War And Peace полностью

‘Ah! A splendid thing. So you want to serve your Tsar and your country? These are times of war. A fine young man like you ought to be a serving soldier, yes, a serving soldier. Ordered to the front, eh?’

‘No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front. But I’m attached . . . What is it I’m attached to, Papa?’ Anatole turned to his father with a laugh.

‘He is a credit to the service, indeed. What am I attached to! Ha-ha-ha!’ laughed the old prince, and Anatole laughed louder. Suddenly the old prince frowned. ‘Off you go then,’ he said to Anatole. Smiling broadly, Anatole returned to the ladies.

‘So you had them educated abroad, Prince Vasily? Eh?’ said the old prince.

‘One did what one could. I must say the education there is much better than ours.’

‘Yes, it’s all different now, new-fangled. A splendid boy! Splendid! Well, let’s go to my room.’ He took Prince Vasily by the arm and led him away to his study.

Alone with Bolkonsky, Prince Vasily lost no time in making known his hopes and his desires.

‘What do you think?’ said the old prince angrily. ‘I’m hanging on to her? I can’t let go of her? The very idea!’ he protested furiously. ‘I’d do it tomorrow! But I will say this – I want to know my future son-in-law better. You know my golden rule: everything out in the open! Tomorrow I shall ask her in your presence. If she says yes, let him stay on. Let him stay on, and I’ll see.’ The prince snorted. ‘Let her get married. I don’t care!’ he screamed with the same piercing shriek as when he had said goodbye to his son.

‘I’ll be quite candid,’ said Prince Vasily sounding like a crafty man who sees it’s no use being crafty with such a sharp mind. ‘I know you can see right through people. Anatole is no genius, but he’s a good, honest boy, a fine son and a family man.’

‘Yes, yes. We’ll see about that.’

As always with lonely women long deprived of male company, the moment Anatole appeared on the scene, all three women in Prince Nikolay’s house felt as one that they had not been living a real life until then. Suddenly their thought processes, feelings and powers of observation were ten times sharper. It was as if lives spent in darkness had suddenly been flooded with a bright light full of new meaning.

Princess Marya forgot all about her face and hairstyle. The handsome, open face of the man who might turn out to be her husband absorbed her whole attention. He seemed so kind, brave, strong, manly and noble. She was sure of it. Dreams of a future married life rose in her imagination by the thousand. She drove them away and tried to conceal them.

‘But perhaps I’m being too cold with him?’ thought Princess Marya. ‘I’m trying to control myself because at the bottom of my heart I can feel myself getting too close to him. But still, he doesn’t know what I think of him. He might even think I don’t like him.’

She tried to be nice to him and didn’t know how.

‘Poor girl, she is terribly ugly,’ Anatole was thinking.

Mademoiselle Bourienne had also been roused by Anatole’s arrival into a state of high excitement, but her thoughts were of a different order. Naturally, a beautiful young girl with no fixed position in society, with no friends or relations, not even a country of her own, was not looking forward to a life spent waiting on Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky, reading to him and being a good friend to Princess Marya. Mademoiselle Bourienne had long been looking forward to the day when a Russian prince sensitive enough to see her as superior to all those ugly, dowdy, clumsy Russian princesses would fall in love with her and carry her off. Now he had come. Mademoiselle Bourienne remembered a favourite story of her aunt’s which she had adapted and loved to run over in her imagination. It was about a young girl who had been seduced, and her poor mother had appeared to her and reproached her for giving herself to a man without getting married. Mademoiselle was often moved to tears when she imagined herself telling him, her would-be seducer, this story. Now he was here – a real Russian prince. He would carry her off, then ‘my poor mother’ would come on the scene, and they would be married. This future history of hers had been unfolding in Mademoiselle Bourienne’s mind all the time they were talking about Paris. Mademoiselle Bourienne was not a scheming woman (she certainly never planned ahead), but everything had been prepared within her long before this and it had suddenly focused on Anatole the moment he appeared, after which she longed to please him and tried as hard as she could.

As for the little princess, she was like an old warhorse hearing a trumpet-blast, ready to gallop off into yet another flirtation, instinctively oblivious to her present situation, without a backward glance or the slightest qualm, her fun-loving heart full of nothing but simple gaiety.