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Both fell silent, peering out through the darkness at the sound of Dolokhov's and Petya's steps as they advanced to the fire leading their horses. "Bonjour, messieurs!" * said Dolokhov loudly and clearly. * "Good day, gentlemen." There was a stir among the officers in the shadow beyond the fire, and one tall, long-necked officer, walking round the fire, came up to Dolokhov.
"Too late again!" flashed through Petya's mind and he galloped on to the place from which the rapid firing could be heard. The shots came from the yard of the landowner's house he had visited the night before with Dolokhov. The French were making a stand there behind a wattle fence in a garden thickly overgrown with bushes and were firing at the Cossacks who crowded at the gateway.
"It's a long way for you to go, and it's dark," he heard Nadyezhda Stepanovna's voice an hour later. "Why shouldn't you stay the night here? Koromyslov can sleep here in the drawing-room on the sofa, and you, Smerkalov, in Petya's bed. . . . I can put Petya in my husband's study. . . . Do stay, really!"
"Father, can you act in plays?" he heard Petya's voice. "Oh, don't worry me with stupid questions!" said Zaikin, getting angry. "He sticks to one like a leaf in the bath! Here you are, six years old, and just as silly as you were three years ago. . . . Stupid, neglected child! Why are you spoiling those cards, for instance? How dare you spoil them?"
"Done for!" he said with a frown, and went to the gate to meet Denisov who was riding toward him. "Killed?" cried Denisov, recognizing from a distance the unmistakably lifeless attitude very familiar to him in which Petya's body was lying.
The mother's wounded spirit could not heal. Petya's death had torn from her half her life. When the news of Petya's death had come she had been a fresh and vigorous woman of fifty, but a month later she left her room a listless old woman taking no interest in life. But the same blow that almost killed the countess, this second blow, restored Natasha to life.
Petya, his heart in his mouth with excitement, rode by his side. "If we're caught, I won't be taken alive! I have a pistol," whispered he. "Don't talk Russian," said Dolokhov in a hurried whisper, and at that very moment they heard through the darkness the challenge: "Qui vive?" * and the click of a musket. * "Who goes there?" The blood rushed to Petya's face and he grasped his pistol.
Such were Dimmler the musician and his wife, Vogel the dancing master and his family, Belova, an old maiden lady, an inmate of the house, and many others such as Petya's tutors, the girls' former governess, and other people who simply found it preferable and more advantageous to live in the count's house than at home.
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