At that moment another guest walked into
the drawing-room. This was the young Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, the husband of
the little princess. Prince Bolkonsky was a very handsome young man, of medium
height, with clear, clean-cut features. Everything in his appearance, from his
weary, bored expression to his slow, measured step, formed the most striking
contrast to his lively little wife. Obviously all the people in the
drawing-room were familiar figures to him, and more than that, he was
unmistakably so sick of them that even to look at them and to listen to them
was a weariness to him. Of all the wearisome faces the face of his pretty wife
seemed to bore him most. With a grimace that distorted his handsome face he
turned away from her. He kissed Anna Pavlovna’s hand, and with half-closed eyelids scanned the whole company.
“You are
enlisting for the war, prince?” said Anna Pavlovna.
“General
Kutuzov has been kind enough to have me as an aide-de-camp,” said Bolkonsky.
“And Lise,
your wife? —”
“She is going
into the country.”
“Isn’t it too
bad of you to rob us of your charming wife?”
“André,” said
his wife, addressing her husband in exactly the same coquettish tone in which
she spoke to outsiders, “the vicomte has just told us such a story about Mlle.
Georges and Bonaparte!”
Prince Andrey scowled and turned away.
Pierre, who had kept his eyes joyfully and affectionately fixed on him ever
since he came in, went up to him and took hold of his arm. Prince Andrey,
without looking round, twisted his face into a grimace of annoyance at any
one’s touching him, but seeing Pierre’s smiling face, he gave him a smile that
was unexpectedly sweet and pleasant.
“Why, you! …
And in such society too,” he said to Pierre .
“I knew you would
be here,” answered Pierre. “I’m coming to supper with you,” he added in an
undertone, not to interrupt the vicomte who was still talking. “Can I?”
“Oh no,
impossible,” said Prince Andrey, laughing, with a squeeze of his hand giving
Pierre to understand that there was no need to ask. He would have said
something more, but at that instant Prince Vassily and his daughter got up and
the two young men rose to make way for them.
“Pardon me, my
dear vicomte,” said Prince Vassily in French, gently pulling him down by his
sleeve to prevent him from getting up from his seat. “This luckless fête at the
ambassador’s deprives me of a pleasure and interrupts you. I am very sorry to
leave your enchanting party,” he said to Anna Pavlovna.
His daughter, Princess Ellen, lightly
holding the folds of her gown, passed between the chairs, and the smile glowed
more brightly than ever on her handsome face. Pierre looked with rapturous, almost
frightened eyes at this beautiful creature as she passed them.
“Very lovely!”
said Prince Andrey.
“Very,” said
Pierre.
As he came up to them, Prince Vassily took Pierre by the arm, and
addressing Anna Pavlovna:
“Get this bear
into shape for me,” he said. “Here he has been staying with me for a month, and
this is the first time I have seen him in society. Nothing’s so necessary for a
young man as the society of clever women.”
c} � r a s ��q women. “I am so enchanted by the wit
and culture of the society — especially of the ladies — in which I have had the
happiness to be received, that I have not yet had time to think of the
climate,” he said. Not letting the abbé and
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