Which French phrase opens War and Peace in its original text?

Which French phrase opens War and Peace in its original text? It opens with “Eh bien, mon prince.”

The phrase means “Well then, my prince” or, more naturally, “Well, my prince.” It begins a conversation at Anna Pavlovna Scherer’s salon in St. Petersburg, where the Russian aristocracy gathers and speaks French as the language of fashionable society.

The opening immediately establishes the world Tolstoy is examining. In the early nineteenth century, French was widely used among Russia’s upper classes, especially in courtly and aristocratic settings. The novel’s Russian text therefore includes substantial French dialogue, while the surrounding narration remains in Russian.

Readers sometimes confuse the opening phrase with the novel’s title or with a famous battle quotation. It is neither: it is a piece of salon conversation, spoken by Anna Pavlovna to Prince Vasili Kuragin. The scene introduces several important characters before the narrative moves toward the political tensions of the Napoleonic era.