say. He looked at her face. She drew nearer to him. Her face
flushed.
‘Oh, take those off… those…’ she said, pointing to his
spectacles.
Pierre took them off, and his eyes, besides the strange
look eyes have from which spectacles have just been removed, had also a frightened and inquiring look. He was
about to stoop over her hand and kiss it, but with a rapid, almost brutal movement of her head, she intercepted his lips
and met them with her own. Her face struck Pierre, by its
altered, unpleasantly excited expression.
‘It is too late now, it’s done; besides I love her,’ thought
Pierre.
‘Je vous aime!’* he said, remembering what has to be said
at such moments: but his words sounded so weak that he felt
ashamed of himself.
*”I love you.’
Six weeks later he was married, and settled in Count
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Bezukhov’s large, newly furnished Petersburg house, the
happy possessor, as people said, of a wife who was a celebrated beauty and of millions of money.
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Chapter III
Old Prince Nicholas Bolkonski received a letter from
Prince Vasili in November, 1805, announcing that he and
his son would be paying him a visit. ‘I am starting on a journey of inspection, and of course I shall think nothing of an
extra seventy miles to come and see you at the same time,
my honored benefactor,’ wrote Prince Vasili. ‘My son Anatole is accompanying me on his way to the army, so I hope
you will allow him personally to express the deep respect
that, emulating his father, he feels for you.’
‘It seems that there will be no need to bring Mary out,
suitors are coming to us of their own accord,’ incautiously
remarked the little princess on hearing the news.
Prince Nicholas frowned, but said nothing.
A fortnight after the letter Prince Vasili’s servants came
one evening in advance of him, and he and his son arrived
next day.
Old Bolkonski had always had a poor opinion of Prince
Vasili’s character, but more so recently, since in the new
reigns of Paul and Alexander Prince Vasili had risen to high
position and honors. And now, from the hints contained in
his letter and given by the little princess, he saw which way
the wind was blowing, and his low opinion changed into a
feeling of contemptuous ill will. He snorted whenever he
mentioned him. On the day of Prince Vasili’s arrival, Prince
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Bolkonski was particularly discontented and out of temper.
Whether he was in a bad temper because Prince Vasili was
coming, or whether his being in a bad temper made him
specially annoyed at Prince Vasili’s visit, he was in a bad
temper, and in the morning Tikhon had already advised the
architect not to go the prince with his report.
‘Do you hear how he’s walking?’ said Tikhon, drawing the
architect’s attention to the sound of the prince’s footsteps.
‘Stepping flat on his heelswe know what that means…’
However, at nine o’clock the prince, in his velvet coat
with a sable collar and cap, went out for his usual walk. It
had snowed the day before and the path to the hothouse,
along which the prince was in the habit of walking, had
been swept: the marks of the broom were still visible in the
snow and a shovel had been left sticking in one of the soft
snowbanks that bordered both sides of the path. The prince
went through the conservatories, the serfs’ quarters, and
the outbuildings, frowning and silent.
‘Can a sleigh pass?’ he asked his overseer, a venerable
man, resembling his master in manners and looks, who was
accompanying him back to the house.
‘The snow is deep. I am having the avenue swept, your
honor.’
The prince bowed his head and went up to the porch.
‘God be thanked,’ thought the overseer, ‘the storm has
blown over!’
‘It would have been hard to drive up, your honor,’ he added. ‘I heard, your honor, that a minister is coming to visit
your honor.’
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The prince turned round to the overseer and fixed his
eyes on him, frowning.
‘What? A minister? What minister? Who gave orders?’
he said in his shrill, harsh voice. ‘The road is not swept for
the princess my daughter, but for a minister! For me, there
are no ministers!’
‘Your honor, I thought..’
‘You thought!’ shouted the prince, his words coming
more and more rapidly and indistinctly. ‘You thought!…
Rascals! Blackgaurds!… I’ll teach you to think!’ and lifting his stick he swung it and would have hit Alpatych, the
overseer, had not the latter instinctively avoided the blow.
‘Thought… Blackguards…’ shouted the prince rapidly.
But although Alpatych, frightened at his own temerity
in avoiding the stroke, came up to the prince, bowing his
bald head resignedly before him, or perhaps for that very
reason, the prince, though he continued to shout: ‘Blackgaurds!… Throw the snow back on the road!’ did not lift his
stick again but hurried into the house.
Before dinner, Princess Mary and Mademoiselle Bourienne, who knew that the prince was in a bad humor, stood
awaiting him; Mademoiselle Bourienne with a radiant face
that said: ‘I know nothing, I am the same as usual,’ and Princess Mary pale, frightened, and with downcast eyes. What
she found hardest to bear was to know that on such occasions she ought to behave like Mademoiselle Bourienne, but
could not. She thought: ‘If I seem not to notice he will think
that I do not sympathize with him; if I seem sad and out of
spirits myself, he will say (as he has done before) that I’m in
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the dumps.’
