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IN APRIL the army was excited by the news of the arrival of the Tsar. Rostov did not succeed in being present at the review the skechers discount Tsar held at Bartenstein; the Pavlograd hussars were at the advance posts, a long way in front of Bartenstein.

They were bivouacking. Denisov and Rostov were living in a mud hut dug out by the soldiers for them, and roofed with branches and turf. The hut was made after a pattern that had just come into fashion among the soldiers. A trench was dug out an ell and a half in breadth, two ells in depth, and three and a half in length. At one end of the trench steps were scooped out, and these formed the entrance and the approach. The trench itself was the room, and in it the lucky officers, such as the captain, had a plank lying on piles at the further end away from the steps—this was the table. On both sides of the trench the earth had been thrown up, and these mounds made the two beds and the sofa. The roof was so constructed that one could stand upright in the middle, and on the beds it was possible to sit, if one moved up close to the table. Denisov, who always fared luxuriously, because the soldiers of his squadron were fond of him, had a board nailed up in the front part of the roof, and in the board a broken but cemented window pane. When it was very cold, they used to bring red-hot embers from the soldiers’ camp-fires in a bent sheet of iron and set them near the steps (in the drawing-room, as Denisov called that part of the hut), and this made it so warm that the officers, of whom there were always a number with Denisov and Rostov, used to sit with nothing but their shirts on.

In April Rostov had been on duty. At eight o’clock in the morning, on coming home after a sleepless night, he sent for hot embers, changed his rain-soaked underclothes, said his prayers, drank some tea, warmed himself, put things tidy in his corner and on the table, and with a wind-beaten, heated face, and with only his shirt on, lay down on his back, folding his hands behind his head. He was engaged in agreeable meditations, reflecting that he would be sure to be promoted for the last reconnoitring expedition, and was expecting Denisov to come in. He wanted to talk to him.

Behind the hut he heard the resounding roar of Denisov, unmistakably irritated. Rostov moved to the window to see to whom he was speaking, and saw the quartermaster, Toptcheenko.

“I told you not to let them stuff themselves with that root—Mary’s what do you call it!” Denisov was roaring. “Why, I saw it myself, Lazartchuk was pulling it up in the field.”

“I did give the order, your honour; they won’t heed it,” answered the quartermaster.

Rostov lay down again on his bed, and thought contentedly: “Let him see to things now; he’s fussing about while I have done my work, and I am lying here—it’s splendid!” Through the wall he could hear now some one besides the quartermaster speaking. Lavrushka, Denisov’s smart rogue of a valet, was telling him something about some transports, biscuits and oxen, he had seen, while on the look-out for provisions.

Again he heard Denisov’s shout from further away, and the words: “Saddle! second platoon!”

“Where are they off to?” thought Rostov.

Five minutes later Denisov came into the hut, clambered with muddy feet on the bed, angrily lighted his pipe, scattered about all his belongings, put on his riding-whip and sword, and was going out of the hut. In reply to Rostov’s question, where was he going? he answered angrily and vaguely that he had business to see after.

“God be my judge, then, and our gracious Emperor!” said Denisov, as he went out. Outside the hut Rostov heard the hoofs of several horses splashing through the mud. Rostov did not even trouble himself to find out where Denisov was going. Getting warm through in his corner, he fell asleep, and it was only towards evening that he came out of the hut. Denisov had not yet come back. The weather had cleared; near the next hut two officers were playing quoits, with a laugh sticking big radishes for pegs in the soft muddy earth. Rostov joined them. In the middle of a game the officers saw transport waggons driving up to them, some fifteen hussars on lean horses rode behind them. The transport waggons, escorted by the hussars, drove up to the picket ropes, and a crowd of hussars surrounded them.

“There, look! Denisov was always fretting about it,” said Rostov; “here are provisions come at last.”

“High time, too!” said the officers. “Won’t the soldiers be pleased!”

A little behind the hussars rode Denisov, accompanied by two infantry officers, with whom he was in conversation. Rostov went to meet them.

“I warn you, captain,” one of the officers was saying, a thin, little man, visibly wrathful.

“Well, I have told you, I won’t give them up,” answered Denisov.

“You will have to answer for it, captain. It’s mutiny—carrying off transports from your own army! Our men have had no food for two days.”

“Mine have had nothing for a fortnight,” answered Denisov.

“It’s brigandage; you will answer for it, sir!” repeated the infantry officer, raising his voice.

“But why do you keep pestering me? Eh?” roared Denisov, suddenly getting furious. “It’s I will have to answer for it, and not you; and you’d better not cry out till you’re hurt. Be off!” he shouted at the officers.

“All right!” the little officer responded, not the least intimidated, and not moving away. “It’s robbery, so I tell you.…”

“Go to the devil, quick march, while you’re safe and sound.” And Denisov moved towards the officer.

“All right, all right,” said the officer threateningly; and he turned his horse and trotted away, swaying in the saddle.

“A dog astride a fence, a dog astride a fence to the life!” Denisov called after him—the bitterest insult a cavalry man can pay an infantry man on horseback; and riding up to Rostov he broke into a guffaw.

“Carried off the transports, carried them off from the infantry by force!” he said. “Why, am I to let the men die of hunger?”

The stores carried off by the hussars had been intended for an infantry regiment, but learning from Lavrushka that the transport was unescorted, Denisov and his hussars had carried off the stores by force. Biscuits were dealt out freely to the soldiers; they even shared them with the other squadrons.

Next day the colonel sent for Denisov, and putting his fingers held apart before his eyes, he said to him: “I look at the matter like this; see, I know nothing, and will take no steps; but I advise you to ride over to the staff, and there, in the commissariat department, to smooth the thing over, and if possible give a receipt for so much stores. If not, and a claim is entered for the infantry regiments, there will be a fuss, and it may end unpleasantly.”

Denisov went straight from the colonel to the staff with a sincere desire to follow his advice.

In the evening he came back to his hut in a condition such as Rostov had never seen his friend in before. Denisov could not speak, and was gasping for breath. When Rostov asked him what was wrong with him, he could only in a faint and husky voice utter incoherent oaths and threats.

Alarmed at Denisov’s condition, Rostov suggested he should undress, drink some water, and sent for the doctor.

“Me to be court-martialled for brigandage—oh! some more water!—Let them court-martial me; I will, I always will, beat blackguards, and I’ll tell the Emperor.—Ice,” he kept saying.

The regimental doctor said it was necessary to bleed him. A deep saucer of black blood was drawn from Denisov’s hairy arm, and only then did he recover himself sufficiently to relate what had happened.

“I got there,” Denisov said. “ ‘Well, where are your chief’s quarters?’ I asked. They showed me. ‘Will you please to wait?’ ‘I have come on business, and I have come over thirty versts, I haven’t time to wait; announce me.’ Very good; but the over-thief appears; he, too, thought fit to lecture me. ‘This is robbery!’ says he. ‘The robber,’ said I, ‘is not the man who takes the stores to feed his soldiers, but the man who takes them to fill his pockets.’ ‘Will you please to be silent?’ Very good. ‘Give a receipt,’ says he, ‘to the commissioner, but the affair will be reported at headquarters.’ I go before the commissioner. I go in. Sitting at the table … Who? No, think of it!… Who is it that’s starving us to death?” roared Denisov, bringing the fist of his lanced arm down so violently that the table almost fell over, and the glasses jumped on it “Telyanin! … ‘What, it’s you that’s starving us to death?’ said I, and I gave him one on the snout, and well it went home, and then another, so … ‘Ah! … you so-and-so …’ and I gave him a thrashing. But I did have a bit of fun, though, I can say that,” cried Denisov, his white teeth showing in a smile of malignant glee under his black moustaches. “I should have killed him, if they hadn’t pulled me off.”

“But why are you shouting; keep quiet,” skechers on sale said Rostov; “it’s bleeding again. Stay, it must be bound up.”

Denisov was bandaged up and put to bed. Next day he waked up calm and in good spirits.

But at midday the adjutant of the regiment came with a grave and gloomy face to the hut shared by Denisov and Rostov, and regretfully showed them a formal communication to Major Denisov from the colonel, in which inquiries were made about the incidents of the previous day. The adjutant informed them that the affair seemed likely to take a very disastrous turn; that a court-martial was to be held; and that, with the strictness now prevailing as regards pillaging and breach of discipline, it would be a lucky chance if it ended in being degraded to the ranks.

The case, as presented by the offended parties, was that Major Denisov, after carrying off the transports, had without any provocation come in a drunken condition to the chief commissioner of the commissariat, had called him a thief, threatened to beat him; and, when he was led out, had rushed into the office, attacked two officials, and sprained the arm of one of them.

In response to further inquiries from Rostov, Denisov said, laughing, that it did seem certainly as though some other fellow had been mixed up in it, but that it was all stuff and nonsense; that he would never dream of being afraid of courts of any sort, and that if the scoundrels dared to pick a quarrel with him, he would give them an answer they wouldn’t soon forget.

Denisov spoke in this careless way of the whole affair. But Rostov knew him too well not to detect that in his heart (though he hid it from others) he was afraid of a court-martial, and was worrying over the matter, which was obviously certain to have disastrous consequences. Documents began to come every day, and notices from the court, and Denisov received a summons to put his squadron under the command of the officer next in seniority, and on the first of May to appear before the staff of the division for an investigation into the row in the commissariat office. On the previous day Platov undertook a reconnaissance of the enemy with two regiments of Cossacks and two squadrons of hussars. Denisov, with his usual swaggering gallantry, rode in the front of the line. One of the bullets fired by the French sharpshooters struck him in the fleshy upper part of the leg. Possibly at any other time Denisov would not have left the regiment for so slight a wound, but now he took advantage of it to excuse himself from appearing before the staff, and went into the hospital. IN THE MONTH of June was fought the battle of Friedland, in which the Pavlograd hussars did not take part. It was followed by a truce. Rostov, who sorely felt his friend’s absence, and had had no news of him since he left, was uneasy about his wound and the course his difficulties might be taking, and he took advantage of the truce to get leave to visit Denisov at the hospital.

The hospital was in a little Prussian town, which had twice been sacked by Russian and French troops. In the summer weather, when the country looked so pleasant, this little town presented a strikingly melancholy contrast, with its broken roofs and fences, its foul streets and ragged inhabitants, and the sick and drunken soldiers wandering about it.

The hospital was a stone house with remnants of fence torn up in the yard, and window frames and panes partly broken. Several soldiers bandaged up, and with pale and swollen faces, were walking or sitting in the sunshine in the yard.

As soon as Rostov went in at the door, he was conscious of the stench of hospital and putrefying flesh all about him. On the stairs he met a Russian army doctor with a cigar in his mouth. He was followed by a Russian trained assistant.

“I can’t be everywhere at once,” the doctor was saying; “come in the evening to Makar Alexyevitch’s, I shall be there.” The assistant asked some further question. “Oh! do as you think best! What difference will it make?”

The doctor caught sight of Rostov mounting the stairs.

“What are you here for, your honour?” said the doctor. “What are you here for? Couldn’t you meet with a bullet that you want to pick up typhus? This is a pest-house, my good sir.”

“How so?” asked Rostov.

“Typhus, sir. It’s death to any one to go in. It’s only we two, Makeev and I” (he pointed to the assistant) “who are still afoot here. Five of us, doctors, have died here already. As soon as a new one comes, he’s done for in a week,” said the doctor with evident satisfaction. “They have sent for Prussian doctors, but our allies aren’t fond of the job.”

Rostov explained that he wanted to see Major Denisov of the hussars, who was lying wounded here.

“I don’t know, can’t tell you, my good sir. Only think, I have three hospitals to look after alone—over four hundred patients. It’s a good thing the Prussian charitable ladies send us coffee and lint—two pounds a month—or we should be lost.” He laughed. “Four hundred, sir; and they keep sending me in fresh cases. It is four hundred, isn’t it? Eh?” He turned to the assistant.

The assistant looked worried. He was unmistakably in a hurry for the talkative doctor to be gone, and was waiting with vexation.

“Major Denisov,” repeated Rostov; “he was wounded at Moliten.”

“I believe he’s dead. Eh, Makeev?” the doctor queried of the assistant carelessly.

The assistant did not, however, confirm the doctor’s words.

“Is he a long, red-haired man?” asked the doctor.

Rostov described Denisov’s appearance.

“He was here, he was,” the doctor declared, with a sort of glee. “He must be dead, but still I’ll see. I have lists. Have you got them, Makeev?”

“The lists are at Makar Alexyevitch’s,” said the assistant. “But go to the officers’ ward, there you’ll see for yourself,” he added, turning to Rostov.

“Ah, you’d better not, sir!” said the doctor, “or you may have to stay here yourself.” But Rostov bowed himself away from the doctor, and asked the assistant to show him the way.

“Don’t blame me afterwards, mind!” the doctor shouted up from the stairs below.

