Once upon a time, a bunch of noblemen in the 19th century were having a get-together to idly shoot the shit with each other in powdered wigs and foppish pimp clothes over glasses of brandy paired with caviar on biscottis, speaking in a whole bunch of languages that no common Russian serf would understand to accentuate their virtuous aloofness of, and contempt for, the underprivileged of Russia's society. In those days, there were no high-end stereo systems so there was no means by which to listen to the latest beats nor brag about them to friends at parties. Even if they had been invented at the time, music back then didn't even have a beat. Since it would be about 150 years before the Synclavier and the TR-909 made traditional orchestral instruments obsolete, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and their contemporaries somehow made due without them although there is no archaeological evidence to indicate what they used instead. We do know that, in the absence of Skype, nobles in those days would travel by animal-drawn carriages (supposedly pulled by St. Bernards chasing after rabbits suspended ahead of them in cages) to travel hundreds, or even thousands, of kilometers to meet each other in palaces with no heating, air conditioning, or indoor plumbing and, rather than having cool technology, music, or Lamborghinis to talk about, they contented themselves to talk of War and Peace.
Anna Pavlovna, a conceited, lazy, menopausal old bitch claiming to be an invalid to fleece the nobility out of their money. Had gathered them all together in her drawing room to give another seminar about why it would be worth their while to donate another 50 grand into the coffers of her fraudulent charitable organization which she used to spend on fuel for her Ford Model T.
To wring more money out of the noblemen she had gathered through guilt, she used a wizened old woman, claiming to be her aunt, as a prop.
"You have not yet seen my aunt?" Anna Pavlovna beckoned her guests in French to greet this withered old tart that nobody either recognized or cared to interact with, even as they went through the motions of politely greeting her and lying about being pleased to make her acquaintance, until the dashing Vicomte Mortemart came to take his turn and immediately smelled bullshit on this situation like a Bloodhound can smell 10 pounds of cocaine in a drug mule's bunghole.
"Oh, I recognize this old bag!" said Vicomte Mortemart in Castilian, "She's some common old beggar woman I encountered when I was on my morning constitutional in the nearby dregs' quarter. At one moment she was intent on hounding me for loose change, practically bawling like a newborn baby for me to bleed the milk of human kindness from my heart, but then, like the two-faced gypsy that she was, she tried to lift my wallet from my back pocket while my back was turned. The only thing preventing me from giving her a swift pistol shot to the face was that she raised a hue and cry about me being a pervert who fondled her bosom with improprietous impoliteness! She is not of noble blood but ill breeding!"
The vicomte knocked the old gypsy woman out of her chair with a lotus snap kick and everybody gave him a round of politely tempered, but enthusiastic, applause. One man, Prince Bolkonsky, said "Bravissimo" in Italian.
Pierre Bezoukov, the real hero of this story whom we will focus on from now on, was mingling with the other members of Russia's crème de la crème. Had video games been invented, he would have been wanting to go home and play them instead of having to talk with these superficial, toffee-nosed, self-absorbed elitists. At that moment, however, he heard that there was another party going on at his friends' place that had much better drinks and more free-spirited activity.
His buddies, Anatole Kuragin and Fedya Dolokhov, were having rodeos with the contemporary equivalent to Bodacious the Bull, a 900-pound grizzly named Pooh Bear, imported all the way from Alaska. They also had a petting zoo with snow leopards and it was great fun to poke them with sticks to make them meow like housecats. It was even better, however, to toss them into steam-powered automatic abattoirs to turn them into tender, juicy cutlets that could be eaten raw without fear of getting infectious diseases like salmonella or gangrene (unbeknownst to them as Germ Theory had not been invented yet so all diseases were attributed to demonic possessions).
Pierre was also bummed out about not going to that party because Anatole managed to book Mozart for a private concert at his place and that guy was an extremely popular, but criminally overrated and cloyingly mainstream, musician in those days much like how Skrillex was a few years ago (although Mozart did not look like a prematurely balding pedophile who parted his hair in such a ghastly fashion that he would have been called a faggot by every member of Flock of Seagulls when they still had theirs) except electronic instruments had not been invented yet so there is no historical evidence to suggest what made him so popular although it was safe to assume that he must have used a primitive instrument like a washtub bass or a didgeridoo.
He had been tuning out a conversation held between Prince Vasili Kuragin (Anatole's dad), Princess Lise Bolkonskaya (who was knitting a sweater with a naughty and sexually-suggestive phrase on it since game boys, let alone smart phones, had not been invented yet), Prince Hippolyte Kuragin (Prince Vasili's most gifted progeny begotten by his wife's dusty eggs), the Abbe Morio (whose existence was inconsequential), the Vicomte Mortemart, and Anna Pavlovna.
"...And how about that ghastly upstart filibuster, Napoleon Bonaparte?" the Vicomte said in Romanian, limply whipping his palm. At the mention of Napoleon's name, a subject of particular interest to him, Pierre's ears perked up to listen to the Vicomte as he continued his opinion, "he thinks he deserves to be the emperor of everything because, in his own words, 'anybody else who's less awesome than him is unfit to run an orphanage, let alone a country!' Why, when the pope came to his coronation to crown him as the emperor of France, he got out of his chair and snatched the crown out of his hands to put it on his own head!"
