War And Peace

‘Goodnight, Liza,’ said Prince Andrey, getting up to kiss her hand, politely, as if she was a stranger to him.

The two friends were silent. Neither wished to start a conversation. Pierre kept looking across at Prince Andrey; Prince Andrey rubbed his forehead with a small hand.

‘Let’s go and have some supper,’ he said with a sigh as he got to his feet and went over to the door.

They went into the elegant, newly decorated and richly appointed dining-room. Everything from the dinner napkins to the silver, the china and the glass, bore the special stamp of newness that exists in the households of recently married couples. Half-way through supper Prince Andrey leant on one elbow, and with the air of a man who has something on his mind and has suddenly decided to talk about it he assumed an expression of nervous irritability the like of which Pierre had never seen in his friend before, and began to speak.

‘Never, never get married, my dear fellow, that’s my advice to you. Don’t get married, not until you can say you’ve done everything possible, and until you have stopped loving your chosen woman, until you can see her clearly – otherwise you will be making a cruel mistake that cannot be put right. Marry when you’re old and good for nothing . . . Otherwise everything good and noble in you will be finished. It will all be frittered away over trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don’t look so surprised. If you’re expecting some kind of future for yourself, you’ll feel every step of the way that everything is closed to you, blocked off, except the drawing-room, where you’ll operate on the same level as the court lackey and the fool. Oh, why bother?’ He made a vigorous gesture with his arm.

Pierre took off his spectacles, which transformed his face, making it look even more benevolent, and gazed in amazement at his friend.

‘My wife,’ Prince Andrey went on, ‘is a splendid woman. She is one of those rare women with whom you feel your honour is secure, but, my God!, what wouldn’t I give now to be an unmarried man! You’re the first and only person I have said this to, because I’m close to you.’

As Prince Andrey said this he seemed less than ever like the earlier Bolkonsky who had sat sprawling in Anna Pavlovna’s drawing-room screwing up his eyes and forcing French phrases through his teeth. Now every muscle in his thin face was quivering with nervous excitement; his eyes, in which all the fire of life had seemed to have gone out, now shone with a radiant, vivid gleam. Clearly, the more lifeless he might seem at ordinary times, the more energetic he became when he was roused.

‘You don’t understand why I’m saying this,’ he went on. ‘Well, this is life itself. You talk about Bonaparte and his career,’ he said, though Pierre had not spoken about Bonaparte; ‘you talk about Bonaparte, but Bonaparte, when he was working his way step by step straight towards his goal, he was free, he had nothing but his goal to go for and he got there. But you tie yourself to a woman and you’ll lose all your freedom, like a convict in fetters. And all the hope and strength there is in you just drags you down and tortures you with regret. Drawing-rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, vacuous nonsense – that’s the vicious circle I’m stuck in. I’m off to the war, the greatest war there’s ever been, and I know nothing, I’m useless. I’m a nice fellow and I have a sharp tongue,’ he went on, ‘and at Anna Pavlovna’s people listen when I speak. And all these stupid people without whom my wife can’t exist, all these women . . . If you only knew what these fine women are, or let’s say women in general! My father’s right. Selfish, vain, stupid, totally vacuous – that’s what women are when they show themselves in their true colours. You see them out in society, you think there might be something there, but no, there’s nothing, nothing. Don’t get married, my dear fellow, just don’t!’

‘It seems odd,’ said Pierre, ‘that you, you consider yourself a failure and your life ruined. You’ve got your whole life in front of you, everything. And you . . .’

He did not say what about you, but his tone showed how much he admired his friend, and how much he was expecting from him in the future.

‘How can he talk like that?’ Pierre thought. He regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all the virtues, because he combined in the highest degree all the qualities he himself lacked – they were best summed up in a single concept: will power. Pierre always admired Prince Andrey’s ability to get on easily with all sorts of people, his remarkable memory, his wide reading (he had read everything, he knew everything and he could understand something about everything), and most of all his capacity for hard work and learning. If Pierre was sometimes struck by Andrey’s inability to dream dreams and philosophize (activities that Pierre was particularly prone to) he saw this not as a defect but as a positive quality.