Rostov and the assistant went into the corridor. The hospital stench was so strong in that dark corridor that Rostov held his nose, and was obliged to pause to recover his energy to go on. A door was opened on the right, and there limped out on crutches a thin yellow man with bare feet, and nothing on but his underlinen. Leaning against the doorpost, he gazed with glittering, anxious eyes at the persons approaching. Rostov glanced in at the door and saw that the sick and wounded were lying there on the floor, on straw and on overcoats.

“Can one go in and look?” asked Rostov.

“What is there to look at?” said the assistant. But just because the assistant was obviously disinclined to let him go in, Rostov went into the soldiers’ ward. The stench, to which he had grown used a little in the corridor, was stronger here. Here the stench was different; it was more intense; and one could smell that it was from here that it came. In the long room, brightly lighted by the sun in the big window, lay the sick and wounded in two rows with their heads to the wall, leaving a passage down the middle. The greater number of them were unconscious, and took no notice of the entrance of outsiders. Those who were conscious got up or raised their thin, yellow faces, and all gazed intently at Rostov, with the same expression of hope of help, of reproach, and envy of another man’s health. Rostov went into the middle of the room, glanced in at the open doors of adjoining rooms, and on both sides saw the same thing. He stood still, looking round him speechless. He had never expected to see anything like this. Just before him lay right across the empty space down the middle, on the bare floor, a sick man, probably a Cossack, for his hair was cut round in basin shape. This Cossack lay on his back, his huge arms and legs outstretched. His face was of a purple red, his eyes were quite sunk in his head so that only the whites could be seen, and on his legs and on his hands, which were still red, the veins stood out like cords. He was knocking his head against the floor, and he uttered some word and kept repeating it. Rostov listened to what he was saying, and distinguished the word he kept repeating. That word was “drink—drink—drink!” Rostov looked about for some one who could lay the sick man in his place and give him water.

“Who looks after the patients here?” he asked the assistant. At that moment a commissariat soldier, a hospital orderly, came in from the adjoining room, and, marching in drill step, drew himself up before him.

“Good day, your honour!” bawled this soldier, rolling his eyes at Rostov, and obviously mistaking him for one in authority.

“Take him away, give him water,” said Rostov, indicating the Cossack.

“Certainly, your honour,” the soldier replied complacently, rolling his eyes more strenuously than ever. and drawing himself up, but not budging to do so.

“No, there’s no doing anything here,” thought Rostov, dropping his eyes; and he wanted to get away, but he was aware of a significant look bent upon him from the right side, and he looked round at it. Almost in the corner there was, sitting on a military overcoat, an old soldier with a stern yellow face, thin as a skeleton’s, and an unshaved grey beard. He was looking persistently at Rostov. The man next the old soldier was whispering something to him, pointing to Rostov. Rostov saw the old man wanted to ask him something. He went closer and saw that the old man had only one leg bent under him, the other had been cut off above the knee. On the other side of the old man, at some distance from him, there lay with head thrown back the motionless figure of a young soldier with a waxen pallor on his snub-nosed and still freckled face, and eyes sunken under the lids. Rostov looked at the snub-nosed soldier and a shiver ran down his back.

“Why, that one seems to be …” he said to the assistant.

“We’ve begged and begged, your honour,” said the old soldier with a quiver in his lower jaw. “He died early in the morning. We’re men, too, not dogs.…”

“I’ll see to it directly; they shall take him, skechers shoes discount they shall take him away,” said the assistant hurriedly. “Come, your honour.”

“Let us go, let us go,” said Rostov hastily; and dropping his eyes and shrinking together, trying to pass unnoticed through the lines of those reproachful and envious eyes fastened upon him, he went out of the room

THE ASSISTANT walked along the corridor and led Rostov to the officers’ wards, three rooms with doors opening between them. In these rooms there were bedsteads; the officers were sitting and lying upon them. Some were walking about the room in hospital dressing-gowns skechers shoes outlet. The first person who met Rostov in the officers’ ward was a thin little man who had lost one arm. He was walking about the first room in a nightcap and hospital dressing-gown, with a short pipe between his teeth. Rostov, looking intently at him, tried to recall where he had seen him.

“See where it was God’s will for us to meet again,” said the little man. “Tushin, Tushin, do you remember I brought you along after Sch?ngraben? They have sliced a bit off me, see,…” said he smiling, and showing the empty sleeve of his dressing-gown. “Is it Vassily Dmitryevitch Denisov you are looking for—a fellow-lodger here?” he said, hearing who it was Rostov wanted. “Here, here,” and he led him into the next room, from which there came the sound of several men laughing. “How can they live in this place even, much less laugh?” thought Rostov, still aware of that corpse-like smell that had been so overpowering in the soldiers’ ward, and still seeing around him those envious eyes following him on both sides, and the face of that young soldier with the sunken eyes.

Denisov, covered up to his head with the quilt, was still in bed, though it was twelve o’clock in the day.

“Ah, Rostov! How are you, how are you?” he shouted, still in the same voice as in the regiment. But Rostov noticed with grief, behind this habitual briskness and swagger, some new, sinister, smothered feeling that peeped out in the words and intonations and the expression of the face of Denisov.

His wound, trifling as it was, had still not healed, though six weeks had passed since he was wounded. His face had the same swollen pallor as all the faces in the hospital. But that was not what struck Rostov: what struck him was that Denisov did not seem pleased to see him, and his smile was forced. Denisov asked him nothing either of the regiment or of the general progress of the war. When Rostov talked of it, Denisov did not listen.

Rostov even noticed that Denisov disliked all reference to the regiment, and to that other free life going on outside the hospital walls. He seemed to be trying to forget that old life, and to be interested only in his quarrel with the commissariat officials. In reply to Rostov’s inquiry as to how this matter was going, he promptly drew from under his pillow a communication he had received from the commissioner, and a rough copy of his answer. He grew more eager as he began to read his answer, and specially called Rostov’s attention to the biting sarcasm with which he addressed his foes. Denisov’s companions in the hospital, who had gathered round Rostov, as a person newly come from the world of freedom outside, gradually began to move away as soon as Denisov began reading his answer. From their faces Rostov surmised that all these gentlemen had more than once heard the whole story, and had had time to be bored with it. Only his nearest neighbour, a stout Uhlan, sat on his pallet-bed, scowling gloomily and smoking a pipe, and little one-armed Tushin still listened, shaking his head disapprovingly. In the middle of the reading the Uhlan interrupted Denisov.

“What I say is,” he said, turning to Rostov, “he ought simply to petition the Emperor for pardon. Just now, they say, there will be great rewards given and they will surely pardon.”

“Me petition the Emperor!” said Denisov in a voice into which he tried to throw his old energy and fire, but which sounded like the expression of impotent irritability. “What for? If I had been a robber, I’d beg for mercy; why, I’m being called up for trying to show up robbers. Let them try me, I’m not afraid of any one; I have served my Tsar and my country honestly, and I’m not a thief! And degrade me to the ranks and … Listen, I tell them straight out, see, I write to them, ‘If I had been a thief of government property…’ ”

“It’s neatly put, no question about it,” said Tushin. “But that’s not the point, Vassily Dmitritch,” he too turned to Rostov, “one must submit, and Vassily Dmitritch here won’t do it. The auditor told you, you know, that it looks serious for you.”

“Well, let it be serious,” said Denisov.

“The auditor wrote a petition for you,” Tushin went on, “and you ought to sign it and despatch it by this gentleman. No doubt he” (he indicated Rostov) “has influence on the staff too. You won’t find a better opportunity.”

“But I have said I won’t go cringing and fawning,” Denisov interrupted, and he went on reading his answer.

Rostov did not dare to try and persuade Denisov, though he felt instinctively that the course proposed by Tushin and the other officers was the safest. He would have felt happy if he could have been of assistance to Denisov, but he knew his stubborn will and straightforward hasty temper.

When the reading of Denisov’s biting replies, which lasted over an hour, was over, Rostov said nothing, and in the most dejected frame of mind spent the rest of the day in the society of Denisov’s companions, who had again gathered about him. He told them what he knew, and listened to the stories told by others. Denisov maintained a gloomy silence the whole evening.

Late in the evening, when Rostov was about to leave, he asked Denisov if he had no commission for him.

“Yes, wait a bit,” said Denisov. He looked round at the officers, and taking his papers from under his pillow, he went to the window where there was an inkstand, and sat down to write.

“It seems it’s no good knocking one’s head against a stone wall,” said he, coming from the window and giving Rostov a large envelope. It was the petition addressed to the Emperor that had been drawn up by the auditor. In it Denisov, making no reference to the shortcoming of the commissariat department, simply begged for mercy. “Give it, it seems…” He did not finish, and smiled a forced and sickly smile. AFTER GOING BACK to the regiment and reporting to the colonel the position of Denisov’s affairs, Rostov rode to Tilsit with the letter to the Emperor.

On the 13th of June the French and Russian Emperors met at Tilsit. Boris Drubetskoy had asked the personage of high rank on whom he was in attendance to include him in the suite destined to be staying at Tilsit.

“I should like to see the great man,” he said, meaning Napoleon, whom he had hitherto, like every one else, always spoken of as Bonaparte.

“You are speaking of Buonaparte?” the general said to him, smiling.

Boris looked inquiringly at his general, and immediately saw that this was a playful test.

“I am speaking, prince, of the Emperor Napoleon,” he replied. With a smile the general clapped him on the shoulder

“You will get on,” said he, and he took him with him. Boris was among the few present at Niemen on the day of the meeting of the Emperors. He saw the raft with the royal monograms, saw Napoleon’s progress through the French guards along the further bank, saw the pensive face of the Emperor Alexander as he sat silent in the inn on the bank of the Niemen waiting for Napoleon’s arrival. He saw both the Emperors get into boats, and Napoleon reaching the raft first, walked rapidly forward, and meeting Alexander, gave him his hand; then both the Emperors disappeared into a pavilion. Ever since he had entered these higher spheres, Boris had made it his habit to keep an attentive watch on what was passing round him, and to note it all down. During the meeting of the Emperors at Tilsit, he asked the names of the persons accompanying Napoleon, inquired about the uniforms they were wearing, and listened carefully to the utterances of persons of consequence. When the Emperors went into the pavilion, he looked at his watch, and did not forget to look at it again when Alexander came out. The interview had lasted an hour and fifty-three minutes; he noted this down that evening among other facts, which he felt were of historical importance. As the Emperors’ suite were few in number, to be present at Tilsit at skechers store the meeting of the Emperors was a matter of great consequence for a man who valued success in the service, and Boris, when he succeeded in obtaining this privilege, felt that his position was henceforth perfectly secure. He was not simply known, he had become an observed and familiar figure. On two occasions he had been sent with commissions to the Emperor himself, so that the Emperor knew him personally, and all the court no longer held aloof from him, as they had done at first, considering him a new man, and would even have noticed his absence with surprise if he had been away.

Boris was lodging with another adjutant, the Polish count, Zhilinsky. Zhilinsky, a Pole educated in Paris, was a wealthy man, devotedly attached to the French, and almost every day of their stay in Tilsit, French officers of the Guards and of the French head staff were dining and breakfasting with Zhilinsky and Boris.

On the 24th of June Zhilinsky, with whom Boris shared quarters, was giving a supper to his French acquaintances. At this supper there were present one of Napoleon’s adjutants—the guest of honour—several officers of the French Guards, and a young lad of an aristocratic old French family, a page of Napoleon’s. On the same evening Rostov, taking advantage of the darkness to pass through unrecognised, came to Tilsit in civilian dress, and went to the quarters of Zhilinsky and Boris.

Rostov, like the whole army indeed, was far from having passed through that revolution of feeling in regard to Napoleon and the French—transforming them from foes into friends—that had taken place at headquarters and in Boris. In the army every one was still feeling the same mingled hatred, fear, and contempt for Bonaparte and the French. Only recently Rostov had argued with an officer of Platov’s Cossacks the question whether if Napoleon was taken prisoner he was to be treated as an emperor or as a criminal. Only a little while previously Rostov had met a wounded French colonel on the road, and had maintained to him with heat that there could be no peace concluded between a legitimate emperor and the criminal Bonaparte. Consequently it struck Rostov as strange to see French officers in Boris’s quarters wearing the uniforms at which he was used to looking with very different eyes from the line of pickets. As soon as he caught sight of a French officer, that feeling of war, of hostility, which he always experienced at the sight of the enemy, came upon him at once. He stood still on the threshold and asked in Russian whether Drubetskoy lived there. Boris, hearing a strange voice in the passage, went out to meet him. For the first moment when he recognised Rostov, his face betrayed his annoyance.

“Ah, that’s you, very glad, very glad to see you,” he said, however, smiling and moving towards him. But Rostov had detected his first impulse.

