War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [508]
Prince Andrei, going back into the shed, lay down on the rug, but could not sleep.
He closed his eyes. One image succeeded another. He lingered long and joyfully over one of them. He vividly recalled one evening in Petersburg. Natasha was telling him with an animated, excited face how she had gone to pick mushrooms the previous summer and lost her way in a big forest. She incoherently described to him the dense forest and her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and, interrupting herself every moment, said: “No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,” even though Prince Andrei reassured her, saying that he did understand, and indeed he understood everything she wanted to say. Natasha was displeased with her own words; she sensed that she was not conveying the passionately poetic feeling which she had experienced that day and which she wanted to bring out. “He was so lovely, that old man, and it was so dark in the forest…and he had such a kind…No, I don’t know how to tell it,” she said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrei now smiled the same joyful smile that he had smiled then, looking in her eyes. “I understood her,” thought Prince Andrei. “I not only understood her, but it was that inner force, that sincerity, that inner openness, that soul of hers, which was as if bound by her body, it was that soul that I loved…loved so strongly, so happily…” And suddenly he remembered what his love had ended with. “He didn’t need any of that. He saw none of it and understood none of it. He saw in her a pretty and fresh girl, with whom he did not deign to join his fate. While I?…And to this day he’s alive and cheerful.”
Prince Andrei jumped up as if someone had burned him and again began pacing in front of the shed.
XXVI
On the twenty-fifth of August, the eve of the battle of Borodino, M. de Beausset, prefect of the French emperor’s palace, and Colonel Fabvier came, the first from Paris, the second from Madrid, to see the emperor Napoleon in his camp at Valuevo.
Having changed into court uniform, M. de Beausset ordered the package he had brought with him carried to the emperor ahead of him, and entered the front section of Napoleon’s tent, where, while talking to Napoleon’s adjutants, who surrounded him, he occupied himself with opening the box.
Fabvier, not going into the tent, stood talking with some generals of his acquaintance by its entrance.
The emperor Napoleon had not yet left his bedroom and was finishing his toilette. Snorting and grunting, he turned now his fat back, now his hairy, fat chest under the brush with which a valet was rubbing his body. Another valet, stopping up the vial with his finger, sprayed eau de cologne over the emperor’s pampered body, with a gesture which said that he alone could know how much eau de cologne must be sprayed and where. Napoleon’s short hair was wet and tousled on his forehead. But his face, though swollen and yellow, expressed physical pleasure: “Allez ferme, allez toujours…”*469 he repeated, cringing and grunting, to the valet rubbing him. An adjutant who came into the bedroom to report to the emperor how many prisoners had been taken in yesterday’s action, having said what he had to say, stood by the door waiting for permission to leave. Napoleon, wincing, gave the adjutant a frowning look from under his eyebrows.
“Point de prisonniers,” he repeated the adjutant’s words. “Ils se font démolir. Tant pis pour l’armée russe,”*470 he said. “Allez toujours, allez ferme,” he said, hunching up and presenting his fat shoulders to the brush.
“C’est bien! Faites entrer monsieur de Beausset, ainsi que Fabvier,”†471 he said to the adjutant, nodding his head.
“Oui, Sire.” And the adjutant disappeared through the door of the tent.
The two valets quickly dressed his majesty, and he, in the dark blue uniform of the guards, with firm, quick steps, went out to the reception room.
Just then Beausset, his hands hurrying, was setting up the present he had brought from the empress on two chairs