War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [239]
“Il faut absolument que vous veniez me voir,” she said to him in a tone implying that, for certain considerations, which he could not know, this was an absolute necessity. “Mardi entre les huit et neuf heures. Vous me ferez grand plaisir.”#302
Boris promised to fulfill her wish and was about to get into conversation with her, when Anna Pavlovna called him away, on the pretext that her aunt wanted to hear him.
“You do know her husband?” said Anna Pavlovna, closing her eyes and pointing to Hélène with a sad gesture. “Ah, she’s such an unhappy and lovely woman! Don’t speak of him in her presence, please don’t speak of him. It’s too painful for her!”
VII
When Boris and Anna Pavlovna returned to the general circle, the conversation there had been taken over by Prince Ippolit. Leaning forward in his armchair, he said:
“Le Roi de Prusse!” and, having said it, he began to laugh. Everyone turned to him. “Le Roi de Prusse?” Ippolit asked, laughed again, and again calmly and seriously sat back in the depths of his armchair. Anna Pavlovna waited a little, but as it seemed that Ippolit decidedly had no intention of saying more, she began to tell about how the godless Bonaparte purloined the sword of Frederick the Great in Potsdam.
“C’est l’épée de Frédéric le Grand que je…”*303 she began, but Ippolit interrupted her with the words:
“Le Roi de Prusse…” and again, as soon as they turned to him, he apologized and fell silent. Anna Pavlovna winced. Mortemart, Ippolit’s friend, addressed him resolutely:
“Voyons à qui en avez vous avec votre Roi de Prusse?”†304
Ippolit laughed, as if he was ashamed of his own laughter.
“Non, ce n’est rien, je voulais dire seulement…” (He intended to repeat a joke that he had heard in Vienna and that he had been trying to put in all evening.) “Je voulais dire seulement que nous avons tort de faire la guerre ‘pour le Roi de Prusse.’”‡305 12
Boris smiled cautiously, so that his smile could be understood either as mockery or as approval of the joke, depending on how it was received. Everyone laughed.
“Il est très mauvais, votre jeu de mots, très spirituel, mais injuste,” said Anna Pavlovna, shaking her shriveled finger. “Nous ne faisons pas la guerre pour le Roi de Prusse, mais pour les bons principes. Ah, le méchant, ce prince Hyppolite!”§306 she said.
The conversation did not flag all evening, turning mostly around political news. At the end of the evening it became especially lively when things got around to the rewards bestowed by the sovereign.
“Last year N. N. received a snuffbox with a portrait,” said l’homme à l’ésprit profond, “why shouldn’t S. S. receive the same reward?”
“Je vous demande pardon, une tabatière avec le portrait de l’Empereur est une récompense, mais point une distinction,” said the diplomat, “un cadeau plutôt.”*307
“Il y eu plutôt de antécédents, je vous citerai Schwarzenberg.”†308
“C’est impossible,”‡309 another objected to him.
“Let’s bet on it. Le grand cordon, c’est différent…”§310
When they all got up to leave, Hélène, who had spoken little all evening, again turned to Boris with the request and the gentle, meaningful order that he visit her on Tuesday.
“It’s very necessary for me,” she said with a smile, glancing at Anna Pavlovna, and Anna Pavlovna, with the same sad smile that accompanied her words when her exalted patroness was mentioned, seconded Hélène’s wish. It seemed as though, from certain words that Boris had spoken that evening about the Prussian troops, Hélène had suddenly discovered the