though she did not understand its significance. This expression suggested that she had resolved to endure her troubles uncomplainingly and that her husband was a cross laid upon her by God. Prince Vasíli expressed his opinion more openly. He shrugged his shoulders when Pierre was mentioned and, pointing to his forehead, remarked:
“A bit touched—I always said so.”
“I said from the first,” declared Anna Pávlovna referring to Pierre, “I said at the time and before anyone else” (she insisted on her priority) “that that senseless young man was spoiled by the depraved ideas of these days. I said so even at the time when everybody was in raptures about him, when he had just returned from abroad, and when, if you remember, he posed as a sort of Marat at one of my soirees. And how has it ended? I was against this marriage even then and foretold all that has happened.”
Anna Pávlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of soirees as before—such as she alone had the gift of arranging—at which was to be found “the cream of really good society, the bloom of the intellectual essence of Petersburg,” as she herself put it. Besides this refined selection of society Anna Pávlovna’s receptions were also distinguished by the fact that she always presented some new and interesting person to the visitors and that nowhere else was the state of the political thermometer of legitimate Petersburg court society so dearly and distinctly indicated.
Toward the end of 1806, when all the sad details of Napoleon’s destruction of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstädt and the surrender of most of the Prussian fortresses had been received, when our troops had already