Coming Home Changed — War and Peace

On his return to Moscow, Nicholas Rostóv is welcomed at home as the best of sons, a hero, and darling Nikólenka; by relations as a charming, polite young man; by acquaintances as a handsome hussar lieutenant, a good dancer, and one of the best matches in the city. The old count has money enough that year, all his estates remortgaged, so Nicholas acquires a trotter, stylish riding breeches no one else in Moscow yet has, and boots with extremely pointed toes and small silver spurs. After a short adaptation he finds it pleasant to be home. Scripture-exam despair, borrowing from Gavríl for a driver, kissing Sónya on the sly: he recalls all that as childishness left behind. Now he wears a silver-laced jacket and the soldier's Cross of St. George, trains the trotter with elderly racing men, visits a lady on a boulevard of an evening, leads the mazurka at the Arkhárovs', talks war with Field Marshal Kámenski, and is intimate with a colonel of forty whom Denísov introduced. His passion for the Emperor has cooled somewhat, yet he still speaks of a love not everyone could understand, and shares Moscow's adoration of the "angel incarnate."

He does not draw closer to Sónya. She is pretty, sweet, and deeply in love, but he is at the age when there seems so much to do that a young man fears to bind himself. There will be, and are, many more such girls; time enough to think about love when he wants to. Women's society seems rather derogatory to his manhood; he goes to balls with an affectation of doing so against his will. Races, the English Club, sprees with Denísov, and visits to a certain house: that is the thing for a dashing hussar. At the beginning of March, Count Ilyá is very busy arranging a dinner at the English Club in honour of Prince Bagratión. In his dressing gown he orders the steward and the famous cook Feoktíst about asparagus, cucumbers, strawberries, veal, fish, cocks' comb in the turtle soup, three cold dishes, large sterlets, and another entrée. Dmítri must gallop to the Moscow estate for two hundred pots from the hothouses, well wrapped in felt, by Friday. The cook and steward listen with pleased faces: under no other management could they extract so good a profit from a dinner of several thousand rubles. Nicholas, rosy, rested, and sleeker, finds his father's head in a whirl. Should they get gypsy singers as well as the count's own orchestra? Military men like that sort of thing. Nicholas smiles that Bagratión worried less before Schön Grabern. The count seizes both his hands: take the sleigh to Bezúkhov's for strawberries and pineapples, then to Rasgulyáy for the gypsy Ilyúshka who danced at Count Orlóv's in a white Cossack coat.

Anna Mikháylovna comes in with her meek Christian look and takes the Bezúkhov errand herself. Pierre has arrived; they will get anything from his hothouses; he has forwarded a letter from Borís, now on the staff. Is his wife with him? Profound sadness: if what they hear is true, it is dreadful. Dólokhov, Mary Ivánovna's son, has compromised her completely. Pierre took him up in Petersburg, and now she has come here and that daredevil after her. By intonation and a half smile she betrays sympathy for the daredevil even as she pities Pierre's broken, lofty soul. "Dear, dear! But still tell him to come to the club. It will all blow over." Next day, 3 March, two hundred and fifty members and fifty guests wait for the hero of the Austrian campaign. When news of Austerlitz first arrived, Moscow would not believe a Russian defeat, then kept silent at the club as in a conspiracy. After a while the bigwigs returned with reasons: Austrian treachery, a defective commissariat, the Pole Przebyszéwski and the Frenchman Langeron, Kutúzov's incapacity, and, in whispers, the sovereign's youth. The army, everyone declared, had achieved miracles. The hero of heroes was Bagratión, the stranger without connections, associated with Suvórov, the simple soldier to honour and the best way to express dislike of Kutúzov, the court weathercock. Shinshín says that had there been no Bagratión, it would have been necessary to invent him. Anecdotes of standards saved and Berg's left-handed sword go round. Of Bolkónski nothing is said, and only those who knew him intimately regret that he died so young, leaving a pregnant wife with his eccentric father.