“Capital!” Prince Ippolit said in English

“Capital!” Prince Ippolit said in English, and he began slapping his knee. The vicomte merely shrugged his shoulders.

Pierre looked solemnly over his spectacles at his audience.

“I say so,” he pursued desperately, “because the Bourbons ran away from the Revolution, leaving the people to anarchy; and Napoleon alone was capable of understanding the Revolution, of overcoming it, and so for the public good he could not stop short at the life of one man.”

“Won’t you come over to this table?” said Anna Pavlovna. But Pierre went on without answering her.

“Yes,” he said, getting more and more eager, “Napoleon is great because he has towered above the Revolution, and subdued its evil tendencies, preserving all that was good—the equality of all citizens, and freedom of speech and of the press, and only to that end has he possessed himself of supreme power.”

“Yes, if on obtaining power he had surrendered it to the lawful king, instead of making use of it to commit murder,” said the vicomte, “then I might have called him a great man.”

“He could not have done that. The people gave him power simply for him to rid them of the Bourbons, and that was just why the people believed him to be a great man. The Revolution was a grand fact,” pursued Monsieur Pierre, betraying by this desperate and irrelevantly provocative statement his extreme youth and desire to give full expression to everything.

“Revolution and regicide a grand fact?…What next?…but won’t you come to this table?” repeated Anna Pavlovna.

“Contrat social,” said the vicomte with a bland smile.

“I’m not speaking of regicide. I’m speaking of the idea.”

“The idea of plunder, murder, and regicide!” an ironical voice put in.

“Those were extremes, of course; but the whole meaning of the Revolution did not lie in them, but in the rights of man, in emancipation from conventional ideas, in equality; and all these Napoleon has maintained in their full force.”

“Liberty and equality,” said the vicomte contemptuously, as though he had at last made up his mind to show this youth seriously all the folly of his assertions: “all high-sounding words, which have long since been debased. Who does not love liberty and equality? Our Saviour indeed preached liberty and equality. Have men been any happier since the Revolution? On the contrary. We wanted liberty, but Bonaparte has crushed it.”

Prince Andrey looked with a smile first at Pierre, then at the vicomte, then at their hostess.

For the first minute Anna Pavlovna had, in spite of her social adroitness, been dismayed by Pierre’s outbreak; but when she saw that the vicomte was not greatly discomposed by Pierre’s sacrilegious utterances, and had convinced herself that it was impossible to suppress them, she rallied her forces and joined the vicomte in attacking the orator. ml> e � � s s H�r s turned completely round, and bending over the little princess asked her for a needle, and began showing her the coat-of-arms of the Condé family, scratching it with the needle on the table. He explained the coat-of-arms with an air of gravity, as though the princess had asked him about it. “Staff, gules; engrailed with gules of azure—house of Condé,” he said. The princess listened smiling. — r � c a s ��r e ladies — in which I have had the happiness to be received, that I have not yet had time to think of the climate,” he said. Not letting the abbé and Pierre slip out of her grasp, Anna Pavlovna, for greater convenience in watching them, made them join the bigger group.