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When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the
latter again thought it his duty to assure him that he was not
French and wished to go away, but the officer would not hear of
it. He was so very polite, amiable, good-natured, and genuinely
grateful to Pierre for saving his life that Pierre had not the
heart to refuse, and sat down with him in the parlor- the first
room they entered. To Pierre's assurances that he was not a Frenchman,
the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone could decline
so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and said
that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let
it be so, but for all that he would be forever bound to Pierre
by gratitude for saving his life.
Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for
perceiving the feelings of others, and had he at all understood
what Pierre's feelings were, the latter would probably have left
him, but the man's animated obtuseness to everything other than
himself disarmed Pierre.
"A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito," said
the officer, looking at Pierre's fine though dirty linen and at
the ring on his finger. "I owe my life to you and offer you
my friendship. A Frenchman never forgets either an insult or a
service. I offer you my friendship. That is all I can say."
There was so much good nature and nobility (in the French
sense of the word) in the officer's voice, in the expression of
his face and in his gestures, that Pierre, unconsciously smiling
in response to the Frenchman's smile, pressed the hand held out
to him.
"Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier
of the Legion of Honor for the affair on the seventh of September,"
he introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering
his lips under his mustache. "Will you now be so good as
to tell me with whom I have the honor of conversing so pleasantly,
instead of being in the ambulance with that maniac's bullet in
my body?"
Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing,
began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason
for concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.
"Oh, please!" said he. "I understand your reasons.
You are an officer... a superior officer perhaps. You have borne
arms against us. That's not my business. I owe you my life. That
is enough for me. I am quite at your service. You belong to the
gentry?" he concluded with a shade of inquiry in his tone.
Pierre bent his head. "Your baptismal name, if you please.
That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say.... That's all I want
to know."
When the mutton and an omelet had been served and a samovar
and vodka brought, with some wine which the French had taken from
a Russian cellar and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre
to share his dinner, and himself began to eat greedily and quickly
like a healthy and hungry man, munching his food rapidly with
his strong teeth, continually smacking his lips, and repeating-
"Excellent! Delicious!" His face grew red and was covered
with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner with
pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan
and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle
of kvass, taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage
was already known to the French and had been given a special name.
They called it limonade de cochon (pig's lemonade), and Morel
spoke well of the limonade de cochon he had found in the kitchen.
But as the captain had the wine they had taken while passing through
Moscow, he left the kvass to Morel and applied himself to the
bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to its neck in a
table napkin and poured out wine for himself and for Pierre. The
satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain still
more lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.
"Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive
candle for saving me from that maniac.... You see, I have bullets
enough in my body already. Here is one I got at Wagram" (he
touched his side) "and a second at Smolensk"- he showed
a scar on his cheek- "and this leg which as you see does
not want to march, I got that on the seventh at the great battle
of la Moskowa. Sacre Dieu! It was splendid! That deluge of fire
was worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us there, my word!
You may be proud of it! And on my honor, in spite of the cough
I caught there, I should be ready to begin again. I pity those
who did not see it."
"I was there," said Pierre.
"Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave
foes. The great redoubt held out well, by my pipe!" continued
the Frenchman. "And you made us pay dear for it. I was at
it three times- sure as I sit here. Three times we reached the
guns and three times we were thrown back like cardboard figures.
Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur Pierre! Your grenadiers were splendid,
by heaven! I saw them close up their ranks six times in succession
and march as if on parade. Fine fellows! Our King of Naples, who
knows what's what, cried 'Bravo!' Ha, ha! So you are one of us
soldiers!" he added, smiling, after a momentary pause. "So
much the better, so much the better, Monsieur Pierre! Terrible
in battle... gallant... with the fair" (he winked and smiled),
"that's what the French are, Monsieur Pierre, aren't they?"
The captain was so naively and good-humoredly gay, so real,
and so pleased with himself that Pierre almost winked back as
he looked merrily at him. Probably the word "gallant"
turned the captain's thoughts to the state of Moscow.
"Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have
all left Moscow? What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid
of?"
"Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians
entered it?" asked Pierre.
"Ha, ha, ha!" The Frenchman emitted a merry, sanguine
chuckle, patting Pierre on the shoulder. "What a thing to
say!" he exclaimed. "Paris?... But Paris, Paris..."
"Paris- the capital of the world," Pierre finished
his remark for him.
The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short
in the middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing,
kindly eyes.
"Well, if you hadn't told me you were Russian, I should
have wagered that you were Parisian! You have that... I don't
know what, that..." and having uttered this compliment, he
again gazed at him in silence.
"I have been in Paris. I spent years there," said
Pierre.
"Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris!... A man who doesn't
know Paris is a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off.
Paris is Talma, la Duchenois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards,"
and noticing that his conclusion was weaker than what had gone
before, he added quickly: "There is only one Paris in the
world. You have been to Paris and have remained Russian. Well,
I don't esteem you the less for it."
Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the
days he had spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre involuntarily
enjoyed talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.
"To return to your ladies- I hear they are lovely. What
a wretched idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when
the French army is in Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed!
Your peasants, now- that's another thing; but you civilized people,
you ought to know us better than that. We took Vienna, Berlin,
Madrid, Naples, Rome, Warsaw, all the world's capitals.... We
are feared, but we are loved. We are nice to know. And then the
Emperor..." he began, but Pierre interrupted him.
"The Emperor," Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly
became sad and embarrassed, "is the Emperor...?"
"The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order,
genius- that's what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell
you so.... I assure you I was his enemy eight years ago. My father
was an emigrant count.... But that man has vanquished me. He has
taken hold of me. I could not resist the sight of the grandeur
and glory with which he has covered France. When I understood
what he wanted- when I saw that he was preparing a bed of laurels
for us, you know, I said to myself: 'That is a monarch,' and I
devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes, mon cher, he is the greatest
man of the ages past or future."
"Is he in Moscow?" Pierre stammered with a guilty
look.
The Frenchman looked at his guilty face and smiled.
"No, he will make his entry tomorrow," he replied,
and continued his talk.
Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several
voices at the gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Wurttemberg
hussars had come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard
where the captain's horses were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly
because the hussars did not understand what was said to them in
French.
The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a
stern voice asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his
commanding officer, and by what right he allowed himself to claim
quarters that were already occupied. The German who knew little
French, answered the two first questions by giving the names of
his regiment and of his commanding officer, but in reply to the
third question which he did not understand said, introducing broken
French into his own German, that he was the quartermaster of the
regiment and his commander had ordered him to occupy all the houses
one after another. Pierre, who knew German, translated what the
German said to the captain and gave the captain's reply to the
Wurttemberg hussar in German. When he had understood what was
said to him, the German submitted and took his men elsewhere.
The captain went out into the porch and gave some orders in a
loud voice.
When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same
place as before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed
suffering. He really was suffering at that moment. When the captain
went out and he was left alone, suddenly he came to himself and
realized the position he was in. It was not that Moscow had been
taken or that the happy conquerors were masters in it and were
patronizing him. Painful as that was it was not that which tormented
Pierre at the moment. He was tormented by the consciousness of
his own weakness. The few glasses of wine he had drunk and the
conversation with this good-natured man had destroyed the mood
of concentrated gloom in which he had spent the last few days
and which was essential for the execution of his design. The pistol,
dagger, and peasant coat were ready. Napoleon was to enter the
town next day. Pierre still considered that it would be a useful
and worthy action to slay the evildoer, but now he felt that he
would not do it. He did not know why, but he felt a foreboding
that he would not carry out his intention. He struggled against
the confession of his weakness but dimly felt that he could not
overcome it and that his former gloomy frame of mind, concerning
vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice, had been dispersed like
dust by contact with the first man he met.
The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling
a tune.
The Frenchman's chatter which had previously amused Pierre
now repelled him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the
gesture with which he twirled his mustache, all now seemed offensive.
"I will go away immediately. I won't say another word to
him," thought Pierre. He thought this, but still sat in the
same place. A strange feeling of weakness tied him to the spot;
he wished to get up and go away, but could not do so.
The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced
up and down the room twice. His eyes shone and his mustache twitched
as if he were smiling to himself at some amusing thought.
"The colonel of those Wurttembergers is delightful,"
he suddenly said. "He's a German, but a nice fellow all the
same.... But he's a German." He sat down facing Pierre. "By
the way, you know German, then?"
Pierre looked at him in silence.
"What is the German for 'shelter'?"
"Shelter?" Pierre repeated. "The German for
shelter is Unterkunft."
"How do you say it?" the captain asked quickly and
doubtfully.
"Unterkunft," Pierre repeated.
"Onterkoff," said the captain and looked at Pierre
for some seconds with laughing eyes. "These Germans are first-rate
fools, don't you think so, Monsieur Pierre?" he concluded.
"Well, let's have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux,
shall we? Morel will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!"
he called out gaily.
Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked
at Pierre by the candlelight and was evidently struck by the troubled
expression on his companion's face. Ramballe, with genuine distress
and sympathy in his face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.
"There now, we're sad," said he, touching Pierre's
hand. "Have I upset you? No, really, have you anything against
me?" he asked Pierre. "Perhaps it's the state of affairs?"
Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman's
eyes whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.
"Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel
friendship for you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me.
It is for life and death. I say it with my hand on my heart!"
said he, striking his chest.
"Thank you," said Pierre.
The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learned
that "shelter" was Unterkunft in German, and his face
suddenly brightened.
"Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!"
he cried gaily, filling two glasses with wine.
Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied
his too, again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on
the table in a pensive attitude.
