Emma Watson Pussy
Books:
Anna Karenina
War And Peace
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and with
these she had prolonged conversations in private on the vanity of
all worldly things, and to them she showed her albums filled with
mournful sketches, maxims, and verses.
To Boris, Julie was particularly gracious: she regretted his early
disillusionment with life, offered him such consolation of
friendship as she who had herself suffered so much could render, and
showed him her album. Boris sketched two trees in the album and wrote:
"Rustic trees, your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me."
On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote:
La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.
Ah! contre les douleurs il ny a pas dautre asile.*
*Death gives relief and death is peaceful.
Ah! from suffering there is no other refuge.
Julie said this was charming
"There is something so enchanting in the smile of melancholy," she
said to Boris, repeating word for word a passage she had copied from a
book. "It is a ray of light in the darkness, a shade between sadness
and despair, showing the possibility of consolation."
In reply Boris wrote these lines:
Aliment de poison dune ame trop sensible,
Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,
Tendre melancholie, ah, viens me consoler,
Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite,
Et mele une douceur secrete
A ces pleurs que je sens couler.*
*Poisonous nourishment of a too sensitive soul,
Thou, without whom happiness would for me be impossible,
Tender melancholy, ah, come to console me,
Come to calm the torments of my gloomy retreat,
And mingle a secret sweetness
With these tears that I feel to be flowing.
For Boris, Julie played most doleful nocturnes on her harp. Boris
read Poor Liza aloud to her, and more than once interrupted the
reading because of the emotions that choked him. Meeting at large
gatherings Julie and Boris looked on one another as the only souls who
understood one another in a world of indifferent people.
Anna Mikhaylovna, who often visited the Karagins, while playing
cards with the mother made careful inquiries as to Julies dowry
(she was to have two estates in Penza and the Nizhegorod forests).
Anna Mikhaylovna regarded the refined sadness that united her son to
the wealthy Julie with emotion, and resignation to the Divine will.
"You are always charming and melancholy, my dear Julie," she said to
the daughter. "Boris says his soul finds repose at your house. He
has suffered so many disappointments and is so sensitive," said she to
the mother. "Ah, my dear, I cant tell you how fond I have grown of
Julie latterly," she said to her son. "But who could help loving
her? She is an angelic being! Ah, Boris, Boris!"--she paused. "And how
I pity her mother," she went on; "today she showed me her accounts and
letters from Penza (they have enormous estates there), and she, poor
thing, has no one to help her, and they do cheat her so!"
Boris smiled almost imperceptibly while listening to his mother.
He laughed blandly at her naive diplomacy but listened to what she had
to say, and sometimes questioned her carefully about the Penza and
Nizhegorod estates.
Julie had long been expecting a proposal from her melancholy
adorer and was ready to accept it; but some secret feeling of
repulsion for her, for her passionate desire to get married, for her
artificiality, and a feeling of horror at renouncing the possibility
of real love still restrained Boris. His leave was expiring. He
spent every day and whole days at the Karagins, and every day on
thinking the matter over told himself that he would propose
tomorrow. But in Julies presence, looking at her red face and chin
(nearly always powdered), her moist eyes, and her expression of
continual readiness to pass at once from melancholy to an unnatural
rapture of married bliss, Boris could not utter the decisive words,
though in imagination he had long regarded himself as the possessor of
those Penza and Nizhegorod estates and had apportioned the use of
the income from them. Julie saw Boris indecision, and sometimes the
thought occurred to her that she was repulsive to him, but her
feminine self-deception immediately supplied her with consolation, and
she told herself that he was only shy from love. Her melancholy,
however, began to turn to irritability, and not long before Boris
departure she formed a definite plan of action.
War And Peace page 327 War And Peace page 329
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