War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [449]
To her surprise, Princess Marya noticed that during the time of his illness, the old prince did not admit Mlle Bourienne to his rooms either. Tikhon alone took care of him.
After a week, the old prince came out and took up his former life again, busying himself especially actively with constructions and gardens and stopping all his former relations with Mlle Bourienne. His look and cold tone with Princess Marya seemed to say to her: “See, you thought up things against me, you lied to Prince Andrei about my relations with this Frenchwoman, and made me quarrel with him; but you see, I need neither you nor the Frenchwoman.”
One half of the day Princess Marya spent with Nikolushka, supervising his lessons, giving him lessons in Russian and music herself, and talking with Dessales; the other part of the day she spent in her rooms with books, her old nanny, and God’s people, who sometimes came to her by the back door.
About the war Princess Marya thought as women think about war. She feared for her brother, who was there; was horrified, not understanding it, at the cruelty of people, which made them kill each other; but she did not understand the significance of this war, which seemed to her the same as all other wars. She did not understand the significance of this war, even though Dessales, her constant interlocutor, passionately interested in the course of the war, tried to explain his reflections to her, and even though God’s people, who came to see her, spoke with horror, each in his own way, of popular rumors about the coming of the Antichrist, and even though Julie, now Princess Drubetskoy, who had again entered into correspondence with her, wrote her patriotic letters from Moscow.3
I write to you in Russian, my good friend, because I have hatred for all Frenchmen as well as their language, which I cannot hear to speak…We in Moscow are all ravished through enthusiasm for our adored emperor.
My poor husband suffers travails and hunger in Jewish pot-houses; but the news which I have inspires me still more.
You must have heard about the heroic deed of Raevsky, in embracing his two sons and saying: “I shall perish with them, but we will not waver!” And indeed, though the enemy was twice stronger, we did not waver. We pass our time as we can; but in war as in war. Princess Alina and Sophie sit whole days with me, and we, unfortunate widows of living husbands, make beautiful conversations over the lint;4 only you, my friend, are lacking…
And so on.
Princess Marya did not understand the whole significance of the war mainly because the old prince never spoke of it, did not acknowledge it, and at dinner laughed at Dessales when he talked of this war. The prince’s tone was so calm and assured that Princess Marya unreasoningly believed him.
For the whole month of July the old prince was extremely active and even animated. He started a new garden and a new building, constructed for the servants. One thing that troubled Princess Marya was that he slept little, and, having abandoned his habit of sleeping in the study, changed his sleeping place every day. One day he would order his camp bed made up in the gallery, then he would remain on the sofa or the Voltaire armchair in the drawing room and doze off without undressing, while, instead of Mlle Bourienne, the boy Petrusha read to him, then he would spend the night in the dining room.
On the first of August, a second letter came from Prince Andrei. In his first letter, which had come soon after his departure, Prince Andrei had humbly asked his father’s forgiveness for what he had allowed himself to tell him and asked to be restored to his favor. To this the old man had replied with an affectionate letter, and after that letter had distanced the Frenchwoman from himself. The second letter from Prince Andrei, written from near Vitebsk after the French had occupied it, consisted of a brief description of the whole campaign, with a map drawn in the letter, and of reflections on the further course of