'Now, we're going to make the most of you, dear Prince,' said the little princess (in French, of course) to Prince Vasily. 'Not like those evenings at Annette's when you were always running away. You do remember our dear Annette?'
'Ah yes, but you won't make me talk politics, like Annette!'
'And our little tea table?'
'Oh yes!'
'Why were you never at Annette's?' the little princess asked Anatole. 'Oh yes, I know,' she said with a wink. 'Your brother, Hippolyte, told me all about you. Oh!' She wagged a tiny finger at him. 'And I know what you got up to in Paris!'
'But there's one thing Hippolyte didn't tell you,' said Prince Vasily to his son, taking the little princess by the arm, as if she was trying to run away from him and he had just managed to catch her. 'He didn't tell you that he was eating his heart out for our sweet princess, and she showed him the door.'
'She really is a pearl among women,' he said, turning to Princess Marya.
At the mention of Paris Mademoiselle Bourienne was not going to miss the opportunity of joining them in their shared memories.
She ventured to ask how long Anatole had been away from Paris and whether he liked the city. Anatole, delighted to respond to the French girl, smiled and stared at her as they talked about her homeland. The moment he had set eyes on the pretty Mademoiselle, Anatole had decided that even here at Bald Hills he might be in for a good time. 'Hm, easy on the eye,' he thought as he examined her. 'Quite something to look at, this lady's companion! I do hope Marya will bring her along when we're married,' he mused. 'She's a nice little thing.'
Up in his room the old prince was taking his time dressing, scowling as he wondered what to do. The visitors annoyed him. 'Prince Vasily and his son, they're nothing to me. The old man is a stupid windbag and his son can't be much better,' he growled to himself. What annoyed him was that this visit raised in his mind a secret unanswered question that he was always running away from: could he ever bear to part with his daughter and give her to a husband? The prince always avoided this direct question, because he knew in advance that any answer would involve the truth, and the truth would undermine not just his feelings, but the meaning of his whole life. Little as he appeared to value her, for the old prince life without Princess Marya was unthinkable. 'What would marriage do for her?' he thought. 'Make her unhappy, that's for sure. Look at Liza married to Andrey (and I don't think you'd find a better husband these days) - she's not happy with her situation. And who would marry Marya for love? She's a plain girl and so gauche. They'd want her for her connections and her money. Old maids don't do too badly, do they? I think they're happier!' These were Prince Nikolay's thoughts as he dressed, but the long-deferred question now had to be resolved. It was obvious that Prince Vasily had brought his son to make a proposal, and within a day or two he would ask for a straight answer. The family name and their social standing were immaculate. 'Well, I'm not against it,' the prince kept saying to himself, 'I just hope he's worthy of her. One day we shall see,' he said out loud. 'One day we shall. One day.'
And with his usual briskness he strode into the drawing-room and took in the whole scene at a single rapid glance: the little princess had changed her dress, Mademoiselle Bourienne was wearing a ribbon, Princess Marya's hair looked hideous and the French girl and Anatole were smiling at each other while his daughter was being left out of the conversation. 'She's dolled herself up like a fool!' he thought, glaring furiously at his daughter. 'Has she no shame? And he doesn't want to have anything to do with her!'
He went over to Prince Vasily.
'Well, how d'ye do, how d'ye do, glad to see you.'
'Friendship smiles at a hundred miles,' said Prince Vasily, as always rapid, confident and familiar in his speech. 'This is my younger son. I hope he will win your favour and sympathy.'
Prince Nikolay examined Anatole.
'Yes, a splendid young man!' he said. 'Well, come and give me a kiss,' he added, offering a cheek. Anatole kissed the old man, and watched him with composure and curiosity, waiting for one of the idiosyncrasies his father had told him to expect.
The old prince sat down in his usual place at one end of the sofa, pulled up an armchair for Prince Vasily, pointed to it and began to ask him about political developments and the latest news. He pretended to be listening closely to what Prince Vasily was saying, but his eyes kept turning to Princess Marya.
'So, letters are coming from Potsdam now, are they?' He repeated Prince Vasily's last words, then he suddenly got up and went over to his daughter.
'So you've got yourself all dressed up like this for the visitors, have you?' he said. 'You look very nice, I'm sure. A new hairstyle for the visitors - well, in front of the visitors I'm telling you this - in future don't even change your dress without consulting me.'
'Father, it was my fault . . .' the little princess interceded, blushing.
'You may do whatever you want,' said the old prince, with a mocking bow to his daughter-in-law, 'but she has no need to disfigure herself - she's ugly enough as it is.' And he sat down again in his place, ignoring his daughter, who had by now been reduced to tears.
'Oh no, that hairstyle suits the princess very well,' said Prince Vasily.
'Well, sir, this young prince, what's his name?' said the old prince, turning to Anatole. 'Come over here. Let's have a talk and get to know each other.'
'This is where the fun begins,' thought Anatole, and he smiled as he sat down by the old prince.
