‘I think it’s by Vinesse,’ said Pierre, mentioning a celebrated miniaturist as he bent forward over the table to take the snuff-box, though he was actually eavesdropping on the conversation at the other table. He half rose, meaning to go over, but the aunt passed him the snuff-box behind Hélène’s back. This caused Hélène to thrust forward to make room, and she looked round with another smile. She was wearing a fashionable evening dress cut very low at the front and back. Her bosom, which had always seemed like marble to Pierre, was so close to his short-sighted eyes that he could hardly miss the vibrant delights of her neck and shoulders, and so near his lips that he was only a few inches away from kissing it all. He could sense the warmth of her body, the aroma of her perfume, and he could hear the slight creaking of her corset as she breathed. What he saw was not marble beauty at one with her gown, what he saw and sensed was the sheer delight of her body, veiled from him only by her clothes. And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.
She glanced round, stared him in the face, her dark eyes flashing, and gave him her smile.
‘So it’s taken you all this time to notice how lovely I am?’ Hélène seemed to be saying. ‘How could you not see that I’m a woman? Yes, a woman, who might belong to anyone – yes, even to you,’ her eyes said. At that moment Pierre suddenly felt that Hélène not only could, but must, become his wife – it had to be so.
He knew it at that moment as surely as he would have done standing beside her under the wedding crown. How it would happen and when, he didn’t know. Neither did he know whether or not it would turn out to be a good thing – he had an inkling that it wouldn’t – but he did know it was going to happen.
Pierre looked down, and then up again, trying to reinstate her as the remote, inaccessible beauty that he had seen in her every day until then, but it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t be done any more than a man who has been staring through a fog at a patch of tall steppe grass thinking it was a tree could ever see a tree in it again once he has recognized it as a patch of grass. She was terribly close to him. Now she had him in her power. And now between him and her there were no barriers of any kind, other than those of his own volition.
‘Well, I’ll leave you in your little corner,’ came Anna Pavlovna’s voice. ‘I can see you like it here.’ And Pierre, coming round with a shock and wondering whether he’d done something badly wrong, blushed as he looked around. He seemed to think that everyone knew as well as he what had happened to him.
Shortly afterwards, when he went over to the larger group, Anna Pavlovna said to him, ‘They say you’re making improvements to your house in Petersburg.’ This was true. The architect had told him it had to be done, and Pierre, without knowing why, was having his immense house done up.
‘That’s a good idea, but don’t move away from Prince Vasily’s. It is a good thing to have a friend like the prince,’ she said, smiling at Prince Vasily. ‘I know a thing or two about that, don’t I? And you’re still very young. You need advice. Now don’t get cross with me for taking advantage of an old woman’s privileges.’
She paused, as women do, expecting some comment after mentioning their age. ‘Now if you were to get married, it would be different.’ And she conjoined them in a single glance. Pierre did not look at Hélène, nor she at him. But she was still terribly close.
He mumbled something and blushed.
When Pierre got home it took a long time to get to sleep. He kept going over what had happened to him. What exactly had happened? Nothing. He had simply become aware that a woman he had known since childhood of whom he used to say quite casually, ‘Yes, she is pretty,’ when people had told him she was a real beauty – he had become aware that this woman might now be his.