“I have come at a bad time, it seems,” said he; “I shouldn’t have come, but it’s on a matter of importance,” he said coldly.…

“No, I was only surprised at your getting away from the regiment. I will be with you in a moment,” he said in reply to a voice calling him.

“I see I have come at a bad time,” repeated Rostov.

The expression of annoyance had by now vanished from Boris’s face; evidently having reflected and made up his mind how to act, he took him by both hands with marked composure and led him into the next room. Boris’s eyes, gazing serenely and unflinchingly at Rostov, seemed as it were veiled by something, as though a sort of screen—the blue spectacles of conventional life—had been put over them. So it seemed to Rostov.

“Oh, please, don’t talk nonsense, as if you could come at a wrong time,” said Boris. Boris led him into a room where supper was laid, introduced him to his guests, mentioning his name, and explaining that he was not a civilian, but an officer in the hussars, and his old friend. “Count Zhilinsky, Count N. N., Captain S. S.,” he said, naming his guests. Rostov looked frowning at the Frenchmen, bowed reluctantly, and was mute.

Zhilinsky was obviously not pleased to receive this unknown Russian outsider into his circle, and said nothing to Rostov. Boris appeared not to notice the constraint produced by the newcomer, and with the same amiable composure and the same veiled look in his eyes with which he had welcomed Rostov, he endeavoured to enliven the conversation. With characteristic French courtesy one of the French officers turned to Rostov, as he sat in stubborn silence, and said to him that he had probably come to Tilsit to see the Emperor.

“No, I came on business,” was Rostov’s short reply. Rostov had been out of humour from the moment when he detected the dissatisfaction on the face of Boris, and as is always the case with persons who are ill-humoured, it seemed to him that every one looked at him with hostile eyes, and that he was in every one’s way. And in fact he was in every one’s way, and he was the only person left out of the general conversation, as it sprang up again. And what is he sitting on here for? was the question asked by the eyes of the guests turned upon him. He got up and went up to Boris.

“I’m in your way, though,” he said to him in an undertone; “let us have a talk about my business, and I’ll go away.”

“Oh, no, not the least,” said Boris. “But if you are tired, come to my room and lie down and rest.”
“Well, really…”

They went into the little room where Boris slept. Rostov, without sitting down, began speaking at once with irritation—as though Boris were in some way to blame in the matter. He told him of Denisov’s scrape, asking whether he would and could through his general intercede with the Emperor in Denisov’s favour, and through him present the letter. When they were alone together, Rostov was for the first time distinctly aware that he felt an awkwardness in looking Boris in the face. Boris crossing one leg over the other, and stroking the slender fingers of his right hand with his left, listened to Rostov, as a general listens to a report presented by a subordinate, at one time looking away, at the next looking Rostov straight in the face with the same veiled look in his eyes. Every time he did so, Rostov felt ill at ease, and dropped his eyes.

“I have heard of affairs of the sort, and I know that the Emperor is very severe in such cases. I think it had better not be taken before his majesty. To my mind, it would be better to apply directly to the commander of the corps.… But generally speaking, I believe…”

“Then you don’t care to do anything, so say so!” Rostov almost shouted, not looking Boris in the face. Boris smiled.

“On the contrary, I will do what I can, only I imagine…”

At that moment they heard the voice skechers outlet of Zhilinsky at the door, calling Boris.

“Well, go along, go, go…” said Rostov, and refusing supper and remaining alone in the little room, he walked up and down for a long while, listening to the light-hearted French chatter in the next room.

ROSTOV had arrived at Tilsit on the day least suitable for interceding in Denisov’s behalf. It was out of the question skechers shoes for him to go himself to the general in attendance, since he was wearing civilian dress, and had come to Tilsit without permission to do so, and Boris, even had he been willing, could not have done so on the day following Rostov’s arrival. On that day, the 27th of June, the preliminaries of peace were signed. The Emperors exchanged orders: Alexander received the Legion of Honour, and Napoleon the Order of St. Andrey of the first degree, and that day had been fixed for the dinner to be given by a battalion of French guards to the Preobrazhensky battalion. The Emperors were to be present at this banquet. Rostov felt so uncomfortable and ill at ease with Boris, that when the latter peeped in at him after supper he pretended to be asleep, and the next day he left early in the morning to avoid seeing him. In a frock coat and round hat, Nikolay strolled about the town, staring at the French and their uniforms, examining the streets and the houses where the Russian and the French Emperors were staying. In the market-place he saw tables set out and preparations for the banquet; in the streets he saw draperies hung across with flags of the Russian and French colours, and huge monograms of A and N. In the windows of the houses, too, there were flags and monograms.

“Boris doesn’t care to help me, and I don’t care to apply to him. That question’s closed,” thought Nikolay; “everything’s over between us, but I’m not going away from here without having done all I can for Denisov, and, above all, getting the letter given to the Emperor. To the Emperor? … He is here!” thought Rostov, who had unconsciously gone back to the house occupied by Alexander.

Saddle horses were standing at the entrance, and the suite were riding up, evidently getting ready for the Emperor to come out.

“Any minute I may see him,” thought Rostov. “If only I could give him the letter directly, and tell him all … could they really arrest me for my frock coat? Impossible. He would understand on which side the truth lay. He understands everything, he knows everything. Who can be juster and more magnanimous than he? Besides, even if they were to arrest me for being here, what would it matter?” he thought, looking at an officer who was going into the house. “Why, people go in, I see. Oh! it’s all nonsense. I’ll go and give the letter to the Emperor myself; so much the worse for Drubetskoy who has driven me to it.” And all at once, with a decision he would never have expected of himself, Rostov, fingering the letter in his pocket, went straight into the house where the Emperor was staying.

“No, this time I won’t miss my opportunity as I did after Austerlitz,” he thought, expecting every minute to meet the Emperor, and feeling a rush of blood to the heart at the idea. “I will fall at his feet and will beseech him. He will lift me up, hear me out, and thank me too. ‘I am happy when I can do good, but to cancel injustice is the greatest happiness,’ ” Rostov fancied the Emperor would say to him. And he passed up the stairs regardless of the inquisitive eyes that were turned upon him. The broad staircase led straight upwards from the entry; on the right was a closed door. Below, under the stairs, was a door to the rooms on the ground floor.

“Whom are you looking for?” some one asked him.

“To give a letter, a petition, to his majesty,” said Nikolay, with a quiver in his voice.

“A petition—to the officer on duty, this way; please” (he was motioned to the door below). “Only it won’t receive attention.”

Hearing this indifferent voice, Rostov felt panic-stricken at what he was doing; the idea that he might meet the Emperor at any minute was so fascinating and consequently so terrible, that he was ready to fly; but an attendant meeting him opened the door to the officer’s room for him, and Rostov went in.

A short, stout man of about thirty in white breeches, high boots, and in a batiste shirt, apparently only just put on, was standing in this room. A valet was buttoning behind him some fine-looking, new, silk-embroidered braces, which for some reason attracted Rostov’s notice. The stout man was conversing with some one in the adjoining room.

“A good figure and in her first bloom,” he was saying, but seeing Rostov he broke off and frowned.

“What do you want? A petition? …”

“What is it?” asked some one in the next room.

“Another petition,” answered the man in the braces.

“Tell him to come later. He’ll be coming out directly; we must go.”

“Later, later, to-morrow. It’s too late.…”

Rostov turned away and would have gone out, but the man in the braces stopped him.

“From whom is it? Who are you?”

“From Major Denisov,” answered Rostov.

“Who are you—an officer?”

“A lieutenant, Count Rostov.”

“What audacity! Send it through the proper channel. And go along with you, go.…” And he began putting on the uniform the valet handed him.

Rostov went out into the hall again, and noticed that by this time there were a great many officers and generals in full dress, and he had to pass through their midst.

Cursing his temerity, ready to faint at the thought that he might any minute meet the Emperor and be put to shame before him and placed under arrest, fully aware by now of all the indecorum of his action, and regretting it, Rostov was making his way out of the house with downcast eyes, through the crowd of the gorgeously dressed suite, when a familiar voice called to him, and a hand detained him.

“Well, sir, what are you doing here in a frock coat?” asked the bass voice.

It was a cavalry general who had won the Emperor’s special favour during this campaign, and had formerly been in command of the division in which Rostov was serving.

Rostov began in dismay to try and excuse himself, but seeing the good-naturedly jocose face of the general, he moved on one side, and in an excited voice told him of the whole affair, begging him to intercede for Denisov, whom the general knew.

The general on hearing Rostov’s story shook his head gravely. “I’m sorry, very sorry for the gallant fellow; give me the letter.”

Rostov had scarcely time to give him the letter and tell him all about Denisov’s scrape, when the clank of rapid footsteps with spurs was heard on the stairs, and the general left his side and moved up to the steps. The gentlemen of the Emperor’s suite ran downstairs and went to their horses. The postillion, the same one who had been at Austerlitz, led up the Emperor’s horse, and on the stairs was heard a light footstep which Rostov knew at once. Forgetting the danger of being recognised, Rostov moved right up to the steps together with some curious persons from the town; and again after two years he saw the features he adored: the same face, the same glance, the same walk, the same combination of majesty and mildness.… And the feeling of enthusiasm and devotion to the Emperor rose up again in Rostov’s heart with all its old force. The Emperor wore the uniform of the Preobrazhensky regiment, white elk-skin breeches and high boots, and a star which Rostov did not recognise (it was the star of the Legion of Honour). He came out on the steps, holding his hat under his arm, and putting on his glove. He stopped, looking round and seeming to shed brightness around him with his glance. To some one of the generals he said a few words. He recognised, too, the former commander of Rostov’s division, smiled to him, and summoned him to him.

All the suite stood back, and Rostov saw the general talking at some length to the Emperor.

The Emperor said a few words to him, and took a step towards his horse. Again the crowd of the suite and the street gazers, among whom was Rostov, moved up closer to the Emperor. Standing still with his hand on the saddle, the Emperor turned to the cavalry general and said aloud with the obvious intention of being heard by all: “I cannot, general, and I cannot because the law is mightier than I am,” and he put his foot in the stirrup. The general bent his head respectfully; the Emperor took his seat and galloped up the street. Rostov, wild with enthusiasm, ran after him with the crowd. IN THE PUBLIC SQUARE towards which the Tsar rode there stood, facing each other, the battalion of the Preobrazhensky regiment on the right, and the battalion of the French guards in bearskin caps on the left.

While the Emperor was riding up to one flank of the battalions, who presented arms, another crowd of horsemen was galloping up to the opposite flank, and at the head of them Rostov recognised Napoleon. That figure could be no one else. He galloped up, wearing a little hat, the ribbon of St. Andrey across his shoulder, and a blue uniform open over a white vest. He was riding a grey Arab horse of extremely fine breed, with a crimson, gold-embroidered saddle-cloth. Riding up to Alexander, he raised his hat, and at that moment Rostov, with his cavalryman’s eye, could not help noticing that Napoleon had a bad and uncertain seat on horseback. The battalions shouted hurrah, and vive l’Empereur! Napoleon said something to Alexander. Both Emperors dismounted from their horses and took each other by the hands. Napoleon’s face wore an unpleasantly hypocritical smile. Alexander was saying something to him with a cordial expression.

In spite of the kicking of the horses of the French gendarmes, who were keeping back the crowd, Rostov watched every movement of the Emperor Alexander and of Bonaparte, and never took his eyes off them. What struck him as something unexpected and strange was that Alexander behaved as though Bonaparte were his equal,skechers mens and that Bonaparte in his manner to the Russian Tsar seemed perfectly at ease, as though this equal and intimate relation with a monarch were something natural and customary with him.

Alexander and Napoleon, with a long tail of suite, moved towards the right flank of the Preobrazhensky battalion, close up to the crowd which was standing there. The crowd found itself unexpectedly so close to the Emperors, that Rostov, who stood in the front part of it, began to be afraid he might be recognised.

“Sire, I ask your permission to give the Legion of Honour to the bravest of your soldiers,” said a harsh, precise voice, fully articulating every letter.

It was little Bonaparte speaking, looking up straight into Alexander’s eyes. Alexander listened attentively to what was said to him, and bending his head smiled amiably.

“To him who bore himself most valiantly in this last war,” added Napoleon, emphasising each syllable, and with an assurance and composure, revolting to Rostov, scanning the rows of Russian soldiers drawn up before him, all presenting arms, and all gazing immovably at the face of their own Emperor.

“Will your majesty allow me to ask the opinion of the colonel?” said Alexander, and he took a few hurried steps towards Prince Kozlovsky, the commander of the battalion. Bonaparte was meanwhile taking the glove off his little white hand, and, tearing it, he threw it away. An adjutant, rushing hurriedly forward from behind, picked it up. “Give it to whom?” the Emperor Alexander asked of Kozlovsky in Russian, in a low voice.

“As your majesty commands.”

