glasses with wine.

Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too,
again pressed Pierre's hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a
pensive attitude.

"Yes, my dear friend," he began, "such is fortune's caprice. Who would
have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons in the
service of Bonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am in Moscow
with him. I must tell you, mon cher," he continued in the sad and
measured tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, "that our name
is one of the most ancient in France."

And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain told Pierre
the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all
about his relations and his financial and family affairs, "ma pauvre
mere" playing of course an important part in the story.

"But all that is only life's setting, the real thing is love--love! Am I
not right, Monsieur Pierre?" said he, growing animated. "Another glass?"

Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.

"Oh, women, women!" and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at
Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.

There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, looking
at the officer's handsome, self-satisfied face, and noting the eager
enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe's love
stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the special
charm and poetry of love, yet he told his story with such sincere
conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the charm of love
and he described women so alluringly that Pierre listened to him with
curiosity.

It was plain that l'amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not
that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor
was it the romantic love stimulated by himself that he experienced for
Natasha. (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the one
he considered the "love of clodhoppers" and the other the "love
of simpletons.") L'amour which the Frenchman worshiped consisted
principally in the unnaturalness of his relation to the woman and in a
combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.

Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a
fascinating marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a charming,
innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching marquise. The
conflict of magnanimi