“You live with your mother?”
“I live at the countess Rostov’s,” said Boris, again adding, “Your Excellency.”
“It’s that Ilya Rostov who married Nathalie Shinshin,” said Anna Mikhailovna.
“I know, I know,” said Prince Vassily in his monotone voice. “Je n’ai jamais pu concevoir comment Natalie s’est décidée à épouser cet ours mal-léché! Un personnage complètement stupide et ridicule. Et joueur à ce qu’on dit.”*98
“Mais très brave homme, mon prince,”†99 observed Anna Mikhailovna, smiling touchingly, as though she, too, knew that Count Rostov deserved such an opinion, but begged for pity on the poor old man.
“What do the doctors say?” the princess asked after a brief pause and again showing great sorrow on her weepy face.
“There’s little hope,” said the prince.
“And I wished so much to thank Uncle for all his benefactions to me and to Borya. C’est son filleul,”*100 she added in such a tone, as though this news was to make Prince Vassily extremely glad.
Prince Vassily pondered and winced. Anna Mikhailovna understood that he feared to find in her a rival over Count Bezukhov’s will. She hastened to reassure him.
“If it weren’t for my true love and devotion to Uncle,” she said, uttering this word with special assurance and casualness, “I know his character, noble, direct, but there are just the princesses around him…They’re still young…” She inclined her head and added in a whisper: “Has he fulfilled his last duty,30 Prince? How precious these last moments are! It cannot get any worse; he must be prepared, if he’s so poorly. We women,” she smiled tenderly, “always know how to say these things, Prince. I must see him. However hard it is for me, by now I’m used to suffering.”
The prince apparently realized, as at Annette Scherer’s soirée, that it was difficult to get rid of Anna Mikhailovna.
“This meeting might be hard on him, chère Anna Mikhailovna,” he said. “Let’s wait till evening; the doctors have predicted a crisis.”
“But we cannot wait, Prince, at such a moment. Pensez, il y va du salut de son âme…Ah! c’est terrible, les devoirs d’un chrétien…”†101
The door to the inner rooms opened and one of the young princesses—the count’s nieces—came out, with a cold and sullen face and a long waist strikingly out of proportion with her legs.
Prince Vassily turned to her.
“Well, how is he?”
“The same. And, like it or not, this noise…” said the princess, looking Anna Mikhailovna over like a stranger.
“Ah, chère, je ne vous reconnaissais pas,” Anna Mikhailovna said with a happy smile, approaching the count’s niece at a light amble. “Je viens d’arriver et je suis à vous pour vous aider à soigner mon oncle. J’imagine combien vous avez souffert,”‡102 she added, rolling up her eyes sympathetically.
The princess made no reply, did not even smile, and left at once. Anna Mikhailovna took off her gloves and settled into a hard-won position in an armchair, inviting Prince Vassily to sit down beside her.
“Boris!” she said to her son and smiled. “I’ll go to the count, my uncle, and meanwhile you go to Pierre, mon ami, and don’t forget to convey to him the invitation from the Rostovs. They’re inviting him to dinner. He won’t go, I suppose?” she turned to the prince.
“On the contrary,” said the prince, now plainly out of sorts. “Je serais très content si vous me débarassez de ce jeune homme…*103 He just sits here. The count has never once asked about him.”
He shrugged his shoulders. The servant led the young man down and up another stairway to Pyotr Kirillovich.
XIII
Pierre had not managed to choose a career for himself in Petersburg, and had indeed been banished to Moscow for riotous behavior. The story told at Count Rostov’s was true. Pierre had taken part in tying the policeman to the bear. He had arrived several days ago and was staying, as usual, at his father’s house. Though he supposed that his story was already known in Moscow, and that the ladies who surrounded his father, always ill-disposed towards him, would have used this chance to rile the count, he nevertheless went to his father’s part of the house the day he arrived. On entering the drawing room, where the princesses were usually to be found, he greeted the ladies, who were sitting over their embroidery and a book, which one of them was reading aloud. There were three of them. The eldest, a neat, long-waisted, stern young lady, the one who had come out to Anna Mikhailovna, was reading; the younger ones, both red-cheeked and pretty, differing from each other only in that one had a mole above her lip, which was very becoming to her, were doing embroidery. Pierre was met like a dead man or a leper. The eldest princess interrupted her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the younger one, without the mole, assumed exactly the same expression; the youngest, with the mole, of a merry, laughter-prone character, bent over her embroidery frame to hide a smile, probably evoked by the forthcoming scene, which she foresaw would be amusing. She drew the woollen thread through and bent down as if studying the design, barely able to keep from laughing.
“Bonjour, ma cousine,” said Pierre. “Vous ne me reconnaissez pas?”†104
“I recognize you only too well, only too well.”
“How is the count’s health? May I see him?” Pierre asked awkwardly, as usual, but without embarrassment.
“The count is suffering both physically and morally, and it seems you have taken care to cause him as much moral suffering as possible.”
“May I see the count?” Pierre repeated.
“Hm!…If you want to kill him, to kill him outright, you may see him. Olga, go and see whether uncle’s bouillon is ready, it’s soon time,” she added, thereby showing Pierre that they were busy, and busy comforting his father, while he was obviously only busy upsetting him.
Olga went out. Pierre stood looking at the sisters for a while and, bowing, said:
“I’ll go to my room, then. Tell me when I can see him.”
He went out, and the ringing, though not loud, laughter of the sister with the mole could be heard behind him.
The next day Prince Vassily came and settled in the count’s house. He summoned Pierre and said to him:
“Mon cher, si vous vous conduisez ici, comme à Pétersburg, vous finirez très mal; c’est tout ce je vous dis.*105 The count is very, very ilclass="underline" you must not see him at all.”
Since then Pierre had not been disturbed, and he spent whole days alone upstairs in his room.
When Boris came in, Pierre was pacing his room, stopping now and then in the corners, making threatening gestures to the wall, as if piercing the invisible enemy with a sword, and looking sternly over his spectacles, and then starting his promenade again, uttering vague words, shrugging his shoulders, and spreading his arms.
“L’Angleterre a vécu,” he said, frowning and pointing his finger at someone. “Monsieur Pitt comme traitre à la nation et au droit des gens est condamné à…”†106 —he did not have time to finish Pitt’s sentence, imagining at that moment that he was Napoleon himself and with his hero had already carried out the dangerous crossing of the Pas de Calais and conquered London, before he saw a young, trim, and handsome officer come into his room. He stopped. Pierre had left Boris a fourteen-year-old boy and had decidedly no recollection of him; but, despite that, with the quick and cordial manner proper to him, he took his hand and smiled amiably.