‘Thank you,’ said Pierre. The captain looked closely at Pierre just as he had done when learning the German for ‘shelter’, and his face suddenly brightened.
‘Very well, then. Here’s to our friendship,’ he cried breezily, pouring out two glasses of wine.
Pierre took the glass and drained it. Ramballe did the same, gave Pierre’s arm another squeeze, and leant forward with his elbows on the table in an attitude of wistful contemplation.
‘Yes, my dear friend, such are the vagaries of fortune . . .’ he began. ‘Who would have said I would one day be a soldier and captain of dragoons in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am with him in Moscow. I must tell you, my dear fellow,’ he continued in the doleful rhythmic tones of a man about to embark on a long story, ‘our name is one of the oldest in France . . .’
And with the easy-going simplicity and openness of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre the history of his ancestors, his childhood, adolescence and manhood, and everything to do with his relations, his fortunes and his family. Naturally enough, ‘my poor mother’ played a prominent part in the recital.
‘But that’s only the stage-setting of life. The real thing is love. Love! Isn’t that right, Monsieur Pierre?’ he said, warming to his theme. ‘Another glass.’
Pierre drained his glass again, and filled up a third one.
‘Ah, women! Women!’ And the captain gazed at Pierre with brimming eyes as he launched into the subject of love and his erotic exploits. There had been a lot of them, and this was easy to believe if the officer’s rather smug but handsome face and the eager enthusiasm with which he talked about women were anything to go by. Although all Ramballe’s accounts of his love affairs had that degrading quality that the French see as the uniqueness and poetic charm of love, the captain told his stories with such genuine certainty that he was the only man who had ever tasted and known the delights of love, and he described women in such alluring terms, that Pierre could not help but be a good listener.
Clearly, the Frenchman’s favourite version of love was neither that mean, straightforward kind of love that Pierre had once felt for his wife nor the romantic love, blown up out of all proportion by himself, that he now felt for Natasha.
Ramballe treated both these kinds of love with equal contempt – one was for working men, the other for morons. The ‘love’ that this Frenchman celebrated consisted mainly in having an unnatural relationship with a woman, and in combinations of outrageous behaviour that set the highest premium on sensuality.
Thus the captain related the moving story of his love for a seductive thirty-five-year-old marquise, which had gone on at the same time as an affair with a charming, innocent child of seventeen, the daughter of the said seductive marquise. The battle between mother and daughter as to who could be the more generous ended with the mother sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her lover, an outcome that even now, as a distant memory, was capable of moving the captain deeply. Then he related an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover, and he – the lover – the part of the husband, and several comic episodes among his memoirs of Germany, the land where
The last episode, dating back only to Poland, was still fresh in the captain’s memory and described with rapid hand movements and a face ablaze with passion. He had saved the life of a Pole – saving people’s lives was a constant theme running through the captain’s stories – and this man had entrusted him with his seductive wife, a Paris girl at heart, while he himself went off to serve with the French. The captain had been delighted, and the seductive Polish lady had wanted to run away with him, but the captain had been moved by a sudden feeling of generosity and restored the wife to the husband with the words, ‘I once saved your life. Now I save your honour!’
At the repetition of these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave himself a shake, as if to rid himself of the weakness that had come over him at the onset of this touching memory.
