《War And Peace》 Book3 CHAPTER I
by Leo Tolstoy
PRINCE VASSILY used not to think over his plans. Still less did he think of
doing harm to others for the sake of his own interest. He was simply a man of
the world, who had been successful in the world, and had formed a habit of being
so. Various plans and calculations were continually forming in his mind, arising
from circumstances and the persons he met, but he never deliberately considered
them, though they constituted the whole interest of his life. Of such plans and
calculations he had not one or two, but dozens in train at once, some of them
only beginning to occur to him, others attaining their aim, others again coming
to nothing. He never said to himself, for instance: “That man is now in power, I
must secure his friendship and confidence, and through him obtain a grant from
the Single-Assistance Fund”; nor, “Now Pierre is a wealthy man, I must entice
him to marry my daughter and borrow the forty thousand I need.” But the man in
power met him, and at the instant his instinct told him that that man might be
of use, and Prince Vassily made friends with him, and at the first opportunity
by instinct, without previous consideration, flattered him, became intimate with
him, and told him of what he wanted.
Pierre was ready at hand in Moscow, and Prince Vassily secured an appointment
as gentleman of the bedchamber for him, a position at that time reckoned equal
in status to that of a councillor of state, and insisted on the young man's
travelling with him to Petersburg, and staying at his house. Without apparent
design, but yet with unhesitating conviction that it was the right thing, Prince
Vassily did everything to ensure Pierre's marrying his daughter. If Prince
Vassily had definitely reflected upon his plans beforehand, he could not have
been so natural in his behaviour and so straightforward and familiar in his
relations with every one, of higher and of lower rank than himself. Something
drew him infallibly towards men richer or more powerful than himself, and he was
endowed with a rare instinct for hitting on precisely the moment when he should
and could make use of such persons.
Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming rich and Count Bezuhov, after his lonely and
careless manner of life, felt so surrounded, so occupied, that he never
succeeded in being by himself except in his bed. He had to sign papers, to
present himself at legal institutions, of the significance of which he had no
definite idea, to make some inquiry of his chief steward, to visit his estate
near Moscow, and to receive a GREat number of persons, who previously had not
cared to be aware of his existence, but now would have been hurt and offended if
he had not chosen to see them. All these various people, business men,
relations, acquaintances, were all equally friendly and well disposed towards
the young heir. They were all obviously and unhesitatingly convinced of Pierre's
noble qualities. He was continually hearing phrases, such as, “With your
exceptionally kindly disposition”; or, “Considering your excellent heart”; or,
“You are so pure-minded yourself, count …” or, “If he were as clever as you,”
and so on, so that he was beginning genuinely to believe in his own exceptional
goodness and his own exceptional intelligence, the more so, as at the bottom of
his heart it had always seemed to him that he really was very good-natured and
very intelligent. Even people, who had before been spiteful and openly hostile
to him, became tender and affectionate. The hitherto ill-tempered, eldest
princess, with the long waist and the hair plastered down like a doll, had gone
into Pierre's room after the funeral. Dropping her eyes and repeatedly turning
crimson, she said that she very much regretted the misunderstanding that had
arisen between them, and that now she felt she had no right to ask him for
anything except permission, after the blow that had befallen her, to remain for
a few weeks longer in the house which she was so fond of, and in which she had
made such sacrifices. She could not control herself, and wept at these words.
Touched at seeing the statue-like princess so changed, Pierre took her by the
hand and begged her pardon, though he could not have said what for. From that
day the princess began knitting a striped scarf for Pierre, and was completely
changed towards him.
“Do this for my sake, my dear boy; she had to put up with a GREat deal from
the deceased, any way,” Prince Vassily said to him, giving him some deed to sign
for the princess's benefit. Prince Vassily reflected that this note of hand for
thirty thousand was a sop worth throwing to the poor princess, that it might not
occur to her to gossip about Prince Vassily's part in the action taken with the
inlaid portfolio. Pierre signed the note, and from that time the princess became
even more amiable. The younger sisters became as affectionate too, especially
the youngest one, the pretty one with the mole, who often disconcerted Pierre
with her smiles and her confusion at the sight of him.
