“Then allow me to express your regret, and I am convinced that our opponents will agree to accept your apology,” said Nesvitsky (who, like the others assisting in the affair, and every one at such affairs, was unable to believe that the quarrel would come to an actual duel). “You know, count, it is far nobler to acknowledge one’s mistake than to push things to the irrevocable. There was no great offence on either side. Permit me to convey…”

“No, what are you talking about?” said Pierre; “it doesn’t matter.… Ready then?” he added. “Only tell me how and where I am to go, and what to shoot at?” he said with a smile unnaturally gentle. He took up a pistol, and began inquiring how to let it off, as he had never had a pistol in his hand before, a fact he did not care to confess. “Oh, yes, of course, I know, I had only forgotten,” he said.

“No apologies, absolutely nothing,” Dolohov was saying to Denisov, who for his part was also making an attempt at reconciliation, and he too went up to the appointed spot.

The place chosen for the duel was some eighty paces from the road, on which their sledges had been left, in a small clearing in the pine wood, covered with snow that had thawed in the warmer weather of the last few days. The antagonists stood forty paces from each other at the further edge of the clearing. The seconds, in measuring the paces, left tracks in the deep, wet snow from the spot where they had been standing to the swords of Nesvitsky and Denisov, which had been thrust in the ground ten paces from one another to mark the barrier. The thaw and mist persisted; forty paces away nothing could be seen. In three minutes everything was ready, but still they delayed beginning. Every one was silent.


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