Volume I, Part 1, Chapter 1
Anna Pavlovna's opening line about Genoa and Lucca being Bonaparte's estates establishes the novel's tension between European high society and the coming war.
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From War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The novel opens famously in French at Anna Pavlovna Scherer's St. Petersburg salon in July 1805, immediately plunging the reader into the artificial chatter of the aristocracy as Napoleon's shadow looms over Europe.
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