War and peace ( Constance Garnett-1900)

Princess Ellen smiled. She got up with the same unchanging smile of the acknowledged beauty with which she had entered the drawing-room. Her white ball-dress adorned with ivy and moss rustled lightly; her white shoulders, glossy hair, and diamonds glittered, as she passed between the men who moved apart to make way for her. Not looking directly at any one, but smiling at every one, as it were courteously allowing to all the right to admire the beauty of her figure, her full shoulders, her bosom and back, which were extremely exposed in the mode of the day, she moved up to Anna Pavlovna, seeming to bring with her the brilliance of the ballroom. Ellen was so lovely that she was not merely free from the slightest shade of coquetry, she seemed on the contrary ashamed of the too evident, too violent and all-conquering influence of her beauty. She seemed to wish but to be unable to soften the effect of her beauty.

‘What a beautiful woman!’ every one said on seeing her. As though struck by something extraordinary, the vicomte shrugged his shoulders and dropped his eyes, when she seated herself near him and dazzled him too with the same unchanging smile.

‘Madame, I doubt my abilities before such an audience,’ he said, bowing with a smile.

The princess leaned her plump, bare arm on the table and did not find it necessary to say anything. She waited, smiling. During the vicomte’s story she sat upright, looking from time to time at her beautiful, plump arm, which lay with its line changed by pressure on the table, then at her still lovelier bosom, on which she set straight her diamond

WARANDPEACE 9

necklace. Several times she settled the folds of her gown, and when the narrative made a sensation upon the audience, she glanced at Anna Pavlovna and at once assumed the expression she saw on the maid-of- honour’s face, then she relapsed again into her unvarying smile. After Ellen the little princess too moved away from the tea-table.

‘Wait for me, I will take my work,’ she said. ‘Come, what are you thinking of?’ she said to Prince Ippolit. ‘Bring me my reticule.’

The little princess, smiling and talking to every one, at once effected a change of position, and settling down again, gaily smoothed out her skirts.

‘Now I’m comfortable,’ she said, and begging the vicomte to begin, she took up her work. Prince Ippolit brought her reticule, moved to her side, and bending close over her chair, sat beside her.

Le charmant Hippolyte struck every one as extraordinarily like his sister, and, still more, as being, in spite of the likeness, strikingly ugly. His features were like his sister’s, but in her, everything was radiant with joyous life, with the complacent, never-failing smile of youth and life and an extraordinary antique beauty of figure. The brother’s face on the contrary was clouded over by imbecility and invariably wore a look of aggressive fretfuiness, while he was thin and feebly built. His eyes, his nose, his mouth—everything was, as it were, puckered up in one vacant, bored grimace, while his arms and legs always fell into the most grotesque attitudes.

‘It is not a ghost story,’ he said, sitting down by the princess and hurriedly fixing his eyeglass in his eye, as though without that instrument he could not begin to speak.

‘Why, no, my dear fellow,’ said the astonished vicomte, with a shrug.

‘Because I detest ghost stories,’ said Prince Ippolit in a tone which showed that he uttered the words before he was aware of their meaning.

From the self-confidence with which he spoke, no one could tell whether what he said was very clever or very stupid. He was dressed in a dark- green frock coat, breeches of the colour of the cuisse de nymphe effrayee, as he called it, stockings and slippers. The vicomte very charmingly related the anecdote then current, that the due d’Enghien had secretly visited Paris for the sake of an interview with the actress, Mile. Georges, and that there he met Bonaparte, who also enjoyed the favours of the celebrated actress, and that, meeting the due, Napoleon had fallen into one of the fits to which he was subject and had been completely in the due’s power, how the due had not taken advantage of it, and Bonaparte had in the sequel avenged this magnanimity by the due’s death.

The story was very charming and interesting, especially at the point when the rivals suddenly recognise each other and the ladies seemed to be greatly excited by it. ‘Charmant!’ said Anna Pavlovna, looking inquiringly at the little princess. ‘Charming!’ whispered the little princess, sticking her needle into her work as an indication that the interest and charm of the story prevented her working. The vicomte appreciated this silent homage, and smiling gratefully, resumed his narrative. But mean-

IO