War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [59]
“Ah, my friend!” he said, taking Pierre by the elbow; and in his voice there was sincerity and weakness, such as Pierre had never noticed in him before. “We sin so much, we deceive so much, and all for what? I’m over fifty, my friend…I’ll…Everything ends in death, everything. Death is terrible.” He wept.
Anna Mikhailovna was the last to come out. She went to Pierre with quiet, slow steps.
“Pierre!…” she said.
Pierre looked at her questioningly. She kissed the young man on the forehead, wetting it with tears. She paused.
“Il n’est plus…”*142
Pierre looked at her through his spectacles.
“Allons, je vous reconduirai. Tâchez de pleurer. Rien ne soulage comme les larmes.”†143
She led him to the dark drawing room, and Pierre was glad that nobody could see his face. Anna Mikhailovna left him, and when she came back, he was sound asleep, his head resting on his arm.
The next morning Anna Mikhailovna said to Pierre:
“Oui, mon cher, c’est une grande perte pour nous tous. Je ne parle pas de vous. Mais Dieu vous soutiendra, vous êtes jeune et vous voilà à la tête d’une immense fortune, je l’espère. Le testament n’a pas été encore ouvert. Je vous connais assez pour savoir que cela ne vous tournera pas la tête, mais cela vous impose des devoirs, et il faut être homme.”‡144
Pierre was silent.
“Peut-être plus tard je vous dirai, mon cher, que si je n’avais pas été là, Dieu sait ce que serait arrivé. Vous savez mon oncle avant-hier encore me promettait de ne pas oublier Boris. Mais il n’a pas eu le temps. J’espère, mon cher ami, que vous remplirez le désir de votre père.”*145
Pierre understood nothing and silently gazed at Anna Mikhailovna, blushing shyly. Having talked with Pierre, Anna Mikhailovna drove off to the Rostovs’ and went to bed. She woke up in the morning and told the Rostovs and all her acquaintances the details of Count Bezukhov’s death. She said that the count had died as she would like to die, that his end had been not only touching, but also instructive; and the last meeting of the father and son had been so touching that she could not recall it without tears, and that she did not know who had behaved better in those terrible moments: the father, who remembered everything and everyone so well in the last minutes and said such touching things to the son; or Pierre, who was a pity to see, he was so crushed, but who nevertheless tried to hide his sorrow, so as not to upset his dying father. “C’est pénible, mais cela fait du bien; ça élève l’âme de voir des hommes comme le vieux comte et son digne fils,”†146 she said. She also told disapprovingly about the actions of the princess and Prince Vassily, but as a great secret and in a whisper.
XXII
At Bald Hills, the estate of Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, the arrival of the young Prince Andrei and the princess was expected any day; but that expectation did not disrupt the harmonious order in which life went on in the old prince’s house. General in Chief Prince Nikolai Andreevich, known in society as le roi de Prusse,‡147 had been banished to his country estate under Paul, and had lived uninterruptedly at Bald Hills ever since, with his daughter, Princess Marya, and her companion, Mlle Bourienne. And under the new reign, though he was permitted entry to the capitals,42 he went on living uninterruptedly in the country, saying that anyone who needed him could travel the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills, but that he himself needed no one and nothing. He used to say that there were only two sources of human vice: idleness and superstition; and that there were only two virtues: activity and intelligence. He occupied himself personally with his daughter’s upbringing, and to develop the two chief virtues in her, gave her lessons in algebra and geometry and portioned out her whole life among constant studies. He himself was constantly occupied, now with writing his memoirs, now with higher mathematical calculations, now with turning snuff boxes on a lathe, now with