"Yes, my dear friend," he began, "such is fortune's
caprice. Who would have said that I should be a soldier and a
captain of dragoons in the service of Bonaparte, as we used to
call him? Yet here I am in Moscow with him. I must tell you, mon
cher," he continued in the sad and measured tones of a man
who intends to tell a long story, "that our name is one of
the most ancient in France."
And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain
told Pierre the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth,
and manhood, and all about his relations and his financial and
family affairs, "ma pauvre mere" playing of course an
important part in the story.
"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing
is love- love! Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?" said he,
growing animated. "Another glass?"
Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.
"Oh, women, women!" and the captain, looking with
glistening eyes at Pierre, began talking of love and of his love
affairs.
There were very many of these, as one could easily believe,
looking at the officer's handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting
the eager enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all
Ramballe's love stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen
regard as the special charm and poetry of love, yet he told his
story with such sincere conviction that he alone had experienced
and known all the charm of love and he described women so alluringly
that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.
It was plain that l'amour which the Frenchman was so fond
of was not that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt
for his wife, nor was it the romantic love stimulated by himself
that he experienced for Natasha. (Ramballe despised both these
kinds of love equally: the one he considered the "love of
clodhoppers" and the other the "love of simpletons.")
L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted principally in
the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a combination
of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.
Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love
for a fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time
for a charming, innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching
marquise. The conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the
daughter, ending in the mother's sacrificing herself and offering
her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now agitated the captain,
though it was the memory of a distant past. Then he recounted
an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover,
and he- the lover- assumed the role of the husband, as well as
several droll incidents from his recollections of Germany, where
"shelter" is called Unterkunft and where the husbands
eat sauerkraut and the young girls are "too blonde."
Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain's
memory, and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing
face, was of how he had saved the life of a Pole (in general,
the saving of life continually occurred in the captain's stories)
and the Pole had entrusted to him his enchanting wife (parisienne
de coeur) while himself entering the French service. The captain
was happy, the enchanting Polish lady wished to elope with him,
but, prompted by magnanimity, the captain restored the wife to
the husband, saying as he did so: "I have saved your life,
and I save your honor!" Having repeated these words the captain
wiped his eyes and gave himself a shake, as if driving away the
weakness which assailed him at this touching recollection.
Listening to the captain's tales, Pierre- as often happens
late in the evening and under the influence of wine- followed
all that was told him, understood it all, and at the same time
followed a train of personal memories which, he knew not why,
suddenly arose in his mind. While listening to these love stories
his own love for Natasha unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going
over the pictures of that love in his imagination he mentally
compared them with Ramballe's tales. Listening to the story of
the struggle between love and duty, Pierre saw before his eyes
every minutest detail of his last meeting with the object of his
love at the Sukharev water tower. At the time of that meeting
it had not produced an effect upon him- he had not even once recalled
it. But now it seemed to him that that meeting had had in it something
very important and poetic.
"Peter Kirilovich, come here! We have recognized you,"
he now seemed to hear the words she had uttered and to see before
him her eyes, her smile, her traveling hood, and a stray lock
of her hair... and there seemed to him something pathetic and
touching in all this.
Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady,
the captain asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar
impulse to sacrifice himself for love and a feeling of envy of
the legitimate husband.
Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt
a need to express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began
to explain that he understood love for a women somewhat differently.
He said that in all his life he had loved and still loved only
one woman, and that she could never be his.
"Tiens!" said the captain.
Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his
earliest years, but that he had not dared to think of her because
she was too young, and because he had been an illegitimate son
without a name. Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth
he dared not think of her because he loved her too well, placing
her far above everything in the world, and especially therefore
above himself.
When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether
he understood that.
The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did
not understand it he begged Pierre to continue.
"Platonic love, clouds..." he muttered.
Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness,
or the thought that this man did not, and never would, know any
of those who played a part in his story, or whether it was all
these things together, something loosened Pierre's tongue. Speaking
thickly and with a faraway look in his shining eyes, he told the
whole story of his life: his marriage, Natasha's love for his
best friend, her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations
with her. Urged on by Ramballe's questions he also told what he
had at first concealed- his own position and even his name.
More than anything else in Pierre's story the captain was
impressed by the fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions
in Moscow, and that he had abandoned everything and not left the
city, but remained there concealing his name and station.
When it was late at night they went out together into the
street. The night was warm and light. To the left of the house
on the Pokrovka a fire glowed- the first of those that were beginning
in Moscow. To the right and high up in the sky was the sickle
of the waning moon and opposite to it hung that bright comet which
was connected in Pierre's heart with his love. At the gate stood
Gerasim, the cook, and two Frenchmen. Their laughter and their
mutually incomprehensible remarks in two languages could be heard.
They were looking at the glow seen in the town.
There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire
in the immense city.
Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet,
and at the glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion.
"There now, how good it is, what more does one need?"
thought he. And suddenly remembering his intention he grew dizzy
and felt so faint that he leaned against the fence to save himself
from falling.
Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate
with unsteady steps and returning to his room lay down on the
sofa and immediately fell asleep.
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