War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [490]
“A fine! A fine!” said the militiaman.
“Well, all right. How boring—it’s impossible to speak!”
“Qu’est-ce qui est la fable de tout Moscou?”†458 Pierre asked angrily, getting up.
“Enough, Count. You know!”
“I don’t know anything,” said Pierre.
“I know that you were friends with Natalie, and so…No, I’ve always been friendlier with Vera. Cette chère Véra!”
“Non, madame,” Pierre went on in a displeased tone. “I did not take upon myself the role of Miss Rostov’s knight at all, and I haven’t been there for almost a month. But I do not understand the cruelty…”
“Qui s’excuse, s’accuse,”‡459 Julie said, smiling and waving the lint, and to have the last word remain hers, she changed the subject immediately. “Imagine, I’ve just learned that poor Marie Bolkonsky arrived in Moscow yesterday. Have you heard she lost her father?”
“Is it true? Where is she? I’d very much like to see her,” said Pierre.
“I spent the evening with her yesterday. Today or tomorrow morning she’s going to her estate near Moscow with her nephew.”
“Well, how is she?” asked Pierre.
“All right, but sad. But do you know who saved her? It’s a whole romance: Nicolas Rostov. They surrounded her, wanted to kill her, wounded her people. He rushed in and saved her…”
“Another romance,” said the militiaman. “Decidedly, this general flight has been done so as to get all the old maids married. Catiche is one, Princess Bolkonsky another.”
“You know, I think in fact that she is un petit peu amoureuse du jeune homme.”*460
“A fine! A fine! A fine!”
“But how do you say it in Russian?…”
XVIII
When Pierre returned home, he was given two of Rastopchin’s posters that had been brought that day.
The first said that the rumor about Count Rastopchin forbidding people to leave Moscow was false and that, on the contrary, Count Rastopchin was glad that ladies and merchants’ wives were leaving. “There will be less fear, less gossip,” said the poster, “but I answer with my life that the villain will never be in Moscow.” These words showed Pierre clearly for the first time that the French would be in Moscow. The second poster said that our headquarters were in Vyazma, that Count Wittgenstein had beaten the French,22 but since many of the inhabitants wished to be armed, there were weapons prepared for them in the arsenal—sabers, pistols, muskets—which the inhabitants could obtain at a low price. The tone of the posters was no longer as jocular as in Chigirin’s former bantering. Pierre fell to pondering over these posters. Obviously, that dreadful storm cloud he had been calling up with all the powers of his soul and which at the same time aroused an involuntary terror in him—obviously, that storm cloud was approaching.
“Go into military service and leave for the army, or sit and wait?” Pierre asked himself this question for the hundredth time. He took a deck of cards that lay on his table and began to play patience.
“If this patience comes out,” he said to himself, shuffling the deck, holding it in his hand, and looking up, “if it comes out, that means…what does it mean?” Before he decided what it meant, he heard the voice of the eldest princess behind the door, asking if she could come in.
“Then it will mean I must go to the army,” Pierre finished to himself. “Come in, come in,” he added, addressing the princess.
(Only the eldest princess, with the long waist and stony face, was still living in Pierre’s house; the two younger ones had married.)
“Excuse me, mon cousin, for coming to you,” she said in a reproachfully agitated voice. “Something must finally be decided on! What is going to happen? Everyone has left Moscow, and the people are rebellious. Why are we staying?”
“On the contrary, everything seems quite well, ma cousine,” said Pierre, with that habitual jocularity which he, always embarrassed by his role as the princess’s benefactor, adopted in his relations with her.
“Yes, quite well…well indeed! Varvara Ivanovna told me today how our troops have distinguished themselves. It can be set down to their honor. And the people are quite rebellious,