“Thank God,” his son said, smiling.
“God has nothing to do with it. Well, tell me,” he went on, getting back on his hobbyhorse, “how have the Germans taught you to fight Bonaparte by this new science of yours known as strategy?”
Prince Andrei smiled.
“Let me collect my wits, papa,” he said, with a smile which showed that his father’s weaknesses did not prevent him from loving and respecting him. “I haven’t even settled in.”
“Nonsense, nonsense,” cried the old man, shaking his queue to see whether it was tightly braided and seizing his son’s arm. “The house is ready for your wife. Princess Marya will take her around and show her and babble three cartloads. That’s their womanish business. I’m glad of her. Sit down, tell me. Mikhelson’s army I understand, and Tolstoy’s…a simultaneous landing…What’s the southern army going to do? Prussia, neutrality…that I know. What about Austria?” he said, getting up from his chair and pacing the room, with Tikhon running after him and handing him pieces of clothing. “What about Sweden? How will they cross Pomerania?”46
Seeing his father’s insistent demand, Prince Andrei, reluctantly at first, but then with more and more animation, and inadvertently switching from Russian to French, out of habit, in the middle of his discourse, began to explain the plan of operations for the proposed campaign. He told how a ninety-thousand-man army was to threaten Prussia, so as to draw her out of neutrality and involve her in the war, how part of that army was to unite with the Swedish army in Strahlsund, how two hundred and twenty thousand Austrians, united with a hundred thousand Russians, were to go into action in Italy and on the Rhine, and how fifty thousand Russians and fifty thousand English would land at Naples, and how in all a five-hundred-thousand-strong army was to attack the French from different sides. The old prince showed not the slightest interest during the telling, as though he was not listening, and, continuing to dress as he paced, interrupted him three times unexpectedly. Once he stopped him and shouted:
“The white one! the white one!”
This meant that Tikhon had not handed him the waistcoat he wanted. Another time he stopped, asked:
“And how soon will she give birth?” and, shaking his head reproachfully, said: “Not good! Go on, go on.”
The third time, as Prince Andrei was finishing his description, the old man sang in an old man’s off-key voice: “Malbroug s’en va-t-en guerre. Dieu sait quand reviendra.”*164 47
His son merely smiled.
“I’m not saying that this is a plan I approve of,” the son said, “I’ve only told you what’s in it. Napoleon has already put together a plan no worse than this one.”
“Well, you haven’t told me anything new.” And the old man muttered pensively to himself in a quick patter: “Dieu sait quand reviendra. Go to the dining room.”
XXIV
At the appointed hour, powdered and clean-shaven, the prince came out to the dining room, where he was awaited by his daughter-in-law, Princess Marya, Mlle Bourienne, and the prince’s architect, who by the prince’s strange caprice was admitted to the table, though by his insignificant position the man could in no way count on such an honor. The prince, who in his life kept firmly to social distinctions and rarely admitted even important provincial officials to the table, suddenly decided to demonstrate by means of the architect Mikhail Ivanovich, who used to blow his nose in the corner on a checkered handkerchief, that all men are equal, and more than once impressed it upon his daughter that Mikhail Ivanovich was no worse than you or I. At table the prince most often addressed himself to the wordless Mikhail Ivanovich.
In the dining room, immensely high like all the rooms in the house, the prince’s entrance was awaited by the domestics and servants standing behind each chair; the butler, a napkin over his arm, examined the place settings, winking to the lackeys and constantly shifting his anxious gaze from the wall clock to the door from which the prince was to appear. Prince Andrei was looking at a huge gilded frame, new to him, with a picture of the family tree of the princes Bolkonsky, which hung across the room from an equally huge frame with a poorly painted portrait (obviously from the hand of a household artist) of a sovereign prince in a crown, who was supposed to be a descendant of Rurik and the first ancestor of the Bolkonsky family. Prince Andrei looked at this genealogical tree, shaking his head and chuckling with the air of someone looking at a portrait that is a ridiculously good likeness.
“That’s him all over!” he said to Prince Marya, who came up to him.
Princess Marya looked at her brother in surprise. She did not understand what made him smile. Everything her father did evoked an awe in her which was not subject to discussion.
“Every man has his Achilles’ heel,” Prince Andrei went on. “With his enormous intelligence, donner dans ce ridicule!”*165
Princess Marya could not understand her brother’s bold opinions and was getting ready to object to him when the awaited footsteps were heard from the study: the prince came in quickly, gaily, as he always did, as if deliberately contrasting his hasty manners to the strict order of the house. At the same moment, the big clock struck two and another in the drawing room responded in a high voice. The prince stopped; from under his thick, beetling brows, his lively, bright, stern eyes looked around at everyone and rested on the young princess. The young princess experienced at that moment the feeling courtiers experience at the appearance of the tsar, that feeling of fear and respect which this old man evoked in all those around him. He stroked the princess’s head and then, with an awkward gesture, patted her on the back of the neck.
“Delighted, delighted,” he said and, looking her intently in the eye once again, quickly stepped away and sat down in his place. “Sit down, sit down! Mikhail Ivanovich, sit down.”
He pointed his daughter-in-law to the place next to him. A servant pulled out the chair for her.
“Ho, ho!” said the old man, looking at her rounded waist. “Rushing things; that’s not good!”
He laughed drily, coldly, unpleasantly, as he always laughed—only with his mouth, not with his eyes.
“You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible,” he said.
The little princess either did not hear or did not want to hear his words. She was silent and seemed embarrassed. The prince asked about her father, and the princess began to speak and smiled. He asked her about mutual acquaintances: the princess became still more animated and started talking away, giving the prince greetings and town gossip.
“La comtesse Apraksine, la pauvre, a perdu son mari et elle a pleuré les larmes de ses yeux,”†166 she said, becoming more and more animated.
As her animation increased, the prince looked at her more and more sternly, and suddenly, as if he had studied her enough and arrived at a clear idea of her, turned away and addressed Mikhail Ivanovich.
“Well, now, Mikhail Ivanovich, things are going badly for our friend Buonaparte. Prince Andrei” (he always referred to his son in the third person like this) “has just been telling me what forces are being prepared against him! But you and I always considered him an empty man.”
Mikhail Ivanovich, who had no idea when this you and I had spoken such words about Bonaparte, but who understood that he was needed in order to launch into the favorite subject, looked at the young prince in surprise, not knowing what would come of it.
“We have a great tactician here!” the prince said to his son, pointing to the architect.
And the conversation turned again to the war, to Bonaparte, and to today’s generals and statesmen. The old prince seemed to be convinced not only that all present-day men of action were mere boys, who did not even understand the ABC’s of military and state affairs, and that Bonaparte was a worthless little Frenchman who was successful only because there were no Potemkins and Suvorovs to oppose him; but he was also convinced that there were no political difficulties in Europe, nor was there a war, but only some sort of marionette comedy that today’s people played at, pretending they meant business. Prince Andrei cheerfully endured his father’s mockery of the new people, and provoked his father to talk and listened to him with obvious delight.