War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [404]
He paced silently from one corner of the room to the other, and again stopped in front of Balashov. His face was as if petrified in its stern expression, and his left leg trembled still more rapidly than before. Napoleon knew that he had this trembling of the left calf. “La vibration de mon mollet gauche est un grand signe chez moi,”*406 he would say later.
“Suggestions such as clearing the Oder and Vistula can be made to the prince of Baden, not to me,” Napoleon nearly cried out, quite unexpectedly for himself. “If you were to give me Petersburg and Moscow, I would not accept these conditions. You say I started the war? And who was the first to join his army? The emperor Alexander, not I. And you offer me negotiations, when I’ve spent millions, while you are in alliance with England, and when your position is bad—you offer me negotiations! What is the goal of your alliance with England? What has it gained you?” he said hurriedly, obviously no longer directing his speech at stating the advantages of concluding a peace and discussing its possibility, but only at proving his rightness and his strength, and the wrongs and errors of Alexander.
The introduction to his speech was made, obviously, with the aim of bringing out the advantages of his position and showing that, in spite of that, he had accepted the opening of negotiations. But he now began to speak, and the more he spoke, the less able he was to control his speech.
The whole aim of his speech now was obviously to exalt himself and insult Alexander, that is, to do the thing he had least wanted to do at the beginning of the meeting.
“They say you’ve concluded a peace with the Turks?”
Balashov inclined his head affirmatively.
“Peace has been concluded…” he began. But Napoleon did not let him speak. He clearly needed to speak himself, and he went on to speak with that eloquence and unrestrained irritation to which spoiled people are so greatly inclined.
“Yes, I know you’ve concluded a peace with the Turks, without getting Moldavia and Wallachia. And I would have given your sovereign those provinces, just as I gave him Finland.13 Yes,” he went on, “I promised, and I would have given the emperor Alexander Moldavia and Wallachia, but now he won’t have those beautiful provinces. He might, however, have joined them to his empire, and within one reign he would have expanded Russia from the Gulf of Bothnia to the mouth of the Danube. Catherine the Great couldn’t have done more,” Napoleon was saying, growing more and more flushed, pacing the room, and repeating to Balashov almost the same words he had spoken to Alexander himself at Tilsit. “Tout cela il l’aurait dû à mon amitié…Ah! quel beau règne, quel beau règne!”*407 he repeated several times, stopped, took a gold snuffbox from his pocket, and inhaled greedily through his nose.
“Quel beau règne aurait pu être celui de l’empereur Alexandre!”†408
He glanced at Balashov with pity, and just as Balashov was about to observe something, he again hastily interrupted him.
“What could he desire and seek that he could not have found in my friendship?…” said Napoleon, with a shrug of perplexity. “No, he found it better to surround himself with my enemies—and who are they?” he went on. “He summoned the Steins, the Armfelts, the Wintzingerodes, the Bennigsens. Stein—a traitor driven from his fatherland; Armfelt—a debauchee and intriguer; Wintzingerode—a fugitive French subject; Bennigsen—a bit more of a soldier than the others, but all the same an incompetent, who was unable to do anything in 1807, and who must call up terrible memories in the emperor Alexander…14 Let’s suppose, if they were competent, they could be made use of,” Napoleon went on, barely able to keep up verbally with the constantly emerging considerations showing him his rightness or power (which to his mind were the same), “but that is not the case: they’re no good either for peace or for war. They say Barclay is more capable than the rest;