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Prince Vasily’s son Hippolyte – “your charming son Hippolyte” as Anna Pavlovna invariably called him – made his entrance, as did the expected vicomte, over whom, according to Anna Pavlovna, “all our ladies” were quite beside themselves. Hippolyte came in peering through a lorgnette, and without lowering this lorgnette, drawled loudly but indistinctly, “the Vicomte de Mortemart” and immediately, paying no attention to his father, seated himself beside the little princess and, inclining his head so close that very little space remained between his face and hers, he began to tell her something obscure and private, laughing.
The vicomte was an attractive-looking young man, with mild features and manners who evidently considered himself a celebrity but, being well brought up, modestly permitted the company in which he found himself to take advantage of his person. Anna Pavlovna was obviously offering him to her guests as a treat. Just as a good maître d’hôtel presents as a supreme delicacy that piece of beef which no one would wish to eat if they had seen it in the filthy kitchen, so this evening Anna Pavlovna served up the vicomte to her guests as something supremely refined, although the gentlemen who were staying at the same hotel and played billiards with him every day saw him as little more than a master of cannon shots, and did not feel in the least bit fortunate to have met the vicomte and spoken with him.
Talk immediately turned to the murder of the Duc d’Enghien. The vicomte said the duke had been killed by his own magnanimity and that there were particular reasons for Bonaparte’s animosity.
“Ah! Do tell us about that, vicomte,” said Anna Pavlovna.
The vicomte bowed slightly as a token of acquiescence and smiled courteously. Anna Pavlovna walked round the vicomte and invited everyone to listen to his story.
“The vicomte was personally acquainted with the duke,” Anna Pavlovna whispered to one person.
“The vicomte is a marvellous raconteur,” she declared to another.
“So obviously a man of good society,” she said to a third, and thus the vicomte was served up to the company in a tasteful manner in the best possible light, like roast beef on a hot dish garnished with fresh green herbs.
The vicomte, about to begin his story, gave a delicate smile.
“Move over here, chère Hélène,” said Anna Pavlovna to the beautiful princess, who was sitting a little distance away, at the centre of a different circle.
Princess Hélène was smiling. She stood up, wearing that same constant smile of a perfectly beautiful woman with which she had entered the drawing room. With a slight rustle of her white ball gown trimmed with its plush and fur, and a gleam of white shoulders, glossy hair and diamonds, she stepped between the men who had made way for her and, looking at none of them, but smiling at all as though obligingly granting each one the right to admire the beauty of her figure and well-formed shoulders and her bosom and her back that were greatly exposed in the fashion of the day, and seeming to bring with her all the splendour of a ball, she went over to Anna Pavlovna. Hélène was so lovely that not only was there not a shade of coquetry to be seen in her, but she seemed, on the contrary, to be ashamed of the all-too-overwhelming power of her undeniable beauty. It was as though she wished to diminish her beauty and could not. “What a beautiful woman!” said all who saw her.
As though overcome by something quite extraordinary, the vicomte shrugged his shoulders and lowered his eyes as she seated herself before him and illuminated him with that same unvarying smile.
“Madame, truly I fear for my abilities before such an audience,” he said, bowing his head and smiling.
The princess, finding it needless to respond, rested the elbow of her shapely, exposed arm on the table. She waited, smiling. Throughout the whole story she sat up straight, glancing occasionally either at her beautiful, well-fleshed arm, the shape of which had changed in pressing against the table, or at her even more beautiful bosom, on which she adjusted her diamond necklace; several times she rearranged the folds of her gown and every time that she was impressed by something in the story, she glanced round at Anna Pavlovna and immediately assumed the very same expression that the lady-in-waiting’s face wore, then settled once again into her radiant smile. Following Hélène, the little princess had also come over from the tea table.
“Attendez-moi, I’ll get my needlework,” she said. “Now, what ever are you thinking of?” she asked, addressing Prince Hippolyte. “Fetch me my ridicule.”
The little princess, smiling and chatting on all sides, promptly made everyone shuffle about as she took her place, and then cheerfully sat rearranging herself.