"I know!" Abbe Morio said in Farsi, "But not a lot of people know what he said next! When he crowned himself he declared that it was a symbolic gesture of his firm belief in upward mobility and Nietzschian self-determination to refuse to be crowned by a heretical and false representative of God whose real name is YHWH and, just to make it perfectly clear, it's pronounced 'Yo-vuh'!"
"He said that about the pope!" cried Anna Pavlovna in German, "this man truly is a swine!"
Pierre, being opinionated as young people often are, felt compelled to blurt out a completely inappropriate contradiction in Brazilian Porugese as his own contribution to the conversation, "Actually, I think Napoleon Bonaparte is actually a pretty cool guy. He supports the First Amendment and he embodies the courage and passion of a real Spartan warrior like Marine Force Recon does."
Several of the gentry in the drawing room dropped their jaws as well as their brandy glasses. The thunderclaps of shattering crystalware punctuated the gravely silent moment.
"I say," Prince Vasily said in Palestinian Arabic, "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. Only an idiot Homelander such as yourself would dare to say something so retarded."
"Oh, hahahaha," Prince Hippolyte chortled in the Mpondo dialect of Xhosa, "I never thought somebody in such dorky spectacles would make such a mockery of himself!"
"Might I retort," Pierre's ice cold enunciation accentuated the harshness of his Afrikaans syllables, "you have a lot of nerve to call my spectacles dorky when you're carrying around such a faggoty-looking lorgnette!"
"WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU JUST SAY ABOUT MY LORGNETTE, YOU LITTLE BITCH!?" shouted Hippolyte in Sumerian as he threw his lorgnette to the floor like an Irishman throwing a bottle of whiskey that he just chugged against the marble-tiled floor.
"Calm down, my good man," said Comte Mortemart in Esperanto, "there's no need to be upset."
"HE INSULTED THE HONOR OF MY LORGNETTE!" Hippolyte grieved angrily in Canadian Gaelic, "I DEMAND SATISFACTION!"
"Then with what weapons shall you duel each other, my son?" asked Vasili in Louisiana Creole, "swords? Pistols"?"
"Neither," Hippolyte said in Trasianka, "we shall fight to the death with Chinese Martial Arts!"
Pierre was daunted by neither Hippolyte's demand for such a duel nor the gasps and anxious, fixated stares of every bystander in the room. They expected him to sheepishly back away and hang his head in shame because, for all of his foibles, Hippolyte was a legendary practitioner of Jeet Kune Do and had killed scores of men with his bare hands on both the battlefield and the field of honor.
"I accept." said Pierre in Surzhyk.
Space was cleared for an impromptu octagon for the two men to square off against each other.
Without a word, they stared intensely into each others' eyes in Cantonese, as falcons lock eyes with their enemies.
For two minutes, they stood their ground, contemplating strategies about how best to defeat the other.
"OPEN THE GAME!" the Comte shouted in Mongolian.
Hippolyte leapt like a freak and screamed like a prostitute at Pierre. Fully intent on chopping Pierre straight down the center with his Soaring Jaguar Hyper Knife-Hand Strike.
Pierre, however, was more than ready. As part of his decade-long tutelage abroad, he spent two years in a Shao Lin Monastery learning the ways of Kung Fu and Acupuncture and, through his own ingenuity, he personally combined both art forms into a new martial art that he christened, "Hokuto Shinken," and became its first practitioner.
As soon as Hippolyte came close enough, Pierre let out a machine gun flurry of precisely aimed strikes at his enemies' vital points at a speed barely susceptible to the naked eye in a technique he called "Spitfire Forked Lightning Fist".
For Hippolyte, however, he thought he had been tickled, "What was that all about? I asked you to fight me, not to gently pet me as you would a Labradoodle! No matter, I shall drive my fist into your testicles, take your life, and declare my victory for I am invincible and insurmountable!"
"Don't be so confident, my good man," Pierre adjusted his spectacles, "For, you see, you are already dead." Pierre said in the Osaka dialect of Japanese.
"Nani?" Hippolyte said in English.
Hardly a moment had past before Hippolyte's head pulsated like a stress ball getting squeezed. He screamed in Assiniboine as his eyeballs and teeth popped out of his head, and his body inflated like a tomato getting filled with helium by a bike pump until it burst asunder to drench the spectators in a shower of human chum.
"Oh, how horrid!" cried Anna Pavlovna in Swahili.
"How amazing!" shouted the Comte in Jive.
Pierre was given a round of golfclap from the gentry and he politely bowed to them as an actor would bow to the audience after a good performance of Don Giovanni.
The clap overed quickly, however, as Princess Helene noticed a strange vapor emanating from the floor, "Is that smoke?" she asked in Puinave.
"Sacre bleu, it is," cried Prince Vasili in Sentinelese "Everybody take off your clothes!"
"Capital idea!" shouted the Abbe Morio in Sac and Fox, "I keep a jar of Astroglide on my person for just such an occasion!"
"No!" Vasili shouted in Kwaza, "I mean we can use our clothes to extinguish the fires before the conflagration gets beyond our control!"
