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By Root 3908 0

her Petya so that he would not leave her again and would always be assigned to places of service where there was no chance of his getting into battle. While Nicolas alone was in danger, it seemed to the countess (and she even felt sorry because of it) that she loved her eldest more than the rest of her children; but when her youngest, the mischief, the poor student, who broke everything in the house and pestered everybody, this snub-nosed Petya, with his merry, dark eyes, fresh ruddy cheeks barely touched with down, ended up there, with those big, frightening, cruel men, who were fighting over something, and found something joyful in it—it seemed to the mother that it was him that she loved more, much more than all her other children. The closer it came to the time when the awaited Petya was to return to Moscow, the more the countess’s anxiety grew. She thought she would never live to see that happiness. The presence not only of Sonya, but of her favorite Natasha, even of her husband, vexed the countess. “What do I care about them, I don’t need anyone but Petya!” she thought.

In the last days of August, the Rostovs received a second letter from Nikolai. He wrote from Voronezh province, where he had been sent for horses. This letter did not calm the countess. Knowing that one son was out of danger, she began to worry still more about Petya.

Though by the twentieth of August almost all the Rostovs’ acquaintances had left Moscow, though everyone tried to persuade the countess to leave as soon as possible, she would hear nothing about departure until her treasure, her adored Petya, returned. On the twenty-eighth of August, Petya arrived. The sixteen-year-old officer did not like the morbidly passionate tenderness with which his mother met him. Though his mother concealed from him her intention of not letting him go again from under her wing, Petya understood her designs and, instinctively afraid of going soft with his mother, of turning womanish (as he thought to himself), he treated her coldly, avoided her, and, during his stay in Moscow, kept exclusively to the company of Natasha, for whom he had always had a special, almost amorous, brotherly tenderness.

Owing to the count’s habitual insouciance, nothing was ready for departure on the twenty-eighth of August, and the carts expected from the Ryazan and Moscow estates to transport all the possessions from the house arrived only on the thirtieth.

From the twenty-eighth to the thirty-first of August, Moscow was all bustle and commotion. Every day thousands of men wounded at the battle of Borodino were brought through the Dorogomilovo gate and distributed all over Moscow, and thousands of carts with citizens and their possessions left through other gates. Despite Rastopchin’s posters, or independently of them, or on account of them, the most strange and contradictory news spread about town. Some said that no one was allowed to leave; some, on the contrary, said that all the icons had been removed from the churches and everybody was being sent away by force; some said that there had been another battle after Borodino, in which the French had been crushed; some said that, on the contrary, the whole Russian army had been annihilated; some spoke of the Moscow militia going to the Three Hills with the clergy at their head; some said on the quiet that Augustin had been ordered not to leave, that some traitors had been caught, that the muzhiks were rioting and robbing those who were leaving, and so on, and so forth. But that was only talk, while in reality both those who were leaving and those who were staying (though the council in Fili at which it was decided to abandon Moscow had not taken place yet) felt, though without showing it, that Moscow would certainly be surrendered and that they had to take themselves away as soon as possible and save their possessions. They felt that everything was suddenly going to break up and change, but up to the first nothing had changed yet. As a criminal led out to execution knows that he is about to die, yet still looks around and straightens