War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [68]
“Delighted, delighted,” he said and, looking her intently in the eye once again, quickly stepped away and sat down in his place. “Sit down, sit down! Mikhail Ivanovich, sit down.”
He pointed his daughter-in-law to the place next to him. A servant pulled out the chair for her.
“Ho, ho!” said the old man, looking at her rounded waist. “Rushing things; that’s not good!”
He laughed drily, coldly, unpleasantly, as he always laughed—only with his mouth, not with his eyes.
“You must walk, walk as much as possible, as much as possible,” he said.
The little princess either did not hear or did not want to hear his words. She was silent and seemed embarrassed. The prince asked about her father, and the princess began to speak and smiled. He asked her about mutual acquaintances: the princess became still more animated and started talking away, giving the prince greetings and town gossip.
“La comtesse Apraksine, la pauvre, a perdu son mari et elle a pleuré les larmes de ses yeux,”†166 she said, becoming more and more animated.
As her animation increased, the prince looked at her more and more sternly, and suddenly, as if he had studied her enough and arrived at a clear idea of her, turned away and addressed Mikhail Ivanovich.
“Well, now, Mikhail Ivanovich, things are going badly for our friend Buonaparte. Prince Andrei” (he always referred to his son in the third person like this) “has just been telling me what forces are being prepared against him! But you and I always considered him an empty man.”
Mikhail Ivanovich, who had no idea when this you and I had spoken such words about Bonaparte, but who understood that he was needed in order to launch into the favorite subject, looked at the young prince in surprise, not knowing what would come of it.
“We have a great tactician here!” the prince said to his son, pointing to the architect.
And the conversation turned again to the war, to Bonaparte, and to today’s generals and statesmen. The old prince seemed to be convinced not only that all present-day men of action were mere boys, who did not even understand the ABC’s of military and state affairs, and that Bonaparte was a worthless little Frenchman who was successful only because there were no Potemkins and Suvorovs to oppose him; but he was also convinced that there were no political difficulties in Europe, nor was there a war, but only some sort of marionette comedy that today’s people played at, pretending they meant business. Prince Andrei cheerfully endured his father’s mockery of the new people, and provoked his father to talk and listened to him with obvious delight.
“All that there was before seems good,” he said, “but wasn’t it that same Suvorov who fell into the trap set for him by Moreau and was unable to get out of it?”48
“Who told you that? Who told you?” cried the prince. “Suvorov!” And he flung away his plate, which was deftly caught by Tikhon. “Suvorov!…Think a little, Prince Andrei. Two men: Friedrich and Suvorov…Moreau! Moreau would have been captured if Suvorov had had a free hand; but he had the Hofs-kriegs-wurst-schnapps-rath49 on his hands. Even the devil wouldn’t be glad of that. But go, and you’ll learn about these Hofs-kriegs-wursts-chnapps-raths! Suvorov couldn’t get on with them, how is Mikhail