"I'm sorry to say that there will be no point to taking off our clothes," lamented Anna Pavlovna in Rer Bare, "asbestos lining went out of fashion last season, I'm afraid."
"Well, I'm taking off my clothes." said the Vicomte in Rapa Nui, "If I'm going to die, I won't be doing it in this ridiculously foppish and stuffy outfit. I swear to Christ that I sweat my balls off like a goddamn pig in the dead of winter while wearing this!"
"Nobody is taking off their clothes," said Dmitry Dhokturov, a character of little to no significance, in Mapudungun "we can break down the door with this chair!"
"My good man, I implore you not to do it!" cried Pierre in Diaguita, "You'll let the backdraft lick its long and terrible tongue upon you and roast your body to a cinder!"
"Oh, balderdash that's just an old wives' tale!" said Dmitry in a dismissive Siksiká.
He thrust his chair through the door, only to find out that what Pierre said about the backdraft was not, in fact, an old wives' tale. He, along with a bunch of other nobles perished in the ensuing inferno and they screamed in a chorus of desperate cries for help in Paliyan before their voices died down and became forever silent in Ladhaki Sign Language.
Anna Pavlovna, no longer having a reason to fake being an infirm, ran to the window to see if she could climb down. Although it was possible for the little princess Bolkonskaya to stitch a rope together out of Anna's bedsheets, they would only escape to a certain doom because the perfidious archnemesis of Russia's elite stood before them with a cadre of his French commandos and Bolshevik allies.
"Napoleon Bonaparte! Mon Dieu," Anna Povlovna shrieked in Jamaican Maroon Spirit-Possession Language, "the Antichrist himself! How dare you profane the sacred forests and steppes of our country with your presence!"
"Very easily, as a matter of fact," Napoleon stood firmly with his hand on his hip.
"Napoleon, you yellow-gutted, snail-eating frog!" shouted Vasili in Guyanese "You shall pay dearly for this mortal transgression against us!"
"Oh, honhonhonhon, I think not," Napoleon limply held his hand out off to the side to beckon his lieutenant, Jean Valjean, to hand him a bottle of Perrier. He twisted off the cap and took his time to chug it all down before letting off a belch before carrying on with his gloating, "For you see, I have gained a most advantageous alliance with these Bolsheviks in order to eradicate our mutual enemy, the meddlesome bourgeoisie of this ponderously expansive and desolate wasteland you call a country and, in exchange, they promise to bow to my will and rule over them. Even as we speak, more of your mansions and palaces, blighted with the tacky architectural aesthetics of the Roccoco style like an unwelcome mold and infested with the hedonistic and effete gentry that suits their environs like a nest of mosquitos in a still puddle of stagnant swamp water, are all burning down in conflagrations that burn with the cathartic fervor of revolution!"
"Monsieur Bonaparte!" Pierre cried in West African Pidgin English, "As your #1 fan, I must ask you this pressing question! Would you truly betray your principals like this for world conquest?"
"It is, indeed, true," said Napoleon, "and I lament that I must adulterate my own integrity by resorting to such craven and wicked devices as arson and mass immolation in order to ensure that my reign of all Europe stands uncontested but, as Agnetha Fältskog once said, 'the winner takes it all; the loser has to fall!' Au revoir!"
As Napoleon turned and walked away without turning back to look, Vasili screamed out to him in Navajo, "Oi! Where the fuck do you think you're going! Get the fuck back over here you psychopathic fucking midget! You think you can just walk back to your tent and stuff your face with foie gras while we burn to death, you cocksucking, chickenshit little homo!" After a moment, however, Vasili changed his tone, "NAPOLEON, WAIT, PLEASE COME BACK! I DIDN'T MEAN THOSE THINGS THAT I SAID!"
His henchmen turned around to make vulgar wanking gestures at Vasili but Napoleon never looked back. He and his men soon disappeared into the woods and left the nobility to their demise.
Anna Pavlovna found it too complicated to tie bedsheets together to make a rope to escape the burning mansion so she tried tossing the old gypsy woman onto the concrete below to use her as a cushion. She jumped out of the balcony, followed by Helene and Lise Bolkonskaya, only for all of them to miss the gypsy hag and break their bones on the pavement. They remained conscious for hours after the mansion burned down. They were eventually abducted by trolls, who carried them to their rape caves and impregnated them. Months later, having survived on scraps of meat cut from stolen livestock and kidnapped peasants with sour beer, brewed by the trolls from subterranean mushrooms, lapped from puddles that spilled on the floor to wash the stuff down, the women died in hellish agony when their newborn troll children sliced their way out of the womb with jagged fingernails and ate them alive. Such was the end of the aristocracy of Russia.
Napoleon, meanwhile, annexed Russia into his empire. The official boundaries of France stretched from the westernmost coasts of Europe to New Brunswick and his empire lasted for generations, ending with its dissolution in 1991.
The End.
Moral of the Story: History is a disingenuous and subversive artform because it paints a false narrative of the Earth as being thousands, or even dozens of millions, of years old when it is really only 14 years old and should not be trusted as an objective evaluation of the past.