but obey him like a corporal, though I am his senior. This is
painful, but, loving my benefactor and sovereign, I submit. Only I am
sorry for the Emperor that he entrusts our fine army to such as he.
Consider that on our retreat we have lost by fatigue and left in the
hospital more than fifteen thousand men, and had we attacked this would
not have happened. Tell me, for God's sake, what will Russia, our mother
Russia, say to our being so frightened, and why are we abandoning our
good and gallant Fatherland to such rabble and implanting feelings of
hatred and shame in all our subjects? What are we scared at and of whom
are we afraid? I am not to blame that the Minister is vacillating,
a coward, dense, dilatory, and has all bad qualities. The whole army
bewails it and calls down curses upon him...

CHAPTER VI

Among the innumerable categories applicable to the phenomena of human
life one may discriminate between those in which substance prevails
and those in which form prevails. To the latter--as distinguished
from village, country, provincial, or even Moscow life--we may allot
Petersburg life, and especially the life of its salons. That life of
the salons is unchanging. Since the year 1805 we had made peace and had
again quarreled with Bonaparte and had made constitutions and unmade
them again, but the salons of Anna Pavlovna and Helene remained just as
they had been--the one seven and the other five years before. At Anna
Pavlovna's they talked with perplexity of Bonaparte's successes just
as before and saw in them and in the subservience shown to him by the
European sovereigns a malicious conspiracy, the sole object of which was
to cause unpleasantness and anxiety to the court circle of which Anna
Pavlovna was the representative. And in Helene's salon, which Rumyantsev
himself honored with his visits, regarding Helene as a remarkably
intelligent woman, they talked with the same ecstasy in 1812 as in 1808
of the "great nation" and the "great man," and regretted our rupture
with France, a rupture which, according to them, ought to be promptly
terminated by peace.

Of late, since the Emperor's return from the army, there had been some
excitement in these conflicting salon circles and some demonstrations
of hostility to one another, but each camp retained its own tendency.
In Anna Pavlovna's circle only those Frenchmen were admitted who were
deep-rooted legitimists, and patriotic views were expressed to the
eff