That private life in Moscow had recently become very hard for Princess Marya. In town she was deprived of her greatest pleasures – conversations with the pilgrims and the solitude, both of which she had found so refreshing at Bald Hills – and none of the advantages and delights of metropolitan life applied to her. She never went out into society; everyone knew that her father wouldn’t allow her to go anywhere without him, and because of his failing health he couldn’t go anywhere. People had stopped inviting her to dinner-parties or balls. Princess Marya had by now abandoned all hope of marriage. She had noted the frostiness and animosity with which the old prince received and dismissed any young men, possible suitors, who appeared at the house from time to time. Friends she had none; during this stay in Moscow she had lost faith in the two friends who had been closest to her. She had become disenchanted with Mademoiselle Bourienne, in whom she had never had complete confidence, and now she kept her at bay for a number of reasons. Julie Karagin, a regular pen-friend over five long years, was here in Moscow, but when they met face to face she struck Princess Marya as utterly alien. On the death of her brothers Julie had become one of the wealthiest heiresses in Moscow and was now making the most of the heady pleasures offered by high society and was surrounded by young men who seemed suddenly appreciative of her virtues. Julie had reached the stage when a young society lady no longer in the first flush of youth begins to sense that her last chance of getting married has come and her fate must soon be decided once and for all. Every Thursday Princess Marya smiled a lugubrious smile as she contemplated the prospect of having no one to write to because Julie was here on the spot and seeing her once a week, not that there was any pleasure to be derived from their meetings. Like the old French émigré who declined to marry the lady with whom he had spent all his evenings over many years because if he got married he wouldn’t know where to spend his evenings, she regretted that with Julie being here she had no one to write to. In Moscow Princess Marya had no one to talk to either, and no one to share her troubles with, just at a time when many new troubles were adding themselves to the old ones. The time for Prince Andrey’s return and marriage was fast approaching, and the task he had given her of bringing their father round was so far from completion that the whole thing seemed beyond hope – the slightest reference to young Countess Rostov simply enraged the old prince, who was almost always in a foul mood nowadays in any case. Another item in Princess Marya’s store of recent troubles arose from the way she had been teaching her six-year-old nephew. In her attitude to little Nikolay she was shocked to find herself displaying the same signs of irritability as her father. However often she told herself not to lose her temper, almost every time she sat down to teach her nephew and pointed to letters of the French alphabet she felt such an urgent desire to make things easy and hurry the process of transferring knowledge from herself to the child (who was always scared stiff that his auntie might be about to come down on him), that at the slightest hint of inattention she quivered and gabbled and snapped at him, or shouted and sometimes grabbed him by his little hand and stood him in a corner. Once she had stood him there she would burst into tears at her own wicked and violent behaviour, whereupon little Nikolay, not to be outdone when it came to sobbing, would creep out of his corner without waiting for permission, walk over and pull her wet hands away from her face in an effort to console her. But the worst, easily the worst of her troubles was her father’s terrible temper, which was invariably directed against his daughter and had recently reached the point of cruelty. Had he forced her to spend every night on her knees in supplication, had he beaten her, or made her chop wood and carry water, it would never have occurred that her lot was a hard one. But this loving tyrant – all the crueller for loving her so much and using that as a pretext for tormenting himself and her – was a past master at deliberate degradation and humiliation and convincing her she was always to blame for anything that happened. He had recently developed a new quirk, one which caused Princess Marya more misery than anything else – and this was his growing intimacy with Mademoiselle Bourienne. The idea that had occurred to him as a joke when he got the first news of his son’s intentions – that if Andrey was going to get married, he might as well marry Mademoiselle Bourienne – clearly appealed to him, and in recent days he had gone out his way to shock her (as she saw it) by being particularly gracious to Mademoiselle Bourienne and demonstrating dissatisfaction with his daughter by a corresponding demonstration of love for the Frenchwoman.
