War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [488]
XVII
After the sovereign’s departure from Moscow, Moscow life flowed on in its former, habitual way, and the course of that life was so habitual that it was hard to remember the recent days of patriotic rapture and enthusiasm, and it was hard to believe that Russia was actually in danger and that the members of the English Club were at the same time sons of the fatherland, ready for any sacrifice for its sake. The one thing that recalled the general rapturously patriotic mood during the sovereign’s stay in Moscow was the call for contributions in men and money, which, as soon as it was made, acquired a legal, official form and seemed inevitable.
With the enemy’s approach to Moscow, the Muscovites’ view of their situation not only did not become more serious, but, on the contrary, became still more light-minded, as always happens with people who see great danger approaching. At the approach of danger, two voices always speak with equal force in a man’s soul: one quite reasonably tells the man to consider the properties of the danger and the means of saving himself from it; the other says still more reasonably that it is too painful and tormenting to think about the danger, when it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and save himself from the general course of things, and therefore it is better to turn away from the painful things until they come and think about what is pleasant. In solitude, a man most often yields to the first voice; in company, on the contrary, to the second. That is what now happened with the citizens of Moscow. It was long since there had been so much merrymaking in Moscow as there was that year.
Rastopchin’s little posters,19 with a picture at the top of a drinking house, a tapster, and the Moscow tradesman Karpushka Chigirin who, being a militiaman and having taken a drop too much from the tap, heard that Bonaparte wanted to march on Moscow, became angry, denounced all the French in nasty terms, came out of the drinking house, and under the eagle began speaking to the assembled people, were read and discussed on a par with the latest bouts-rimés of Vassily Lvovich Pushkin.20
People gathered in the corner room of the club to read these posters, and some liked the way Karpushka taunted the French, saying that they will get bloated with cabbage, burst with kasha, choke on shchi, that they’re all dwarfs, and that one peasant woman will toss three of them with a pitch-fork. Some disapproved of this tone and said it was banal and stupid. It was said that Rastopchin had banished all Frenchmen and even all foreigners from Moscow, that there were spies and agents of Napoleon among them; but this was said primarily in order to have an occasion to repeat the witticism Rastopchin had produced as they were being sent away. The foreigners were sent by barge to Nizhny, and Rastopchin said to them: “Rentrez en vous-même, entrez dans la barque et n’en faites pas une barque de Charon.”*454 21 It was said that all the government offices had already been sent away from Moscow, and at once Shinshin’s joke was added, that for that alone people should be grateful to Napoleon. The story went that Mamonov’s regiment would cost him eight hundred thousand, that Bezukhov had spent still more on his militia, but that the best thing about Bezukhov’s actions was that he was going to put on a uniform himself and ride at the head of his regiment, and charge no admission