War And Peace: Book 8 - CHAPTER I

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AFTER PRINCE ANDREY'S ENGAGEMENT to Natasha, Pierre suddenly, for no apparent

reason, felt it impossible to go on living in the same way as before. Firm as

his belief was in the truths revealed to him by his benefactor, the old

freemason, and happy as he had been at first in the task of perfecting his inner

spiritual self, to which he had devoted himself with such ardour, yet after

Prince Andrey's engagement to Natasha, and the death of Osip Alexyevitch, the

news of which reached him almost simultaneously, the whole zest of his religious

life seemed to have suddenly vanished. Nothing but the skeleton of life

remained: his house with his brilliant wife, now basking in the favours of a

very grand personage indeed, the society of all Petersburg, and his service at

court with its tedious formalities. And that life suddenly filled Pierre with

unexpected loathing. He gave up keeping his diary, avoided the society of

brother-masons, took to visiting the club again and to drinking a great deal;

associated once more with gay bachelor companions, and began to lead a life so

dissipated that Countess Elena Vassilyevna thought it necessary to make severe

observations to him on the subject. Pierre felt that she was right; and to avoid

compromising his wife he went away to Moscow.

In Moscow, as soon as he entered his huge house with the faded and fading

princesses, his cousins, and the immense retinue of servants, as soon as,

driving through the town, he saw the Iversky chapel with the lights of

innumerable candles before the golden setting of the Madonna, the square of the

Kremlin with its untrodden snow, the sledge-drivers, and the hovels of Sivtsev

Vrazhok; saw the old Moscow gentlemen quietly going on with their daily round,

without hurry or desire of change; saw the old Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls,

and the English Club—he felt himself at home, in a quiet haven of rest. In

Moscow he felt comfortable, warm, at home, and snugly dirty, as in an old

dressing-gown.

All Moscow society, from the old ladies to the children, welcomed Pierre back

like a long-expected guest, whose place was always ready for him, and had never

been filled up. For the Moscow world, Pierre was the most delightful,

kind-hearted, intellectual, good-humoured, and generous eccentric, and a

heedless and genial Russian gentleman of the good old school. His purse was

always empty, because it was always open to every one.

Benefit-entertainments, poor pictures and statues, benevolent societies,

gypsy choruses, schools, subscription dinners, drinking parties, the masons,

churches, and books—no one and nothing ever met with a refusal, and had it not

been for two friends, who had borrowed large sums of money from Pierre and

constituted themselves guardians of a sort over him, he would have parted with

everything. Not a dinner, not a soirée took place at the club without

him.

As soon as he was lolling in his place on the sofa, after a couple of bottles

of Margaux, he was surrounded by a circle of friends, and arguments, disputes,

and jokes sprang up round him. Where there were quarrels, his kindly smile and

casually uttered jokes were enough to reconcile the antagonists. The masonic

dining lodges were dull and dreary when he was absent.

When after a bachelor supper, with a weak and good-natured smile, he yielded

to the entreaties of the festive party that he would drive off with them to

share their revels, there were shouts of delight and triumph. At balls he danced

if there were a lack of partners. Girls and young married ladies liked him,

because he paid no special attention to any one, but was equally amiable to all,

especially after supper. “He is charming; he is of no sex,” they used to say of

him.

Pierre was just a kammerherr, retired to end his days in Moscow, like

hundreds of others. How horrified he would have been if, seven years before,

when he had just come home from abroad, any one had told him that there was no

need for him to look about him and rack his brains, that the track had long ago

been trodden, marked out from all eternity for him, and that, struggle as he

would, he would be just such another as all men in his position. He could not

have believed it then! Had he not longed with his whole heart to establish a

republic in Russia; then to be himself a Napoleon; then to be a philosopher; and

then a great strategist and the conqueror of Napoleon? Had he not passionately

desired and believed in the regeneration of the sinful race of man and the

schooling of himself to the highest point of perfect virtue? Had he not founded

schools and hospitals and liberated his serfs?

But instead of all that, here he was the wealthy husband of a faithless wife,

a retired kammerherr, fond of dining and drinking, fond, too, as he unbuttoned

his waistcoat after dinner, of indulging in a little abuse of the government, a

member of the Moscow English Club, and a universal favourite in Moscow society.

For a long while he could not reconcile himself to the idea that he was

precisely the retired Moscow kammerherr, the very type he had so profoundly

scorned seven years before.

Sometimes he consoled himself by the reflection that it did not count, that

he was only temporarily leading this life. But later on he was horrified by

another reflection, that numbers of other men, with the same idea of its being

temporary, had entered that life and that club with all their teeth and a thick

head of hair, only to leave it when they were toothless and bald.

In moments of pride, when he was reviewing his position, it seemed to him

that he was quite different, distinguished in some way from the retired

kammerherrs he had looked upon with contempt in the past; that they were vulgar

and stupid, at ease and satisfied with their position, “while I am even now

still dissatisfied; I still long to do something for humanity,” he would assure

himself in moments of pride. “But possibly all of them too, my fellows,

struggled just as I do, tried after something new, sought a path in life for

themselves, and have been brought to the same point as I have by the force of

surroundings, of society, of family, that elemental force against which man is

powerless,” he said to himself in moments of modesty. And after spending some

time in Moscow he no longer scorned his companions in destiny, but began even to

love them, respect them, and pity them like himself.

