War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [165]
“It’s good, but he’ll dislike it very much,” remarked Bolkonsky.
“Oh, very much! My brother knows him: he dined with him, the present emperor, more than once in Paris, and he told me that he never saw a more subtle and clever diplomat—you know, a combination of French adroitness and Italian playacting. Do you know the anecdotes about him and Count Markóv? Count Markóv was the only one who knew how to handle him. Do you know the story of the handkerchief? It’s charming!”
And the loquacious Dolgorukov, turning now to Boris, now to Prince Andrei, told how Bonaparte, wishing to test Markóv, our ambassador, purposely dropped his handkerchief in front of him and stood there looking at him, probably expecting a service from Markóv, and how Markóv at once dropped his own handkerchief next to it and picked it up, without picking up Bonaparte’s handkerchief.
“Charmant,” said Bolkonsky. “But the thing is, Prince, that I’ve come to solicit you for this young man. You see…”
But before Prince Andrei finished, an adjutant came into the room to summon Prince Dolgorukov to the emperor.
“Ah, how vexing!” said Dolgorukov, hurriedly getting up and shaking hands with Prince Andrei and Boris. “You know, I’ll be very glad to do everything in my power both for you and for this nice young man.” He shook Boris’s hand once more with an expression of good-natured, sincere, and animated light-mindedness. “But you see—till next time!”
Boris was excited by the thought of the closeness to supreme power in which he felt himself to be at that moment. He was conscious of himself being in touch with the springs that controlled all those huge mass movements, of which he, in his regiment, felt himself a small, submissive, and insignificant part. They followed Prince Dolgorukov to the corridor and met, coming out of the door to the sovereign’s room by which Dolgorukov went in, a short man in civilian clothes, with an intelligent face and a distinctive, sharply protruding jaw, which, without spoiling his looks, endowed him with a particular liveliness and shiftiness of expression. This short man gave the nod of a close acquaintance to Dolgorukov, and began peering at Prince Andrei with an intently cold gaze, walking straight at him, and clearly expecting Prince Andrei to greet him or give way to him. Prince Andrei did neither; his face expressed spite, and the young man, turning away, went down the side of the corridor.
“Who’s that?” asked Boris.
“That is one of the most remarkable, and for me most unpleasant, of men. That is the minister of foreign affairs, Prince Adam Czartoryski. It’s these people,” Bolkonsky said with a sigh which he could not suppress, as they were leaving the palace, “it’s these people who decide the fates of nations.”
The next day the troops set out on the march, and Boris had no time up to the battle of Austerlitz itself to visit either Bolkonsky or Dolgorukov and remained for a time with the Izmailovsky regiment.
X
At dawn on the sixteenth, Denisov’s squadron, in which Nikolai Rostov served and which was in Bagration’s detachment, moved from its night lodgings into action, as they said, and having gone about half a mile behind other columns, halted on the high road. Rostov saw the Cossacks go past him, the first and second squadrons of hussars, the infantry battalions with the artillery, and then Generals Bagration and Dolgorukov rode past with their adjutants. All the fear which, as previously, he experienced before action, all the inner struggle by means of which he overcame that fear, all his dreams of how he would distinguish himself as a fine hussar in this action—went for naught. Their squadron was kept in reserve, and Nikolai Rostov spent that day feeling bored and melancholy. Between eight and nine in the morning, he heard gunfire ahead of him, shouts of “Hurrah,” saw some wounded brought back (they were not many), and finally saw a whole detachment of French cavalry led along in the midst of a Cossack hundred. Obviously the action was over, and the action had obviously been not big, but successful.