"Onterkoff," said the captain, and for several seconds he looked at

Pierre with his laughing eyes. "The Germans are awful fools, aren't they, M.

Pierre?" he concluded.

"Well, another bottle of this Moscow claret, eh? Morel, warm us another

bottle!" the captain shouted gaily.

Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre in

the candle-light, and was obviously struck by the troubled face of his

companion. With genuine regret and sympathy in his face, Ramballe approached

Pierre, and bent over him.

"Eh, we are sad!" he said, touching Pierre on the hand. "Can I have hurt you?

No, really, have you anything against me?" he questioned. "Perhaps it is owing

to the situation of affairs?"

Pierre made no reply, but looked cordially into the Frenchman's eyes. This

expression of sympathy was pleasant to him.

"My word of honour, to say nothing of what I owe you, I have a liking for

you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death. With my

hand and my heart, I say so," he said, slapping himself on the chest.

"Thank you," said Pierre. The captain gazed at Pierre as he had gazed at him

when he learnt the German for "refuge," and his face suddenly brightened.

"Ah, in that case, I drink to our friendship," he cried gaily, pouring out

two glasses of wine.

Pierre took the glass and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his, pressed Pierre's

hand once more, and leaned his elbow on the table in a pose of pensive

melancholy.

"Yes, my dear friend, such are the freaks of fortune," he began. "Who would

have said I should be a soldier and captain of dragoons in the service of

Bonaparte, as we used to call him. And yet here I am at Moscow with him. I must

tell you, my dear fellow," he continued in the mournful and measured voice of a

man who intends to tell a long story, "our name is one of the most ancient in

France."

And with the easy and naïve unreserve of a Frenchman, the captain told Pierre

the history of his forefathers, his childhood, boyhood, and manhood, and all his

relations, his fortunes, and domestic affairs. "Ma pauvre mère," took, of

course, a prominent part in this recital.

"But all that is only the setting of life; the real thing is love. Love! Eh,

M. Pierre?" he said, warming up. "Another glass."

Pierre again emptied his glass, and filled himself a third.

"O women! women!" and the captain, gazing with moist eyes at Pierre, began

talking of love and his adventures with the fair sex. They were very numerous,

as might readily be believed, judging from the officer's conceited, handsome

face and the eager enthusiasm with which he talked of women. Although all

Ramballe's accounts of his love affairs were characterised by that peculiar

nastiness in which the French find the unique charm and poetry of love, the

captain told his stories with such genuine conviction that he was the only man

who had tasted and known all the sweets of love, and he described the women he

had known in such an alluring fashion that Pierre listened to him with

curiosity.

It was evident that l'amour the Frenchman was so fond of was neither

that low and simple kind of love Pierre had at one time felt for his wife, nor

the romantic love, exaggerated by himself, that he felt for Natasha. For both

those kinds of love Ramballe had an equal contempt-one was l'amour des

charretiers, the other l'amour des nigauds. L'amour for which the

Frenchman had a weakness consisted principally in an unnatural relation to the

woman, and in combinations of monstrous circumstances which lent the chief charm

to the feeling.

Thus the captain related the touching history of his love for a fascinating

marquise of five-and-thirty, and at the same time for a charming, innocent child

of seventeen, the daughter of the fascinating marquise. The conflict of

generosity between mother and daughter, ending in the mother sacrificing herself

and offering her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now, though it was a

memory in the remote past, moved the captain deeply. Then he related an episode

in which the husband played the part of the lover, and he-the lover-the part of

the husband, and several comic episodes among his reminiscences of Germany,

where Unterkunft means asile, where the husbands eat cabbage soup,

and where the young girls are too flaxen-haired.

The last episode was one in Poland, still fresh in the captain's memory, and

described by him with rapid gestures and a glowing face. The story was that he

had saved the life of a Pole-the episode of saving life was continually cropping

up in the captain's anecdotes-and that Pole had intrusted to his care his

bewitching wife, a Parisian in heart, while he himself entered the French

service. The captain had been happy, the bewitching Polish lady had wanted to

elope with him; but moved by a magnanimous impulse, the captain had restored the

wife to the husband with the words: "I saved your life, and I save your

honour."

As he repeated these words, the captain wiped his eyes and shook himself, as

though to shake off the weakness that overcame him at this touching

recollection.

As men often do at a late hour at night, and under the influence of wine,

Pierre listened to the captain's stories, and while he followed and understood

all he told him, he was also following a train of personal reminiscences which

had for some reason risen to his imagination. As he listened to those love

affairs, his own love for Natasha suddenly came into his mind, and going over

all the pictures of that love in his imagination, he mentally compared them with

Ramballe's stories. As he heard the account of the conflict between love and

duty, Pierre saw before him every detail of the meeting with the object of his

love at the Suharev Tower. That meeting had not at the time made much impression

on him; he had not once thought of it since. But now it seemed to him that there

was something very significant and romantic in that meeting.

"Pyotr Kirillitch, come here, I recognise you"; he could hear her words now,

could see her eyes, her smile, her travelling cap, and the curl peeping out

below it … and he felt that there was something moving, touching in all

that.

When he had finished his tale about the bewitching Polish lady, the captain

turned to Pierre with the inquiry whether he had had any similar experience of

self-sacrifice for love and envy of a lawful husband.

Pierre, roused by this question, lifted his head and felt an irresistible

impulse to give expression to the ideas in his mind. He began to explain that he

looked upon love for woman somewhat differently. He said he had all his life

long loved one woman, and still loved her, and that that woman could never be

his.

"Tiens!" said the captain.

Then Pierre explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest youth,

but had not dared to think of her because she was too young, and he had been an

illegitimate son, with no name of his own. Then when he had received a name and

wealth, he had not dared think of her because he loved her too much, because he

set her too high above all the world, and so even more above himself. On

reaching this point, Pierre asked the captain, did he understand that.

The captain made a gesture expressing that whether he understood it or not,

he begged him to proceed.

"Platonic love; moonshine…" he muttered. The wine he had drunk, or an impulse

of frankness, or the thought that this man did not know and never would know,

any of the persons concerned in his story, or all together loosened Pierre's

tongue. With faltering lips and with a faraway look in his moist eye, he told

all his story; his marriage and the story of Natasha's love for his dearest

friend and her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations with her. In

response to questions from Ramballe, he told him, too, what he had at first

concealed-his position in society-and even disclosed his name.

What impressed the captain more than anything else in Pierre's story was the

fact that Pierre was very wealthy, that he had two palatial houses in Moscow,

and that he had abandoned everything, and yet had not left Moscow, but was

staying in the town concealing his name and station.

Late in the night they went out together into the street. The night was warm

and clear. On the left there was the glow of the first fire that broke out in

Moscow, in Petrovka. On the right a young crescent moon stood high in the sky,

and in the opposite quarter of the heavens hung the brilliant comet which was

connected in Pierre's heart with his love. At the gates of the yard stood

Gerasim, the cook, and two Frenchmen. Pierre could hear their laughter and talk,

incomprehensible to one another. They were looking at the glow of the fire

burning in the town.

There was nothing alarming in a small remote fire in the immense city.

Gazing at the lofty, starlit sky, at the moon, at the comet and the glow of

the fire, Pierre felt a thrill of joyous and tender emotion. "How fair it all

is! what more does one want?" he thought. And all at once, when he recalled his

design, his head seemed going round; he felt so giddy that he leaned against the

fence so as not to fall.

Without taking leave of his new friend, Pierre left the gate with unsteady

steps, and going back to his room lay down on the sofa and at once fell

asleep.