Once again Napoleon took out his snuff-box and paced the room several times in silence, only to surprise Balashev by walking rapidly over to him. With the ghost of a smile on his face and in one easy, firm, quick movement, as if he was doing something not merely momentous but also pleasurable to Balashev, he reached up to the forty-year-old Russian general’s face, took hold of one ear and tweaked it with a smile on his lips that wasn’t in his eyes.
To have your ear tweaked by the Emperor was regarded as the greatest honour and the highest mark of favour at the French court.
‘So, you have nothing to say, admirer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander?’ he said, as if it was amusing for someone in his company to be a courtier and admirer of anyone who was not Napoleon. ‘Are the horses ready for the general?’ he added, with a slight nod in acknowledgement of Balashev’s bow. ‘Give him mine. He has
The letter brought back by Balashev was Napoleon’s last letter to Alexander. Every last detail of the conversation was communicated to the Russian Emperor, and they were at war.
CHAPTER 8
After his meeting with Pierre in Moscow Prince Andrey went up to Petersburg, telling his family it was a business trip, though in fact he was going there to meet Anatole Kuragin, something that he felt simply had to be done. But when he got to Petersburg and asked after him, Kuragin was gone. Pierre had let his brother-in-law know that Prince Andrey was after him. Anatole Kuragin had lost no time in obtaining a commission from the war minister, and he’d gone off to join the army in Moldavia. But while he was in Petersburg Prince Andrey came across Kutuzov, his old general, who had always had a soft spot for him, and Kutuzov invited him to go with him to Moldavia, where the old general had been placed in command of the army. Once Prince Andrey had received an appointment on the commander’s staff he travelled down to Turkey.
Prince Andrey did not think it was right for him to get in touch with Kuragin and challenge him formally. He thought that any challenge from him, without some new pretext for a duel, might compromise young Countess Rostov; so he wanted to meet Kuragin face to face in order to fabricate a different excuse for a duel. But even down in the Turkish army Prince Andrey missed Kuragin, who had gone back to Russia soon after Prince Andrey’s arrival. There, in a new country and new surroundings, Prince Andrey found life easier. After his fiancée’s unfaithfulness, which hurt him more and more as he strove to conceal the effect it was having on him, the very circumstances that had recently made him so happy now became unbearable, especially the freedom and independence he had come to value so much. He had abandoned those ideas that had first come to him on the battlefield at Austerlitz, the thoughts he had enjoyed discussing with Pierre and had relied on to fill his empty hours first at Bogucharovo, then in Switzerland and Rome, and in fact he now dreaded them and the boundless vistas of light they had once opened up. Now, all he had time for were matters of immediate and practical relevance, quite different from his former interests, and he seized on these with an eagerness that grew in proportion to his success in suppressing the earlier ones. It was as if the infinitely receding firmament that had once arched above him had suddenly turned into a low, fixed vault bearing down on him, perfectly clear but containing nothing eternal or mysterious.
Of all the activities open to him military service was the most straightforward and familiar. He carried out his duties as a staff general with great diligence and enthusiasm, amazing Kutuzov by his appetite for work and his eye for detail. Despite his failure to catch up with Kuragin in Turkey Prince Andrey did not feel impelled to gallop after him back to Russia. Nevertheless, he was certain of one thing: however long it took, whatever his contempt for Kuragin, however many times he could prove to himself that Kuragin wasn’t worth stooping to quarrel with, he knew that when they did meet he would be no more able to resist challenging him than a starving man could resist grabbing at food. And it was this continual awareness that the insult had not been avenged, and his heart was still overflowing with unassuaged fury, that poisoned the spurious tranquillity Prince Andrey was managing to enjoy in Turkey by keeping inordinately busy displaying his ambition and expending a great deal of useless energy.
In 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached Bucharest (where Kutuzov had spent two months day and night alongside his Wallachian mistress), Prince Andrey asked to be transferred to the western army. Kutuzov, by now thoroughly sick of Bolkonsky’s constant activity, which he took personally as an accusation of idleness, was only too ready to let him go, and sent him off with a commission to Barclay de Tolly.
