Just back from the country, and now in a serious frame of mind, Natasha saw all this as astonishingly grotesque. She couldn’t follow the opera and couldn’t hear any music; all she could see was painted cardboard and oddly dressed men and women, talking, singing and prancing about just as oddly under bright lights. She knew what it was supposed to represent, but it was all so grotesquely forced and unnatural that she found herself alternating between embarrassment and amusement at the actors’ expense. She glanced round at faces in the audience, looking for signs of the same amusement and bewilderment that she was feeling. But all the faces were absorbed in what was happening on the stage, and they displayed a kind of rapture that Natasha could only assume to be affected. ‘I suppose it has to be like this!’ thought Natasha. She looked alternately at the rows of pomaded men’s heads in the stalls and the half-naked women in the boxes, especially Hélène in the next box who was sitting there so openly exposed, staring fixedly at the stage with a quiet and serene smile on her face, and basking in the bright light that flooded the theatre and the close atmosphere warmed up by the crowd. Natasha was beginning to glide steadily into a state of light-headedness the like of which she hadn’t experienced for some time. She lost all sense of what she was and where she was and what was going on before her eyes. She gazed ahead, letting her thoughts wander, and the weirdest of disconnected ideas suddenly flashed through her mind. One moment she felt like leaping over the footlights and singing along with the actress; then she felt an urge to dig an old gentleman sitting near by with her fan, or lean over towards Hélène and tickle her.
In a moment of silence on the stage with a new aria about to begin, a stalls door creaked open on the Rostovs’ side of the theatre, and a man’s footsteps could be heard padding over the carpet. ‘That’s him, Kuragin!’ whispered Shinshin. Countess Bezukhov turned and beamed at the late arrival. Natasha followed Countess Bezukhov’s eyes and saw a strikingly handsome adjutant walking towards their box with a confident stride and a courteous manner. It was Anatole Kuragin, whom she had seen and noticed some time before at a ball in Petersburg. He was wearing his adjutant’s uniform, with one epaulette and a shoulder knot. He walked with a jaunty little swagger that would have looked ridiculous if he hadn’t been so handsome, and if his fine features hadn’t expressed such open-hearted self-assurance and high spirits. Although the performance was in full swing he didn’t hurry as he strode down the sloping, carpeted aisle, his perfumed, handsome head held high and his spurs and sword gently jingling. With a quick glance at Natasha he went over to his sister, laid a tightly gloved hand on the edge of her box, nodded to her and leant over to asked her something, with a gesture towards Natasha.
‘Delightful girl!’ he said, obviously referring to Natasha, who could not hear his words but could read his lips. Then he proceeded to the front row and sat down beside Dolokhov, giving him a casual, friendly elbow in the ribs – and this was Dolokhov, the man who inspired such deference in everybody else. With a cheeky wink and a merry smile at him Anatole put one foot up on the orchestra-screen.
‘Brother and sister, and they’re so like each other,’ said the count. ‘Handsome pair!’
Shinshin lowered his voice and began telling the count about one of Kuragin’s escapades in Moscow, and Natasha listened, not least because he had called her a delightful girl.
The first act came to an end. Everyone stood up in the stalls, they left their places and there was much coming and going.
Boris came over to the Rostovs’ box, accepted their congratulations without any fuss, raised his eyebrows with a distracted smile, told Natasha and Sonya that his fiancée wished to invite them both to the wedding, and then left. Natasha had been chatting to him with a cheery, flirtatious smile on her lips, and she had congratulated him on his approaching marriage, the same Boris she had once been in love with. In the kind of light-headed mood she was in, everything seemed perfectly straightforward and natural.
Hélène was sitting near by in all her semi-nakedness, beaming at all and sundry, and Natasha beamed at Boris in exactly the same way.
Hélène’s box had filled up inside and was surrounded from the stalls by the cleverest and most distinguished men, falling over each other in their eagerness to let everyone see that they were known to her.
