Chapter 3
ANNA PAVLOVNA’S soirée was in full swing.
The spindles kept up their regular hum on all sides without pause. Except the
aunt, beside whom was sitting no one but an elderly lady with a thin, careworn
face, who seemed rather out of her element in this brilliant society, the
company was broken up into three groups. In one of these, the more masculine,
the centre was the abbé; in the other, the group of young people, the chief
attractions were the beautiful Princess Ellen, Prince Vassily’s daughter, and
the little Princess Bolkonsky, with her rosy prettiness, too plump for her
years. In the third group were Mortemart and Anna Pavlovna.
The vicomte was a pretty young gentleman
with soft features and manners, who obviously regarded himself as a celebrity,
but with good breeding modestly allowed the company the benefit of his society.
Anna Pavlovna unmistakably regarded him as the chief entertainment she was
giving her guests. As a clever ma?tre d’h?tel serves as something superlatively
good the piece of beef which no one would have cared to eat seeing it in the
dirty kitchen, Anna Pavlovna that evening served up to her guests — first, the
vicomte and then the abbé, as something superlatively subtle. In Mortemart’s
group the talk turned at once on the execution of the duc d’Enghien. The
vicomte said that the duc d’Enghien had been lost by his own magnanimity and
that there were special reasons for Bonaparte’s bitterness against him.
“Ah, come!
Tell us about that, vicomte,” said Anna Pavlovna gleefully, feeling that the
phrase had a peculiarly Louis Quinze note about it: “Contez-nous cela,
vicomte.”
The vicomte bowed and smiled courteously in
token of his readiness to obey. Anna Pavlovna made a circle round the vicomte
and invited every one to hear his story.
“The vicomte
was personally acquainted with his highness,” Anna Pavlovna whispered to one.
“The vicomte tells a story perfectly,” she said to another. “How one sees the
man of quality,” she said to a third, and the vicomte was presented to the
company in the most elegant and advantageous light, like the roast-beef on the
hot dish garnished with green parsley.
The vicomte was about to begin his
narrative, and he smiled subtly.
“Come over
here, chère Hélène,” said Anna Pavlovna to the young beauty who was sitting a
little way off, the centre of another group.
Princess Ellen smiled. She got up with the
same unchanging smile of the acknowledged beauty with which she had entered the
drawing-room. Her white ball-dress adorned with ivy and moss rustled lightly;
her white shoulders, glossy hair, and diamonds glittered, as she passed between
the men who moved apart to make way for her. Not looking directly at any one,
but smiling at every one, as it were courteously allowing to all the right to
admire the beauty of her figure, her full shoulders, her bosom and back, which
were extremely exposed in the mode of the day, she moved up to Anna Pavlovna,
seeming to bring with her the brilliance of the ballroom. Ellen was so lovely
that she was not merely free from the slightest shade of coquetry, she seemed
on the contrary ashamed of the too evident, too violent and all-conquering
influence of her beauty. She seemed to wish but to be unable to soften the
effect of her beauty.
“What a
beautiful woman!” every one said on seeing her. As though struck by something
extraordinary, the vicomte shrugged his shoulders and dropped his eyes, when
she seated herself near him and dazzled him too with the same unchanging smile.
“Madame, I
doubt my abilities before such an audience,” he said, bowing with a smile.
The princess leaned her plump, bare arm on
the table and did not find it necessary to say anything. She waited, smiling.
During the vicomte’s story she sat upright, looking from time to time at her
beautiful, plump arm, which lay with its line changed by pressure on the table,
then at her still lovelier bosom, on which she set straight her diamond necklace.
Several times she settled the folds of her gown and when the narrative made a
sensation upon the audience, she glanced at Anna Pavlovna and at once assumed
the expression she saw on the maid-of-honour’s face, then she relapsed again
into her unvarying smile. After Ellen the little princess too moved away from
the tea-table.
� � : t �.s s ersburg
gathered together here, and his eyes strayed about like a child’s in a
toy-shop. He was afraid at every moment of missing some intellectual
conversation which he might have heard. Gazing at the self-confident and
refined expressions of the personages assembled here, he was continually
expecting something exceptionally clever. At last he moved up to Abbé Morio.
The conversation seemed interesting, and he stood still waiting for an
opportunity of expressing his own ideas, as young people are fond of doing.
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