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Volume II, Part Three, Chapter XIV

Suddenly everything stirred, the crowd began to talk, moved forward, then parted again, and between two ranks that had drawn apart, to the sounds of the music that had struck up, the sovereign entered. Behind him came the host and hostess. The sovereign walked quickly, bowing to right and left, as if trying to be rid as soon as possible of these first moments of the meeting. The musicians were playing the polonaise, known at that time by the words composed for it. Those words began: “Alexander, Elizaveta, you enrapture us.” The sovereign passed into the drawing room, the crowd surged toward the doors; several faces with altered expressions hurried there and back again. The crowd flowed back once more from the doors of the drawing room, in which the sovereign appeared, talking with the hostess. Some young man with a flustered air was pressing upon the ladies, begging them to make way. Certain ladies, with faces expressing a complete forgetfulness of all the conventions of society, crowded forward, spoiling their gowns. The men began to approach the ladies and to form up in couples for the polonaise.

Everyone drew apart, and the sovereign, smiling and leading the mistress of the house by the hand out of time with the music, came out of the doors of the drawing room. Behind him walked the host with M. A. Naryshkina, then the envoys, ministers, various generals, whom Peronskaya named without ceasing. More than half the ladies had partners and were dancing, or preparing to dance, the polonaise. Natasha felt that she was left, with her mother and Sonya, among the lesser part of the ladies, pressed back against the wall and not taken into the polonaise. She stood, her thin arms hanging down, her scarcely defined bosom rising evenly, and, holding her breath, she gazed before her with shining, frightened eyes, with an expression of readiness for the greatest joy and the greatest grief. Neither the sovereign nor all the important persons whom Peronskaya was pointing out occupied her — she had but one thought: “Can it be that no one will come up to me, that I shall not dance among the first, that I shall not be noticed by all these men, who now, it seems, do not even see me, and if they look at me, look with such an expression as though they were saying: Ah! that’s not she, so there’s nothing to look at. No, it cannot be!” she thought. “They must know how I long to dance, how splendidly I dance, and how gay it will be for them to dance with me.”

The sounds of the polonaise, which had continued a good while, were beginning to sound sad — a memory in Natasha’s ears. She wanted to cry. Peronskaya had walked away from them. The count was at the other end of the hall; the countess, Sonya, and she stood alone as if in a forest amid that alien crowd, of interest to no one and needed by no one. Prince Andrei passed by them with some lady, evidently not recognizing them. The handsome Anatole, smiling, was saying something to the lady he was leading, and glanced at Natasha’s face with the look with which one glances at walls. Boris passed them twice and each time turned away. Berg and his wife, who were not dancing, came up to them.

This family drawing-together here, at the ball, seemed offensive to Natasha, as though there were no other place for family conversations than at a ball. She neither listened to nor looked at Vera, who was saying something to her about her green dress.

At last the sovereign stopped beside his last partner (he danced with three), the music ceased; a preoccupied adjutant ran up to the Rostovs, begging them to move still farther aside, though they were standing against the wall, and from the gallery came the distinct, careful, and enticingly measured sounds of a waltz. The sovereign glanced with a smile at the hall. A minute passed — still no one had begun. The steward-adjutant went up to Countess Bezukhova and invited her. She smilingly raised her hand and laid it, without looking at him, on the adjutant’s shoulder. The steward-adjutant, a master of his art, confidently, unhurriedly, and rhythmically, holding his partner firmly, set off with her first in a glissade, along the edge of the circle; at the corner of the hall he caught up her left hand, turned her, and, above the ever-quickening sounds of the music, one heard only the measured clink of the spurs of the adjutant’s swift and adroit feet, while every three beats, at the turn, the velvet dress of his partner seemed to flash out, billowing. Natasha looked at them and was ready to cry that it was not she dancing this first round of the waltz.

Prince Andrei, in his colonel’s white cavalry uniform, in stockings and pumps, animated and gay, stood in the front rows of the circle, not far from the Rostovs. Baron Firhof was talking with him about the supposed first session of the Council of State on the morrow. Prince Andrei, as a man close to Speransky and taking part in the work of the legislative commission, could give reliable information about the next day’s session, of which various rumors were going about. But he did not listen to what Firhof was telling him and looked now at the sovereign, now at the cavaliers gathering to dance who could not bring themselves to enter the circle.

Prince Andrei was observing these cavaliers, shy in the sovereign’s presence, and the ladies swooning with desire to be asked.

Pierre went up to Prince Andrei and seized him by the arm.

— You always dance. Here is my protegée, the young Rostova; ask her, — he said.

— Where? — asked Bolkonsky. — Forgive me, — he said, turning to the baron, — we will finish this conversation elsewhere; at a ball one must dance. — He stepped forward, in the direction Pierre had shown him. Natasha’s desperate, swooning face caught Prince Andrei’s eye. He recognized her, guessed her feeling, understood that she was a novice, recalled her conversation at the window, and with a gay expression of face approached Countess Rostova.

— Allow me to introduce you to my daughter, — said the countess, blushing.

— I have the pleasure of being acquainted, if the countess remembers me, — said Prince Andrei with a courteous and low bow that utterly contradicted Peronskaya’s remarks about his rudeness, going up to Natasha and raising his arm to encircle her waist even before he had finished the invitation to dance. He offered her a round of the waltz. That swooning expression of Natasha’s face, ready for despair or for rapture, was suddenly lit up by a happy, grateful, childlike smile.

“I have long been waiting for you,” this frightened and happy girl seemed to say, with her smile breaking through her ready tears, as she raised her hand to Prince Andrei’s shoulder. They were the second couple to enter the circle. Prince Andrei was one of the best dancers of his time. Natasha danced superbly. Her little feet in their satin ball slippers did their work swiftly, lightly, and independently of her, while her face beamed with the rapture of happiness. Her bare neck and arms were thin and not beautiful. Compared with Hélène’s shoulders, hers were thin, her bosom undefined, her arms slender; but on Hélène there already seemed to be a varnish from all the thousands of glances that had slid over her body, whereas Natasha seemed like a girl bared for the first time, who would have been very much ashamed of it had she not been assured that this was absolutely necessary.

Prince Andrei loved dancing, and wishing to escape as quickly as possible the political and clever conversations with which everyone addressed him, and wishing to break as quickly as possible that irksome circle of constraint formed by the sovereign’s presence, he went to dance and chose Natasha, because Pierre had pointed her out to him and because she was the first of the pretty women to catch his eye; but scarcely had he encircled that slender, supple waist, and had she stirred so close to him and smiled so close to him, than the wine of her charm went to his head: he felt himself revived and grown younger when, catching his breath and leaving her, he stopped and began to watch the dancers.