War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [360]
Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy admirer and was prepared to accept it; but some secret feeling of aversion for her, for her passionate desire to get married, for her unnaturalness, and a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility of true love, still stopped Boris. The time of his leave was coming to an end. All day and every blessed day he spent at the Karagins’, and every day, reasoning with himself, Boris said to himself that he would propose the next day. But in Julie’s presence, looking at her red face and chin, almost always daubed with powder, at her moist eyes, and the expression of her face, which showed a permanent readiness to change at once from melancholy to the unnatural rapture of marital happiness, Boris was unable to utter the decisive words—despite the fact that, in his imagination he had long considered himself the owner of the Penza and Nizhni Novgorod estates and had allocated the use of the income from them. Julie saw Boris’s irresolution, and the thought sometimes occurred to her that she repulsed him; but at once her feminine self-deception furnished her with a consolation, and she said to herself that it was merely the shyness that comes from love. However, her melancholy began to turn into irritation, and shortly before Boris’s departure, she undertook a decisive plan. At the same time that Boris’s leave was coming to an end, Anatole Kuragin appeared in Moscow and, naturally enough, in the Karagins’ drawing room, and Julie, unexpectedly abandoning her melancholy, became very cheerful and attentive to Kuragin.
“Mon cher,” Anna Mikhailovna said to her son, “je sais de bonne source que le prince Basile envoie son fils à Moscou pour lui fair épouser Julie.*372 I love Julie so much that I would find that a pity. What do you think, my friend?” said Anna Mikhailovna.
The thought of making a fool of himself and wasting this whole month of heavy melancholic duty around Julie for nothing, and seeing the income from the Penza estates, already allocated and properly put to use in his imagination, in the hands of another—especially in the hands of stupid Anatole—offended Boris. He went to the Karagins’ with the firm intention of making a proposal. Julie met him with a cheerful and careless air, told him casually how merry she had been at last night’s ball, and asked him when he was leaving. Though Boris had come with the intention of speaking of his love, and therefore intended to be tender, he began speaking irritably of women’s inconstancy: of how easily women could go from sadness to joy, and that their mood depended only on who was courting them. Julie became offended and said that it was all true, that a woman needed diversity, that one and the same thing all the time would bore anyone.
“In that case I’d advise you…” Boris began, wishing to sting her. But at that moment the offensive thought occurred to him that he might leave Moscow without achieving his goal and having wasted his efforts (which never happened to him in anything). He stopped in mid-speech, lowered his eyes, so as not to see her unpleasantly irritated and irresolute face, and said: “It’s not at all to quarrel with you that I’ve come today. On the contrary…” He glanced at her to make sure he could go on. All her irritation suddenly vanished, and her anxious, pleading eyes were directed at him in eager expectation. “I can always arrange it so that I see her rarely,” thought Boris. “The thing’s started and must be done!” He turned bright red, raised his eyes to her, and said: “You know my feelings for you!” There was no need to say more: Julie’s face beamed with triumph and self-satisfaction; yet she made Boris say everything that is said on such occasions, that he loved her and had never loved any woman more than her. She knew she could demand that in exchange for the Penza estates and the Nizhni Novgorod woodlands, and she got what she demanded.
The bride-