War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [408]
“Give him mine, he has far to go…”
The letter Balashov brought back was Napoleon’s last letter to Alexander. All the details of the conversation were conveyed to the Russian emperor, and the war began.
VIII
After his meeting with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrei left for Petersburg on business, as he told his family, but in reality in order to meet Prince Anatole Kuragin, whom he considered it necessary to meet. Kuragin, about whom he made inquiries when he reached Petersburg, was no longer there. Pierre had let his brother-in-law know that Prince Andrei was coming after him. Anatole Kuragin at once obtained an appointment from the minster of war and left for the army in Moldavia. At that same time in Petersburg, Prince Andrei met Kutuzov, his former general, who was always well-disposed towards him, and Kutuzov suggested that he go with him to the army in Moldavia, where the old general had been appointed commander in chief.20 Prince Andrei, receiving an appointment to be attached to general headquarters, left for Turkey.
Prince Andrei considered it improper to write to Kuragin and challenge him. Without giving him a new pretext for a duel, Prince Andrei considered that a challenge on his part would compromise Countess Rostov, and therefore he sought to meet Kuragin personally with the intention of finding a new pretext for a duel. But in the Turkish army he again failed to meet Kuragin, who returned to Russia soon after Prince Andrei’s arrival in Turkey. In a new country and in new conditions, Prince Andrei’s life became easier. After his fiancée’s betrayal, which struck him the more strongly the more he tried to conceal its effect on him from everyone, the conditions of life in which he had been happy became a burden for him, and still more of a burden were the freedom and independence that had once been so dear to him. He not only did not think those former thoughts that had first come to him as he gazed at the sky on the field of Austerlitz, which he had liked to enlarge upon with Pierre, and which had filled his solitude in Bogucharovo and then in Switzerland and Rome; but he was even afraid to remember those thoughts that had opened boundless and bright horizons. He was now concerned only with the most immediate, practical interests, unconnected with his former ones, which he grasped at the more eagerly the more closed to him the former ones were. As if that boundless, ever-receding vault of the sky that used to stand over him had suddenly turned into a low, definite, oppressive vault, in which everything was clear and nothing was eternal or mysterious.
Of the activities that presented themselves to him, military service was the simplest and most familiar. Occupying the post of general on duty in Kutuzov’s headquarters, he performed his duties persistently and diligently, astonishing Kutuzov by his zeal for work and his conscientiousness. Not having found Kuragin in Turkey, Prince Andrei did not consider it necessary to gallop back to Russia after him; but all the same he knew that, no matter how much time passed, he could not, on meeting Kuragin, despite all the contempt he had for him, despite all the proofs he gave himself that it was not worth humiliating himself by a confrontation with him, he knew that, on meeting him, he could not help challenging him, as a hungry man cannot help falling upon food. And this awareness that the insult had not yet been avenged, that the anger had not yet been vented, but remained in his heart, poisoned the artificial calm that Prince Andrei arranged for himself in Turkey, in the form of a bustlingly busy and somewhat ambitious and vainglorious activity.
In the year twelve, when news of the war with Napoleon reached Bucharest (where Kutuzov had been staying for two months, spending the days and nights with his Wallachian woman), Prince Andrei asked Kutuzov to transfer him to the Western Army. Kutuzov, who by then was sick of Bolkonsky’s activity, which served as a reproach to his idleness, quite willingly let him go and gave him an