The Emperor frowned, with a look of displeasure, and, looking round, said: “Well, we must give him an answer.”

Kozlovsky scanned the ranks with a resolute air, taking in Rostov too, in that glance.

“Won’t it be me!” thought Rostov.

“Lazarev!” the colonel called with a scowling face; and Lazarev, the soldier who was the best shot in firing at the range, stepped smartly forward.

“Where are you off to? Stand still!” voices whispered to Lazarev, who did not know where he was to go. Lazarev stopped short, with a sidelong scared look at his colonel, and his face quivered, as one so often sees in soldiers called up in front of the ranks.

Napoleon gave a slight backward turn of his head, and a slight motion of his little fat hand, as though seeking something with it. The members of his suite, who guessed the same second what was wanted, were all in a bustle; they whispered together, passing something from one to another, and a page—the same one Rostov had seen the previous evening at Boris’s quarters—ran forward, and respectfully bowing over the outstretched hand and not keeping it one instant waiting, put in it an order on a red ribbon. Napoleon, without looking at it, pressed two fingers together; the order was between them. Napoleon approached Lazarev, who stood rolling his eyes, and still gazing obstinately at his own Emperor only. Napoleon looked round at the Emperor Alexander, as though to show that what he was doing now he was doing for the sake of his ally. The little white hand, with the order in it, just touched the button of the soldier Lazarev. It was as though Napoleon knew that it was enough for his, Napoleon’s, hand to deign to touch the soldier’s breast, for that soldier to be happy, rewarded, and distinguished from every one in the world. Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lazarev’s breast, and, dropping his hand, turned to Alexander, as though he knew that cross would be sure to stick on Lazarev’s breast. The cross did, in fact, stick on.

Officious hands, Russian and French, were instantaneously ready to support it, to fasten it to his uniform.

Lazarev looked darkly at the little man with white hands who was doing something to him, and still standing rigidly, presenting arms, he looked again straight into Alexander’s face, as though he were asking him: “Was he to go on standing there, or was it his pleasure for him to go now, or perhaps to do something else?” But no order was given him, and he remained for a good while still in the same rigid position.

The Emperors mounted their horses and rode away. The Preobrazhensky battalion broke up, and, mingling with the French guards, sat down to the tables prepared for them.

Lazarev was put in the place of honour. French and Russian officers embraced him, congratulated him, and shook hands with him. Crowds of officers and common people flocked up simply to look at Lazarev. There was a continual hum of laughter and French and Russian chatter round the tables in the square. Two officers with flushed faces passed by Rostov, looking cheerful and happy.

“What do you say to the banquet, my boy? All served on silver,” one was saying. “Seen Lazarev?”

“Yes.”

“They say the Preobrazhenskies are to give them a dinner tomorrow.”

“I say, what luck for Lazarev! Twelve hundred francs pension for life.”

“Here’s a cap, lads!” cried a Preobrazhensky soldier, putting on a French soldier’s fur cap.

“It’s awfully nice, first-rate!”

“Have you heard the watchword?” said an officer of the guards to another. “The day before yesterday it was ‘Napoléon, France, bravoure’; to-day it’s ‘Alexandre, Russie, grandeur.” One day our Emperor gives it, and next day Napoleon. To-morrow the Emperor is to send the St. George to the bravest of the French guards. Can’t be helped! Must respond in the same way.”

Boris, with his comrade Zhilinsky, had come too to look at the banquet. On his way back Boris noticed Rostov, who was standing at the corner of a house. “Rostov! good day; we haven’t seen each other,” he said, and could not refrain from asking him what was the matter, so strangely gloomy and troubled was the face of Rostov.

“Nothing, nothing,” answered Rostov.

“Are you coming in?”

“Yes.”

Rostov stood a long while in the corner, looking at the fête from a distance. His brain was seething in an agonising confusion, which he could not work out to any conclusion. Horrible doubts were stirring in his soul. He thought of Denisov with his changed expression, his submission, and all the hospital with torn-off legs and arms, with the filth and disease. So vividly he recalled that hospital smell of corpse that he looked round to ascertain where the stench came from. Then he thought of that self-satisfied Bonaparte, with his white hands—treated now with cordiality and respect by the Emperor Alexander. For what, then, had those legs and arms been torn off, those men been killed? Then he thought of Lazarev rewarded, and Denisov punished and unpardoned. He caught himself in such strange reflections that he was terrified at them.

Hunger and the savoury smell of the Preobrazhensky dinner roused him from this mood; he must get something to eat before going away. He went to an hotel which he had seen in the morning. In the hotel he found such a crowd of people, and of officers who had come, as he had, in civilian dress, that he had difficulty in getting dinner. Two officers of his own division joined him at table. The conversation naturally turned on the peace. The two officers, Rostov’s comrades, like the greater part of the army, were not satisfied with the peace concluded after Friedland. They said that had they kept on a little longer it would have meant Napoleon’s downfall; that his troops had neither provisions nor ammunition. Nikolay ate in silence and drank heavily. He finished two bottles of wine by himself. The inward ferment working within him still fretted him, and found no solution. He dreaded giving himself up to his thoughts, and could not get away from them. All of a sudden, on one of the officers saying that it was humiliating to look at the French, Rostov began shouting with a violence that was quite unprovoked, and consequently greatly astounded the officers.

“And how can you judge what would be best!” he shouted, with his face suddenly suffused with a rush of blood. “How can you judge of the action of the Emperor? What right have we to criticise him? We cannot comprehend the aims or the actions of the Emperor!”

“But I didn’t say a word about the Emperor,” the officer said in justification of himself, unable to put any other interpretation on Rostov’s violence than that he was drunk.

But Rostov did not heed him.

“We are not diplomatic clerks, we are soldiers, and nothing more,” he went on. “Command us to die—then we die. And if we are punished, it follows we’re in fault; it’s not for us to judge. If it’s his majesty the Emperor’s pleasure to recognise Bonaparte as emperor, and to conclude an alliance with him, then it must be the right thing. If we were once to begin criticising and reasoning about everything, nothing would be left holy to us. In that way we shall be saying there is no God, nothing,” cried Nikolay, bringing his fist down on the table. His remarks seemed utterly irrelevant to his companions, but followed quite consistently from the train of his own ideas. “It’s our business to do our duty, to hack them to pieces, and not to think; skechers mens shoes that’s all about it,” he shouted.

“And to drink,” put in one of the officers, who had no desire to quarrel.

“Yes, and to drink,” assented Nikolay. “Hi, you there! Another bottle!” he roared

IN THE year 1808 the Emperor Alexander visited Erfurt for another interview with the Emperor Napoleon; and in the skechers mens shoes highest Petersburg society a great deal was said of the great significance of this meeting.

In 1809 the amity between the two sovereigns of the world, as Napoleon and Alexander used to be called, had become so close that when Napoleon declared war that year with Austria, a Russian corps crossed the frontier to co-operate with their old enemy Bonaparte against their old ally, the Austrian Emperor; so close that in the highest society there was talk of a possible marriage between Napoleon and one of the sisters of the Emperor Alexander. But, apart from foreign policy, the attention of Russian society was at that time drawn with special interest to the internal changes taking place in all departments of the government.

Life meanwhile, the actual life of men with their real interests of health and sickness, labour and rest, with their interests of thought, science, poetry, music, love, affection, hatred, passion, went its way, as always, independently, apart from the political amity or enmity of Napoleon Bonaparte, and apart from all possible reforms.

Prince Andrey had spent two years without a break in the country. All those projects which Pierre had attempted on his estates, and changing continually from one enterprise to another, had never carried out to any real result—all those projects had been carried out by Prince Andrey without display to any one and without any perceptible exertion. He possessed in the highest degree the quality Pierre lacked, that practical tenacity which, without fuss or any great effort on his part, set things in working order.

On one estate of his, three hundred serfs were transformed into free cultivators (it was one of the first examples in Russia), in others forced labour was replaced by payment of rent. On Bogutcharovo a trained midwife had been engaged at his expense to assist the peasant-women in childbirth, and a priest, at a fixed salary, was teaching the children of the peasants and house servants to read and write.

Half his time Prince Andrey spent at Bleak Hills with his father and his son, who was still in the nursery. The other half he passed at his Bogutcharovo retreat, as his father called his estate. In spite of the indifference to all the external events of the world that he had shown to Pierre, he studiously followed them, received many books, and, to his own surprise, when people coming fresh from Petersburg, the very vortex of life, visited him or his father, he noticed that those people, in knowledge of all that was passing in home and foreign politics, were far behind him, though he had never left the country.

Besides looking after his estates, and much general reading of the most varied kind, Prince Andrey was busily engaged at this time upon a critical survey of our two late disastrous campaigns and the composition of a proposal for reforms in our army rules and regulations.

In the spring of 1809 Prince Andrey set off to visit the Ryazan estates, the heritage of his son, whose trustee he was.

Warmed by the spring sunshine he sat in the carriage, looking at the first grass, the first birch leaves and the first flecks of white spring clouds floating over the bright blue of the sky. He was thinking of nothing, but looking about him, light-hearted and thoughtless.

They crossed the ford where he had talked with Pierre a year before. They drove through a muddy village, by threshing floors, and patches of green corn; down hill by a drift of snow still lying near the bridge, up hill along a clay road hollowed out by the rain, by strips of stubble-field, with copse turning green here and there; and drove at last into a birch forest that lay on both sides of the road. In the forest it was almost hot, the wind could not be felt. The birches, all studded with sticky, green leaves, did not stir, and lilac-coloured flowers and the first grass lifted the last year’s leaves and peeped out green from under them. Tiny fir-trees, dotted here and there among the birches, brought a jarring reminder of winter with their coarse, unchanging green. The horses neighed as they entered the forest and were visibly heated.

Pyotr the footman said something to the coachman; the coachman assented. But apparently the coachman’s sympathy was not enough for Pyotr. He turned round on the box to his master.

“Your excellency, how soft it is!” he said, smiling respectfully.

“Eh?”

“It is soft, your excellency.”

“What does he mean?” wondered Prince Andrey. “Oh, the weather, most likely,” he thought, looking from side to side. “And, indeed, everything’s green already…how soon! And the birch and the wild cherry and the alder beginning to come out.…But I haven’t noticed the oak. Yes, here he is, the oak!”

At the edge of the wood stood an oak. Probably ten times the age of the birch-trees that formed the bulk of the forest, it was ten times the thickness and twice the height of any birch-tree. It was a huge oak, double a man’s span, with branches broken off, long ago it seemed, and with bark torn off, and seared with old scars. With its huge, uncouth, gnarled arms and fingers sprawling unsymmetrically, it stood an aged, angry, and scornful monster among the smiling birches. Only the few dead-looking, evergreen firs dotted about the forest, and this oak, refused to yield to the spell of spring, and would see neither spring nor sunshine.

“Spring and love and happiness!” that oak seemed to say. “Are you not sick of that ever-same, stupid, and meaningless cheat? Always the same, and always a cheat! There is no spring, nor sunshine, nor happiness. See yonder stand the cramped, dead fir-trees, ever the same, and here I have flung my torn and broken fingers wherever they have grown out of my back or my sides. As they have grown, so I stand, and I put no faith in your hopes and deceptions.”

Prince Andrey looked round several times at that oak as though he expected something from it. There were flowers and grass under the oak too, but still it stood, scowling, rigid, weird and grim, among them.

“Yes, he’s right, a thousand times right, the old oak,” thought Prince Andrey. “Others, young creatures, may be caught anew by that deception, but we know life—our life is over!” A whole fresh train of ideas, hopeless, but mournfully sweet, stirred up in Prince Andrey’s soul in connection with that oak. During this journey he thought over his whole life as it were anew, and came to the same hopeless but calming conclusion, that it was not for him to begin anything fresh, that he must live his life, content to do no harm, dreading nothing and desiring nothing. PRINCE ANDREY’S DUTIES as trustee of his son’s Ryazan estates necessitated an interview with the marshal of the district. This marshal was Count Ilya Andreivitch skechers for men Rostov, and in the middle of May Prince Andrey went to see him.

It was by now the hot period of spring. The forest was already in full leaf. It was dusty, and so hot that at the sight of water one longed to bathe.

Prince Andrey drove along the avenue leading to the Rostovs’ house at Otradnoe, depressed and absorbed in considering what questions he must ask the marshal about his business. Behind some trees on the right he heard merry girlish cries, and caught sight of a party of girls running across the avenue along which his coach was driving. In front of all the rest there ran towards the coach a black-haired, very slender, strangely slender, black-eyed girl in a yellow cotton gown. On her head was a white pocket-handkerchief, from under which strayed locks of her loose hair. The girl was shouting something, but perceiving a stranger, she ran back laughing, without glancing at him.