'Good, there we are. Now, my dear boy, they tell me you were educated abroad. Not like your father and me, taught to read and write by the local deacon. Tell me, are you in the horse guards?' asked the old man, looking closely and insistently at Anatole.
'No, I have transferred into the line,' answered Anatole, finding it hard not to laugh.
'Ah! A splendid thing. So you want to serve your Tsar and your country? These are times of war. A fine young man like you ought to be a serving soldier, yes, a serving soldier. Ordered to the front, eh?'
'No, Prince, our regiment has gone to the front. But I'm attached . . . What is it I'm attached to, Papa?' Anatole turned to his father with a laugh.
'He is a credit to the service, indeed. What am I attached to! Ha-ha-ha!' laughed the old prince, and Anatole laughed louder. Suddenly the old prince frowned. 'Off you go then,' he said to Anatole. Smiling broadly, Anatole returned to the ladies.
'So you had them educated abroad, Prince Vasily? Eh?' said the old prince.
'One did what one could. I must say the education there is much better than ours.'
'Yes, it's all different now, new-fangled. A splendid boy! Splendid! Well, let's go to my room.' He took Prince Vasily by the arm and led him away to his study.
Alone with Bolkonsky, Prince Vasily lost no time in making known his hopes and his desires.
'What do you think?' said the old prince angrily. 'I'm hanging on to her? I can't let go of her? The very idea!' he protested furiously. 'I'd do it tomorrow! But I will say this - I want to know my future son-in-law better. You know my golden rule: everything out in the open! Tomorrow I shall ask her in your presence. If she says yes, let him stay on. Let him stay on, and I'll see.' The prince snorted. 'Let her get married. I don't care!' he screamed with the same piercing shriek as when he had said goodbye to his son.
'I'll be quite candid,' said Prince Vasily sounding like a crafty man who sees it's no use being crafty with such a sharp mind. 'I know you can see right through people. Anatole is no genius, but he's a good, honest boy, a fine son and a family man.'
'Yes, yes. We'll see about that.'
As always with lonely women long deprived of male company, the moment Anatole appeared on the scene, all three women in Prince Nikolay's house felt as one that they had not been living a real life until then. Suddenly their thought processes, feelings and powers of observation were ten times sharper. It was as if lives spent in darkness had suddenly been flooded with a bright light full of new meaning.
Princes
s Marya forgot all about her face and hairstyle. The handsome, open face of the man who might turn out to be her husband absorbed her whole attention. He seemed so kind, brave, strong, manly and noble. She was sure of it. Dreams of a future married life rose in her imagination by the thousand. She drove them away and tried to conceal them.
'But perhaps I'm being too cold with him?' thought Princess Marya. 'I'm trying to control myself because at the bottom of my heart I can feel myself getting too close to him. But still, he doesn't know what I think of him. He might even think I don't like him.'
She tried to be nice to him and didn't know how.
'Poor girl, she is terribly ugly,' Anatole was thinking.
Mademoiselle Bourienne had also been roused by Anatole's arrival into a state of high excitement, but her thoughts were of a different order. Naturally, a beautiful young girl with no fixed position in society, with no friends or relations, not even a country of her own, was not looking forward to a life spent waiting on Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky, reading to him and being a good friend to Princess Marya. Mademoiselle Bourienne had long been looking forward to the day when a Russian prince sensitive enough to see her as superior to all those ugly, dowdy, clumsy Russian princesses would fall in love with her and carry her off. Now he had come. Mademoiselle Bourienne remembered a favourite story of her aunt's which she had adapted and loved to run over in her imagination. It was about a young girl who had been seduced, and her poor mother had appeared to her and reproached her for giving herself to a man without getting married. Mademoiselle was often moved to tears when she imagined herself telling him, her would-be seducer, this story. Now he was here - a real Russian prince. He would carry her off, then 'my poor mother' would come on the scene, and they would be married. This future history of hers had been unfolding in Mademoiselle Bourienne's mind all the time they were talking about Paris. Mademoiselle Bourienne was not a scheming woman (she certainly never planned ahead), but everything had been prepared within her long before this and it had suddenly focused on Anatole the moment he appeared, after which she longed to please him and tried as hard as she could.
As for the little princess, she was like an old warhorse hearing a trumpet-blast, ready to gallop off into yet another flirtation, instinctively oblivious to her present situation, without a backward glance or the slightest qualm, her fun-loving heart full of nothing but simple gaiety.
In female company Anatole usually adopted the pose of a man weary of being chased by women, but his vanity was pleasantly tickled by the effect he was having on these three women. More than that, he was beginning to feel towards the pretty and seductive Mademoiselle Bourienne the kind of animal passion that sometimes swept over him with amazing speed and urged him to indulge in the most reckless and boorish behaviour.
After tea the party moved into the sitting-room, and Princess Marya was asked to play the clavichord. Anatole leant on one elbow opposite her and close to Mademoiselle Bourienne; his eyes, full of fun and laughter, were fixed on Princess Marya. She was agonized and delighted to feel his eyes upon her. Her favourite sonata bore her away to a world of soulful poetry, and the feeling of his eyes upon her brought even more poetry into that world. But the look in Anatole's eyes which seemed to be directed at her had rather more to do with the writhing of Mademoiselle's little foot, entwined with his under the piano. Mademoiselle Bourienne was also gazing at Princess Marya, and her lovely eyes also shone with a mixture of alarm, joy and longing that was new to the princess.
