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After dinner they went to drink coffee in Napoleon’s study, which four days previously had been that of the Emperor Alexander. Napoleon sat down, toying with his Svres coffee cup, and motioned Balashv to a chair beside him.
Napoleon was in that well-known after-dinner mood which, more than any reasoned cause, makes a man contented with himself and disposed to consider everyone his friend. It seemed to him that he was surrounded by men who adored him: and he felt convinced that, after his dinner, Balashv too was his friend and worshiper. Napoleon turned to him with a pleasant, though slightly ironic, smile.
“They tell me this is the room the Emperor Alexander occupied? Strange, isn’t it, General?” he said, evidently not doubting that this remark would be agreeable to his hearer since it went to prove his, Napoleon’s, superiority to Alexander.
Balashv made no reply and bowed his head in silence.
“Yes. Four days ago in this room, Wintzingerode and Stein were deliberating,” continued Napoleon with the same derisive and self-confident smile. “What I can’t understand,” he went on, “is that the Emperor Alexander has surrounded himself with my personal enemies. That I do not... understand. Has he not thought that I may do the same?” and he turned inquiringly to Balashv, and evidently this thought turned him back on to the track of his morning’s anger, which was still fresh in him.
“And let him know that I will do so!” said Napoleon, rising and pushing his cup away with his hand. “I’ll drive all his Wrttemberg, Baden, and Weimar relations out of Germany.... Yes. I’ll drive them out. Let him prepare an asylum for them in Russia!”
Balashv bowed his head with an air indicating that he would like to make his bow and leave, and only listened because he could not help hearing what was said to him. Napoleon did not notice this expression; he treated Balashv not as an envoy from his enemy, but as a man now fully devoted to him and who must rejoice at his former master’s humiliation.
“And why has the Emperor Alexander taken command of the armies? What is the good of that? War is my profession, but his business is to reign and not to command armies! Why has he taken on himself such a responsibility?”
Again Napoleon brought out his snuffbox, paced several times up and down the room in silence, and then, suddenly and unexpectedly, went up to Balashv and with a slight smile, as confidently, quickly, and simply as if he were doing something not merely important but pleasing to Balashv, he raised his hand to the forty-year-old Russian general’s face and, taking him by the ear, pulled it gently, smiling with his lips only.
To have one’s ear pulled by the Emperor was considered the greatest honor and mark of favor at the French court.
“Well, adorer and courtier of the Emperor Alexander, why don’t you say anything?” said he, as if it was ridiculous, in his presence, to be the adorer and courtier of anyone but himself, Napoleon. “Are the horses ready for the general?” he added, with a slight inclination of his head in reply to Balashv’s bow. “Let him have mine, he has a long way to go!”
The letter taken by Balashv was the last Napoleon sent to Alexander. Every detail of the interview was communicated to the Russian monarch, and the war began....
After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew went to Petersburg, on business as he told his family, but really to meet Anatole Kurgin whom he felt it necessary to encounter. On reaching Petersburg he inquired for Kurgin but the latter had already left the city. Pierre had warned his brother-in-law that Prince Andrew was on his track. Anatole Kurgin promptly obtained an appointment from the Minister of War and went to join the army in Moldavia. While in Petersburg Prince Andrew met Kutzov, his former commander who was always well disposed toward him, and Kutzov suggested that he should accompany him to the army in Moldavia, to which the old general had been appointed commander in chief. So Prince Andrew, having received an appointment on the headquarters staff, left for Turkey.
Prince Andrew did not think it proper to write and challenge Kurgin. He thought that if he challenged him without some fresh cause it might compromise the young Countess Rostva and so he wanted to meet Kurgin personally in order to find a fresh pretext for a duel. But he again failed to meet Kurgin in Turkey, for soon after Prince Andrew arrived, the latter returned to Russia. In a new country, amid new conditions, Prince Andrew found life easier to bear. After his betrothed had broken faith with him—which he felt the more acutely the more he tried to conceal its effects—the surroundings in which he had been happy became trying to him, and the freedom and independence he had once prized so highly were still more so. Not only could he no longer think the thoughts that had first come to him as he lay gazing at the sky on the field of Austerlitz and had later enlarged upon with Pierre, and which had filled his solitude at Boguchrovo and then in Switzerland and Rome, but he even dreaded to recall them and the bright and boundless horizons they had revealed. He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more eagerly the more those past interests were closed to him. It was as if that lofty, infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.
Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was the simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutzov’s staff, he applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and surprised Kutzov by his willingness and accuracy in work. Not having found Kurgin in Turkey, Prince Andrew did not think it necessary to rush back to Russia after him, but all the same he knew that however long it might be before he met Kurgin, despite his contempt for him and despite all the proofs he deduced to convince himself that it was not worth stooping to a conflict with him—he knew that when he did meet him he would not be able to resist calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching at food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless, plodding, and rather vainglorious and ambitious activity.
In the year 1812, when news of the war with Napoleon reached Bucharest—where Kutzov had been living for two months, passing his days and nights with a Wallachian woman—Prince Andrew asked Kutzov to transfer him to the Western Army. Kutzov, who was already weary of Bolknski’s activity which seemed to reproach his own idleness, very readily let him go and gave him a mission to Barclay de Tolly.
