“There is blood on your cloak; have you been having a hand-to-hand fight?” Kalugin asked him. “Oh, 'tis frightful! Just imagine....” And Pesth began to relate how he had led his company, how the commander of the company had been killed, how he had spitted a Frenchman, and how, if it had not been for him, the battle would have been lost. The foundations for this tale, that the company commander had been killed, and that Pesth had killed a Frenchman, were correct; but, in giving the details, the yunker had invented facts and bragged. He bragged involuntarily, because, during the whole engagement, he had been in a kind of mist, and had forgotten himself to such a degree that everything which happened seemed to him to have happened somewhere, sometime, and with some one, and very naturally he had endeavored to bring out these details in a light which should be favorable to himself. But what had happened in reality was this:&mdash...
After Anna Mikháylovna had driven off with her son to visit Count Cyril Vladímirovich Bezúkhov, Countess Rostóva sat for a long time all alone applying her handkerchief to her eyes. At last she rang. “What is the matter with you, my dear?” she said crossly to the maid who kept her waiting some minutes. “Don’t you wish to serve me? Then I’ll find you another place.” The countess was upset by her friend’s sorrow and humiliating poverty, and was therefore out of sorts, a state of mind which with her always found expression in calling her maid “my dear” and speaking to her with exaggerated politeness. “I am very sorry, ma’am,” answered the maid. “Ask the count to come to me.” The count came waddling in to see his wife with a rather guilty look as usual. “Well, little countess? What a sauté of...