Prince Andrey for some reason felt a sudden pang. The day was so lovely, the sun so bright, everything around him so gay, and that slim and pretty girl knew nothing of his existence, and cared to know nothing, and was content and happy in her own life—foolish doubtless—but gay and happy and remote from him. What was she so glad about? What was she thinking of? Not of army regulations; not of the organisation of the Ryazan rent-paying peasants. “What is she thinking about, and why is she so happy?” Prince Andrey could not help wondering with interest.

Count Ilya Andreivitch was living in the year 1809 at Otradnoe, exactly as he had always done in previous years; that is to say, entertaining almost the whole province with hunts, theatricals, dinner parties and concerts. He was delighted to see Prince Andrey, as he always was to see any new guest, and quite forced him to stay the night.

Prince Andrey spent a tedious day, entertained by his elderly host and hostess and the more honoured among the guests, of whom the count’s house was full in honour of an approaching name-day. Several times in the course of it, Bolkonsky glanced at Natasha, continually laughing and full of gaiety among the younger members of the company, and asked himself each time, “What is she thinking of? What is she so glad about?”

In the evening, alone in a new place, he was for a long while unable to sleep. He read for a time, then put out his candle, and afterwards lighted it again. It was hot in the bedroom with the shutters closed on the inside. He felt irritated with this foolish old gentleman (so he mentally called Count Rostov) who had detained him, declaring that the necessary deeds had not yet come from the town, and he was vexed with himself for staying.

Prince Andrey got up and went to the window to open it. As soon as he opened the shutter, the moonlight broke into the room as though it had been waiting a long while outside on the watch for this chance. He opened the window. The night was fresh and bright and still. Just in front of the window stood a row of pollard-trees, black on one side, silvery bright on the other. Under the trees were rank, moist, bushy, growing plants of some kind, with leaves and stems touched here and there with silver. Further away, beyond the black trees, was the roof of something glistening with dew; to the right was a great, leafy tree, with its trunk and branches brilliantly white, and above it the moon, almost full, in a clear, almost starless, spring sky. Prince Andrey leaned his elbow on the window, and his eyes rested on that sky.
His room was on the second story; there were people in the room over his head, and awake too. He heard girls’ chatter overhead.

“Only this once more,” said a girlish voice, which Prince Andrey recognised at once.

“But when are you coming to bed?” answered another voice.

“I’m not coming! I can’t sleep; what’s the use? Come, for the last time.…”

Two feminine voices sang a musical phrase, the finale of some song.

“Oh, it’s exquisite! Well, now go to sleep, and there’s an end of it.”

“You go to sleep, but I can’t,” responded the first voice, coming nearer to the window. She was evidently leaning right out of the window, for he could hear the rustle of her garments and even her breathing. All was hushed and stonily still, like the moon and its lights and shadows. Prince Andrey dared not stir for fear of betraying his unintentional presence.

“Sonya! Sonya!” he heard the first voice again. “Oh, how can you sleep! Do look how exquisite! Oh, how exquisite! Do wake up, Sonya!” she said, almost with tears in her voice. “Do you know such an exquisite night has never, never been before.”

Sonya made some reluctant reply.

“No, do look what a moon!…Oh, how lovely it is! Do come here. Darling, precious, do come here. There, do you see? One has only to squat on one’s heels like this—see—and to hold one’s knees—as tight, as tight as one can—give a great spring and one would fly away.… Like this—see!”

“Mind, you’ll fall.”

He heard sounds of a scuffle and Sonya’s voice in a tone of vexation: “Why, it’s past one o’clock.”

“Oh, you only spoil it all for me. Well, go to bed then, go along.”

All was hushed again; but Prince Andrey knew she was still sitting there. He heard at times a soft rustle, and at times a sigh.

“O my God! my God! what does it mean?” she cried suddenly. “To bed then, if it must be so!” and she closed the window with a slam.

“And nothing to do with my existence!” thought Prince Andrey while he had been listening to her talk, for some reason hoping and dreading she might say something about him. “And she again! As though skechers mens it were on purpose!” he thought. All at once there stirred within his soul such a wholly unexpected medley of youthful hopes and ideas, running counter to the whole tenor of his life, that he made haste to fall asleep, feeling incapable of seeing clearly into his own state of mind

NEXT DAY Prince Andrey took leave of the count alone and set off on his way home, without waiting for the ladies to appear.

It was the beginning of June when Prince skecher shoes Andrey, on his return journey, drove again into the birch forest, in which the old, gnarled oak had made upon him so strange and memorable an impression. The ringing of the bells did not carry so far now in the forest as six weeks before. Everything was fully out, thick, and shut in. And the young firs, dotted about the forest, did not break the general beauty, but, subdued to the same character as the rest, were softly green with their feathery bunches of young needles.

The whole day had been hot; a storm was gathering, but only a small rain-cloud had sprinkled the dust of the road and the sappy leaves. The left side of the forest was dark, lying in shadow. The right side, glistening with the raindrops, gleamed in the sunlight, faintly undulating in the wind. Everything was in flower, the nightingales twittered and carolled, now close, now far away.

“Yes, it was here, in this forest, I saw that oak, with whom I was in sympathy,” thought Prince Andrey. “But where is he?” he thought again as he gazed at the left side of the road, and, all unaware and unrecognising, he was admiring the very oak he was seeking. The old oak, utterly transformed, draped in a tent of sappy dark green, basked faintly, undulating in the rays of the evening sun. Of the knotted fingers, the gnarled excrescences, the aged grief and mistrust—nothing was to be seen. Through the rough, century-old bark, where there were no twigs, leaves had burst out so sappy, so young, that it was hard to believe that aged creature had borne them.

“Yes, that is the same tree,” thought Prince Andrey, and all at once there came upon him an irrational, spring feeling of joy and of renewal. All the best moments of his life rose to his memory at once. Austerlitz, with that lofty sky, and the dead, reproachful face of his wife, and Pierre on the ferry, and the girl, thrilled by the beauty of the night, and that night and moon—it all rushed at once into his mind.

“No, life is not over at thirty-one,” Prince Andrey decided all at once, finally and absolutely. “It’s not enough for me to know all there is in me, every one must know it too; Pierre and that girl, who wanted to fly away into the sky; every one must know me so that my life may not be spent only on myself; they must not live so apart from my life, it must be reflected in all of them and they must all share my life with me!”

On getting home after his journey, Prince Andrey made up his mind to go to Petersburg in the autumn, and began inventing all sorts of reasons for this decision. A whole chain of sensible, logical reasons, making it essential for him to visit Petersburg, and even to re-enter the service, was at every moment ready at his disposal. He could not indeed comprehend now how he could ever have doubted of the necessity of taking an active share in life, just as a month before he could not have understood how the idea of leaving the country could ever occur to him. It seemed clear to him that all his experience of life would be wasted and come to naught, if he did not apply it in practice and take an active part in life again. He could not understand indeed how on a basis of such poor arguments it could have seemed so incontestable to him that he would be lowering himself, if after the lessons he had received from life, he were to put faith again in the possibility of being useful and in the possibility of happiness and of love. Reason now gave its whole support to the other side. After his journey to Ryazan, Prince Andrey began to weary of life in the country; his former pursuits ceased to interest him, and often sitting alone in his study, he got up, went to the looking-glass and gazed a long while at his own face. Then he turned away to the portrait of Liza, who, with her curls tied up à la grecque, looked gaily and tenderly out of the gold frame at him. She did not say those terrible words to him; she looked curiously and merrily at him. And, clasping his hands behind him, Prince Andrey would walk a long while up and down his room, frowning and smiling by turns, as he brooded over those irrational ideas, that could not be put into words, and were secret as a crime—the ideas connected with Pierre, with glory, with the girl at the window, with the oak, with woman’s beauty, and love, which had changed the whole current of his life. And if any one came into his room at such moments, he would be particularly short, severely decided and disagreeably logical.

“Mon cher,” Princess Marya would say coming in at such a moment, “Nikolushka cannot go out for a walk to-day; it is very cold.”

“If it were hot,” Prince Andrey would answer his sister with peculiar dryness on such occasions, “then he would go out with only his smock on; but as it is cold, you must put on him warm clothes that have been designed for that object. That’s what follows from its being cold, and not staying at home when the child needs fresh air,” he would say, with an exaggerated logicality, as it were punishing some one for that secret, illogical element working within him.

On such occasions Princess Marya thought what a chilling effect so much intellectual work had upon men. PRINCE ANDREY arrived in Petersburg in the August of 1809. It was the period when the young Speransky was at the zenith of his fame and his reforms were being carried out with the utmost vigour. In that very month the Tsar was thrown out of his carriage, hurt his foot, and was laid up for three weeks at Peterhof, seeing Speransky every day and no one else. At that period there were in preparation the two famous decrees that so convulsed society, abolishing the bestowal of grades by court favour and establishing examinations for obtaining the ranks of collegiate assessors and state councillors. But besides these reforms, a whole political constitution was under discussion destined to transform the whole legal, administrative and financial system of government sketcher shoes from the Privy Council to the district tribunals. At this time the vague, liberal ideals with which the Emperor Alexander had ascended the throne were taking shape and being carried into practice. Those ideals he had striven to realise with the aid of Tchartorizhsky, Novosiltsov, Kotchubey, and Stroganov, whom he used himself to call in fun his “comité du salut publique.” Now all were replaced by Speransky on the civil side and Araktcheev on the military.

Soon after his arrival, Prince Andrey, as a kammerherr, presented himself at court and at a levée. The Tsar, meeting him on two occasions, did not deign to bestow a single word upon him. Prince Andrey had fancied even before then that he was antipathetic to the Tsar; that the Tsar disliked his face and his whole personality. In the cold, repellent glance with which the Tsar looked at him, Prince Andrey found further confirmation of this supposition. Courtiers explained the Tsar’s slight to Prince Andrey by saying that his majesty was displeased at Bolkonsky’s having retired from active service since 1805.

“I know myself that one has no control over one’s likes and dislikes,” thought Prince Andrey, “and so it is of no use to think of presenting my note on army reform in person to the Tsar, but the thing will speak for itself.” He sent word about his note to an old field-marshal, a friend of his father’s. The field-marshal fixed an hour to see him, received him cordially, and promised to lay it before the Tsar. A few days later, Prince Andrey received notice that he was to call upon the minister of war, Count Araktcheev.

At nine o’clock in the morning on the day appointed, Prince Andrey entered Count Araktcheev’s reception-room.

Prince Andrey did not know Araktcheev personally and had never seen him, but all that he knew about him had inspired him with little respect for the man.

“He is the minister of war, a person the Tsar trusts, and no one need have any concern with his personal qualities; he has been commissioned to look at my note, consequently he is the only person who can get it adopted,” thought Prince Andrey, as he waited among many persons of importance and unimportance in Count Araktcheev’s anteroom.

During the years of his service—for the most part as an adjutant—Prince Andrey had seen the anterooms of many great personages, and the various characteristic types of such anterooms were very readily recognised by him. Count Araktcheev’s anteroom had quite a special character. The faces of the persons of no consequence who were awaiting their turns for an audience with Count Araktcheev betrayed a feeling of humiliation and servility; the faces of those of superior rank all wore an expression of general discomfort, concealed under a mask of ease and ridicule, of themselves and their position and the person they were waiting to see. Some of them walked up and down plunged in thought; others were laughing and whispering together, and Prince Andrey caught the nickname Sila Andreitch (Sila meaning Force or Violence), and the words “the governor’ll give it you,” referring to Count Araktcheev. One general (a person of great consequence), unmistakably chagrined at being kept waiting so long, sat with crossed legs, disdainfully smiling to himself.

But as soon as the door opened, all faces instantly betrayed one feeling only—terror.

Prince Andrey asked the adjutant on duty to mention his name again, but he received a sarcastic stare, and was told his turn would come in due course. After several persons had been let in and let out of the minister’s room by the adjutant, an officer was admitted at the dreadful door, whose abject and panic-stricken face had struck Prince Andrey. The officer’s audience lasted a long while. Suddenly the roar of a harsh voice was heard through the door, and the officer, with a white face and trembling lips, came out, and clutching at his head, crossed the anteroom. After that, Prince Andrey was conducted to the door, and the adjutant in a whisper said: “To the right, at the window.”

Prince Andrey went into a plain, neat study, and saw at the table a man of forty with a long waist, with a long, closely-cropped head, deep wrinkles, scowling brows over brown-green, dull eyes, and a red, over-hanging nose. Araktcheev turned his head towards him, without looking at him.

“What is it you are petitioning for?” asked Araktcheev.

“There is nothing that I am…petitioning for, your excellency,” Prince Andrey pronounced softly. Araktcheev’s eyes turned to him.

“Sit down,” said Araktcheev. “Prince Bolkonsky?”

