Pierre’s duel with Dolokhov had been hushed up, and in spite of the Tsar’s strong disapproval of duelling at that time no one paid a price for it, neither the duellists nor their seconds. Nevertheless the whole affair, confirmed by Pierre’s break with his wife, was much talked of in society. As an illegitimate son Pierre had been looked on most patronizingly; as the most eligible bachelor in all Russia he had been cosseted and praised; but now after his marriage, when young ladies and their mothers had lost all hope in him, he had declined steeply in society’s esteem, especially since he had neither the wit nor the will to curry public favour. He was blamed for the whole affair. Hadn’t he been insanely jealous, given to the same fits of bloodthirsty rage as his father? And when Hélène returned to Petersburg after Pierre’s departure she was received on all sides not only warmly but with a touch of deference appropriate for someone in distress. Whenever the conversation touched upon her husband, Hélène would assume a dignified expression which she had mastered with all her usual
‘Yes, I said it was coming,’ Anna Pavlovna would say about Pierre. ‘I said it at the time, and I was the first to do so.’ (She had to insist on being the first.) ‘I said he was a young madman ruined by the depravity of our times. I said it when everyone else was in ecstasies over him, and he’d only just come home from abroad. Don’t you remember? At one of my soirées he passed himself off as some kind of Marat?6 And look how it’s ended. I was against that marriage all along. I predicted everything that has happened.’
When she was free to do so Anna Pavlovna was still giving her soirées, soirées that only she could arrange, soirées which brought together what she described as ‘the real cream of good society, the flower of Petersburg’s intellectual élite’. Apart from their fine sense of social discrimination Anna Pavlovna’s soirées were still famous for always parading some new and interesting personality and determining more clearly and unmistakably than anywhere else the exact political temperature of loyalist court society in Petersburg.
Towards the end of 1806, when all the grisly details were known – Napoleon’s rout of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstadt, and the surrender of almost all the Prussian strongholds – and just when our troops had entered Prussia at the start of our second campaign against Napoleon, Anna Pavlovna was giving one of these soirées. Tonight ‘the real cream of good society’ consisted of the enchanting if unhappy Hélène, deserted by her husband; Mortemart; the fascinating Prince Hippolyte, just back from Vienna; two diplomats; the same old aunt; one young man described in that drawing-room as ‘a man of much merit’; one newly appointed maid of honour and her mother, and several other persons of lesser standing.
Tonight’s novelty, Anna Pavlovna’s new offering to her guests for their delectation this evening, was Boris Drubetskoy, who had just arrived as a special messenger from the Prussian army, and it was in that same Prussian army that he served as adjutant to a personage of very high rank.
The political temperature taken at that soirée indicated the following:
‘Whatever the European rulers and commanders may do by way of pandering to Bonaparte with the object of causing
This is what was shown by the political temperature taken at Anna Pavlovna’s soirée. When Boris, soon to be served up to the guests, entered the drawing-room, almost everyone who mattered was there and the conversation had been steered by Anna Pavlovna towards our diplomatic relations with Austria and the prospects of an alliance with her.
Boris cut a dashing figure in his adjutant’s elegant uniform as he strolled into the drawing-room, fresh-faced and rosy-cheeked but now fully matured as a man. He was duly led across to pay his respects to the aunt before joining the general circle.
