War and Peace: Original Version. Лев Толстой

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СКАЧАТЬ thousand Russians were to operate in Italy and on the Rhine, how fifty thousand Russians and fifty thousand English would land in Naples, and how in the end an army of five hundred thousand was to attack the French from all sides. The old prince showed not the slightest interest in this account, as if he were not listening, continuing to dress himself as he walked, but he interrupted it unexpectedly three times. Once he halted it by shouting:

      “White, the white one!”

      This meant that Tikhon had not handed him the waistcoat he wanted. The second time he halted it by asking: “Will she have the child soon?” And on being told in reply that it would be soon, he shook his head reproachfully and said: “Not good! Carry on, carry on.”

      The third time, as Prince Andrei was concluding his description, the old man began singing in an old man’s voice, out of tune: “Malbrook s’en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra.” His son only smiled.

      “I don’t say this is a plan of which I approve,” said the son, “I have only told you what is the case. Napoleon has already drawn up his own plan, no worse than this one.”

      “Well, you have not told me anything new.” And he muttered rapidly and pensively to himself: “God knows when he’ll come back.”

      “Go to the dining room.”

      Prince Andrei went out. Father and son had not spoken at all about their own affairs.

      At the appointed hour the prince, powdered, fresh and shaved, entered the dining room, where his daughter-in-law, Princess Marya, Mademoiselle Bourienne and the prince’s architect were waiting for him. By a strange whim of the prince, the architect was allowed at the table, although according to his station this insignificant individual could not possibly have expected any such honour. The prince, who in his life firmly maintained the distinctions between the various estates and rarely allowed even important provincial officials to join him at table, had suddenly decided to use the architect Mikhail Ivanovich, who was blowing his nose into a checked handkerchief in the corner, to demonstrate that all people are equal, and repeatedly impressed on his daughter that Mikhail Ivanovich was in no way inferior to either of them. At table, when he expounded his sometimes strange ideas, it was to the tongue-tied Mikhail Ivanovich that he appealed most often.

      In the dining room, as immense and high-ceilinged as all the rooms in the house, the prince’s entrance was awaited by the members of the household and the footmen standing behind each chair: the butler, with a napkin over his arm, surveyed the table setting and winked at the menservants, his agitated gaze constantly flitting from the wall clock to the door through which the prince was due to appear. Prince Andrei looked at the huge gold frame, which was new to him, containing a chart of the genealogical tree of the princes Bolkonsky, which was hung opposite an equally huge frame with a badly painted depiction (evidently by the hand of a household artist) of a crowned prince, who was supposed to have been a descendant of Riurik and the founder of the Bolkonsky line. Prince Andrei looked at this genealogical tree, shaking his head and laughing, in the manner in which people gaze at a portrait that is funny because it is such a good likeness.

      “How clearly I recognise him in all of this,” he said to Princess Marya, who had come over to him.

      Princess Marya looked at her brother in surprise. She did not understand what he was smiling at. Everything that their father did inspired in her a respect that was not subject to discussion.

      “Everyone has his own Achilles’ heel,” Prince Andrei continued. “With his immense intelligence, to give way to such triviality!”

      To Princess Marya the audacity of her brother’s judgement was incomprehensible and she was preparing to protest, when the anticipated footfalls were heard from the study; the prince entered briskly, as he always did, elated and in disarray as though deliberately representing in his hastiness the antithesis of the strict order of the house. At that very moment the large clock struck two and another clock responded in a thin voice from the drawing room; the prince halted and, from beneath the dense, beetling brows, his animated, glittering, stern eyes surveyed them all and came to rest on the young Princess Lise. At that moment the young princess experienced the same feeling that is experienced by courtiers at the entrance of the Tsar, the feeling of fear and respect which this old man inspired in everyone close to him. He stroked the princess’s hair and then patted the back of her head with a movement that was clumsy, but to which she felt herself obliged to submit.

      “I am glad, very glad,” he said and, glancing keenly into her eyes once again, he walked quickly away and sat in his place.

      “Sit down! Sit down! Mikhail Ivanovich, sit down!”

      He indicated the place beside himself to his daughter-in-law and a footman moved the chair out for her. In her pregnant condition the space was cramped.

      “Oho!” said the old man, surveying her rounded waist. “You were in a hurry, that’s not good.”

      He gave a dry, cold, disagreeable laugh, the way he always laughed, with his mouth alone and not his eyes.

      “You need to walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible,” he said.

      The little princess did not hear, or did not want to hear, what he said. She said nothing and seemed embarrassed. The prince asked her about her father, and the princess began speaking and smiled. He asked her about acquaintances that they had in common, the princess brightened up even more and began to tell him about them, conveying greetings to the prince and relating the town gossip. As soon as the conversation touched on things that had happened, the princess became visibly more at ease.

      “Princess Apraksina, the poor thing, lost her husband and cried her eyes out,” she said, growing more and more animated.

      As she became ever more animated, the prince regarded her ever more severely, and suddenly, as though he had now studied her sufficiently and formed a clear impression of her, he turned away and addressed Mikhail Ivanovich.

      XXXVI

      “Well now, Mikhail Ivanovich, our Buonaparte is having a hard time of it. From what Prince Andrei” (he always referred to his son in this way in the third person) “has told me, huge forces are gathering against him! Yet you and I have always considered him an insignificant individual.”

      Mikhail Ivanovich, who quite definitely did not know when you and I had said any such thing about Bonaparte, but realised that he was necessary for the preamble to this favourite topic of discussion, glanced in surprise at the young prince, wondering to himself what would come of this.

      “I have a great tactician here!” the prince said to his son, indicating the architect, and the conversation moved on to Bonaparte and the modern-day generals and statesmen. The old prince seemed convinced, not only that all the current public figures were mere boys with no grasp of the essentials of either warfare or statecraft, and that Bonaparte was an insignificant little Frenchman, who was only successful because there were no Potemkins and Suvorovs to oppose him; he was even convinced there were not really any political troubles in Europe, nor any war either, but that there was a comic puppet play of some kind being acted out by modern-day people pretending that they were doing something serious. Prince Andrei cheerfully endured his father’s jibes at the new men, challenging his father to discussion and listening to him with evident pleasure.

      “Everything from the old times may seem so fine,” he said, “but did not that same Suvorov fall into a trap set for him by СКАЧАТЬ