Her husband looked at her as if he was surprised to notice there was someone else in the room besides himself and Pierre. However, with cold politeness he inquiringly addressed his wife:
“What are you afraid of, Liza? I cannot understand,” he said.
“See what egoists all men are; all, all egoists! For the sake of his whims, God knows why, he abandons me, he locks me up in the country alone.”
“With my father and sister, don’t forget,” Prince Andrei said quietly.
“Alone all the same, without my friends…And he wants me not to be afraid.”
Her tone was querulous now, her little lip rose, giving her face not a joyful but an animalish, squirrel-like expression. She fell silent, as if finding it indecent to speak of her pregnancy in front of Pierre, though that was where the essence of the matter lay.
“I still haven’t understood de quoi vous avez peur,”*74 Prince Andrei said slowly, not taking his eyes off his wife.
The princess blushed and waved her hands desperately.
“Non, André, je dis que vous avez tellement, tellement changé…”†75
“Your doctor tells you to go to bed earlier,” said Prince Andrei. “You should get some sleep.”
The princess said nothing, and her short lip with its little mustache suddenly trembled. Prince Andrei, getting up and shrugging his shoulders, began to pace the room.
Pierre gazed wonderingly and naïvely through his spectacles now at him, now at the princess, and stirred as if he also wanted to get up, but changed his mind again.
“What do I care if M’sieur Pierre is here,” the little princess said suddenly, and her pretty face suddenly spread into a tearful grimace. “I’ve long wanted to say to you, André: why have you changed so much towards me? What have I done to you? You’re going into the army, you have no pity for me. Why is it?”
“Lise!” was all Prince Andrei said; but in this word there was an entreaty, and a threat, and above all the conviction that she herself would regret her words; but she hurriedly went on:
“You treat me like a sick person or a child. I see it all. You weren’t like this six months ago.”
“Lise, I beg you to stop,” Prince Andrei said still more expressively.
Pierre, who was becoming more and more agitated during this conversation, got up and went over to the princess. He seemed unable to bear the sight of tears and was about to start crying himself.
“Calm yourself, Princess. It seems so to you, because, I assure you, I myself have experienced…why…because…No, excuse me, an outsider is in the way here…No, calm yourself…Good-bye…”
Prince Andrei caught him by the arm.
“No, wait, Pierre. The princess is so good that she will not want to deprive me of the pleasure of spending an evening with you.”
“No, he thinks only of himself,” said the princess, not holding back her angry tears.
“Lise,” Prince Andrei said drily, raising his tone to a degree which showed that his patience had run out.
Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression on the princess’s beautiful little face changed to an attractive and compassion-provoking expression of fear; her pretty eyes glanced from under her eyebrows at her husband, and her face acquired the timid and admissive look of a dog rapidly but weakly wagging its drooping tail.
“Mon dieu, mon dieu!” said the princess, and taking up a fold of her dress in one hand, she went over to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.
“Bonsoir, Lise,”*76 said Prince Andrei, standing up and kissing her hand politely, as if she were a stranger.
The friends were silent. Neither of them would begin talking. Pierre kept glancing at Prince Andrei; Prince Andrei was rubbing his forehead with his small hand.
“Let’s go and have supper,” he said with a sigh, getting up and heading for the door.
They went into the elegantly, newly, richly decorated dining room. Everything from the napkins to the silverware, china, and crystal bore that special stamp of newness that is found in the households of the recently married. In the middle of supper, the prince leaned his elbow on the table and, with an expression of nervous irritation such as Pierre had never seen in his friend before, began to talk, like a man who has long had something on his heart and suddenly decides to speak it out:
“Never, never marry, my friend. Here’s my advice to you: don’t marry until you can tell yourself that you’ve done all you could, and until you’ve stopped loving the woman you’ve chosen, until you see her clearly, otherwise you’ll be cruelly and irremediably mistaken. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing…Otherwise all that’s good and lofty in you will be lost. It will all go on trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don’t look at me with such astonishment. If you expect something from yourself in the future, then at every step you’ll feel that it’s all over for you, it’s all closed, except the drawing room, where you’ll stand on the same level as a court flunkey and an idiot…Ah, well!…”
He waved his hand energetically.
Pierre took off his spectacles, which made his face change, expressing still more kindness, and looked at his friend in astonishment.
“My wife,” Prince Andrei went on, “is a wonderful woman. She’s one of those rare women with whom one can be at ease regarding one’s own honor; but, my God, what wouldn’t I give now not to be married! You’re the first and only one I’m saying this to, because I love you.”
Prince Andrei, in saying this, was less than ever like that Bolkonsky who sat sprawled in Anna Pavlovna’s armchair and, narrowing his eyes, uttered French phrases through his teeth. His dry face was all aquiver with the nervous animation of every muscle; his eyes, in which the fire of life had seemed extinguished, now shone with a bright, radiant brilliance. One could see that, the more lifeless he seemed in ordinary times, the more energetic he was in moments of irritation.
“You don’t understand why I’m saying this,” he went on. “Yet it’s a whole life’s story. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” he said, though Pierre had not talked of Bonaparte. “You talk of Bonaparte; but Bonaparte, when he was working, went step by step towards his goal, he was free, he had nothing except his goal—and he reached it. But bind yourself to a woman—and, like a prisoner in irons, you lose all freedom. And whatever hope and strength you have in you, it all only burdens and torments you with remorse. Drawing rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, triviality—that is the vicious circle I can’t get out of. I’m now going to the war, to the greatest war that has ever been, yet I know nothing and am good for nothing. Je suis très aimable et très caustique,”*77 Prince Andrei went on, “and they listen to me at Anna Pavlovna’s. And this stupid society, without which my wife cannot live, and these women…If you only knew what toutes les femmes distinguées†78 and women in general really are! My father is right. Egoism, vanity, dull-wittedness, triviality in everything—that’s women, when they show themselves as they are. Looking at them in society, it seems there’s something there, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing! No, don’t marry, dear heart, don’t marry,” Prince Andrei concluded.
“I find it funny,” said Pierre, “that you, you yourself, consider that you have no ability and that your life is a ruined life. You have everything, everything ahead of you. And you…”