The day after Andrew leaves, Prince Nicholas sends for Princess Mary. Well? Are you satisfied now? You made me quarrel with my son. I am old and weak, and this is what you wanted. After that she does not see him for a week. He is ill and will not leave his study. To her surprise he excludes not only her but Mademoiselle Bourienne. Tikhon alone attends him. At the end of the week he resumes his life, throwing himself into building and gardens and completely breaking off with the Frenchwoman. His cold tone says: you lied to Andrew about that woman and made me quarrel, but I need neither her nor you.
Mary spends half of every day with little Nicholas, teaching him Russian and music, talking to Dessalles, reading, sitting with her old nurse or with God's folk who come by the back door. She fears for her brother and is horrified that men kill one another, but this war seems to her like all others. Dessalles tries to explain it. God's folk report rumours of Antichrist. Julie, now Princess Drubetskaya, writes patriotic letters in Frenchified Russian because she has a detestation for all the French, praises Raevski embracing his sons, and calls herself and the princesses Aline and Sophie unhappy widows of live men making charpie. The chief reason Mary does not grasp the war is that the old prince never speaks of it, does not recognize it, and laughs at Dessalles at dinner. His calm is so confident that she believes him.
All July he is active, planning another garden and a new building for domestic serfs. What makes her anxious is that he sleeps very little and changes his place every day: camp bed in the glass gallery, couch in the drawing room without undressing while a serf boy reads, a night in the dining room. On August 1 a second letter comes from Andrew. The first, soon after he left, asked forgiveness; the prince replied affectionately and kept the Frenchwoman at a distance. The second, written near Vitebsk after the French occupied that town, gives a brief account of the campaign, a plan, and forecasts, and warns that Bald Hills lies on the army's line. He advises a move to Moscow. At dinner Dessalles mentions Vitebsk. The prince remembers the letter, will not let Bourienne fetch it, sends Michael Ivanovich, then goes himself. In the drawing room he has Mary read it aloud while he studies the plan of the new building. Dessalles ventures that the theatre of war may move near. The prince laughs: the theatre of war is Poland, the enemy will never get beyond the Niemen. Dessalles is amazed; the enemy is already at the Dnieper. Mary, forgetting the geography, thinks her father correct. He talks of Polish swamps and 1807 as if recent, then peevishly of a river where the French were beaten. Dessalles says the letter mentions no such thing. No one speaks. The prince returns to the plan, looks angrily at Mary and Dessalles, and goes to his room. In the evening Michael Ivanovich comes for the forgotten letter, lowers his voice, and says the prince is at his desk, busy with his will. Alpatych has been waiting to start for Smolensk.
Coming Up in Chapter 193
When Michael Ivanovich returns to the study with the letter, the old prince, with spectacles on and a shade over his eyes, sits at his open bureau with screened candles, holding a paper in his outstretched hand and reading his Remarks, which are to be transmitted to the Emperor after his death.
