• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3368 0

dressed-up men and women, who moved, talked, and sang strangely in the bright light; she knew what it was all supposed to represent, but it was all so pretentiously false and unnatural that she first felt embarrassed for the performers, and then found them ridiculous. She looked around at the faces of the spectators, seeking in them the same feeling of mockery and perplexity that was in her; but all the faces were attentive to what was taking place on stage and expressed admiration—feigned, as it seemed to Natasha. “That must be how it’s supposed to be!” she thought. She kept looking alternately now at the rows of pomaded heads in the parterre, now at the bare women in the boxes, particularly at her neighbor Hélène, who, totally undressed, with a quiet and calm smile, never took her eyes off the stage. Sensing the bright light spread all through the theater and the warm air heated by the crowd, Natasha was gradually beginning to get into a state of inebriation such as she had not experienced for a long time. She did not remember who she was and where she was and what was happening before her. She looked and thought, and the strangest thoughts flashed through her head unexpectedly, without connection. Now the thought came to her of jumping up to the footlights and singing the aria the actress was singing, then she wanted to touch a little old man who was sitting not far away with her fan, then to lean over to Hélène and tickle her.

At one of the moments when everything was hushed onstage, waiting for an aria to begin, the front door creaked, and over the carpet of the parterre on the side where the Rostovs’ box was, the footsteps of a late arrival were heard. “Here’s Kuragin!” Shinshin whispered. Countess Bezukhov turned, smiling, to the entering man. Natasha followed Hélène’s gaze and saw an extraordinarily handsome adjutant approaching their box with a self-assured and at the same time courteous air. This was Anatole Kuragin, whom she had seen and noticed at a Petersburg ball long ago. He was now in an adjutant’s uniform with one epaulette and an aiguillette. He walked with a restrained swagger that would have been ridiculous if he had not been so good-looking and if his handsome face had not borne an expression of such benevolent satisfaction and good cheer. Though the performance was going on, he walked down the slanting carpet of the aisle unhurriedly, lightly jingling his spurs and saber, bearing his handsome, perfumed head smoothly aloft. Having glanced at Natasha, he went up to his sister, placed his tightly gloved hand on the edge of her box, nodded to her, and, leaning over, asked her something, pointing to Natasha.

“Mais charmante!”*374 he said, evidently about Natasha, as she did not so much hear as understand from the movement of his lips. Then he walked to the front row and sat down next to Dolokhov, nudging with his elbow in a friendly and casual way that same Dolokhov whom others treated so fawningly. He smiled at him with a merry wink and rested his foot against the rail.

“How alike the brother and sister are!” said the count. “And both so handsome!”

Shinshin began telling the count in a low voice the story of some intrigue of Kuragin’s in Moscow, which Natasha listened in on precisely because he had said “charmante” of her.

The first act was over. Everyone in the parterre stood up, mingled, began coming and going.

Boris came to the Rostovs’ box, received their felicitations with great simplicity and, raising his eyebrows, with a distracted smile, conveyed to Natasha and Sonya his fiancée’s request that they be present at her wedding, and left. Natasha spoke to him with a merry and flirtatious smile, and offered to that same Boris with whom she had once been in love her felicitations on his marriage. In the state of inebriation she was in, everything seemed simple and natural.

The bare Hélène sat next to her and smiled identically at everyone; and Natasha smiled at Boris in the same way.

Hélène’s box was filled and surrounded on the parterre side by the most well-born and intelligent men, who seemed