A Little Read

 

Je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, J’y crois)—je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami.

So starts Tolstoy's War and Peace. Ironically in French, left that way in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.* Character Anna Pavlovna jumps right in complaining about Napoleon, who is going to attempt the invasion of Russia, and lose nearly one million soldiers in that futile endeavor.

*a wonderful work of translation! Try to get the out-of-print hardback edition. Why would anyone want a book that is 1250 pages long as paperback? Unless you didn't want to actually read it. Or like I was in 1989: much too broke to afford anything but. I still have that old book. It is two volumes now, having broken in half, with yellow pages flying when I take it off the shelf to look at my underlines.