“Now I’m all right,” she said and, requesting them to begin, she took up her work. Prince Hippolyte, after bringing her work-bag, had gone round behind her and, drawing up an armchair, sat close beside her.
The charming Hippolyte was striking for his uncommon resemblance to his beautiful sister, but even more for the fact that, despite the resemblance, he was amazingly ugly. The features of his face were precisely the same as those of his sister, but in her case everything was constantly illuminated by a buoyant, self-sufficient, youthfully vital smile and an exceptional, classical beauty of body, while in the brother’s case, on the contrary, the same face was clouded by idiocy and invariably expressed a self-opinionated peevishness, while the body was puny and weak. The eyes, nose and mouth – all seemed to be clenched into a single indeterminate, dull grimace, and the hands and legs always assumed unnatural positions.
“It isn’t a ghost story, is it?” he asked, having seated himself beside the princess and hastily set his lorgnette to his eyes, as though he could not speak without this instrument.
“Most decidedly not, my dear fellow,” said the astonished storyteller, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“The thing is, I absolutely detest ghost stories,” he said in a tone that made it clear that he uttered words first and only realised what they meant afterwards.
Because he spoke with such self-confidence, no one could tell whether what he had said was very clever or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark-green frock coat and knee-breeches in the flesh-pink shade that he called cuisse de nymphe éffrayée, with stockings and shoes. He had seated himself as far back as possible in the armchair, facing the raconteur, and placed one hand, with one plain and one engraved signet ring, upon the table in front of him in such an outstretched pose that it clearly cost him a great deal of effort to maintain it at that distance, and yet he held it there throughout the story. In the palm of his other hand he clasped his lorgnette, teasing up with that same hand the curly “titus” coiffure that lent his elongated face an even odder expression and, as though he had just remembered something, he began looking first at his hand with the rings, extended in display, then at the vicomte’s feet, and then he twisted himself entirely around with a rapid, lurching movement, the way he did everything, and stared long and hard at the Princess Bolkonskaya.
HIPPOLYTE KURAGIN Drawing by M.S. Bashilov, 1866
“When I had the good fortune to see the late lamented Duc d’Enghien for the last time,” the vicomte began in a tone of mournful elegance, surveying his listeners, “he spoke in the most flattering terms of the beauty and genius of the great Mademoiselle Georges. Who does not know this brilliant and charming woman? I expressed my surprise as to how the duke could have come to know her, not having been in Paris in recent years. The duke smiled and told me that Paris is not as far from Mannheim as it might seem. I was horrified and informed his highness of my terror at the thought of his visiting Paris. ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘God only knows whether even here we are not surrounded by turncoats and traitors and whether your presence in Paris, no matter how secret it may be, is not known to Buonaparte!’ But the duke only smiled at my words with the chivalry and courage which constitute the distinguishing trait of his line.”
“The house of Condé is a branch of laurel grafted on to the tree of the Bourbons, as Pitt recently said,” Prince Vasily pronounced in a monotone, as though he were dictating to some invisible clerk.
“Monsieur Pitt put it very well,” his son Hippolyte added laconically, twisting abruptly on his armchair, his trunk in one direction and his legs in the other, after hastily snatching up his lorgnette and directing his sights at his parent.
“In short,” continued the vicomte, addressing himself primarily to the beautiful Princess Hélène, who kept her gaze fixed on him, “I had to leave Etenheim and only later learned that the duke, in the impetuosity of his valour, had travelled to Paris and paid Mademoiselle Georges the honour not only of admiring her, but also of visiting her.”
“But he had an attachment of the heart for the Princess Charlotte de Rohan Rochefort,” Anna Pavlovna interrupted passionately. “They said that he was secretly married to her,” she added, evidently frightened by the imminent content of this tale, which seemed to her too free in the presence of a young girl.
“One attachment is no hindrance to another,” the vicomte continued, smiling subtly and failing to perceive Anna Pavlovna’s apprehension. “But the point is that prior to her intimacy with the duke, Mademoiselle Georges had enjoyed intimate relations with another person.”
