War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [594]
“Merci,” said Pierre. The captain looked intently at Pierre, as he had looked at him when he learned what shelter was in German, and his face suddenly brightened.
“Ah! dans ce cas je bois à notre amitié!”§603 he cried merrily, pouring two glasses of wine. Pierre took the filled glass and drank it. Ramballe drank his, shook Pierre’s hand once more, and leaned his elbow on the table in a pensively melancholic pose.
“Oui, mon cher ami, voilà les caprices de la fortune,” he began. “Qui m’aurait dit que je serai soldat et capitaine de dragons au service de Bonaparte, comme nous l’appelions jadis. Et cependant me voilà à Moscou avec lui. Il faut vous dire, mon cher,” he went on in the sad and measured voice of a man who is about to tell a long story, “que notre nom est l’un de plus anciens de la France.”#604
And with the easy and naïve candor of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre the history of his ancestors, his childhood, adolescence, and maturity, all his genealogical, proprietary, and familial relations. “Ma pauvre mère” naturally played an important role in the story.
“Mais tout ça ce n’est que la mise en scène de la vie, le fond c’est l’amour. L’amour! N’est-ce pas, monsieur Pierre?” he said, growing animated. “Encore un verre.”*605
Pierre drank again and poured a third glass.
“Oh, les femmes, les femmes!”†606 And the captain, looking at Pierre with unctuous eyes, began talking about love and about his amorous adventures. There were a great many of them, which was easy to believe, looking at the officer’s self-satisfied, handsome face and the rapturous animation with which he talked about women. Despite the fact that all of Ramballe’s love stories had that smutty character in which the French see the exceptional charm and poetry of love, the captain told his stories with such a genuine conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the charms of love, and described women so enticingly, that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
It was obvious that the amour which the Frenchman liked so much was neither that low and simple kind of love that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor the romantic love he felt for Natasha and fanned so much himself (Ramballe equally despised both these kinds of love—one was l’amour de charretiers, the other l’amour des nigauds‡607 ); the amour which the Frenchman venerated consisted mainly in unnatural relations with women and in the combinations of abnormalities that endowed the feeling with its main charm.
Thus, the captain told a touching story of his love for an enchanting thirty-five-year-old marquise and at the same time for a charmingly innocent seventeen-year-old child, the enchanting marquise’s daughter. The contest of magnanimity between the mother and daughter, which ended with the mother sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her own lover, excited the captain even now, though it was a long-past memory. Then he recounted an episode in which the husband played the role of the lover and he (the lover) the role of the husband, and several other comic episodes from his souvenirs d’Allemagne, where asile means Unterkunft, where les maris mangent de la choucroute and les jeunes filles sont trop blondes.§608
Finally, the latest episode in Poland, still fresh in the captain’s memory, which he recounted with quick gestures and a flushed face, consisted in the fact that he had saved the life of a Pole (in general, episodes of saving lives occurred constantly in the captain’s stories) and the Pole had entrusted his enchanting wife to him (Parisienne de coeur*609 ), while he himself entered into the service of the French. The captain was happy, the enchanting Polish lady wanted to run off with him; but, moved by magnanimity, the captain had returned the wife to her husband with the words: “Je vous ai sauvé la vie, je sauve votre honneur!”†610 Having repeated these words, the captain rubbed his eyes and shook himself, as if to drive away the weakness that came over him at this touching memory.
Listening to the captain’s stories, as often