“Not only is Vienna occupied, but Bonaparte is at Schönbrunn, and the count—our dear Count Urbna—is setting off to receive his orders.”

After the fatigues and impressions of his journey and his reception, and even more after the dinner he had just eaten, Bolkonsky felt that he could not take in all the significance of the words he had just heard.

“Count Lichtenfels was here this morning,” pursued Bilibin, “and he showed me a letter containing a full description of the parade of the French at Vienna. Prince Murat and all the rest of it … You see that your victory is not a great matter for rejoicing, and that you can’t be received as our deliverer…”

“Really, I don’t care about that, I don’t care in the slightest!” said Prince Andrey, beginning to understand that his news of the battle before Krems was really of little importance in view of such an event as the taking of the capital of Austria. “How was Vienna taken? And its bridge and its famous fortifications, and Prince Auersperg? We heard rumours that Prince Auersperg was defending Vienna,” said he.

“Prince Auersperg is stationed on this side—our side—and is defending us; defending us very ineffectually, I imagine, but any way he is defending us. But Vienna’s on the other side of the river. No, the bridge has not been taken, and I hope it won’t be taken, because it is mined and orders have been given to blow it up. If it were not so, we should have long ago been in the mountains of Bohemia, and you and your army would have spent a bad quarter of an hour between two fires.”

“But still that doesn’t mean that the campaign is over,” said Prince Andrey.

“But I believe that it is over. And so do all the big-wigs here, though they don’t dare to say so. It will be as I said at the beginning of the campaign, that the matter will not be settled by your firing before Därenstein, not by gunpowder, but by those who invented it,” said Bilibin, repeating one of his mots, letting the creases run out of his forehead and pausing. “The only question is what the meeting of the Emperor Alexander and the Prussian king may bring forth. If Prussia enters the alliance, they will force Austria’s hand and there will be war. If not, the only point will be to arrange where to draw up the articles of the new Campo Formio.”

“But what an extraordinary genius!” cried Prince Andrey suddenly, clenching his small hand and bringing it down on the table. “And what luck the man has!”

“Buonaparte?” said Bilibin interrogatively, puckering up his forehead and so intimating that a mot was coming. “Buonaparte?” he said, with special stress on the u. “I think, though, that now when he is dictating laws to Austria from Schönbrunn, we must let him off the u. I shall certainly adopt the innovation, and call him simply Bonaparte.”

“No, joking apart,” said Prince Andrey, “do you really believe the campaign is over?”

“I’ll tell you what I think. Austria has been made a fool of, and she is not used to that. And she’ll avenge it. And she has been made a fool of because in the first place her provinces have been pillaged (they say the Holy Russian armament is plundering them cruelly), her army has been destroyed, her capital has been taken, and all this for the sweet sake of his Sardinian Majesty. And so between ourselves, my dear boy, my instinct tells me we are being deceived; my instinct tells me of negotiations with France and projects of peace, a secret peace, concluded separately.”

“Impossible!” said Prince Andrey. “That would be too base.”

“Time will show,” said Bilibin, letting the creases run off his forehead again in token of being done with the subject.

When Prince Andrey went to the room that had been prepared for him, and lay down in the clean linen on the feather-bed and warmed and fragrant pillows, he felt as though the battle of which he brought


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