War And Peace

Natasha was married in the early spring of 1813, and by 1820 she had three daughters and the son she had been longing for and was now nursing herself. She had put on weight and filled out; the waif-like, energetic Natasha of former days was almost unrecognizable in this sturdy young mother. Her facial features were more sharply defined, and they carried a placid expression of quiet serenity that had replaced the undying fire of excitement that had once been the most charming thing about her. Often nowadays all you saw was her face and body; her spirit was not in evidence. All you saw was a picture of lovely, buxom female fertility. It was a rare thing nowadays for the old fire to flare up again. This would only happen when her husband came back from a long trip, as now, or when a sick child recovered, or when she talked about Prince Andrey to Countess Marya (she never talked to her husband about him because she thought he might be jealous of her memories), or very occasionally when something prompted her to sing – she had not done any serious singing since she got married. And on those rare occasions when the old fire did flare up again her lovely full figure made her more attractive than ever before.

Since her marriage Natasha and her husband had lived in Moscow and Petersburg, on their estate near Moscow and at her mother’s house, or rather Nikolay’s. The young Countess Bezukhov was not much seen in society, and those who saw her were not greatly impressed. She was neither charming nor friendly. It wasn’t that Natasha was a lover of solitude (she wasn’t sure whether she liked it or not – probably not, she thought), but busy as she was with pregnancy, confinements and nursing children, as well as involving herself in every minute of her husband’s life, the only way she could satisfy all these demands was by renouncing society. Everybody who had known Natasha before her marriage was astonished to see how much she had changed, as if this was something out of the ordinary. Only the old countess, whose maternal instinct had told her that Natasha’s wild behaviour had sprung from the need to have a husband and children of her own – as Natasha herself had declared more than once at Otradnoye, and more in earnest than in jest – had known and the only thing that amazed her was the amazement of other people who simply didn’t understand Natasha. She never stopped saying she had always known that her daughter would make an ideal wife and mother.

‘But she does go to extremes with all this devotion to her husband and children,’ the countess would say. ‘It’s getting rather absurd.’

Natasha had failed to follow the golden rule laid down by so many clever people, especially the French, that tells a newly married young girl not to neglect herself, not to drop the things she is good at, to take even more care over her appearance than when she was a maid and to make every effort to stay as attractive to her husband as she was before he came to be her husband. Natasha did the very opposite: she immediately dropped all the things that had charmed everybody else, including the one thing she was really good at – her singing. She gave it up precisely because of its charming effect on people. In the words of the popular phrase, she let herself go. Natasha didn’t bother any more about nice manners or choosing her words carefully, she made no attempt to show herself off to advantage or look her best when her husband was around, and she didn’t hesitate to make demands on him. She flagrantly broke every one of these rules. She felt that the seductive arts that had come to her by instinct in earlier days couldn’t help but seem ridiculous now to her husband, to whom she had completely surrendered herself from the first moment – with her whole soul, that is, no corner of which was kept from him. She now felt bound to her husband not by the romantic emotions that had first attracted him to her, but by something different, something hard to define but as strong as the tie between her body and soul.

Fussing with her hair, dressing up and singing songs just to appeal to her husband would have seemed as weird as adorning herself to please herself. Adorning herself to please other people might have been quite nice – she wasn’t sure – but she simply didn’t have the time. The real reason why she didn’t bother about singing, or grooming herself or picking her words carefully was that she simply didn’t have the time for anything like that.

We all know that people are capable of absorbing themselves in one single subject, however trivial it may seem to be. We also know there is no subject so trivial that it won’t go on infinitely expanding once people have become absorbed in it.

The subject that now absorbed Natasha so completely was her family: her husband, who had to be held on to very firmly to ensure he belonged exclusively to her and the family, and also the children she had to carry, give birth to, nurse and bring up.