War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [65]
“He’ll get up in twenty minutes. Let’s go to Princess Marya,” he said.
The little princess had filled out during this time, but her eyes and her short lip with its little mustache and smile rose as gaily and sweetly as ever when she began to speak.
“Mais c’est un palais,” she said to her husband, looking around with the expression of someone paying compliments to the host at a ball. “Allons, vite, vite!…”*154 Looking about, she smiled at Tikhon, and at her husband, and at the servant who accompanied them.
“C’est Marie qui s’exerce? Allons doucement, il faut la surprendre.”†155
Prince Andrei walked behind her with a polite and sad expression.
“You’ve aged, Tikhon,” he said to the old man, who kissed his hand as he passed.
Before the room from which the sounds of the clavichord came, a pretty blonde Frenchwoman popped out of a side door. Mlle Bourienne seemed wildly ecstatic.
“Ah! quel bonheur pour la princesse,” she said. “Enfin! Il faut que je la prévienne.”‡156
“Non, non, de grâce…Vous êtes Mlle Bourienne, je vous connais déjà par l’amitié que vous porte ma belle-soeur,” said the princess, kissing her. “Elle ne nous attend pas!”§157
They went up to the door of the sitting room, through which came the sounds of the same passage repeated again and again. Prince Andrei stopped and winced, as if expecting something unpleasant.
The princess went in. The passage broke off in the middle; a cry was heard, then the heavy footsteps of Princess Marya and the sounds of kissing. When Prince Andrei went in, the two princesses, who had seen each other only once for a short time at Prince Andrei’s wedding, were standing with their arms around each other, their lips pressed hard to whatever place they had happened upon in the first moment. Mlle Bourienne was standing beside them, her hands pressed to her heart, smiling piously, apparently as ready to weep as to laugh. Prince Andrei shrugged his shoulders and winced, as music lovers wince when they hear a false note. The two women let go of each other, then again, as if fearing it would be too late, seized each other by the hands, began kissing, tore their hands away, and then again began kissing each other on the face, and, quite unexpectedly for Prince Andrei, they both wept and began to kiss again. Mlle Bourienne also wept. Prince Andrei obviously felt awkward; but for the two women it seemed natural to weep; it seemed it had never occurred to them that their meeting could be otherwise.
“Ah! chère!…Ah! Marie!…” the two women suddenly began to speak and then laughed. “J’ai revé cette nuit…” “Vous ne nous attendiez donc pas?…” “Ah, Marie, vous avez maigri…” “Et vous avez repris…”*158
“J’ai tout de suite reconnu madame la princesse,”†159 Mlle Bourienne put in.
“Et moi qui ne me doutais pas!…” exclaimed Princess Marya. “Ah! André, je ne vous voyais pas.”‡160
Prince Andrei and his sister kissed each other’s hands, and he told her she was the same pleurnicheuse§161 she had always been. Princess Marya turned to her brother, and through her tears the loving, warm, and meek gaze of her big, luminous eyes, very beautiful at that moment, rested on Prince Andrei’s face.
The little princess talked nonstop. Her short upper lip with its mustache would momentarily flit down, touching, where it had to, the rosy lower lip, and open up again in a smile of gleaming teeth and eyes. She told about an incident that had happened to her on Spasskoe Hill, which was dangerous for her in her condition, and just after that said she had left all her dresses in Petersburg and would go about here in God knows what, and that Andrei was quite changed, and that Kitty Ordyntsev had married an old man, and that there was a suitor for Princess Marya pour tout de bon,*162 but we’ll talk about that later. Princess Marya went on silently looking at her brother, and there was love and sadness in her beautiful eyes. It was clear that she had established her own train of thought, independent