War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [265]
Late in the evening, Rostov got ready to go and asked Denisov whether there would be any errands.
“Yes, wait,” said Denisov, glancing at the officers, and, taking his papers from under the pillow, he went to the window, where there was an inkstand, and sat down to write.
“It seems you can’t break an axhead with a straw,” he said, coming from the window and handing Rostov a large envelope. This was a petition addressed to the sovereign, drawn up by the auditor, in which Denisov, without mentioning anything about the failures of the provisions department, merely begged for mercy.
“Hand it in, since it seems…” He did not finish and smiled a painfully false smile.
XIX
Having returned to the regiment and told the commander about the state of Denisov’s case, Rostov rode on to Tilsit with the letter to the sovereign.
On the thirteenth of June, the French and Russian emperors met at Tilsit.25 Boris Drubetskoy asked the important person to whom he was attached that he be included in the suite appointed to be stationed in Tilsit.
“Je voudrais voir le grand homme,”*326 he said, referring to Napoleon, whom, until then, like everyone else, he had always called Buonaparte.
“Vous parlez de Buonaparte?”†327 his general said to him, smiling.
Boris looked questioningly at his general and understood at once that this was a joking test.
“Mon prince, je parle de l’empereur Napoléon,”‡328 he replied. The general smiled and patted him on the shoulder.
“You’ll go far,” he said to him, and took him along.
Boris was among the few who were at the Niemen on the day of the emperors’ meeting; he saw the rafts with monograms and Napoleon riding along the other bank past the French guards; saw the emperor Alexander’s pensive face as he sat silently in a tavern on the bank of the Niemen awaiting Napoleon’s arrival; saw how both emperors got into boats and how Napoleon, who was the first to reach the raft, stepped forward quickly to meet Alexander and gave him his hand, and how the two disappeared into the pavilion. Since the time of his entrance into the higher world, Boris had made it his habit to observe attentively what was happening around him and to write it down. During the meeting in Tilsit, he asked the names of the persons who arrived with Napoleon, about the uniforms they were wearing, and listened attentively to the words spoken by important persons. At the moment when the emperors went into the pavilion, he looked at his watch, and he did not forget to look again when Alexander came out of the pavilion. The meeting had lasted an hour and fifty-three minutes; and he wrote it down that evening, among other facts which he supposed were of historic significance. Since the emperor’s suite was very small, for a man who valued his success in the service to be in Tilsit at the time of the emperors’ meeting was a very important matter, and Boris, having gone to Tilsit, felt that from then on his position was completely assured. He was not only known, he was an accustomed and familiar figure. Twice he had been entrusted with messages to the sovereign himself, so that the sovereign knew his face, and all his attendants were now not only not aloof, as before, considering him a new person, but would have been surprised if he were not there.
Boris roomed with another adjutant, the Polish count Zhilinsky. Zhilinsky, a Pole brought up in Paris, was rich, passionately loved the French, and almost every day during their stay in Tilsit, Zhilinsky and Boris gathered French officers from the guards and French headquarters for dinners and lunches.
In the evening of the twenty-fourth of June, Count Zhilinsky, Boris’s roommate, gave a supper for his French acquaintances. At this supper there was a guest of honor—one of Napoleon’s adjutants—as well as several officers of the French guards, and a young boy from an old French aristocratic family, Napoleon’s page. On that same day, Rostov, taking advantage of