War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [801]
4. so er verdient: Tolstoy took this letter from A Description of the First War of the Emperor Alexander with Napoleon in 1805, by A. I. Mikhailovsky-Danilevsky (St. Petersburg, 1844).
5. a Vladimir with a bow: The civil and military order of St. Vladimir was founded in 1782 by Catherine the Great to commemorate the twentieth year of her reign; it was named for St. Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev (ca. 958–1015), who converted Kievan Rus to Orthodox Christianity. The military decoration was worn with a special bow in the ribbon.
6. Lambach, Amstetten, and Mölk: These three battles were given by a detachment of 6,000 men under Bagration, whom Kutuzov sent to delay the French while the Russian army retreated from Krems to Znaim. The same detachment also fought at Schöngraben.
7. our ambassador in Vienna: The Russian ambassador in Vienna at that time was Count Razumovsky, who is best known now for the “Razumovsky” string quartets he commissioned from Beethoven. He built a fine neoclassical embassy in Vienna at his own expense, and was the chief Russian negotiator at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, which reorganized Europe after the fall of Napoleon.
8. Orthodox Russian armed forces: An ironic reference to a phrase that occurs in the litanies of various church services.
9. Bonaparte is in Schönbrunn…Count Vrbna…orders: Having taken Vienna on 1 November 1805, Napoleon chose as his headquarters the superb imperial residence of the Hapsburgs in the Schönbrunn quarter of the city. Count Rudolf Vrbna acted as mediator in the negotiations between the Austrians and the French.
10. those who invented gunpowder: Russians say of a stupid person that he “won’t invent gunpowder.” Bilibin’s mot reverses the saying.
11. the meeting in Berlin…a new Campo Formio: In October 1805, Alexander I went to Berlin to try to persuade the Prussian king Friedrich-Wilhelm III to join the war against Napoleon. They reached a secret agreement in Potsdam, but before the Prussian envoy Haugwitz could reach Napoleon with an ultimatum, the Russian-Austrian alliance had already been defeated, and it was Napoleon who dictated the terms of the peace. Eight years earlier, on 17 October 1797, in the Italian town of Campo Formio, a peace agreement had been signed between the French republic and the Austrian empire which ended Napoleon’s campaign in Italy.
12. pour les beaux yeux…separately: In accordance with the treaty of Turin (1796), the king of Sardinia, Victor-Amadeus III, had to yield Nice, Savoy, and other fortresses and towns to the French. One of the conditions of the Potsdam ultimatum (see previous note) was recompense for the king of Sardinia. Before the French took Vienna, the Austrian emperor Franz I indeed sent an ambassador to Napoleon with an offer of a separate peace, and on the eve of abandoning the capital, he sent Napoleon another offer of a truce. Neither offer was accepted.
13. Démosthène…bouche d’or: The greatest of the Athenian orators, Demosthenes (384–322 b.c.) was said to have had a speech defect as a boy and to have corrected it by learning to speak clearly while holding a pebble in his mouth.
14. here was that Toulon: Napoleon’s first victory was the taking of Toulon, which had become the center of French royalist resistance, in 1793. Following it he was promoted from captain to general.
15. I’m not joking…ni bêtise, ni lâcheté: The historical facts of the French taking of the bridge of Tabor in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) are very close to Bilibin’s version.
16. touched a Leiden jar: The Leiden jar was the first electrical condenser, invented in 1745 by Pieter van Musschenbroek, professor of physics at Leiden