“Are you the commander of the regiment of Emperor Alexander’s horse-guards？” asked Napoleon.
“I was in command of a squadron,” replied Repnin.
“Your regiment did its duty honourably,” said Napoleon.
“The praise of a great general is a soldier’s best reward,” said Repnin.
“I bestow it upon you with pleasure,” said Napoleon. “Who is this young man beside you？” Prince Repnin gave his name, Lieutenant Suhtelen.
Looking at him, Napoleon said with a smile： “He has come very young to meddle with us.”
“Youth is no hindrance to valour,” said Suhtelen in a breaking voice.
“A fine answer,” said Napoleon; “young man, you will go far.”
Prince Andrey, who had been thrust forward under the Emperor’s eyes to complete the show of prisoners, could not fail to attract his notice. Napoleon apparently remembered seeing him on the field, and addressing him he used the same epithet, “young man,” with which his first sight of Bolkonsky was associated in his memory.
“And you, young man,” he said to him, “how are you feeling, mon brave？”
Although five minutes previously Prince Andrey had been able to say a few words to the soldiers who were carrying him, he was silent now, with his eyes fastened directly upon Napoleon. So trivial seemed to him at that moment all the interests that were engrossing Napoleon, so petty seemed to him his hero, with his paltry vanity and glee of victory, in comparison with that lofty, righteous, and kindly sky which he had seen and comprehended, that he could not answer him. And all indeed seemed to him so trifling and unprofitable beside the stern and solemn train of thought aroused in him by weakness from loss of blood, by suffering and the nearness of death. Gazing into Napoleon’s eyes, Prince Andrey mused on the nothingness of greatness, on the nothingness of life, of which no one could comprehend the significance, and on the nothingness—still more—of death, the meaning of which could be understood and explained by none of the living.
The Emperor, after vainly pausing for a reply, turned away and said to one of the officers in command—
“See that they look after these gentlemen and take them to my bivouac; let my doctor Larrey attend to their wounds. Au revoir, Prince Repnin,” and he galloped away.
His face was radiant with happiness and self-satisfaction.
The soldiers, who had been carrying Prince Andrey, had come across the golden relic Princess Marya had hung upon her brother’s neck, and taken it off him, but seeing the graciousness the Emperor had shown to the prisoners, they made haste to restore the holy image.
Prince Andrey did not see who put it on him again, nor how it was replaced, but all at once he found the locket on its delicate gold chain on his chest outside his uniform.
“How good it would be,” thought Prince Andrey, as he glanced at the image which his sister had hung round his neck with such emotion and reverence, “how good it would be if all were as clear and ****** as it seems to Marie. How good to know where to seek aid in this life and what to expect after it, there, beyond the grave！”
“How happy and at peace I should be, if I could say now, ‘Lord, have mercy on me！…’ But to whom am I to say that？ Either a Power infinite, inconceivable, to which I cannot appeal, which I cannot even put into words, the great whole, or nothing,” he said to himself, “or that God, who has been sewn up here in this locket by Marie？ There is nothing, nothing certain but the nothingness of all that is comprehensible to us, and the grandeur of something incomprehensible, but more important！”
The stretchers began to be moved. At every jolt he felt intolerable pain again. The fever became higher, and he fell into delirium. Visions of his father, his wife, his sister, and his future son, and the tenderness he had felt for them on the night before the battle, the figure of that little, petty Napoleon, and over all these the lofty sky, formed the chief substance of his delirious dreams. The quiet home life and peaceful happiness of Bleak Hills passed before his imagination. He was enjoying that happiness when suddenly there appeared that little Napoleon with his callous, narrow look of happiness in the misery of others, and there came doubts and torments, and only the sky promised peace. Towards morning all his dreams mingled and melted away in the chaos and darkness of unconsciousness and oblivion, far more likely, in the opinion of Napoleon’s doctor, Larrey, to be ended by death than by recovery.
“He is a nervous, bilious subject,” said Larrey; “he won’t recover.”
Prince Andrey, with the rest of the hopeless cases, was handed over to the care of the inhabitants of the district.