War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [148]
“Well, well, all right, we’ll see.”
As always happens with lonely women who have long lived without the society of men, on Anatole’s appearance all three women in Prince Nikolai Andreevich’s house felt equally that their life had not been life until that moment. The power of thought, feeling, observation instantly increased tenfold in them, as if their life, going on in darkness till then, was suddenly lit up by a new light filled with meaning.
Princess Marya did not think at all or even remember about her face and hairstyle. The handsome, open face of the man who would perhaps be her husband absorbed all her attention. To her he seemed kind, brave, resolute, manly, and magnanimous. She was convinced of it. Thousands of fancies of her future family life kept emerging in her imagination. She drove them away and tried to hide them.
“But am I not too cold with him?” thought Princess Marya. “I’m trying to restrain myself, because deep in my soul I feel myself already too close to him; but he doesn’t know all that I’m thinking about him and may imagine that I find him disagreeable.”
And Princess Marya tried and was unable to be cordial with the new guest.
“La pauvre fille! Elle est diablement laide,”*249 thought Anatole.
Mlle Bourienne, whom Anatole’s arrival had also brought to a high level of excitement, was thinking along different lines. Of course, the beautiful young woman, with no definite position in the world, with no family or friends or even country, did not intend to devote her life to serving Prince Nikolai Andreevich, reading books to him, or being friends with Princess Marya. Mlle Bourienne had long been waiting for a Russian prince who would at once be able to appreciate her superiority over the plain, badly dressed, awkward Russian princesses, would fall in love with her and carry her off; and this Russian prince had finally come. Mlle Bourienne had a story, heard from her aunt, completed by herself, which she liked to tell over in her imagination. It was a story about a seduced girl, whose poor mother, sa pauvre mère, appeared to her in a vision and reproached her for giving herself to a man outside wedlock. Mlle Bourienne often brought herself to tears, telling him, the seducer, this story in her imagination. Now he, this real Russian prince, had come. He will carry her off, then ma pauvre mère will appear, and he will marry her. Thus the whole future story of Mlle Bourienne had taken shape in her head while she was talking with him about Paris. Mlle Bourienne was not guided by calculation (she did not spend a moment thinking of what she was to do), but it had all been long prepared in her and now merely arranged itself around the visiting Anatole, whom she wished and strove to please as much as she could.
The little princess, like an old warhorse hearing the sound of trumpets, was preparing herself, unconsciously and forgetting her condition, for her habitual coquettish gallop, without any second thoughts or struggles, but with naïve, light-minded merriment.
Although Anatole, in women’s company, usually placed himself in the position of a man who is sick of having women running after him, he took a vain pleasure in seeing his effect on these three women. Besides, he was beginning to experience for the pretty and provocative Bourienne that passionate, animal feeling which came over him with extraordinary quickness and urged him towards the most coarse and bold actions.
After tea the company went to the sitting room, and the princess was asked to play on the clavichord. Anatole leaned on his elbow before her next to Mlle Bourienne, and his eyes, laughing and joyful, looked at Princess Marya. Princess Marya felt his gaze upon her with tormenting and joyful excitement. Her favorite sonata transported her into her innermost poetic world, and the gaze she felt upon her endowed that world with still greater poetry. Anatole’s gaze, though directed at her, referred not to her but to the movements of Mlle Bourienne’s little foot, which he touched