Like all the other rooms in the house, the dining-room was vast, with a high ceiling. With the prince about to enter, servants and waiters stood there expectantly, one behind each chair. The butler, with a napkin draped over his arm, was checking the table and giving eye-signals to the servants, all the time glancing uneasily from the wall-clock to the doorway through which the prince would soon enter. Prince Andrey was staring at something new – an immense gilt frame containing the Bolkonsky family tree and across from it another frame, just as big, with a badly painted image of a crowned Prince Regent (obviously done by some amateur domestic), supposedly a descendant of Rurik45 and founder of the Bolkonsky dynasty. Prince Andrey shook his head as he looked at this family tree and laughed as you would at an unintended caricature.
‘That’s him to a T!’ he said to Princess Marya as she came up to him.
Princess Marya looked at her brother in surprise, not seeing anything funny about it. Everything her father did was beyond criticism and inspired reverence.
‘Everyone has an Achilles’ heel,’ Prince Andrey went on. ‘All
Princess Marya couldn’t understand her brother’s biting criticism and was just about to protest when the footsteps they were all listening for were heard coming from the study. In strode the prince with a brisk joviality. This was how he always walked, as if consciously contradicting the strict household regime with a bustling manner of his own. On the instant the big clock struck two and another clock in the drawing-room echoed with a thinner chime. The prince stopped and peered out sternly from under his great bushy eyebrows, his sharp eyes glinting as they first surveyed all the diners and then lighted on the little princess. She felt like a courtier at the entrance of the Tsar, such was the feeling of intimidation and profound respect that this old man evoked in everyone about him. He stroked her hair, and then rather awkwardly gave her a pat on the neck.
‘Yes, I’m very pleased,’ he said, and after staring into her eyes he walked off and sat down in his place. ‘Do sit down, everyone. Mikhail Ivanovich, do sit down.’
He motioned for his daughter-in-law to sit beside him, and a footman pulled back a chair for her.
‘Oho!’ said the old man, looking at her rounded figure. ‘You’ve not wasted any time. Not a good thing!’ His laugh was dry, cold and disagreeable; as always he laughed with his mouth, but not with his eyes. ‘You must go out walking, plenty of walking, yes, as much as you can,’ he said.
The little princess, not hearing him, or perhaps not wanting to, sat there in silence, looking embarrassed. But when the prince asked after her father she began to talk and smile. He also asked about common acquaintances, at which she became more and more animated, and began chattering away, conveying best wishes from various people and telling him the city gossip.
‘Countess Apraksin has lost her husband and she cried her eyes out, poor dear,’ she said, growing livelier by the moment. As she did so, the prince stared at her more and more severely, and then suddenly, as though he had studied all there was to study about her and formed a clear impression, he turned the other way and spoke to Mikhail Ivanovich.
‘Well, Mikhail Ivanovich, our friend Bu . . . onaparte is in for a bad time. Prince Andrey’ (he always spoke of his son in the third person) ‘has just been telling me what forces are being massed against him! And you and I always thought he was a nobody.’
Mikhail Ivanovich had no knowledge of a time when ‘you and I’ had said any such thing about Napoleon, but he could see that he was needed so that they could get round to the prince’s favourite subject, so he sat there staring at the younger prince, nonplussed and wondering what might now develop.
‘He’s my master tactician!’ said the prince to his son, pointing to the architect, and once again the conversation turned to the war, Napoleon, and the latest generals and politicians. The old prince seemed convinced that all these public men were babes-in-arms without the slightest knowledge of warfare and politics, and Napoleon was a useless French nonentity who had been successful only because there were no more Potyomkins46 and Suvorovs to stop him. He was even convinced there weren’t any political difficulties in Europe, there wasn’t any war, only a kind of puppet show with people fooling around, pretending to be doing something serious. Prince Andrey accepted his father’s sneering attitude towards the new people quite cheerfully, and egged his father on to say more. He obviously enjoyed listening.
‘The past always seems better,’ he said, ‘but didn’t Suvorov fall into a trap he couldn’t get out of, set by Moreau?’