To Pierre it seemed so natural that every one should be fond of him, it would
have seemed to him so unnatural if any one had not liked him, that he could not
help believing in the sincerity of the people surrounding him. Besides, he had
no time to doubt their sincerity or insincerity. He never had a moment of
leisure, and felt in a continual state of mild and aGREeable intoxication. He
felt as though he were the centre of some important public function, felt that
something was continually being expected of him; that if he did this and that,
all would be well, and he did what was expected of him, but still that happy
result loomed in the future.
In these early days Prince Vassily, more than all the rest, took control of
Pierre's affairs, and of Pierre himself. On the death of Count Bezuhov he did
not let Pierre slip out of his hands. Prince Vassily had the air of a man
weighed down by affairs, weary, worried, but from sympathetic feeling, unable in
the last resort to abandon this helpless lad, the son, after all, of his friend,
and the heir to such an immense fortune, to leave him to his fate to become a
prey to plotting knaves. During the few days he had stayed on in Moscow after
Count Bezuhov's death, he had invited Pierre to him, or had himself gone to see
Pierre, and had dictated to him what he was to do in a tone of weariness and
certainty which seemed to be always saying: “You know that I am overwhelmed with
business and that it is out of pure charity that I concern myself with you, and
moreover you know very well that what I propose to you is the only feasible
thing.”
“Well, my dear boy, to-morrow we are off at last,” he said one day, closing
his eyes, drumming his fingers on his elbow, and speaking as though the matter
had long ago been settled between them, and could not be settled in any other
way.
“To-morrow we set off; I'll give you a place in my coach. I'm very glad. Here
all our important business is settled. And I ought to have been back long ago.
Here, I have received this from the chancellor. I petitioned him in your favour,
and you are put on the diplomatic corps, and created a gentleman of the
bedchamber. Now a diplomatic career lies open to you.”
Notwithstanding the effect produced on him by the tone of weariness and
certainty with which these words were uttered, Pierre, who had so long been
pondering over his future career, tried to protest. But Prince Vassily broke in
on his protest in droning, bass tones, that precluded all possibility of
interrupting the flow of his words; it was the resource he fell back upon when
extreme measures of persuasion were needed.
“But, my dear boy, I have done it for my own sake, for my conscience' sake,
and there is no need to thank me. No one has ever complained yet of being too
much loved; and then you are free, you can give it all up to-morrow. You'll see
for yourself in Petersburg. And it is high time you were getting away from these
terrible associations.” Prince Vassily sighed. “So that's all settled, my dear
fellow. And let my valet go in your coach. Ah, yes, I was almost forgetting,”
Prince Vassily added. “You know, my dear boy, I had a little account to settle
with your father, so as I have received something from the Ryazan estate, I'll
keep that; you don't want it. We'll go into accounts later.”
What Prince Vassily called “something from the Ryazan estate” was several
thousands of roubles paid in lieu of service by the peasants, and this sum he
kept for himself.
In Petersburg, Pierre was surrounded by the same atmosphere of affection and
tenderness as in Moscow. He could not decline the post, or rather the title (for
he did nothing) that Prince Vassily had obtained for him, and acquaintances,
invitations, and social duties were so numerous that Pierre was even more than
in Moscow conscious of the feeling of stupefaction, hurry and continued
expectation of some future good which was always coming and was never
realised.
Of his old circle of bachelor acquaintances there were not many left in
Petersburg. The Guards were on active service, Dolohov had been degraded to the
ranks; Anatole had gone into the army and was somewhere in the provinces; Prince
Andrey was abroad; and so Pierre had not the opportunity of spending his nights
in the way he had so loved spending them before, nor could he open his heart in
intimate talk with the friend who was older than himself and a man he respected.
All his time was spent at dinners and balls, or at Prince Vassily's in the
society of the fat princess, his wife, and the beauty, his daughter Ellen.
Like every one else, Anna Pavlovna Scherer showed Pierre the change that had
taken place in the attitude of society towards him.
In former days, Pierre had always felt in Anna Pavlovna's presence that what
he was saying was unsuitable, tactless, not the right thing; that the phrases,
which seemed to him clever as he formed them in his mind, became somehow stupid
as soon as he uttered them aloud, and that, on the contrary, Ippolit's most
pointless remarks had the effect of being clever and charming. Now everything he
said was always “delightful.” Even if Anna Pavlovna did not say so, he saw she
was longing to say so, and only refraining from doing so from regard for his
modesty.