“I have no petition to make, but his majesty the Tsar has graciously sent to your excellency a note submitted by me—”

“Be so good as to see, my dear sir; I have read your note,” Araktcheev interrupted, uttering only the first words civilly, again looking away from him, and relapsing more and more into a tone of grumbling contempt. “Is it new army regulations you propose? There are regulations in plenty; no one will carry out the old ones. Nowadays every one’s drawing up regulations; it’s easier writing than doing.”

“I have come by the desire of his majesty the Tsar to learn from your excellency how you propose to deal with my project,” said Prince Andrey courteously.

“I have proposed a resolution in regard to your note, and have forwarded it to the committee. I do not approve,” said Araktcheev, getting up and taking a paper out of the writing-table. “Here.” He gave it to Prince Andrey. Right across the note had been scrawled, without punctuation or capital letters and with words misspelt: “Superficially compiled seeing that it’s drawn up in imitation of the French army regulations and needlessly departing from the standing orders.”

“To what committee has the note been referred?” asked Prince Andrey.

“To the Committee on Army Regulations, and I have proposed your honour being enrolled among its members. Only without salary.”

Prince Andrey skechers shoes smiled.

“I am not seeking a salary.”

“A member without salary,” repeated Araktcheev. “I wish you good day. Hey! call! who’s the next?” he shouted, as he bowed to Prince Andrey.

WHILE AWAITING THE ANNOUNCEMENT of his name having been put on the committee, Prince Andrey looked up old acquaintances, skechers shoes especially among those persons whom he knew to be in power, and so able to be of use to him. He experienced now in Petersburg a sensation akin to what he had known on the eve of a battle, when he was fretted by restless curiosity and irresistibly attracted to those higher spheres, where the future was in preparation, that future on which hung the fate of millions. From the angry irritability of the elder generation, from the curiosity of the uninitiated and the reserve of the initiated, from the hurry and anxious absorption of every one, from the multiplicity of committees and commissions—he was learning of new ones every day—he felt that now, in the year 1809, there was in preparation here in Petersburg some vast political contest, and the commander-in-chief in it was a mysterious personage whom he did not know, but imagined to be a man of genius—Speransky.

And this movement of reform, of which he knew vaguely, and Speransky, the moving spirit of it, began to interest him so keenly that his proposed reform of the army regulations very soon fell into a subordinate position in his mind.

Prince Andrey happened to be most favourably placed for obtaining a good reception in the highest and most various circles of the Petersburg society of that day. The reforming party welcomed him warmly, and sought him out, in the first place, because he had the reputation of being clever and very well read, and secondly because he had already gained the reputation of being a liberal by the emancipation of his serfs. The party of the dissatisfied older generation welcomed him simply as the son of his father, and reckoned upon his sympathy in their disapproval of the reforms. The feminine world, society, received him cordially because he was a wealthy match of high rank, and a person almost new, encircled by a halo of romance from his narrow escape from death and the tragic loss of his young wife. Moreover the general verdict of all who had known him previously was that he had greatly changed for the better during the last five years, had grown softer and more manly, that he had lost his old affectation, pride, and sarcastic irony, and had gained the serenity that comes with years. People talked of him, were interested in him, and eager to see him

The day after his interview with Count Araktcheev, Prince Andrey was at a soirée at Count Kotchubey’s. He described to the latter his interview with Sila Andreitch. (This was the name by which Kotchubey spoke of Araktcheev with that vague note of jeering in his voice which Prince Andrey had noticed in the anteroom of the minister of war.)

“Mon cher, even in this affair you can’t do without Mihail Mihalovitch. He has a hand in everything. I’ll speak to him. He promised to come in the evening…”

“But what has Speransky to do with the army regulations?” asked Prince Andrey.

Kotchubey shook his head, smiling, as though wondering at Bolkonsky’s simplicity.

“We were talking to him about you the other day,” Kotchubey continued; “about your free cultivators…”

“Yes, so it was you, prince, who freed your serfs?” said an old gentleman of Catherine’s court, turning disdainfully to Bolkonsky.

“The little estate brought me no income as it was,” answered Bolkonsky, trying to minimise what he had done to the old gentleman, to avoid irritating him needlessly.

“You are afraid of being late,” said the old gentleman, looking at Kotchubey.

“There’s one thing I don’t understand,” pursued the old gentleman. “Who is to till the land if they are set free? It’s easy to pass laws, but hard work to govern. It’s just the same as now; I ask you, count, who will preside over the courts when all have to pass examinations?”

“Those who pass the examinations, I suppose,” answered Kotchubey, crossing his legs and looking about him.

“Here I have Pryanitchnikov in my department, a capital man, a priceless man, but he is sixty; how is he to go in for examinations?…”

“Yes, that’s a difficult question, considering that education is so restricted, but…”

Count Kotchubey did not finish his sentence; he got up, and taking Prince Andrey by the arm, went to meet a tall, bald, fair-haired man of forty, who had just come in. He had a large, open forehead, and his long face was of a strange, exceptional whiteness; he wore a blue frock coat and had a cross at his neck and a star on the left side of his breast. It was Speransky. Prince Andrey recognised him at once, and that thrill passed through him that comes at the great moments of one’s life. Whether it was a thrill of respect, of envy, of anticipation, he did not know. Speransky’s whole figure had a peculiar character by which he could be distinguished immediately. Never in any one of the circles in which Prince Andrey had moved had he seen such calm and self-confidence as was manifest in this man’s heavy and ungainly movements. Never in any one had he seen a glance so resolute, and yet so soft, as now in those half-closed and moist-looking eyes; never had he seen such firmness as in that smile that meant nothing. Never had he heard a voice so delicate, smooth, and soft; but what struck him most of all was the tender whiteness of the face, and still more the hands, which were rather broad, but extremely plump, soft, and white. Such whiteness and softness Prince Andrey had seen only in the faces of soldiers who had been a long while in hospital.

This was Speransky, the secretary of state,sketcher shoes the Tsar’s confidential adviser, who had accompanied him to Erfurt, and there had more than once seen and talked with Napoleon. Speransky’s eyes did not shift from one face to another, as one’s eyes unconsciously do on first coming into a large company, and he was in no hurry to speak. He spoke slowly, with conviction that he would be listened to, and looked only at the person to whom he was speaking. Prince Andrey watched every word and gesture of Speransky’s with peculiar intentness. As is often the case with men, particularly with those who criticise their fellows severely, Prince Andrey on meeting a new person, especially one like Speransky, whom he knew by reputation, had always a hope of finding in him a full perfection of human qualities.

Speransky said to Kotchubey that he was sorry that he had not been able to come earlier, because he had been detained at the palace. He did not say that the Tsar had kept him. And this affectation of modesty did not escape Prince Andrey. When Kotchubey mentioned Prince Andrey’s name to him, Speransky slowly transferred his eyes to Bolkonsky, with the same smile on his face, and gazed for a moment at him in silence.

“I am very glad to make your acquaintance; I have heard of you, as every one has,” said he.

Kotchubey said a few words about the reception Araktcheev had given Bolkonsky. Speransky’s smile broadened.

“The chairman of the Committee of Army Regulations is a friend of mine—M. Magnitsky,” he said, articulating fully every word and every syllable, “and, if you wish it, I can make you acquainted with him.” (He paused at the full stop.) “I expect that you would meet with sympathy in him and a desire to assist in anything reasonable.”

A circle formed at once round Speransky, and the same old gentleman, who had talked of his clerk, Pryanitchnikov, addressed a question to Speransky.

Taking no part in the conversation, Prince Andrey watched every gesture of Speransky—this man, only a little time before an insignificant divinity student, who now held in his hands—those plump white hands—the fate of Russia, as Bolkonsky thought. Prince Andrey was struck by the extraordinarily contemptuous composure with which Speransky answered the old gentleman. He seemed to drop him his condescending words from an immeasurable height above him. When the old gentleman began talking too loud, Speransky smiled and said that he could not judge of the advantage or disadvantage of what the Tsar saw fit to command.

After talking for a little while in the general circle, Speransky got up, and going to Prince Andrey, drew him away to the other end of the room. It was evident that he thought it well to interest himself in Bolkonsky.

“I have not had time for a word with you, prince, in the engrossing conversation into which I was dragged by that excellent old gentleman,” he said, with a smile of bland contempt, by which he seemed to take for granted that Prince Andrey and himself were at one in recognising the insignificance of the people with whom he had just been talking. This flattered Prince Andrey. “I have known you for a long while: first from your action with the serfs, the first instance of the kind among us, an example which one would desire to find many following; and, secondly, from your being one of those kammerherrs who have not considered themselves wronged by the new decree in regard to promotion by court favour, that has provoked so much criticism and censure.”

“Yes,” said Prince Andrey, “my father did not care for me to take advantage of that privilege; I began the service from the lower grades.”

“Your father, a man of the older generation, is undoubtedly above the level of our contemporaries, who condemn this measure, though it is simply an act of natural justice.”

“I imagine there is some basis though even for that condemnation,” said Prince Andrey, trying to resist the influence of Speransky, of which he began to be aware. He disliked agreeing with him in everything; he tried to oppose him. Prince Andrey, who usually spoke so well and so readily, felt a difficulty even in expressing himself as he talked with Speransky. He was too much occupied in observing the personality of the celebrated man.

“In the interests of personal ambition perhaps,” Speransky slowly put in his word.

“And to some extent in the interests of the state,” said Prince Andrey.

“How do you mean?…” said Speransky slowly, dropping his eyes.

“I am an admirer of Montesquieu,” said Prince Andrey. “And his theory that the principle of monarchies is honour seems to me incontestable. Certain rights and privileges of the nobility appear to me to be means of maintaining that sentiment.”

The smile vanished from Speransky’s white face, and his countenance gained greatly by its absence. Probably Prince Andrey’s idea seemed to him an interesting one.

“If you look at the question from that point of view,” he began, pronouncing French with obvious difficulty, and speaking even more deliberately than he had done when speaking Russian, but still with perfect composure. He said that honour, l’honneur, cannot be supported by privileges prejudicial to the working of the government; that honour, l’honneur, is either a negative concept of avoidance of reprehensible actions or a certain source of emulation in obtaining the commendation and rewards in which it finds expression.

His arguments were condensed, simple, and clear. “The institution that best maintains that honour, the source of emulation, is an institution akin to the Legion of Honour of the great Emperor Napoleon, which does not detract from but conduces to the successful working of the government service, and not a class or court privilege.”

“I do not dispute that, but there is no denying that the court privileges did attain the same object,” said Prince Andrey. “Every courtier thought himself bound to do credit to his position.”

“But you did not care to profit by it, prince,” said Speransky, showing with a smile that he wished to conclude with civility an argument embarrassing for his companion. “If you will do me the honour to call on Wednesday, then I shall have seen Magnitsky, and shall have something to tell you skecher shoes that may interest you, and besides I shall have the pleasure of more conversation with you.” Closing his eyes, he bowed, and trying to escape unnoticed, he went out of the drawing-room without saying good-bye, à la fran?aise.

DURING THE FIRST PART of his stay in Petersburg, Prince Andrey found all the habits of thought he had formed in his skecher shoes solitary life completely obscured by the trifling cares which engrossed him in Petersburg.

In the evening on returning home he noted down in his memorandum-book four or five unavoidable visits or appointments for fixed hours. The mechanism of life, the arrangement of his day, so as to be in time everywhere, absorbed the greater part of his vital energy. He did nothing, thought of nothing even, and had no time to think, but only talked, and talked successfully, of what he had had time to think about in the past in the country.

He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that it happened to him to repeat the same remarks on the same day to different audiences. But he was so busy for whole days together that he had no time to reflect that he was thinking of nothing. Just as at their first meeting at Kotchubey’s, Speransky had a long and confidential talk with Prince Andrey on Wednesday at his own home, where he received Bolkonsky alone and made a great impression on him.

Prince Andrey regarded the immense mass of men as contemptible and worthless creatures, and he had such a longing to find in some other man the living pattern of that perfection after which he strove himself, that he was ready to believe that in Speransky he had found this ideal of a perfectly rational and virtuous man. Had Speransky belonged to the same world as Prince Andrey, had he been of the same breeding and moral traditions, Bolkonsky would soon have detected the weak, human, unheroic sides of his character; but this logical turn of mind was strange to him and inspired him with the more respect from his not fully understanding it. Besides this, Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrey’s abilities or because he thought it as well to secure his adherence, showed off his calm, impartial sagacity before Prince Andrey, and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and consists in a tacit assumption that one’s companion and oneself are the only people capable of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their own ideas.

In the course of their long conversation on Wednesday evening Speransky said more than once: “Among us everything that is out of the common rut of tradition is looked at,” … or with a smile: “But we want the wolves to be well fed and the sheep to be unhurt.” … or: “They can’t grasp that” … and always with an expression that said. “We, you and I, we understand what they are and who we are.”

