Notes on WAR AND PEACE, Napoleon Visits the Plague Victims at Jaffa

 

Notes on Tolstoy's War and Peace

                                               The Beginning of the Novel: Napoleon at Jaffa

I’ve decided to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace in Russian. A good way to occupy my time in The Year of the Great Plague. I have a twenty-volume Collected Works of Tolstoy in Russian. All of FOUR whole volumes are devoted to War and Peace. I hope to make it through the novel by the end of the year, if I make it through the end of the year.

 

The novel begins with a soiree held by Annette (Anna Pavlovna) Scherer at her salon in St. Petersburg in the year 1805. All the Russian aristocrats of that time spoke French as their preferred language of concourse, so War and Peace begins in French. The first line: “Eh bien, mon prince.” Much on the mind of the people in attendance at the soiree are the politics of Europe, and the antics of Napoleon in particular.

 

Since the pandemic is the most important news in 2020, it struck me as interesting that in the early pages of War and Peace an occurrence of the plague is mentioned in passing, by Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, one of the main characters. Prince Andrei suggests that Napoleon showed his greatness “in the hospital in Jaffa, where he offered his hand to those afflicted with the plague.”

 

This incident is depicted in a famous painting by Baron Antoine-Jean Gros (1804), held in the Louvre. The painting shows Napoleon, during his Egyptian campaign, visiting plague-stricken soldiers at a hospital in Jaffa, Syria, on March 11, 1799. Napoleon is reaching out to touch one of the victims, and some have suggested that this is a kind of laying on of hands, analogous to Christ’s touching a leper. Whether Napoleon actually made such a gesture is debatable, but apparently the painting was used to help solidify the myth of the great man.