Pierre was silent.
“Peut-être plus tard je vous dirai, mon cher, que si je n’avais pas été là, Dieu sait ce que serait arrivé. Vous savez mon oncle avant-hier encore me promettait de ne pas oublier Boris. Mais il n’a pas eu le temps. J’espère, mon cher ami, que vous remplirez le désir de votre père.”*145
Pierre understood nothing and silently gazed at Anna Mikhailovna, blushing shyly. Having talked with Pierre, Anna Mikhailovna drove off to the Rostovs’ and went to bed. She woke up in the morning and told the Rostovs and all her acquaintances the details of Count Bezukhov’s death. She said that the count had died as she would like to die, that his end had been not only touching, but also instructive; and the last meeting of the father and son had been so touching that she could not recall it without tears, and that she did not know who had behaved better in those terrible moments: the father, who remembered everything and everyone so well in the last minutes and said such touching things to the son; or Pierre, who was a pity to see, he was so crushed, but who nevertheless tried to hide his sorrow, so as not to upset his dying father. “C’est pénible, mais cela fait du bien; ça élève l’âme de voir des hommes comme le vieux comte et son digne fils,”†146 she said. She also told disapprovingly about the actions of the princess and Prince Vassily, but as a great secret and in a whisper.
XXII
At Bald Hills, the estate of Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, the arrival of the young Prince Andrei and the princess was expected any day; but that expectation did not disrupt the harmonious order in which life went on in the old prince’s house. General in Chief Prince Nikolai Andreevich, known in society as le roi de Prusse,‡147 had been banished to his country estate under Paul, and had lived uninterruptedly at Bald Hills ever since, with his daughter, Princess Marya, and her companion, Mlle Bourienne. And under the new reign, though he was permitted entry to the capitals,42 he went on living uninterruptedly in the country, saying that anyone who needed him could travel the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, but that he himself needed no one and nothing. He used to say that there were only two sources of human vice: idleness and superstition; and that there were only two virtues: activity and intelligence. He occupied himself personally with his daughter’s upbringing, and to develop the two chief virtues in her, gave her lessons in algebra and geometry and portioned out her whole life among constant studies. He himself was constantly occupied, now with writing his memoirs, now with higher mathematical calculations, now with turning snuff boxes on a lathe, now with working in the garden and supervising the construction work that never ceased on his estate. As the main condition for activity was order, so the order in his way of life was brought to the utmost degree of precision. His coming to the table was performed under the same invariable conditions, and not only at the same hour, but at the same minute. With the people around him, from his daughter to the servants, the prince was brusque and invariably demanding, and thus, without being cruel, inspired a fear and respect for himself such as the cruelest of men would not find it easy to obtain. Though he was retired and now had no importance in state affairs, every governor of the province in which the prince’s estate lay considered it his duty to call on him and, like the architect, the gardener, or Princess Marya, to wait at the appointed hour for the prince to come out to the high-ceilinged waiting room. And each person in the waiting room experienced the same feeling of respect and even fear at the moment when the immensely high door to the study opened and revealed the small figure of the old man, in a powdered wig, with small dry hands and gray beetling brows, which sometimes, when he frowned, hid the brightness of his intelligent and youthfully bright eyes.
On the day of the young couple’s arrival, in the morning, as usual, Princess Marya went into the waiting room at the appointed hour for the morning greeting and fearfully crossed herself and inwardly recited a prayer. Every day she went in and every day she prayed that this daily meeting would go well.
A powdered old servant who was sitting in the waiting room got up with a quiet movement and in a whisper announced: “If you please.”
From behind the door came the regular sounds of a lathe. The princess timidly pulled the easily and smoothly opening door and stopped in the doorway. The prince was working at the lathe and, having glanced at her, went on with what he was doing.
The immense study was filled with things obviously in constant use. The big table with books and plans lying on it, the tall bookcases with keys in their glass doors, the tall table for writing in a standing position, on which lay an open notebook, the lathe with tools laid out and wood shavings strewn around it—everything spoke of constant, diverse, and orderly activity. By the movements of the small foot shod in a silver-embroidered Tartar boot, by the firm pressure of the sinewy, lean hand, one could see in the prince the still persistent and much-enduring strength of fresh old age. Having made a few more turns, he took his foot from the pedal of the lathe, wiped the chisel, dropped it into a leather pouch attached to the lathe, and, going to the table, called his daughter over. He never blessed his children, but, offering her his bristly, as yet unshaven cheek and giving her a stern and at the same time attentively tender look, merely said:
“Are you well?…Sit down, then!”
He took the geometry notebook, written in his own hand, and moved a chair over with his foot.
“For tomorrow!” he said, quickly finding the page and marking it paragraph by paragraph with his hard fingernail.
The princess bent to the table over the notebook.
“Wait, there’s a letter for you,” the old man said suddenly, taking an envelope with a woman’s handwriting on it from a pouch attached to the table and dropping it in front of her.
At the sight of the letter, the princess’s face became covered with red blotches. She hastily took it and bent over it.
“From Héloïse?”43 asked the prince, baring his still strong and yellowish teeth in a cold smile.
“Yes, from Julie,” said the princess, glancing up timidily and smiling timidly.
“I’ll skip two letters and read the third,” the prince said sternly. “I’m afraid you write a lot of nonsense. I’ll read the third.”
“You can read this one, mon père,” the princess replied, blushing still more and handing him the letter.
“The third, I said, the third,” the prince shouted curtly, pushing the letter away, and, leaning his elbow on the table, he drew the notebook with geometric drawings towards him.
“Well, ma’am,” the old man began, bending close to his daughter over the notebook and putting one arm on the back of the chair in which the princess was sitting, so that the princess felt herself surrounded on all sides by her father’s smell of tobacco and pungent old age, which she had known so long. “Well, ma’am, these triangles are similar; kindly look, the angle ABC…”
The princess glanced fearfully at her father’s bright eyes, so near to her; red blotches came over her face, and it was obvious that she understood nothing, and was so afraid that fear would prevent her from understanding all of her father’s further explanations, however clear they were. Whether it was the teacher or the pupil who was at fault, the same thing repeated itself each day: the princess felt giddy, saw nothing, heard nothing, but only felt the lean face of her stern father near her, felt his breathing and his smell, and thought only of how to get out of the study as quickly as possible and work out the problem in the freedom of her own room. The old man would get beside himself: he would noisily move the chair he was sitting in back and forth, try hard to keep himself from flying into a rage, and almost always flew into a rage, poured out abuse, and sometimes flung the notebook away.