“ ‘I showed them the path of glory; they would not take it,’ ” he said after a brief pause, again quoting Napoleon’s words. “ ‘I opened my anterooms to them; they crowded in.’ … I do not know in what degree he had a right to say so.”
“None!” retorted the vicomte. “Since the duc’s murder even his warmest partisans have ceased to regard him as a hero. If indeed some people made a hero of him,” said the vicomte addressing Anna Pavlovna, “since the duke’s assassination there has been a martyr more in heaven, and a hero less on earth.”
Anna Pavlovna and the rest of the company hardly had time to smile their appreciation of the vicomte’s words, when Pierre again broke into the conversation, and though Anna Pavlovna had a foreboding he would say something inappropriate, this time she was unable to stop him.
“The execution of the duc d’Enghien,” said Monsieur Pierre, “was a political necessity, and I consider it a proof of greatness of soul that Napoleon did not hesitate to take the whole responsibility of it upon himself.”
“Dieu! mon Dieu!” moaned Anna Pavlovna, in a terrified whisper.
“What, Monsieur Pierre! you think assassination is greatness of soul?” said the little princess, smiling and moving her work nearer to her.
“Ah! oh!” cried different voices.
“Capital!” Prince Ippolit said in English, and he began slapping his knee. The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders.
Pierre looked solemnly over his spectacles at his audience.
“I say so,” he pursued desperately, “because the Bourbons ran away from the Revolution, leaving the people to anarchy; and Napoleon alone was capable of understanding the Revolution, of overcoming it, and so for the public good he could not stop short at the life of one man.”
“Won’t you come over to this table?” said Anna Pavlovna. But Pierre went on without answering her.
“Yes,” he said, getting more and more eager, “Napoleon is great because he has towered above the Revolution, and subdued its evil tendencies, preserving all that was good—the equality of all citizens, and freedom of speech and of the press, and only to that end has he possessed himself of supreme power.”
“Yes, if on obtaining power he had surrendered it to the lawful king, instead of making use of it to commit murder,” said the vicomte, “then I might have called him a great man.”
“He could not have done that. The people gave him power simply for him to rid them of the Bourbons, and that was just why the people believed him to be a great man. The Revolution was a grand fact,” pursued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by this desperate and irrelevantly provocative statement his extreme youth and desire to give full expression to everything.
“Revolution and regicide a grand fact?… What next?… but won’t you come to this table?” repeated Anna Pavlovna.
“Contrat social,” said the vicomte with a bland smile.
“I’m not speaking of regicide. I’m speaking of the idea.”
“The idea of plunder, murder, and regicide!” an ironical voice put in.
“Those were extremes, of course; but the whole meaning of the Revolution did not lie in them, but in the rights of man, in emancipation from conventional ideas, in equality; and all these Napoleon has maintained in their full force.”
“Liberty and equality,” said the vicomte contemptuously, as though he had at last made up his mind to show this youth seriously all the folly of his assertions: “all high-sounding words, which have long since been debased. Who does not love liberty and equality? Our Saviour indeed preached liberty and equality. Have men been any happier since the Revolution? On the contrary. We wanted liberty, but Bonaparte has crushed it.”
Prince Andrey looked with a smile first at Pierre, then at the vicomte, then at their hostess.
For the first minute Anna Pavlovna had, in spite of her social adroitness, been dismayed by Pierre’s outbreak; but when she saw that the vicomte was not greatly discomposed by Pierre’s sacrilegious utterances, and had convinced herself that it was impossible to suppress them, she rallied her forces and joined the vicomte in attacking the orator.
“Mais, mon cher Monsieur Pierre,” said Anna Pavlovna, “what have you to say for a great man who was capable of executing the duc—or simply any human being—guiltless and untried?”
“I should like to ask,” said the vicomte, “how monsieur would explain the 18th of Brumaire? Was not that treachery?”
“It was a juggling trick not at all like a great man’s way of acting.”
“And the wounded he killed in Africa?” said the little princess; “that was awful!” And she shrugged her shoulders.
“He’s a plebeian, whatever you may say,” said Prince Ippolit.
Monsieur Pierre did not know which to answer. He looked at them all and smiled. His smile was utterly unlike the half-smile of all the others. When he smiled, suddenly, instantaneously, his serious, even rather sullen, face vanished completely, and a quite different face appeared, childish, good-humoured, even rather stupid, that seemed to beg indulgence. The vicomte, who was seeing him for the first time, saw clearly that this Jacobin was by no means so formidable as his words. Every one was silent.
“How is he to answer every one at once?” said Prince Andrey. “Besides, in the actions of a statesman, one must distinguish between his acts as a private person and as a general or an emperor. So it seems to me.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” put in Pierre, delighted at the assistance that had come to support him.
“One must admit,” pursued Prince Andrey, “that Napoleon as a man was great at the bridge of Arcola, or in the hospital at Jaffa, when he gave his hand to the plague-stricken, but … but there are other actions it would be hard to justify.”
Prince Andrey, who obviously wished to relieve the awkwardness of Pierre’s position, got up to go, and made a sign to his wife.
Suddenly Prince Ippolit got up, and with a wave of his hands stopped every one, and motioning to them to be seated, began:
“Ah, I heard a Moscow story to-day; I must entertain you with it. You will excuse me, vicomte, I must tell it in Russian. If not, the point of the story will be lost.” And Prince Ippolit began speaking in Russian, using the sort of jargon Frenchmen speak after spending a year in Russia. Every one waited expectant; Prince Ippolit had so eagerly, so insistently called for the attention of all for his story.
“In Moscow there is a lady, une dame. And she is very stingy. She wanted to have two footmen behind her carriage. And very tall footmen. That was her taste. And she had a lady’s maid, also very tall. She said.…”
Here Prince Ippolit paused and pondered, apparently collecting his ideas with difficulty.
“She said … yes, she said: ‘Girl,’ to the lady’s maid, ‘put on livrée, and get up behind the carriage, to pay calls.’ ”
Here Prince Ippolit gave a loud guffaw, laughing long before any of his audience, which created an impression by no means flattering to him. Several persons, among them the elderly lady and Anna Pavlovna, did smile, however.
“She drove off. Suddenly there was a violent gust of wind. The girl lost her hat, and her long hair fell down …”
At this point he could not restrain himself, and began laughing violently, articulating in the middle of a loud guffaw, “And all the world knew …”
There the anecdote ended. Though no one could understand why he had told it, and why he had insisted on telling it in Russian, still Anna Pavlovna and several other people appreciated the social breeding of Prince Ippolit in so agreeably putting a close to the disagreeable and ill-bred outbreak of Monsieur Pierre. The conversation after this episode broke up into small talk of no interest concerning the last and the approaching ball, the theatre, and where and when one would meet so-and-so again.