This first long conversation with Speransky only strengthened the feeling with which Prince Andrey had seen him for the first time. He saw in him a man of vast intellect and sober, accurate judgment, who had attained power by energy and persistence, and was using it for skechers shoes the good of Russia only. In Prince Andrey’s eyes Speransky was precisely the man—finding a rational explanation for all the phenomena of life, recognising as of importance only what was rational and capable of applying the standard of reason to everything—that he would have liked to be himself. Everything took a form so simple, so clear in Speransky’s exposition of it that Prince Andrey could not help agreeing with him on every subject. If he argued and raised objections it was simply with the express object of being independent and not being entirely swayed by Speransky’s ideas. Everything was right, everything was as it should be, yet one thing disconcerted Prince Andrey. That was the cold, mirror-like eye of Speransky, which seemed to refuse all admittance to his soul, and his flabby, white hand, at which Prince Andrey instinctively looked, as one usually does look at the hands of men who have power. That mirror-like eye and that flabby hand vaguely irritated Prince Andrey. He was disagreeably struck too by the excessive contempt for other people that he observed in Speransky, and by the variety of the lines of argument he employed in support of his views. He made use of every possible weapon of thought, except analogy, and his transitions from one line of defence to another seemed to Prince Andrey too violent. At one time he took his stand as a practical man and found fault with idealists, then he took a satirical line and jeered sarcastically at his opponents, then maintained a strictly logical position, or flew off into the domain of metaphysics. (This last resource was one he was particularly fond of using in argument.) He raised the question into the loftiest region of metaphysics, passed to definitions of space, of time, and of thought, and carrying off arguments to confute his opponent, descended again to the plane of the original discussion. What impressed Prince Andrey as the leading characteristic of Speransky’s mind was his unhesitating, unmovable faith in the power and authority of the reason. It was plain that Speransky’s brain could never admit the idea—so common with Prince Andrey—that one can never after all express all one thinks. It had never occurred to him to doubt whether all he thought and all he believed might not be meaningless nonsense. And that peculiarity of Speransky’s mind was what attracted Prince Andrey most.

During the first period of his acquaintance with Speransky, Prince Andrey had a passionate and enthusiastic admiration for him, akin to what he had once felt for Bonaparte. The very fact that Speransky was the son of a priest, which enabled many foolish persons to regard him with vulgar contempt, as a member of a despised class, made Prince Andrey peculiarly delicate in dealing with his own feeling for Speransky and unconsciously strengthened it in him.

On that first evening that Bolkonsky spent with him, they talked of the commission for the revision of the legal code; and Speransky described ironically to Prince Andrey how the commission had been sitting for one hundred and fifty years, had cost millions, and had done nothing, and how Rosenkampf had pasted labels on all the various legislative codes.

“And that’s all the state has got for the millions it has spent!” said he. “We want to give new judicial powers to the Senate, and we have no laws. That’s why it is a sin for men like you, prince, not to be in the government.”

Prince Andrey observed that some education in jurisprudence was necessary for such work, and that he had none.

“But no one has, so what would you have? It’s a circulus viciosus, which one must force some way out of.”

Within a week Prince Andrey was a member of the committee for the reconstruction of the army regulations, and—a thing he would never have expected—he was also chairman of a section of the commission for the revision of the legal code. At Speransky’s request skechers shoe he took the first part of the civil code under revision; and with the help of the Napoleonic Code and the Code of Justinian he worked at the revision of the section on Personal Rights.

TWO YEARS BEFORE, at the beginning of 1808, Pierre had returned to Petersburg from his visits to his estates, and by no design of his own had taken a leading position among the freemasons in skechers brown boots Petersburg. He organised dining and funeral lodges, enrolled new members, took an active part in the formation of different lodges, and the acquisition of authentic acts. He spent his money on the construction of temples, and, to the best of his powers, made up the arrears of alms, a matter in which the majority of members were niggardly and irregular. At his own expense, almost unaided, he maintained the poorhouse built by the order in Petersburg.

Meanwhile his life ran on in the old way, yielding to the same temptations and the same laxity. He liked a good dinner and he liked strong drink; and, though he thought it immoral and degrading to yield to them, he was unable to resist the temptations of the bachelor society in which he moved.

Yet even in the whirl of his active work and his dissipations, Pierre began, after the lapse of a year, to feel more and more as though the ground of freemasonry on which he had taken his stand was slipping away under his feet the more firmly he tried to rest on it. At the same time he felt that the further the ground slipped from under his feet, the more close was his bondage to the order. When he had entered the brotherhood he had felt like a man who confidently puts his foot down on the smooth surface of a bog. Having put one foot down, he had sunk in; and to convince himself of the firmness of the ground on which he stood, he had put the other foot down on it too, and had sunk in further, had stuck in the mud, and now was against his own will struggling knee-deep in the bog.

Osip Alexyevitch was not in Petersburg. (He had withdrawn from all participation in the affairs of the Petersburg lodge, and now never left Moscow.) All the brothers who were members of the lodge were people Pierre knew in daily life, and it was difficult for him to see in them simply brothers in freemasonry, and not Prince B., nor Ivan Vasilyevitch D., whom he knew in private life mostly as persons of weak and worthless character. Under their masonic aprons and emblems he could not help seeing the uniforms and the decorations they were striving after in mundane life. Often after collecting the alms and reckoning up twenty to thirty roubles promised—and for the most part left owing—from some ten members, of whom half were as well-off as Pierre himself, he thought of the masonic vow by which every brother promised to give up all his belongings for his neighbour; and doubts stirred in his soul from which he tried to escape.

He divided all the brothers he knew into four classes. In the first class he reckoned brothers who took no active interest in the affairs of the lodges nor in the service of humanity, but were occupied exclusively with the scientific secrets of the order, with questions relating to the threefold designation of God, or the three first elements of things—sulphur, mercury, and salt—or the significance of the square and all the figures of the Temple of Solomon. Pierre respected this class of masons, to which the elder brothers principally belonged—in it Pierre reckoned Osip Alexyevitch—but he did not share their interests. His heart wasn’t in the mystic side of freemasonry.

In the second class Pierre included himself, and brothers like himself, wavering, seeking, and not yet finding in freemasonry a straight and fully understood path for themselves, but still hoping to find it.

In the third class he reckoned brothers—they formed the majority—who saw in freemasonry nothing but an external form and ceremonial, and valued the strict performance of that external form without troubling themselves about its import or significance. Such were Villarsky and the Grand Master of the lodge indeed.

The fourth class, too, included a great number of the brothers especially among those who had entered the brotherhood of late. These were men who, as far as Pierre could observe, had no belief in anything, nor desire of anything, but had entered the brotherhood simply for the sake of getting into touch with the wealthy young men, powerful through their connections or their rank, who were numerous in the lodge.

Pierre began to feel dissatisfied with what he was doing. Freemasonry, at least as he knew it here, seemed to him sometimes to rest simply upon formal observances. He never dreamed of doubting of freemasonry itself, but began to suspect that Russian freemasonry had got on to a false track, and was deviating from its original course. And so towards the end of the year Pierre went abroad to devote himself to the higher mysteries of the order.

It was in the summer of 1809 that Pierre returned to Petersburg. From the correspondence that passed between freemasons in Russia and abroad, it was known that Bezuhov had succeeded in gaining the confidence of many persons in high positions abroad; that he had been skechers brown shoes initiated into many mysteries, had been raised to a higher grade, and was bringing back with him much that would conduce to the progress of freemasonry in Russia. The Petersburg freemasons all came to see him, tried to ingratiate themselves with him, and all fancied that he had something in reserve that he was preparing for them.

A solemn assembly of the lodge of the second order was arranged, at which Pierre promised to communicate the message he had to give the Petersburg brothers from the highest leaders of the order abroad. The assembly was a full one. After the usual ceremonies Pierre got up and began to speak:

“Dear brothers,” he began, blushing and hesitating, with a written speech in his hand, “it is not enough to guard our secrets in the seclusion of the lodge,—what is needed is to act … to act. … We are falling into slumber, and we need to act.”

Pierre opened his manuscript and began to read.

“For the propagation of the pure truth and the attainment of virtue,” he read, “we must purify men from prejudice, diffuse principles in harmony with the spirit of the times, undertake the education of the younger generation, ally ourselves by indissoluble ties with the most enlightened men, boldly, and at the same time prudently, overcome superstition, infidelity, and folly, and form of those devoted to us men linked together by a common aim and possessed of power and authority.

“For the attainment of this aim we must secure to virtue the preponderance over vice; we must strive that the honest man may obtain his eternal reward even in this world. But in those great projects we are very gravely hindered by existing political institutions. What is to be done in the existing state of affairs? Are we to welcome revolutions, to overthrow everything, to repel violence by violence? … No, we are very far from that. Every reform by violence is to be deprecated, because it does little to correct the evil while men remain as they are, and because wisdom has no need of violence.

“The whole plan of our order should be founded on the training of men of character and virtue, bound together by unity of conviction and aim,—the aim of suppressing vice and folly everywhere by every means, and protecting talent and virtue, raising deserving persons out of the dust and enrolling them in our brotherhood. Only then will our order obtain the power insensibly to tie the hands of the promoters of disorder, and to control them without their being aware of it. In a word, we want to found a form of government holding universal sway, which should be diffused over the whole world without encroaching on civil obligations; under which all other governments could continue in their ordinary course and do all, except what hinders the great aim of our order, that is, the triumph of virtue over vice. This aim is that of Christianity itself. It has taught men to be holy and good, and for their own profit to follow the precept and example of better and wiser men.

“In times when all was plunged in darkness, exhortation alone was of course enough; the novelty of truth gave it peculiar force, but nowadays far more powerful means are necessary for us. Now a man guided by his senses needs to find in virtue a charm palpable to the senses. The passions cannot be uprooted; we must only attempt to direct them to a noble object, and so every one should be able to find satisfaction for his passions within the bounds of virtue, and our order should provide means to that end. As soon as we have a certain number of capable men in every state, each of them training again two others, and all keeping in close cooperation, then everything will be possible for our order, which has already done much in secret for the good of humanity.”

This speech did not merely make a great impression, it produced a thrill of excitement in the lodge. The majority of the brothers, seeing in this speech dangerous projects of “illuminism,” to Pierre’s surprise received it coldly. The Grand Master began to raise objections to it; Pierre began to expound his own views with greater and greater heat. It was long since there had been so stormy a meeting. The lodge split up into parties; one party opposed Pierre, accusing him of “illuminism”; the other supported him. Pierre was for the first time at this meeting impressed by the endless multiplicity of men’s minds, which leads to no truth being ever seen by two persons alike.

Even those among the members who seemed to be on his side interpreted him in their own way, with limitations and variations, to which he could not agree. What Pierre chiefly desired was always to transmit his thought to another exactly as he conceived it himself.

At the conclusion of the sitting, the Grand Master spoke with ill-will and irony to Bezuhov of his hasty temper; and observed skechers brown that it was not love of virtue alone, but a passion for strife, that had guided him in the discussion.

Pierre made him no reply, but briefly inquired whether his proposal would be accepted. He was told that it would not be; and without waiting for the usual formalities, he left the lodge and went home.

AGAIN PIERRE was overtaken by that despondency he so dreaded. For three days after the delivery of his speech at the skechers boots women lodge he lay on a sofa at home, seeing no one, and going nowhere.

At this time he received a letter from his wife who besought him to see her, wrote of her unhappiness on his account, and her desire to devote her whole life to him.

At the end of the letter she informed him that in a day or two she would arrive in Petersburg from abroad.

The letter was followed up by one of the freemasons whom Pierre respected least bursting in upon his solitude. Turning the conversation upon Pierre’s matrimonial affairs, he gave him, by way of brotherly counsel, his opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong, and that Pierre was departing from the first principles of freemasonry in not forgiving the penitent. At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vassily’s wife, sent to him, beseeching him to visit her, if only for a few minutes, to discuss a matter of great importance. Pierre saw there was a conspiracy against him, that they meant to reconcile him with his wife, and he did not even dislike this in the mood in which he then was. Nothing mattered to him; Pierre regarded nothing in life as a matter of great consequence, and under the influence of the despondency which had taken possession of him, he attached no significance either to his own freedom or to having his own way be punishing his wife.

“No one is right, no one is to blame, and so she, too, is not to blame,” he thought. If Pierre did not at once give his consent to being reunited to his wife, it was simply because in the despondent state into which he had lapsed, he was incapable of taking any line of action. Had his wife come to him, he could not now have driven her away. Could it matter beside the questions that were absorbing Pierre, whether he live with his wife or not?

Without answering either his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre at once set off late in the evening and drove to Moscow to see Osip Alexyevitch.

This is what Pierre wrote in his diary.

