‘It’s like this,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘if it comes to a battle pretty soon your lot will win. But you wait a couple of days and if there’s a battle then, it’ll go on a bit.’ A beaming Lelorgne d’Ideville gave the following translation: ‘If battle is engaged within three days the French would win, but if it was later God knows what would come of it.’ Napoleon was not beaming, though he did seem to be in the highest of spirits, and he had the words repeated.
This did not escape Lavrushka, who decided to provide further amusement by pretending not to know who he was talking to.
‘We know you’ve got your Bonaparte and he’s beaten everybody in the world, but we’re a different kettle of fish . . .’ he said, without knowing how and why this bit of chauvinism slipped into his concluding words. The interpreter translated his speech, omitting the last bit, and Bonaparte gave a smile. ‘The young Cossack brought a smile to the lips of his all-powerful interlocutor,’ says Thiers. Napoleon rode on a few paces in silence, then turned to Berthier and said he wanted to see what effect it would have on ‘this son of the Don’ when he found out that the man who the son of the Don was talking to was the Emperor himself, the man who had carved his victorious name on the Pyramids for all time.
The news was broken.
Lavrushka could tell this was being done to fox him and Napoleon expected him to be in a state of panic, so he tried to please his new masters by putting on a great show of dumbfounded amazement and stupefaction, with much rolling of the eyes, and the kind of face he always pulled whenever he was being taken away for a thrashing. ‘The word were scarcely out of the interpreter’s mouth,’ Thiers informs us, ‘when the Cossack was so stricken with amazement that he did not utter another word, but rode on with his eyes glued on this conqueror, whose fame had reached him across the steppes of the Orient. All his loquacity was suddenly stemmed and replaced by a simple-minded and reverent silence. Napoleon gave him a reward and ordered him to be set free like a bird returned to the fields that witnessed its birth.’
Napoleon rode on, dreaming of Moscow, his obsession, while the bird returning to the fields that had witnessed his birth galloped back to our outposts, working out in advance a version of events that had not taken place but could be told to his comrades. He wasn’t keen on the idea of telling them what had really happened, for the simple reason that it didn’t seem worth talking about. He rode back to the Cossacks, asked where he could find his regiment, now part of Platov’s detachment, and by evening he had found his master, Nikolay Rostov, encamped at Yankovo. Rostov had just got on his horse to ride round the local villages with Ilyin. He gave Lavrushka another horse and took him along too.
CHAPTER 8
Prince Andrey was wrong in thinking that Princess Marya was in Moscow and out of danger.
After Alpatych’s return from Smolensk, the old prince began to behave as if he had suddenly woken up. He gave orders for the militia to be called up from the villages and supplied with arms, then he wrote to the commander-in-chief informing him that he had every intention of staying on at Bald Hills and defending himself to the last; it was for the commander-in-chief to decide whether or not steps should be taken for the defence of Bald Hills, where one of the oldest surviving Russian generals would soon be taken prisoner or die. He announced to his household that he was staying on at Bald Hills.
But although he was determined to stay, the prince made arrangements for sending the princess, along with Dessalles and the little prince, first to Bogucharovo and then on to Moscow. Alarmed by her father’s outburst of feverish, sleepless activity so soon after his earlier despondency, Princess Marya could not bring herself to leave him behind on his own, so for the first time in her life she made so bold as to disobey him. She refused to go, and brought down on her head a horrific storm of fire and fury. The prince raked up all his righteous grievances against her. He was full of accusations: she had tormented him, she had caused trouble between him and his son, she had harboured the vilest suspicions about him, she had made it her one goal in life to poison his existence. He drove her out of his study, telling her he didn’t care one way or the other whether she stayed or went. He said he didn’t want to know of her existence, and gave her fair warning to keep right out of his sight. This came as a relief to Princess Marya, because she had been afraid he would have her forcibly removed from Bald Hills, and all he had done was banish her from his sight. She knew the meaning of this: deep down in his heart he was secretly glad she was staying on and not going away.