He paused.
“That person was called Buonaparte,” he announced, glancing round at his listeners with a smile. Anna Pavlovna, in her turn, glanced around uneasily, seeing the tale becoming ever more dangerous.
“And so,” the vicomte continued, “the new sultan from the Thousand and One Nights did not scorn to spend frequent evenings at the home of the most beautiful, most agreeable woman in France. And Mademoiselle Georges” – he paused, with an expressive shrug of his shoulders – “was obliged to make a virtue of necessity. The fortunate Buonaparte would usually arrive in the evening, without appointing the days in advance.”
“Ah! I see what is coming, and it fills me with horror,” said the pretty little Princess Bolkonskaya with a shudder of her lissom, shapely shoulders.
The elderly lady, who had been sitting beside the aunt the whole evening, came to join the raconteur’s circle and shook her head with an emphatic, sad smile.
“It is terrible, is it not?” she said, although she had obviously not even heard the beginning of the story. No one paid any attention to the inappropriateness of her remark, nor indeed to her.
Prince Hippolyte promptly declared in a loud voice:
“Georges in the role of Clytemnestra, how marvellous!”
Anna Pavlovna remained silent and anxious, still not having finally made up her mind whether the tale that the vicomte was telling was proper or improper. On the one hand, it involved evening visits to actresses, on the other hand, if the Vicomte de Mortemart himself, a relative of the Montmorencys through the Rohans, the finest representative of the St. Germain district, was going to make unseemly talk in the drawing room, then who, after all, knew what was proper or improper?
“One evening,” the vicomte continued, surveying his listeners and becoming more animated, “this Clytemnestra, having enchanted the entire theatre with her astonishing interpretation of Racine, returned home and thought she would rest to recover from her fatigue and excitement. She was not expecting the sultan.”
Anna Pavlovna shuddered at the word “sultan”. Princess Hélène lowered her eyes and stopped smiling.
“Then suddenly the maidservant announced that the former Vicomte Rocroi wished to see the great actress. Rocroi was the name that the duke used for himself. He was received,” the vicomte added, and after pausing for a few seconds in order to make it clear that he was not telling all that he knew, he continued: “The table gleamed with crystal, enamel, silver and porcelain. Two places were set, the time flew by imperceptibly, and the delight …”
Unexpectedly at this point in the narrative Prince Hippolyte emitted a peculiar, loud sound, which some took for a cough, others for snuffling, mumbling or laughing, and he began hastily fumbling after the lorgnette which he had dropped. The narrator stopped in astonishment. The alarmed Anna Pavlovna interrupted the description of the delights which the vicomte was depicting with such relish.
“Do not keep us in suspense, vicomte,” she said.
The vicomte smiled.
“Delight reduced hours to minutes, when suddenly there came a ring at the door and the startled maid, trembling, came running in to announce that a terrible Bonapartist Mameluke was ringing and that his appalling master was already standing at the entrance …”
“Charmant, délicieux,” whispered the little Princess Bolkonskaya, jabbing her needle into her embroidery as if to indicate that the fascination and charm of the story had prevented her from continuing her work.
The vicomte acknowledged this mute praise with a grateful smile and was about to continue when a new person entered the drawing room and effected the very pause that was required.
IV
This new person was the young Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, husband of the little princess. It was clear, not so much from the way the young prince had arrived late and was yet received in the most polite fashion by the hostess, as from the way that he made his entrance, that he was one of those young people who are so pampered by society that they have come to despise it. The young prince, a slightly short but slim man, was extremely handsome, with dark hair and a brownish complexion and a somewhat languorous air; he was dressed with exceptional elegance and had tiny hands and feet. Everything about his appearance, from his bored and weary gaze to his measured saunter, made the sharpest possible contrast to his lively little wife. He was evidently not only acquainted with everyone present in the drawing room, but so sick of them all that he found it utterly tedious even to look at or listen to them, since he knew in advance exactly how everything would go. Of all the people there that he found so very boring, he seemed to find none more so than his own pretty wife. He turned away from her lovely face with a faint, sour grimace that spoiled his handsome features, as if he were thinking: “You were the last thing this company required to make it utterly loathsome to me.”
