’
The third interruption came when Prince Andrew was
finishing his description. The old man began to sing, in the
cracked voice of old age: ‘Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre. Dieu
sait quand reviendra.’*
*”Marlborough is going to the wars; God knows when
he’ll return.’
His son only smiled.
‘I don’t say it’s a plan I approve of,’ said the son; ‘I am
only telling you what it is. Napoleon has also formed his
plan by now, not worse than this one.’
‘Well, you’ve told me nothing new,’ and the old man repeated, meditatively and rapidly:
‘Dieu sait quand reviendra. Go to the dining room.’
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Chapter XXVII
At the appointed hour the prince, powdered and shaven,
entered the dining room where his daughter-in-law, Princess
Mary, and Mademoiselle Bourienne were already awaiting
him together with his architect, who by a strange caprice
of his employer’s was admitted to table though the position
of that insignificant individual was such as could certainly
not have caused him to expect that honor. The prince, who
generally kept very strictly to social distinctions and rarely
admitted even important government officials to his table,
had unexpectedly selected Michael Ivanovich (who always
went into a corner to blow his nose on his checked handkerchief) to illustrate the theory that all men are equals, and
had more than once impressed on his daughter that Michael
Ivanovich was ‘not a whit worse than you or I.’ At dinner the
prince usually spoke to the taciturn Michael Ivanovich more
often than to anyone else.
In the dining room, which like all the rooms in the house
was exceedingly lofty, the members of the household and the
footmenone behind each chairstood waiting for the prince to
enter. The head butler, napkin on arm, was scanning the setting of the table, making signs to the footmen, and anxiously
glancing from the clock to the door by which the prince was
to enter. Prince Andrew was looking at a large gilt frame,
new to him, containing the genealogical tree of the Princes
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Bolkonski, opposite which hung another such frame with a
badly painted portrait (evidently by the hand of the artist belonging to the estate) of a ruling prince, in a crownan alleged
descendant of Rurik and ancestor of the Bolkonskis. Prince
Andrew, looking again at that genealogical tree, shook his
head, laughing as a man laughs who looks at a portrait so
characteristic of the original as to be amusing.
‘How thoroughly like him that is!’ he said to Princess
Mary, who had come up to him.
Princess Mary looked at her brother in surprise. She did
not understand what he was laughing at. Everything her
father did inspired her with reverence and was beyond question.
‘Everyone has his Achilles’ heel,’ continued Prince Andrew. ‘Fancy, with his powerful mind, indulging in such
nonsense!’
Princess Mary could not understand the boldness of her
brother’s criticism and was about to reply, when the expected footsteps were heard coming from the study. The prince
walked in quickly and jauntily as was his wont, as if intentionally contrasting the briskness of his manners with the
strict formality of his house. At that moment the great clock
struck two and another with a shrill tone joined in from the
drawing room. The prince stood still; his lively glittering eyes
from under their thick, bushy eyebrows sternly scanned all
present and rested on the little princess. She felt, as courtiers
do when the Tsar enters, the sensation of fear and respect
which the old man inspired in all around him. He stroked
her hair and then patted her awkwardly on the back of her
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neck.
‘I’m glad, glad, to see you,’ he said, looking attentively into
her eyes, and then quickly went to his place and sat down.
‘Sit down, sit down! Sit down, Michael Ianovich!’
He indicated a place beside him to his daughter-in-law. A
footman moved the chair for her.
‘Ho, ho!’ said the old man, casting his eyes on her rounded figure. ‘You’ve been in a hurry. That’s bad!’
He laughed in his usual dry, cold, unpleasant way, with
his lips only and not with his eyes.
‘You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as
possible,’ he said.
The little princess did not, or did not wish to, hear his
words. She was silent and seemed confused. The prince
asked her about her father, and she began to smile and talk.
He asked about mutual acquaintances, and she became still
more animated and chattered away giving him greetings
from various people and retailing the town gossip.
‘Countess Apraksina, poor thing, has lost her husband
and she has cried her eyes out,’ she said, growing more and
more lively.
As she became animated the prince looked at her more
and more sternly, and suddenly, as if he had studied her sufficiently and had formed a definite idea of her, he turned
away and addressed Michael Ivanovich.
‘Well, Michael Ivanovich, our Bonaparte will be having
a bad time of it. Prince Andrew’ (he always spoke thus of
his son) ‘has been telling me what forces are being collected
against him! While you and I never thought much of him.’
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Michael Ivanovich did not at all know when ‘you and I’
had said such things about Bonaparte, but understanding
that he was wanted as a peg on which to hang the prince’s
favorite topic, he looked inquiringly at the young prince,
wondering what would follow.
‘He is a great tactician!’ said the prince to his son, pointing to the architect.
And the conversation again turned on the war, on
Bonaparte, and the generals and statesmen of the day. The
old prince seemed convinced not only that all the men of the
day were mere babies who did not know the A B C of war
or of politics, and that Bonaparte was an insignificant little
Frenchy, successful only because there were no longer any
Potemkins or Suvorovs left to oppose him; but he was also
convinced that there were no political difficulties in Europe
and no real war, but only a sort of puppet show at which the
men of the day were playing, pretending to do something
real. Prince Andrew gaily bore with
