At Bald Hills,
Prince Nicholas Andreevich Bolkonski's estate,
the arrival of young Prince Andrew
and his wife was daily expected,
but this expectation did not upset the regular routine
of life in the old prince's household.
General in Chief Prince Nicholas Andreevich
(nicknamed in society, "the King of Prussia")
ever since the Emperor Paul had exiled him
to his country estate had lived there continuously
with his daughter, Princess Mary, and her companion,
Mademoiselle Bourienne.
Though in the new reign
he was free to return to the capitals,
he still continued to live in the country,
remarking that anyone who wanted to see him
could come the hundred miles from Moscow to Bald Hills,
while he himself needed no one and nothing.
He used to say that there are only two sources
of human vice- idleness and superstition,
and only two virtues- activity and intelligence.
He himself undertook his daughter's education,
and to develop these two cardinal virtues
in her gave her lessons in algebra and geometry
till she was twenty,
and arranged her life so that her whole time was occupied.
He was himself always occupied: writing his memoirs,
solving problems in higher mathematics,
turning snuffboxes on a lathe, working in the garden,
or superintending the building
that was always going on at his estate.
As regularity is a prime condition facilitating activity,
regularity in his household was carried to
the highest point of exactitude.
He always came to table under precisely the same conditions,
and not only at the same hour but at the same minute.
With those about him, from his daughter to his serfs,
the prince was sharp and invariably exacting,
so that without being a hardhearted man he inspired
such fear and respect as few hardhearted
men would have aroused.
Although he was in retirement and had now no
influence in political affairs,
every high official appointed to the province
in which the prince's estate lay considered it his duty
to visit him and waited in the lofty antechamber ante chamber
just as the architect, gardener,
or Princess Mary did,
till the prince appeared punctually to the appointed hour.
Everyone sitting in this antechamber experienced
the same feeling of respect and even fear
when the enormously high study door opened
and showed the figure of a rather small old man,
with powdered wig, small withered hands,
and bushy gray eyebrows which,
when he frowned,
sometimes hid the gleam of his shrewd,
youthfully glittering eyes.