War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [548]
Bilibin shrugged his shoulders, showing that even he could do nothing about such a plight.
“Une maîtresse-femme! Voilà ce qui s’appelle poser carrément la question. Elle voudrait épouser tous les trois à la fois,”**525 thought Bilibin.
“But, tell me, how will your husband look at the matter?” he said, his reputation being so firmly founded that he was not afraid of harming himself by such a naïve question. “Will he consent?”
“Ah! Il m’aime tant!” said Hélène, who for some reason fancied that Pierre also loved her. “Il fera tout pour moi.”*526
Bilibin gathered the skin to indicate that a mot was in preparation.
“Même le divorce,”†527 he said.
Hélène laughed.
Among the people who allowed themselves to doubt the lawfulness of the projected marriage was Hélène’s mother, Princess Kuragin. She was constantly tormented by envy of her daughter, and now, when the subject of envy was closest to the princess’s heart, she could not reconcile herself to this thought. She consulted with a Russian priest about the extent to which it was possible to divorce and enter into marriage while the husband was living, and the priest told her it was impossible, and, to her joy, pointed out to her a Gospel text which (as it seemed to the priest) rejected outright the possibility of entering into marriage while the husband is living.
Armed with these arguments, which to her seemed irrefutable, the princess went to her daughter early one morning, so as to find her alone.
Having heard her mother’s objections, Hélène smiled meekly and mockingly.
“But it says straight out: whoever marries a divorced woman…”8 said the old princess.
“Ah, maman, ne dites pas de bêtises. Vous ne comprenez rien. Dans ma position j’ai des devoirs,”‡528 Hélène began, switching to French from Russian, in which it always seemed to her there was some lack of clarity in her case.
“But, my friend…”
“Ah, maman, comment est-ce que vous ne comprenez pas que le Saint Père, qui a le droit de donner des dispenses…”§529
Just then a lady companion who lived at Hélène’s came to report that his highness was in the reception room and wished to see her.
“Non, dites-lui que je ne veux pas le voir, que je suis furieuse contre lui, parce qu’il m’a manqué parole.”#530
“Comtesse, à tout péché miséricorde,”**531 said a fair-haired young man with a long face and nose, coming in.
The old princess respectfully rose and curtsied. The young man paid no attention to her. The princess nodded to her daughter and sailed towards the door.
“No, she’s right,” thought the old princess, all of whose convictions crumbled before the appearance of his highness. “She’s right; but how is it we didn’t know it in our long-lost youth? Yet it was so simple,” thought the old princess, getting into her carriage.
At the beginning of August, Hélène’s case became perfectly defined and she wrote a letter to her husband (who loved her very much, as she thought) in which she informed him of her intention to marry N. N., and of the fact that she had embraced the one true religion and that she asked him to go through all the necessary formalities for divorce, of which the bearer of the letter would inform him.
“Sur ce je prie Dieu, mon ami, de vous avoir sous sa sainte et puissante garde. Votre amie Hélène.”*532
This letter was brought to Pierre’s house at the time when he was on the field of Borodino.
VIII
Having run down from the Raevsky battery for the second time towards the end of the battle of Borodino, Pierre, with crowds of soldiers, made his way through the gully towards Knyazkovo, reached the dressing station, and, seeing blood and hearing cries and moans, hastened on, mixing with the crowds of soldiers.
The one thing Pierre now desired with all the forces of his soul was to get away as quickly as possible from those dreadful impressions in which he had lived that day, to return to the ordinary