At the beginning of the winter, in the year 1805, Pierre received one of Anna
Pavlovna's customary pink notes of invitation, in which the words occurred: “You
will find the fair Hélène at my house, whom one never gets tired of
seeing.”
On reading that passage, Pierre felt for the first time that there was being
formed between himself and Ellen some sort of tie, recognised by other people,
and this idea at once alarmed him, as though an obligation were being laid upon
him which he could not fulfil, and pleased him as an amusing supposition.
Anna Pavlovna's evening party was like her first one, only the novel
attraction which she had provided for her guests was not on this occasion
Mortemart, but a diplomat, who had just arrived from Berlin, bringing the latest
details of the Emperor Alexander's stay at Potsdam, and of the inviolable
alliance the two exalted friends had sworn together, to maintain the true cause
against the enemy of the human race. Pierre was welcomed by Anna Pavlovna with a
shade of melancholy, bearing unmistakable reference to the recent loss sustained
by the young man in the death of Count Bezuhov (every one felt bound to be
continually assuring Pierre that he was GREatly afflicted at the death of his
father, whom he had hardly known). Her melancholy was of precisely the same kind
as that more exalted melancholy she always displayed at any allusion to Her Most
August Majesty the Empress Marya Fyodorovna. Pierre felt flattered by it. Anna
Pavlovna had arranged the groups in her drawing-room with her usual skill. The
larger group, in which were Prince Vassily and some generals, had the benefit of
the diplomat. Another group gathered about the tea-table. Pierre would have
liked to join the first group, but Anna Pavlovna, who was in the nervous
excitement of a general on the battlefield, that mental condition in which
numbers of brilliant new ideas occur to one that one has hardly time to put into
execution—Anna Pavlovna, on seeing Pierre, detained him with a finger on his
coat sleeve: “Wait, I have designs on you for this evening.”
She looked round at Ellen and smiled at her.
“My dear Hélène, you must show charity to my poor aunt, who has an adoration
for you. Go and keep her company for ten minutes. And that you may not find it
too tiresome, here's our dear count, who certainly won't refuse to follow
you.”
The beauty moved away towards the old aunt; but Anna Pavlovna still detained
Pierre at her side, with the air of having still some last and essential
arrangement to make with him.
“She is exquisite, isn't she?” she said to Pierre, indicating the majestic
beauty swimming away from them. “And how she carries herself! For such a young
girl, what tact, what a finished perfection of manner. It comes from the heart.
Happy will be the man who wins her. The most unworldly of men would take a
brilliant place in society as her husband. That's true, isn't it? I only wanted
to know your opinion,” and Anna Pavlovna let Pierre go.
Pierre was perfectly sincere in giving an affirmative answer to her question
about Ellen's perfection of manner. If ever he thought of Ellen, it was either
of her beauty that he thought, or of her extraordinary capacity for serene,
dignified silence in society.
The old aunt received the two young people in her corner, but appeared
anxious to conceal her adoration of Ellen, and rather to show her fear of Anna
Pavlovna. She glanced at her niece, as though to inquire what she was to do with
them. Anna Pavlovna again laid a finger on Pierre's sleeve and said: “I hope you
will never say in future that people are bored at my house,” and glanced at
Ellen. Ellen smiled with an air, which seemed to say that she did not admit the
possibility of any one's seeing her without being enchanted. The old aunt
coughed, swallowed the phlegm, and said in French that she was very glad to see
Ellen; then she addressed Pierre with the same GREeting and the same grimace. In
the middle of a halting and tedious conversation, Ellen looked round at Pierre
and smiled at him with the bright, beautiful smile with which she smiled at
every one. Pierre was so used to this smile, it meant so little to him, that he
did not even notice it. The aunt was speaking at that moment of a collection of
snuff-boxes belonging to Pierre's father, Count Bezuhov, and she showed them her
snuff-box. Princess Ellen asked to look at the portrait of the aunt's husband,
which was on the snuff-box.
