He pointed his daughter-in-law to a seat
beside him. The footman moved a chair back for her.
“Ho, ho!” said
the old man, looking at her rounded figure. “You’ve not lost time; that’s bad!”
He laughed a dry, cold, unpleasant laugh, laughing as he always did with his
lips, but not with his eyes. “You must have exercise, as much exercise as
possible, as much as possible,” he said.
The little princess did not hear or did not
care to hear his words. She sat dumb and seemed disconcerted. The prince asked
after her father, and she began to talk and to smile. He asked her about common
acquaintances; the princess became more and more animated, and began talking
away, giving the prince greetings from various people and retailing the gossip
of the town.
“Poor Countess
Apraxin has lost her husband; she has quite cried her eyes out, poor dear,” she
said, growing more and more lively.
As she became livelier, the prince looked
more and more sternly at her, and all at once, as though he had studied her
sufficiently and had formed a clear idea of her, he turned away and addressed
Mihail Ivanovitch:
“Well, Mihail
Ivanovitch, our friend Bonaparte is to have a bad time of it. Prince Andrey”
(this was how he always spoke of his son) “has been telling me what forces are
being massed against him! While you and I have always looked upon him as a very
insignificant person.”
Mihail Ivanovitch, utterly at a loss to
conjecture when “you and I” had said anything of the sort about Bonaparte, but
grasping that he was wanted for the introduction of the prince’s favourite
subject, glanced in wonder at the young prince, not knowing what was to come
next.
“He’s a great
tactician!” said the prince to his son, indicating the architect, and the
conversation turned again on the war, on Bonaparte, and the generals and political
personages of the day. The old prince was, it seemed, convinced that all the
public men of the period were mere babes who had no idea of the A B C of
military and political matters; while Bonaparte, according to him, was an
insignificant Frenchman, who had met with success simply because there were no
Potyomkins and Suvorovs to oppose him. He was even persuaded firmly that there
were no political difficulties in Europe , that
there was no war indeed, but only a sort of marionette show in which the men of
the day took part, pretending to be doing the real thing. Prince Andrey
received his father’s jeers at modern people gaily, and with obvious pleasure
drew his father out and listened to him.
“Does
everything seem good that was done in the past?” he said; “why, didn’t Suvorov
himself fall into the trap Moreau laid for him, and wasn’t he unable to get out
of it too?”
“Who told you
that? Who said so?” cried the prince. “Suvorov!” And he flung away his plate,
which Tihon very neatly caught. “Suvorov!… Think again, Prince Andrey. There
were two men—Friedrich and Suvorov … Moreau! Moreau would have been a prisoner
if Suvorov’s hands had been free, but his hands were tied by the
Hofsskriegswurstschnappsrath; the devil himself would have been in a tight
place. Ah, you’ll find out what these Hofskriegswurstschnappsraths are like!
Suvorov couldn’t get the better of them, so how is Mihail Kutuzov going to do
it? No, my dear,” he went on; “so you and your generals aren’t able to get
round Bonaparte; you must needs call in Frenchmen —set a thief to catch a
thief! The German, Pahlen, has been sent to New York
in America
“I don’t say
at all that all those plans are good,” said Prince Andrey; “only I can’t
understand how you can have such an opinion of Bonaparte. Laugh, if you like,
but Bonaparte is any way a great general!”
