raised his head. Anatole, with his everlasting companion Makarin, dashed by in a sledge with a pair of grey trotting-horses, who were kicking up the snow on to the forepart of the sledge. Anatole was sitting in the classic pose of military dandies, the lower part of his face muffled in his beaver collar, and his head bent a little forward. His face was fresh and rosy; his hat, with its white plume, was stuck on one side, showing his curled, pomaded hair, sprinkled with fine snow.
‘Indeed, he is the real philosopher!’ thought Pierre. ‘He sees nothing beyond the present moment of pleasure; nothing worries him, and so he is always cheerful, satisfied, and serene. What would I not give to be just like him!’ Pierre mused with envy.
In Marya Dmitryevna’s entrance-hall the footman, as he took off Pierre’s fur coat, told him that his mistress begged him to come to her in her bedroom.
As he opened the door into the reception-room, Pierre caught sight of Natasha, sitting at the window with a thin, pale, and ill-tempered face. She looked round at him, frowned, and with an expression of frigid dignity walked out of the room.
‘What has happened?’ asked Pierre, going in to Marya Dmitryevna.
‘Fine doings,’ answered Marya Dmitryevna. ‘Fifty-eight years I have lived in the world—never have I seen anything so disgraceful.’ And exacting from Pierre his word of honour not to say a word about all he was to hear, Marya Dmitryevna informed him that Natasha had broken off her engagement without the knowledge of her parents; that the cause of her doing so was Anatole Kuragin, with whom Pierre’s wife had thrown her, and with whom Natasha had attempted to elope in her father’s absence in order to be secretly married to him.
Pierre, with hunched shoulders and open mouth, listened to what Marya Dmitryevna was saying, hardly able to believe his ears. That Prince An- drey’s fiancee, so passionately loved by him, Natasha Rostov, hitherto so charming, should give up Bolkonsky for that fool Anatole, who was married already (Pierre knew the secret of his marriage), and be so much in love with him as to consent to elope with him—that Pierre could not conceive and could not comprehend. Fie could not reconcile the sweet impression he had in his soul of Natasha, whom he had known from childhood, with this new conception of her baseness, folly, and cruelty. He thought of his wife. ‘They are all alike,’ he said to himself, reflecting he was not the only man whose unhappy fate it was to be bound to a low woman. But still he felt ready to weep with sorrow for Prince An- drey, with sorrow for his pride. And the more he felt for his friend, the greater was the contempt and even aversion with which he thought of Natasha, who had just passed him with such an expression of rigid dignity. He could not know that Natasha’s heart was filled with despair, shame, and humiliation, and that it was not her fault that her face accidentally expressed dignity and severity.
‘What! get married?’ cried Pierre at Marya Dmitryevna’s words. ‘He can’t get married; he is married.’
‘Worse and wotse,’ said Marya Dmitryevna. ‘He’s a nice youth. A perfect scoundrel. And she’s expecting him; she’s been expecting him these two days. We must tell her; at least she will leave off expecting him.’
After learning from Pierre the details of Anatole’s marriage, and pouring out her wrath against him in abusive epithets, Marya Dmitryevna informed Pierre of her object in sending for him. Marya Dmitryevna was afraid that the count or Bolkonsky, who might arrive any moment, might hear of the affair, though she intended to conceal it from them, and might challenge Kuragin, and she therefore begged Pierre to bid his brother-in-law from her to leave Moscow and not to dare to show himself in her presence. Pierre promised to do as she desired him, only then grasping the danger menacing the old count, and Nikolay, and Prince Andrey. After briefly and precisely explaining to him her wishes, she let him go to the drawing-room.
‘Mind, the count knows nothing of it. You behave as though you know nothing,’ she said to him. ‘And I’ll go and tell her it’s no use for her to expect him! And stay to dinner, if you care to,’ Marya Dmitryevna called after Pierre.
Pierre met the old count. He seemed upset and anxious. That morning Natasha had told him that she had broken off her engagement to Bolkonsky.