“It's probably the work of Vines,” said Pierre, mentioning a celebrated
miniature painter. He bent over the table to take the snuff-box, listening all
the while to the conversation going on in the larger group. He got up to move
towards it, but the aunt handed him the snuff-box, passing it across Ellen,
behind her back. Ellen bent forward to make room, and looked round smiling. She
was, as always in the evening, wearing a dress cut in the fashion of the day,
very low in the neck both in front and behind. Her bust, which had always to
Pierre looked like marble, was so close to his short-sighted eyes that he could
discern all the living charm of her neck and shoulders, and so near his lips
that he need scarcely have stooped to kiss it. He felt the warmth of her body,
the fragrance of scent, and heard the creaking of her corset as she moved. He
saw not her marble beauty making up one whole with her gown; he saw and felt all
the charm of her body, which was only veiled by her clothes. And having once
seen this, he could not see it otherwise, just as we cannot return to an
illusion that has been explained.
“So you have never noticed till now that I am lovely?” Ellen seemed to be
saying. “You haven't noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman, who might
belong to any one—to you, too,” her eyes said. And at that moment Pierre felt
that Ellen not only could, but would become his wife, that it must be so.
He knew it at that moment as surely as he would have known it, standing under
the wedding crown beside her. How would it be? and when? He knew not, knew not
even if it would be a good thing (he had a feeling, indeed, that for some reason
it would not), but he knew it would be so.
Pierre dropped his eyes, raised them again, and tried once more to see her as
a distant beauty, far removed from him, as he had seen her every day before. But
he could not do this. He could not, just as a man who has been staring in a fog
at a blade of tall steppe grass and taking it for a tree cannot see a tree in it
again, after he has once recognised it as a blade of grass. She was terribly
close to him. Already she had power over him. And between him and her there
existed no barriers of any kind, but the barrier of his own will.
“Very good, I will leave you in your little corner. I see you are very
comfortable there,” said Anna Pavlovna's voice. And Pierre, trying
panic-stricken to think whether he had done anything reprehensible, looked about
him, crimsoning. It seemed to him as though every one knew, as well as he did,
what was passing in him. A little later, when he went up to the bigger group,
Anna Pavlovna said to him:
“I am told you are making improvements in your Petersburg house.” (This was
the fact: the architect had told him it was necessary, and Pierre, without
knowing with what object, was having his immense house in Petersburg
redecorated.) “That is all very well, but do not move from Prince Vassily's. It
is a good thing to have such a friend as the prince,” she said, smiling to
Prince Vassily. “I know something about that. Don't I? And you are so young. You
need advice. You mustn't be angry with me for making use of an old woman's
privileges.” She paused, as women always do pause, in anticipation of something,
after speaking of their age. “If you marry, it's a different matter.” And she
united them in one glance. Pierre did not look at Ellen, nor she at him. But she
was still as terribly close to him.
He muttered something and blushed.
After Pierre had gone home, it was a long while before he could get to sleep;
he kept pondering on what was happening to him. What was happening? Nothing.
Simply he had grasped the fact that a woman, whom he had known as a child, of
whom he had said, without giving her a thought, “Yes, she's nice-looking,” when
he had been told she was a beauty, he had grasped the fact that that woman might
belong to him. “But she's stupid, I used to say myself that she was stupid,” he
thought. “There is something nasty in the feeling she excites in me, something
not legitimate. I have been told that her brother, Anatole, was in love with
her, and she in love with him, that there was a regular scandal, and that's why
Anatole was sent away. Her brother is Ippolit.…Her father is Prince
Vassily.…That's bad,” he mused; and at the very moment that he was reflecting
thus (the reflections were not followed out to the end) he caught himself
smiling, and became conscious that another series of reflections had risen to
the surface across the first, that he was at the same time meditating on her
worthlessness, and dreaming of how she would be his wife, how she might love
him, how she might become quite different, and how all he had thought and heard
about her might be untrue. And again he saw her, not as the daughter of Prince
Vassily, but saw her whole body, only veiled by her GREy gown. “But, no, why
didn't that idea ever occur to me before?” And again he told himself that it was
impossible, that there would be something nasty, unnatural, as it seemed to him,
and dishonourable in this marriage. He recalled her past words and looks, and
the words and looks of people, who had seen them together. He remembered the
words and looks of Anna Pavlovna, when she had spoken about his house, he
recollected thousands of such hints from Prince Vassily and other people, and he
was overwhelmed with terror that he might have bound himself in some way to do a
thing obviously wrong, and not what he ought to do. But at the very time that he
was expressing this to himself, in another part of his mind her image floated to
the surface in all its womanly beauty.
