War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [813]
34. Charles IX having an upset stomach: On the night of the feast of St. Bartholomew, 24 August 1572, King Charles IX of France, at the instigation of his mother, Catherine de Medicis, and the family of the Guises, ordered a massacre of French Protestants.
35. Lodi…Wagram: A list of brilliant victories from Napoleon’s campaigns against Austria and Prussia between 1796 and 1809, which had made him seem invincible.
36. Murat had been taken prisoner: The news was false. The captured general was Charles Auguste Bonnamy de Bellefontaine (1764–1830), who had taken the Raevsky redoubt during the battle of Borodino, but then lost all his troops defending it and fell with twenty bayonet wounds. The Russians nursed him back to life, however, and returned him to France in 1814.
37. La guerre de Russie…bienfaits: This and the following quotation are from The Memorial of St. Helena (see note 19 to Volume I, Part Two).
Part Three
1. the siege of Saragossa: The siege of the Spanish city of Saragossa, capital of the province of Aragon, lasted for over two months, ending on 20 February 1809. The resistance of the citizens was so heroic that the French had to take the city piecemeal, storming each house.
2. the battle of Friedland: See note 23 to Volume II, Part Two.
3. allowed Mme Aubert-Chalmet…to remain in the city: However, see note 10 to Volume II, Part Five.
4. he gathered the people…to fight the French: Rastopchin’s posters summoned the people to assemble at the Three Hills Gate in Moscow on 1 September “to exterminate the villain.”
5. Georges Dandin: See note 9 to Volume II, Part Two.
6. the holy brothers of the Society of Jesus: Members of the Jesuit order, founded in 1543. The order was expelled from Portugal in 1759 and from France in 1762, and was briefly suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. Catherine the Great protected the Jesuits, as did the kings of Prussia, but Alexander I eventually expelled them from Russia. A Jésuite à robe courte was a sympathizer who was not a member of the order.
7. Columbus’s egg…simplicity: The story goes that Columbus, angered when someone at a banquet said that anyone could have discovered America, asked if anyone there could balance an egg on its end. When they all failed, Columbus took a hard-boiled egg, flattened one end on the table, and stood it up.
8. whoever marries a divorced woman: It is said by Christ, in Matthew 5:32 and in Luke 16:18.
9. Hamburg Gazette: The story of Vereshchagin and his false “proclamations” is historically accurate, as is Tolstoy’s account, in chapter XXV, of Vereshchagin’s ultimate fate and Rastopchin’s cynical role in it.
10. Speransky and Magnitsky…Klyucharev: For Speransky, see note 3 to Volume II, Part Three; note 17 to Volume II, Part Five; and note 14 to Volume III, Part One. M. L. Magnitsky was an associate of Speransky’s in 1810–11 and shared his disgrace. F. P. Klyucharev, the director of the Moscow Post Office and a Mason from Novikov’s circle (see note 4 to Volume II, Part Two), was totally innocent, but aroused Rastopchin’s suspicions by interceding for young Vereshchagin, who was a friend of his son’s.
11. a Vladimir and an Anna on the neck: See note 5 to Volume I, Part Two and note 2 to Volume II, Part Four respectively. The Order of St. Anna had two degrees, one worn on the breast, the other on a ribbon around the neck.
12. tied a knot in it: As a reminder to himself—a Russian custom that still persists.
13. to sit…and pray before their departure: See note 15 to Volume II, Part Five.
14. boyars: Tolstoy implies Napoleon’s ignorance of Russian history: the boyars were a privileged order of the medieval Russian aristocracy, abolished a century earlier by Peter the Great.
15. Rastopchin…notes: Count Rastopchin’s La vérité sur l’incendie de Moscou (“The Truth About the Burning of Moscow”) was first published in Paris in 1823.
16. the Reign of Terror: See note 11 to Volume II, Part One. La Terreur, as it is known in French, directed by the Committee for Public Safety, lasted from 31 May 1793 to 27 July 1794;