He kissed Anna Pavlovna’s hand with an expression that suggested he would have given God only knew what to be spared this onerous duty and, squinting his eyes till they were almost closed, he surveyed the assembled company.
“You have a large gathering,” he said in a high, thin voice, nodding to one person while proffering his hand to another, holding it out to be shaken.
“You intend to go to the war, prince?” said Anna Pavlovna.
“General Kutuzóv,” he said, stressing the final syllable, zóff, like a Frenchman, and removing a glove from a perfectly white, tiny hand with which he rubbed his eye, “General-in-Chief Kutuzóv has asked me to be his adjutant.”
“But what about Lise, your wife?”
“She will go to the country.”
“And are you not ashamed to deprive us of your delightful wife?”
The young adjutant puffed out his lips to make a derisive sound of the kind that only the French make, but said nothing.
“André,” said his wife, addressing her husband in the same flirtatious tone in which she addressed strangers, “do come here and sit down and listen to the story the vicomte is telling us about Mademoiselle Georges and Buonaparte.”
Andrei narrowed his eyes and sat down as far away as possible, as though he had not heard his wife.
“Pray continue, vicomte,” said Anna Pavlovna. “The vicomte was telling us how the Duc d’Enghien visited Mademoiselle Georges,” she added, addressing the new arrival, so that he could follow the continuation of the story.
“The purported rivalry between Buonaparte and the duke over Mademoiselle Georges,” said Prince Andrei in a tone suggesting it was absurd for anyone not to know about that, and he slumped against the armrest of his chair. At this point the young man in spectacles named Monsieur Pierre, who had not taken his delighted, affectionate gaze off Prince Andrei from the moment he entered the drawing room, approached him and grasped him by the arm. Prince Andrei was so incurious that, without even glancing round, he twisted his face into a grimace that expressed annoyance with whoever was touching his epaulette, but on seeing Pierre’s smiling face, Prince Andrei also broke into a smile, and suddenly his entire face was transformed by the kind and intelligent expression that suffused it.
“What’s this? You here, my dear Horse Guard?” the prince asked with delight, but also with a slightly patronising and supercilious inflection.
“I knew that you would be,” replied Pierre. “I’ll come to you for supper,” he added quietly, in order not to disturb the vicomte, who was continuing with his story. “May I?”
“No, you may not,” said Prince Andrei, laughing and turning away, but letting Pierre know with a gentle squeeze of his hand that he need not have asked.
The vicomte was telling them that Mademoiselle Georges had implored the duke to hide, that the duke had said he had never hidden from anyone, and that Mademoiselle Georges had said to him, “Your highness, your sword belongs to the King and to France” and that the duke had after all hidden himself under the laundry in the next room, and that when Napoleon had become unwell, the duke had emerged from under the laundry and seen Buonaparte there before him.
“Charming, quite exquisite!” said a voice among the listeners.
Even Anna Pavlovna, having observed that the most difficult part of the tale had been negotiated successfully, calmed down and was quite able to enjoy the story. The vicomte warmed to his task and, rolling his r’s powerfully, declaimed with the animation of an actor …
“The enemy of his house, the usurper of the throne, the man who stood at the head of his nation, was here, before him, prostrate and motionless on the ground and perhaps at his last gasp. As the great Corneille said: ‘Malicious glee surged in his breast and outraged majesty alone helped him repel it.’”
The vicomte stopped and, as he prepared to proceed with his story with still greater verve, he smiled, as though reassuring the ladies, who were already over-excited. Quite without warning during this pause, the beautiful Princess Hélène looked at her watch, exchanged glances with her father, and the two of them suddenly stood up, their movements disturbing the circle and interrupting the story.
“We shall be late, papa,” she said simply, all the while beaming her smile at everyone.