'Oh, she does love me!' Princess Marya was thinking. 'How happy I am now and shall be in the future with such a friend and such a husband! Dare I say husband?' she thought, not bold enough to glance at his face but still sensing his eyes fixed upon her.
When the party broke up after supper, Anatole kissed Princess Marya's hand. Where she got the strength from she would never know, but as the handsome face came close to her she managed to squint straight at it with her short-sighted eyes. After the princess, he went to kiss the hand of Mademoiselle Bourienne (this was discourteous, but he acted with composure and simplicity), and Mademoiselle Bourienne coloured, glancing in dismay at the princess.
'She's so sensitive!' thought Princess Marya. 'How could Amelie' (Mademoiselle's name) 'possibly imagine I might be jealous of her, and not value her tenderness and devotion to me?' She went over to Mademoiselle Bourienne and gave her a particularly warm kiss. Anatole moved towards the little princess.
'Oh no you don't, sir! When your father writes and tells me that you're being a good boy, then I shall give you my hand to kiss. But not before.' And wagging her tiny finger at him, she left the room smiling.
CHAPTER 5
They went to their rooms, and everyone except Anatole, who dropped off the moment he got into bed, took a long time to get to sleep that night. 'Is he really going to be my husband, that stranger, that good, handsome man. He is good - that's the most important thing,' thought Princess Marya, and she was struck by the kind of terror she had scarcely ever felt before. She was afraid to turn her head - was that someone standing there behind the screen in the corner? It might be the devil - and he might be that man with the white forehead, black eyebrows and red lips.
She rang for her maid and asked her to sleep in her room.
Mademoiselle Bourienne strolled about the winter garden for a long time that evening, waiting in vain for someone, smiling at someone or else weepy at the thought of her 'poor mother' reproaching her for her fall.
The little princess was uncomfortable in bed and complained to her maid. She couldn't lie on her side or on her front. She felt weighed down and awkward in every position. Her big lump got in the way - got in the way more than ever that night, because Anatole's presence had transported her vividly back to another time when she didn't have it and had been light and carefree. She went and sat in a low chair in her dressing jacket and nightcap. Katya, sleepy and with dishevelled hair, turned the heavy feather bed and plumped it up for the third time, grumbling as she did so.
'I told you it was all bumps and hollows,' the little princess insisted. 'I want to get to sleep, so it can't be my fault.' She spoke with a quavering voice like a child on the verge of tears.
The old prince also found sleep difficult. Tikhon, half-asleep, could hear him stamping about and snorting in his anger. The old prince felt as though his daughter had been used to insult him. The insult was all the more hurtful for being levelled not at him but at someone else, his daughter, whom he loved more than himself. He told himself to reconsider the whole business and decide what was right and what must be done, but instead of that all he did was work himself up more and more.
'The first man that happens along she forgets her father and everything else, she runs upstairs and has her hair all scraped up, then goes all coy - she's not the same woman! Only too glad to drop her old father! And she knew I was bound to notice. Grr . . . grr . . . grr . . . They must think I'm blind . . . that fool has eyes for no one but that Bourienne girl . . . must get rid of her. How can she have so little pride that she can't see it? If she can't show any pride for herself, can't she show some for me? I must show her that that young idiot isn't thinking about her, his eyes are on Bourienne. She has no pride, but I'll show her . . .'
But the old prince knew that by telling his daughter she was making a mistake and that Anatole was busy flirting with Mademoiselle Bourienne he would undermine her self-respect, and his cause - to avoid being parted from his daughter - would be lost, so eventually he began to calm down. He summoned Tikhon and began undressing.
'Damn them for coming here!' he thought, as Tikhon slipped a nightshirt over his desiccated old body and his chest covered with grey hair. 'I didn't invite them. They come here and turn my life upside down. And there's not much of it left. Damn them!' he mumbled while his head was hidden in the nightshirt. Tikhon was used to the prince's habit of sometimes thinking aloud, and his face didn't change when he encountered an inquiring angry glare emerging from the nightshirt.
'
In bed?' asked the prince.
Like any good valet Tikhon had a flair for following his master's thoughts. He guessed that the question referred to Prince Vasily and his son.
'Their Honours have retired and put out their lights, sir.'
'They had no reason, no reason at all,' the prince gabbled, shuffling his feet into his slippers and his arms into his dressing-gown before going over to the couch where he slept.
Although nothing had been said between Anatole and Mademoiselle Bourienne, they had a perfect understanding over the first part of their affair, up to the 'poor mother' episode. Knowing they had much to say to each other in private, they watched from early morning for the first opportunity of meeting alone. As soon as the princess went in for the usual hour with her father, Mademoiselle Bourienne and Anatole met in the winter garden.