“He’ll get up in twenty minutes. Let’s go to Princess Marya,” he said.
The little princess had filled out during this time, but her eyes and her short lip with its little mustache and smile rose as gaily and sweetly as ever when she began to speak.
“Mais c’est un palais,” she said to her husband, looking around with the expression of someone paying compliments to the host at a ball. “Allons, vite, vite!…”*154 Looking about, she smiled at Tikhon, and at her husband, and at the servant who accompanied them.
“C’est Marie qui s’exerce? Allons doucement, il faut la surprendre.”†155
Prince Andrei walked behind her with a polite and sad expression.
“You’ve aged, Tikhon,” he said to the old man, who kissed his hand as he passed.
Before the room from which the sounds of the clavichord came, a pretty blonde Frenchwoman popped out of a side door. Mlle Bourienne seemed wildly ecstatic.
“Ah! quel bonheur pour la princesse,” she said. “Enfin! Il faut que je la prévienne.”‡156
“Non, non, de grâce…Vous êtes Mlle Bourienne, je vous connais déjà par l’amitié que vous porte ma belle-soeur,” said the princess, kissing her. “Elle ne nous attend pas!”§157
They went up to the door of the sitting room, through which came the sounds of the same passage repeated again and again. Prince Andrei stopped and winced, as if expecting something unpleasant.
The princess went in. The passage broke off in the middle; a cry was heard, then the heavy footsteps of Princess Marya and the sounds of kissing. When Prince Andrei went in, the two princesses, who had seen each other only once for a short time at Prince Andrei’s wedding, were standing with their arms around each other, their lips pressed hard to whatever place they had happened upon in the first moment. Mlle Bourienne was standing beside them, her hands pressed to her heart, smiling piously, apparently as ready to weep as to laugh. Prince Andrei shrugged his shoulders and winced, as music lovers wince when they hear a false note. The two women let go of each other, then again, as if fearing it would be too late, seized each other by the hands, began kissing, tore their hands away, and then again began kissing each other on the face, and, quite unexpectedly for Prince Andrei, they both wept and began to kiss again. Mlle Bourienne also wept. Prince Andrei obviously felt awkward; but for the two women it seemed natural to weep; it seemed it had never occurred to them that their meeting could be otherwise.
“Ah! chère!…Ah! Marie!…” the two women suddenly began to speak and then laughed. “J’ai revé cette nuit…” “Vous ne nous attendiez donc pas?…” “Ah, Marie, vous avez maigri…” “Et vous avez repris…”*158
“J’ai tout de suite reconnu madame la princesse,”†159 Mlle Bourienne put in.
“Et moi qui ne me doutais pas!…” exclaimed Princess Marya. “Ah! André, je ne vous voyais pas.”‡160
Prince Andrei and his sister kissed each other’s hands, and he told her she was the same pleurnicheuse§161 she had always been. Princess Marya turned to her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm, and meek gaze of her big, luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested on Prince Andrei’s face.
The little princess talked nonstop. Her short upper lip with its mustache would momentarily flit down, touching, where it had to, the rosy lower lip, and open up again in a smile of gleaming teeth and eyes. She told about an incident that had happened to her on Spasskoe Hill, which was dangerous for her in her condition, and just after that said she had left all her dresses in Petersburg and would go about here in God knows what, and that Andrei was quite changed, and that Kitty Ordyntsev had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Princess Marya pour tout de bon,*162 but we’ll talk about that later. Princess Marya went on silently looking at her brother, and there was love and sadness in her beautiful eyes. It was clear that she had established her own train of thought, independent of her sister-in-law’s talk. In the middle of her story about the last fête in Petersburg, she addressed her brother.
“And you’re decidedly going to the war, André?” she said, sighing.
Lise also sighed.
“Tomorrow even,” her brother answered.
“Il m’abondonne ici et Dieu sait pourquoi, quand il aurait pu avoir de l’avancement…”†163
Princess Marya did not finish listening and, continuing with the thread of her thoughts, turned to her sister-in-law, her gentle eyes indicating her stomach.
“Is it certain?” she asked.
The princess’s face changed. She sighed.
“Yes, certain,” she said. “Ah! It’s very frightening…”
Liza’s little lip lowered. She brought her face close to her sister-in-law’s face and again wept unexpectedly.
“She needs rest,” said Prince Andrei, wincing. “Isn’t it so, Liza? Take her to your rooms, and I’ll go to father. How is he, the same?”
“The same, yes, the same; I don’t know whether in your eyes,” the princess replied joyfully.
“The same hours, and the strolls in the avenues? The lathe?” asked Prince Andrei with a barely perceptible smile, which showed that, despite all his love and respect for his father, he was aware of his weaknesses.
“The same hours, and the lathe, also mathematics, and my geometry lessons,” Princess Marya replied joyfully, as though her lessons in geometry were one of the most joyful impressions of her life.
When they had waited out the twenty minutes until it was time for the old prince to get up, Tikhon came to summon the young prince to his father. In honor of his son’s arrival, the old man had made an exception in his way of life: he gave orders to allow him into his part of the house while he was still dressing for dinner. The prince held to the old fashion of wearing a kaftan and powdering his hair. And at the moment when Prince Andrei (not with that peevish expression and manner he assumed in drawing rooms, but with the same animated face he had when he talked with Pierre) came to his father’s, the old man was sitting in his dressing room, on a wide morocco-upholstered armchair, in a powdering mantle, entrusting his head to Tikhon’s hands.
“Ah! The warrior! So you want to defeat Bonaparte?” said the old man, shaking his powdered head as much as the braided queue, which was in Tikhon’s hands, would let him. “At least give him a good drubbing, or pretty soon he’ll be writing us down, too, as his subjects. Greetings!” And he offered his cheek.
The old man was in high spirits following his before-dinner nap. (He used to say that an after-dinner nap was silver, but a before-dinner nap was gold.) He joyfully cast sidelong glances at his son from under his thick, beetling brows. Prince Andrei went up and kissed his father on the place indicated to him. He did not respond to his father’s favorite subject—poking fun at the present-day military, and especially at Bonaparte.
“Yes, I’ve come to see you, papa, and with a pregnant wife,” said Prince Andrei, his animated and respectful eyes following the movement of every feature of his father’s face. “How is your health?”
“Only fools and profligates can be unwell, my boy, and you know me: I’m busy from morning till evening, I’m temperate, and so I’m well.”