“Do forgive me, my dear vicomte,” said Prince Vasily to the Frenchman, affectionately tugging him down by the sleeve to prevent him rising from his seat. “These wretched festivities of the ambassador’s deprive me of my pleasure and interrupt you.”
“So awfully sorry to forsake your exquisite soirée,” he said to Anna Pavlovna.
His daughter, Princess Hélène, began making her way between the chairs, gently restraining the folds of her gown, with the smile on her lovely face beaming ever more radiantly.
V
Anna Pavlovna requested the vicomte to wait while she showed Prince Vasily and his daughter out through the next room. The elderly lady who had previously been sitting with the aunt and had then so foolishly expressed her interest in the vicomte’s story, hastily rose to her feet and followed Prince Vasily to the entrance hall.
The former pretence of interest had completely vanished from her face. That kind, tearful face now expressed only anxiety and fear.
“What can you tell me, prince, about my Boris?” she said, as she caught up with him in the hallway (she pronounced the name Boris with a distinctive stress on the “o”). “I cannot stay here in St. Petersburg any longer. Tell me, what news can I bring my poor boy?”
Although Prince Vasily listened to the elderly lady unwillingly, almost impolitely, and even showed his impatience, she smiled at him affectionately and imploringly, and to prevent him leaving took him by the arm.
“What trouble would it be for you to have a word with His Majesty, and he would be directly transferred to the Guards,” she pleaded.
“Believe me, I will do all that I can, princess,” replied Prince Vasily, “but it is difficult for me to ask His Majesty; I would advise you to appeal to Razumovsky through Prince Golitsyn, that would be wiser.”
The elderly lady bore the name of Drubetskaya, one of the finest family names in Russia, but she was poor and, having long since withdrawn from society, she had forfeited her former connections. She had come here now solely to obtain an appointment to the Guards for her only son. It was only in order to see Prince Vasily that she had had herself invited to Anna Pavlovna’s soirée, and it was only for that reason that she had sat listening to the vicomte’s story. She was alarmed at Prince Vasily’s words; her once-beautiful face expressed, for a moment, something close to disdain. She smiled again and clutched Prince Vasily’s arm more tightly.
“Listen, prince,” she said, “I have never once petitioned you for anything and I never will, and I have never once reminded you of my father’s friendship towards you. But now I entreat you in God’s name, do this for my son and I shall regard you as my benefactor,” she added hastily. “No, do not be angry, but promise me. I have asked Golitsyn and he refused. Be the same good fellow you always were,” she said, trying to smile, despite the tears in her eyes.
“Papa, we shall be late,” said Princess Hélène, turning her beautiful head on her classical shoulders as she waited by the door.
Influence in society is capital which, if it is not to diminish, must be protected. Prince Vasily knew this and, realising that if he began asking for everyone who begged him, he would soon be unable to ask for anyone at all, he rarely made use of his influence. In Princess Drubetskaya’s case, however, her renewed appeal prompted something akin to a pang of conscience. She had reminded him of the truth: that he had been obliged to her father for the first steps in his own career. In addition, he could see from her manner that she was one of those women, especially mothers, who, once they have taken an idea into their heads, will never relent until their wishes have been granted, otherwise they are prepared to carry on badgering every day and every minute and even create scenes. It was this final consideration that swayed him.
“My dear Anna Mikhailovna,” he said with the customary familiarity and boredom in his voice, “for me it is almost impossible to do what you wish, but in order to prove to you that I love you and honour the memory of the late count, your father, I shall do the impossible. Your son shall be transferred to the Guards, here is my hand on it. Are you content?”
And he shook her hand, tugging it downwards.
“My dear man, you are my benefactor! I expected nothing less from you,” the mother lied and demeaned herself, “I knew how kind you are.”
He was about to leave.
“Wait, just one more word. Since he will move to the Guards …” she said and stopped short. “You are on good terms with Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov, recommend Boris to him as an adjutant. Then my mind would be at rest, and then …”
Anna Mikhailovna begged, like a gypsy, for her son: the more she was given, the more she wanted. Prince Vasily smiled.