The prince looked at his daughter’s frightened face and
snorted.
‘Fool… or dummy!’ he muttered.
‘And the other one is not here. They’ve been telling tales,’
he thoughtreferring to the little princess who was not in the
dining room.
‘Where is the princess?’ he asked. ‘Hiding?’
‘She is not very well,’ answered Mademoiselle Bourienne
with a bright smile, ‘so she won’t come down. It is natural
in her state.’
‘Hm! Hm!’ muttered the prince, sitting down.
His plate seemed to him not quite clean, and pointing to
a spot he flung it away. Tikhon caught it and handed it to a
footman. The little princess was not unwell, but had such
an overpowering fear of the prince that, hearing he was in a
bad humor, she had decided not to appear.
‘I am afraid for the baby,’ she said to Mademoiselle Bourienne: ‘Heaven knows what a fright might do.’
In general at Bald Hills the little princess lived in constant fear, and with a sense of antipathy to the old prince
which she did not realize because the fear was so much the
stronger feeling. The prince reciprocated this antipathy,
but it was overpowered by his contempt for her. When the
little princess had grown accustomed to life at Bald Hills,
she took a special fancy to Mademoiselle Bourienne, spent
whole days with her, asked her to sleep in her room, and often talked with her about the old prince and criticized him.
‘So we are to have visitors, mon prince?’ remarked Ma392
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demoiselle Bourienne, unfolding her white napkin with her
rosy fingers. ‘His Excellency Prince Vasili Kuragin and his
son, I understand?’ she said inquiringly.
‘Hm!his excellency is a puppy…. I got him his appointment in the service,’ said the prince disdainfully. ‘Why his
son is coming I don’t understand. Perhaps Princess Elizabeth and Princess Mary know. I don’t want him.’ (He
looked at his blushing daughter.) ‘Are you unwell today? Eh?
Afraid of the ‘minister’ as that idiot Alpatych called him
this morning?’
‘No, mon pere.’
Though Mademoiselle Bourienne had been so unsuccessful in her choice of a subject, she did not stop talking,
but chattered about the conservatories and the beauty of a
flower that had just opened, and after the soup the prince
became more genial.
After dinner, he went to see his daughter-in-law. The little
princess was sitting at a small table, chattering with Masha,
her maid. She grew pale on seeing her father-in-law.
She was much altered. She was now plain rather than
pretty. Her cheeks had sunk, her lip was drawn up, and her
eyes drawn down.
‘Yes, I feel a kind of oppression,’ she said in reply to the
prince’s question as to how she felt.
‘Do you want anything?’
‘No, merci, mon pere.’
‘Well, all right, all right.’
He left the room and went to the waiting room where Alpatych stood with bowed head.
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‘Has the snow been shoveled back?’
‘Yes, your excellency. Forgive me for heaven’s sake… It
was only my stupidity.’
‘All right, all right,’ interrupted the prince, and laughing
his unnatural way, he stretched out his hand for Alpatych to
kiss, and then proceeded to his study.
Prince Vasili arrived that evening. He was met in the
avenue by coachmen and footmen, who, with loud shouts,
dragged his sleighs up to one of the lodges over the road
purposely laden with snow.
Prince Vasili and Anatole had separate rooms assigned
to them.
Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms
akimbo before a table on a corner of which he smilingly and
absent-mindedly fixed his large and handsome eyes. He regarded his whole life as a continual round of amusement
which someone for some reason had to provide for him.
And he looked on this visit to a churlish old man and a rich
and ugly heiress in the same way. All this might, he thought,
turn out very well and amusingly. ‘And why not marry her if
she really has so much money? That never does any harm,’
thought Anatole.
He shaved and scented himself with the care and elegance
which had become habitual to him and, his handsome head
held high, entered his father’s room with the good-humored
and victorious air natural to him. Prince Vasili’s two valets
were busy dressing him, and he looked round with much
animation and cheerfully nodded to his son as the latter entered, as if to say: ‘Yes, that’s how I want you to look.’
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‘I say, Father, joking apart, is she very hideous?’ Anatole
asked, as if continuing a conversation the subject of which
had often been mentioned during the journey.
‘Enough! What nonsense! Above all, try to be respectful
and cautious with the old prince.’
‘If he starts a row I’ll go away,’ said Prince Anatole. ‘I
can’t bear those old men! Eh?’
‘Remember, for you everything depends on this.’
In the meantime, not only was it known in the maidservants’ rooms that the