Pierre no longer suffered from moments of despair, melancholy, and loathing

for life as he had done. But the same malady that had manifested itself in acute

attacks in former days was driven inwards and never now left him for an instant.

“What for? What's the use? What is it is going on in the world?” he asked

himself in perplexity several times a day, instinctively beginning to sound the

hidden significance in the phenomena of life. But knowing by experience that

there was no answer to these questions, he made haste to try and turn away from

them, took up a book, or hurried off to the club, or to Apollon Nikolaevitch's

to chat over the scandals of the town.

“Elena Vassilyevna, who has never cared for anything but her own body, and is

one of the stupidest women in the world,” Pierre thought, “is regarded by people

as the acme of wit and refinement, and is the object of their homage. Napoleon

Bonaparte was despised by every one while he was really great, and since he

became a pitiful buffoon the Emperor Francis seeks to offer him his daughter in

an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through their Catholic Church, return thanks

to God for their victory over the French on the 14th of June, and the French,

through the same Catholic Church, return thanks to God for their victory over

the Spaniards on the same 14th of June. My masonic brothers swear in blood that

they are ready to sacrifice all for their neighbour, but they don't give as much

as one rouble to the collections for the poor, and they intrigue between Astraea

and the manna-seekers, and are in a ferment about the authentic Scottish rug,

and an act, of which the man who wrote it did not know the meaning and no one

has any need. We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of sins and love

for one's neighbour—the law, in honour of which we have raised forty times forty

churches in Moscow—but yesterday we knouted to death a deserter; and the

minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, the priest, gave the soldier

the cross to kiss before his punishment.”

Such were Pierre's reflections, and all this universal deception recognised

by all, used as he was to seeing it, was always astounding him, as though it

were something new. “I understand this deceit and tangle of cross-purposes,” he

thought, “but now am I to tell them all I understand? I have tried and always

found that they understood it as I did, at the bottom of their hearts, but were

only trying not to see it. So I suppose it must be so! But me—what refuge is

there for me?” thought Pierre.

He suffered from an unlucky faculty—common to many men, especially

Russians—the faculty of seeing and believing in the possibility of good and

truth, and at the same time seeing too clearly the evil and falsity of life to

be capable of taking a serious part in it. Every sphere of activity was in his

eyes connected with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he

took up, evil and falsity drove him back again and cut him off from every field

of energy. And meanwhile he had to live, he had to be occupied. It was too awful

to lie under the burden of those insoluble problems of life, and he abandoned

himself to the first distraction that offered, simply to forget them. He visited

every possible society, drank a great deal, went in for buying pictures,

building, and above all reading.

He read and re-read everything he came across. On getting home he would take

up a book, even while his valets were undressing him, and read himself to sleep;

and from sleep turned at once to gossip in the drawing-rooms and the club; from

gossip to carousals and women; from dissipation back again to gossip, reading,

and wine. Wine was more and more becoming a physical necessity to him, and at

the same time a moral necessity. Although the doctors told him that in view of

his corpulence wine was injurious to him, he drank a very great deal. He never

felt quite content except when he had, almost unconsciously, lifted several

glasses of wine to his big mouth. Then he felt agreeably warm all over his body,

amiably disposed towards all his fellows, and mentally ready to respond

superficially to every idea, without going too deeply into it. It was only after

drinking a bottle or two of wine that he felt vaguely that the terrible tangled

skein of life which had terrified him so before was not so terrible as he had

fancied. With a buzzing in his head, chatting, listening to talk or reading

after dinner and supper, he invariably saw that tangled skein on some one of its

sides. It was only under the influence of wine that he said to himself: “Never

mind. I'll disentangle it all; here I have a solution all ready. But now's not

the time. I'll go into all that later on!” But that later on never

came.

In the morning, before breakfast, all the old questions looked as insoluble

and fearful as ever, and Pierre hurriedly snatched up a book and rejoiced when

any one came in to see him.

Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told of soldiers under fire in

ambuscade when they have nothing to do, how they try hard to find occupation so

as to bear their danger more easily. And Pierre pictured all men as such

soldiers trying to find a refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards,

some in framing laws, some in women, some in playthings, some in horses, some in

politics, some in sport, some in wine, some in the government service. “Nothing

is trivial, nothing is important, everything is the same; only to escape from it

as best one can,” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that terrible

it.”

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1. Ebooks list page : 83
2. War And Peace: Book 4 - CHAPTER V
3. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER III
4. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER II
5. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER I
6. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER IV
7. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIX
8. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XVI
9. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XV
10. War And Peace: Book 3 - CHAPTER XIV
11. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER V
12. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER VI
13. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIX
14. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XVI
15. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XIV
16. War And Peace: Book 2 - CHAPTER XV