War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [615]
Provincial life in 1812 was exactly the same as ever, with the only difference that things were more lively in town because of the arrival of many rich families from Moscow, and that, as in everything that was going on at that time in Russia, some special boldness was noticeable in it—devil-may-care, harum-scarum—and also in that the banal conversation necessary among people, which formerly was about the weather and mutual acquaintances, was now about Moscow, the army, and Napoleon.
The society gathered at the governor’s was the best society of Voronezh.
There were a great many ladies, there were several of Nikolai’s Moscow acquaintances, but none of the men could in any way rival the bearer of the St. George, the remount officer of the hussars, who was at the same time the good-natured and well-bred Count Rostov. Among the men there was an Italian prisoner—an officer of the French army—and Nikolai felt that the presence of this prisoner further enhanced his significance as a Russian hero. He was like a trophy. Nikolai felt it, and it seemed to him that everyone looked at the Italian that way, and Nikolai treated this officer kindly, with dignity and restraint.
As soon as Nikolai entered in his hussar uniform, spreading about him the smell of scent and wine, and said himself and heard said to him several times the words “vaut mieux tard que jamais,” he was surrounded; all eyes turned to him, and he felt at once that he had stepped into the position of the universal favorite, which befitted him in the province, and was always agreeable, but now, after prolonged privation, made him drunk with pleasure. Not only in posting stations, inns, and the landowner’s carpet room were the servant girls flattered by his attentions, but here, at the governor’s soirée, there was (as it seemed to Nikolai) an inexhaustible number of young ladies and pretty girls who were waiting impatiently for him to pay attention to them. Ladies and girls flirted with him, and from the first day the old folk began bustling about to get this dashing scapegrace of a hussar married and settled down. Among the latter was the governor’s wife herself, who received Rostov like a close relation, called him “Nicolas” and “my dear.”
Katerina Petrovna indeed began to play waltzes and écossaises, and dancing began, in which Nikolai charmed the whole provincial society still more with his adroitness. He even surprised them with his special, casual way of dancing. Nikolai was surprised himself at his way of dancing that evening. He had never danced that way in Moscow, and even would have considered such an all-too-casual way of dancing improper and mauvais genre;*666 but here he felt the need to astonish them all with something extraordinary, something which they would take as ordinary in the capital, but as yet unknown in the provinces.
All evening Nikolai paid most attention to a blue-eyed, plump, and sweet-looking blonde, the wife of one of the provincial officials. With the naïve conviction of young men making merry, that other men’s wives were created for them, Rostov never left this lady’s side and treated her husband in a friendly, somewhat conspiratorial way, as if, though there was no talk of it, they knew how nicely they would get along together—that is, Nikolai and this husband’s wife. The husband, however, did not seem to share that conviction and tried to sulk with Rostov. But Nikolai’s good-natured naïveté was so boundless that now and then the husband involuntarily yielded to his merry spirits. Towards the end of the evening, however, as the wife’s face became ever more flushed and animated, her husband’s face became sadder and paler, as if they had one portion of animation between them, and as it increased in the wife, it diminished in the husband.
V
Nikolai, with a smile that never left his face, slightly curved in an armchair, sat bending closely over the blonde, paying her mythological