with her, when Anna Pavlovna called him away on the pretext that her aunt wished to hear him.
"You know her husband, of course?" said Anna Pavlovna, closing her eyes and indicating Helene with a sorrowful gesture. "Ah, she is such an unfortunate and charming woman! Don't mention him before her--please don't! It is too painful for her!"
CHAPTER VII
When Boris and Anna Pavlovna returned to the others Prince Hippolyte had the ear of the company.
Bending forward in his armchair he said: "Le Roi de Prusse!" and having said this laughed. Everyone turned toward him.
"Le Roi de Prusse?" Hippolyte said interrogatively, again laughing, and then calmly and seriously sat back in his chair. Anna Pavlovna waited for him to go on, but as he seemed quite decided to say no more she began to tell of how at Potsdam the impious Bonaparte had stolen the sword of Frederick the Great.
"It is the sword of Frederick the Great which I..." she began, but Hippolyte interrupted her with the words: "Le Roi de Prusse..." and again, as soon as all turned toward him, excused himself and said no more.
Anna Pavlovna frowned. Mortemart, Hippolyte's friend, addressed him firmly.
"Come now, what about your Roi de Prusse?"
Hippolyte laughed as if ashamed of laughing.
"Oh, it's nothing. I only wished to say..." (he wanted to repeat a joke he had heard in Vienna and which he had been trying all that evening to get in) "I only wished to say that we are wrong to fight pour le Roi de Prusse!"