“Moscow, November 17.—I have only just come from seeing my benefactor, and I hasten to note down all I have been feeling. Osip Alexyevitch lives in poverty, and has been for three years past suffering from a painful disease of the bladder. No one has ever heard from him a groan or a word of complaint. From morning till late at night, except at the times when he partakes of the very plainest food, he is working at science. He received me graciously, and made me sit down on the bed on which he was lying. I made him the sign of the Knights of the East and of Jerusalem; he responded with the same, and asked me with a gentle smile what I had learned and gained in the Prussian and Scottish lodges. I told him everything as best I could, repeating to him the principles of action I had proposed in our Petersburg lodge, and telling him of the unfavourable reception given me, and the rupture between me and the brothers. Osip Alexyevitch, after some silent thought, laid all his own views of the subject before me, which immediately threw light on all the past and all the course that lies before me. He surprised me by asking whether I remembered the threefold aim of the order—(1) the preservation and study of the holy mystery; (2) the purification and reformation of self for its reception; and (3) the improvement of the human race through striving for such purification. Which, he asked, was the first and greatest of those three aims? Undoubtedly self-reformation and self-purification. It is only towards that aim that we can always strive independently of all circumstances. But at the same time it is just that aim which requires of us the greatest effort, and therefore, led astray by pride, we let that aim drop, and either strive to penetrate to the mystery which we are unworthy in our impurity to receive, or seek after the reformation of the human race, while we are ourselves setting an example of vice and abomination. ‘Illuminism’ is not a pure doctrine precisely because it is seduced by worldly activity and puffed up with pride. On this ground Osip Alexyevitch censured my speech and all I am doing. At the bottom of my heart I agreed with him. Talking of my domestic affairs, he said to me: ‘The first duty of a mason, as I have told you, is the perfection of himself. But often we imagine that by removing all the difficulties of our life, we may better attain this aim. It is quite the contrary, sir,’ he said to me: ‘it is only in the midst of the cares of the world that we can reach the three great aims—(1) self-knowledge, for a man can know himself only by comparison; (2) greater perfection, which can only be obtained by conflict; and (3) the attainment of the chief virtue—love of death. Only the corruptions of life can show us all its vanity, and strengthen our innate love for death, or rather regeneration into new life.’ These words were the more remarkable as Osip Alexyevitch, in spite of his grievous physical sufferings, is never weary of life, though he loves death, for which he does not, in spite of all the purity and loftiness of his inner man, yet feel himself prepared. Then my benefactor explained to me fully the significance of the great square of creation, and pointed out that the third and the seventh number are the basis of everything. He counselled me not to withdraw from co-operation with the Petersburg brothers, and while undertaking women’s skechers boots duties only of the second order in the lodge, to endeavour to draw the brothers away from the seductions of pride, and to turn them into the true path of self-knowledge and self-perfection. Moreover, for myself personally, he advised me first of all to keep a watch over myself, and with that aim he gave me a manuscript-book, the one in which I am writing now, and am to note down all my actions in the future.”

“Petersburg, November 23.—I am reconciled with my wife. My mother-in-law came to me in tears, and said that Ellen was here, and that she besought me to hear her; that she was innocent, that she was miserable at my desertion of her, and a great deal more. I knew that if I once let myself see her, I should not be able to refuse to accede to her wishes. In my uncertainty, I did not know to whose help and advice to have recourse. If my benefactor had been here, he would have told me what to do. I retired to my own room, read over the letters of Osip Alexyevitch, recalled my conversations with him, and from all that I reached the conclusion that I ought not to refuse a suppliant, and ought to hold out a helping hand to every one, and, above all, to a person so closely connected with me, and that I must bear my cross. But if I forgive her for the sake of doing right, at least let my reunion with her have a spiritual end only. So I decided, and so I wrote to Osip Alexyevitch. I said to my wife that I begged her to forget all the past, that I begged her to forgive whatever wrong I might have done her, and that I had nothing to forgive her. It was a joy to me to tell her that. May she never know how painful it was to me to see her again! I have installed myself in the upper rooms in this great house, and I am conscious of a happy feeling of beginning anew.” AT THAT TIME, as always indeed, the exalted society that met at court and at the great balls was split up into several circles, each of which had its special tone. The largest among them was the French circle—supporting the Napoleonic alliance—the circle of Count Rumyantsev and Caulaincourt. In this circle Ellen took a leading position, as soon as she had established herself in her husband’s house in Petersburg. She received the members of the French embassy, and a great number of people, noted for their wit and their politeness, and belonging to that political section.

Ellen had been at Erfurt at the time of the famous meeting of the Emperors; and had there formed close ties with all the notable figures in Europe belonging to the Napoleonic circle. In Erfurt she had been brilliantly successful. Napoleon himself, seeing her at the theatre, had asked who she was, and admired her beauty. Her triumphs in the character of a beautiful and elegant woman did not surprise Pierre, for with years she had become even more beautiful than before. But what did surprise him was that during the last two years his wife had succeeded in gaining a reputation as “a charming woman, as witty as she is beautiful,” as was said of her. The distinguished Prince de Ligne wrote her letters of eight pages. Bilibin treasured up his mots to utter them for the first time before Countess Bezuhov. To be received in Countess Bezuhov’s salon was looked upon as a certificate of intellect. Young men read up subjects before one of Ellen’s soirées, so as to be able to talk of something in her salon, and secretaries of the embassy, and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that Ellen was in a way a power. It was with a strange feeling of perplexity and alarm that Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes at her dinners and soirées, listened to conversation about politics, poetry, and philosophy. At these soirées he experienced a sensation such as a conjuror must feel who expects every moment that his trick will be discovered. But either because stupidity was just what was needed for the successful management of such a salon, or because those who were deceived took pleasure in the deception, the cheat was not discovered, and the reputation of “a charming woman” clung so persistently to Elena Vassilyevna Bezuhov, that she could utter the vulgarest and stupidest speeches, and every one was just as enthusiastic over every word, and eagerly found in it a profound meaning of which she did not dream herself.

Pierre was exactly the husband needed by this brilliant society woman. He was that absent-minded, eccentric, grand seigneur of a husband, who got in nobody’s way and far from spoiling the general impression of the highest tone in her drawing-room, formed by his contrast with his wife’s elegance and tact an advantageous foil to her. Pierre’s continual concentration on immaterial interests during the last two years, and his genuine contempt for everything else, gave him in his wife’s circle, which did not interest him, that tone of unconcern, indifference, and benevolence towards all alike, which cannot be acquired artificially, and for that reason commands involuntary respect. He entered his wife’s drawing-room as though it were a theatre, was acquainted with every one, equally affable to all, and to all equally indifferent. Sometimes he took part in conversation on some subject that interested him, and then, without any consideration whether the “gentlemen of the embassy” were present or not, he mumbled out his opinions, which were by no means always in harmony with the received catch-words of the time. But the public estimate of the eccentric husband of “the most distinguished woman in Petersburg” was now so well established that no one took his sallies seriously.

Among the numerous young men, who were daily to be seen in Ellen’s house, Boris Drubetskoy, who had by now achieved marked success in the service, was, after Ellen’s return from Erfurt, the most intimate friend of the Bezuhov household. Ellen used to call him “mon page,” and treated him like a child. Her smile for him was the same smile she bestowed on all, but it was sometimes distasteful to Pierre to see that smile. Boris behaved to Pierre with a marked, dignified, and mournful respectfulness. This shade of respectfulness too disturbed Pierre. He had suffered so much three years before from the mortification caused him by his wife, that now he secured himself from all possibility of similar mortification; in the first place, by being his wife’s husband only in name, and secondly, by not allowing himself to suspect anything. “No, now she has become a blue-stocking, she has renounced for ever her former errors,” he said to himself. “There has never been an instance of a blue-stocking giving way to tender passions,” he repeated to himself; a maxim he had picked up somewhere and implicitly believed. But, strange to say, the presence of Boris in his wife’s drawing-room (and he was almost always there) had a physical effect on Pierre; it seemed to make all his limbs contract, and destroyed the unconsciousness and freedom of his movement.

“Such a strange antipathy,” thought Pierre; “and at one time I really liked him very much.”

In the eyes of the world, Pierre was a great lord, the rather blind and absurd husband of a distinguished wife; a clever eccentric, skechers boots who did nothing but who was no trouble to any one, a good-natured, capital fellow. In Pierre’s soul all this while a complex and laborious process of inner development was going on that revealed much to him and led him to many spiritual doubts and joys.

HE KEPT UP his diary and this was what he was writing in it at that time:

“November 24.—I got up at eight o’clock, read the Scriptures, then went to my duties” (Pierre by the advice of Osip Alexyevitch cheap skechers boots was serving on one of the government committees), “came back to dinner, dined alone (the countess had a lot of guests whom I did not care for), ate and drank with moderation, and after dinner copied out passages for the brothers. In the evening I went down to the countess, and told a ridiculous story about B., and only bethought myself that I ought not to have done so, when every one was laughing loudly at it.

“I went to bed with a calm and happy spirit. Great Lord, help me to walk in Thy paths: (1) to flee anger by gentleness and deliberation; (2) to flee lust by self-restraint and loathing; (3) to escape from the turmoil of the world without cutting myself off from (a) the duties of my political work, (b) the cares of my household, (c) relations with my friends, and (d) the management of my finances.”

“November 27.—I got up late and lay a long while in bed after I was awake, giving way to sloth. My God, help me and strengthen me that I may walk in Thy ways. Read the Scriptures, but without proper feeling. Brother Urusov came: talked of the cares of this world. He told me of the Tsar’s new projects. I was beginning to criticise them, but remembered my principles and the words of my benefactor, that a true mason ought to be zealous in working for the state, when his aid is required, but should look on quietly at what he is not called upon to assist in. My tongue is my enemy. Brothers G.V. and O. visited me; there was a conversation preliminary to the reception of a new brother. They lay upon me the duty of rhetor. I feel weak and unworthy. Then there was talk of the interpretation of the seven pillars and steps of the Temple, of the seven sciences, the seven virtues, the seven vices, the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Brother O. was very eloquent. In the evening the reception took place. The new decoration of the building added a good deal to the magnificence of the spectacle. Boris Drubetskoy was admitted. I had proposed him, and I was the rhetor. A strange feeling troubled me all the time I was with him in the dark temple. I detected in myself a feeling of hatred, which I studiously strove to overcome. And I could sincerely have desired to save him from evil and to lead him into the way of truth, but evil thoughts of him never left me. The thought came to me that his object in entering the brotherhood was simply to gain the intimacy and favour of men in our lodge. Apart from the fact that he several times asked me whether N. or S. were not members of our lodge (a question I could not answer), he is incapable, so far as my observation goes, of feeling a reverence for our holy order, and is too much occupied, and too well satisfied with the outer man, to care much for the improvement of the spiritual man. I had no grounds for doubting of him, but he seemed to me insincere; and all the time I stood face to face with him in the dark temple I kept fancying he was smiling contemptuously at my words, and I should have liked really to stab his bare chest with the sword I held pointed at it. I could not be eloquent, and could not sincerely communicate my doubts to the brothers and the Grand Master. O Great Architect of Nature, help me to find the true path that leads out of the labyrinth of falsehood!”

After this three pages of the diary were left blank, and then had been written:

“I had a long and instructive conversation with brother V., who advised me not to abandon brother A. Much was revealed to me, unworthy as I am. Adonai is the name of the creator of worlds. Elohim is the name of the ruler of all. The third name, the name unutterable, has the significance of the All. Talks with brother V. strengthen and refresh me and confirm me in the path of virtue. In his presence there is no room for doubt. I see clearly the distinction between the poor doctrine of mundane science and our sacred, all-embracing teaching. Human sciences dissect everything to understand it, and destroy everything to analyse it. In the sacred science of our order all is one, all is known for its combination and life. The trinity—the three elements of things—are sulphur, mercury, and salt. Sulphur is of an oily and fiery nature; in its combination with salt by its fiery quality it arouses a craving in it, by means of which it attracts mercury, fastens upon it, holds it, and in combination with it forms various substances. Mercury is the unsubstantial, floating, spiritual essence—Christ, the Holy Ghost, Him.”

“December 3.—I waked up late, read the Scripture, but was unmoved by it. Afterwards I went down and walked up and down the big hall. I tried to meditate; but instead of that my imagination brought before me an incident which occurred four years ago. Dolohov, meeting me after my duel in Moscow, said to me that he hoped I was now enjoying complete mental peace in spite of my wife’s absence. At the time I made him no answer. Now I recalled all the details of that interview, and in my mind made him the most vindictive and biting retorts. I recovered myself and drove away that idea, only when I had caught myself in a passion of anger; but I did not repent of it sufficiently. Afterwards Boris Drubetskoy came and began describing various incidents. The moment he came in I felt amazed at his visit and said something horrid to him. He retorted. I got hot, and said a great deal to him that was disagreeable and even rude. He did not reply, and I checked myself only when it was too late. My God, I cannot get on with him at all. It is myself too that is to blame for it. I set myself above him, and so I become far inferior to him, for he is lenient to my rudeness, while I nourish a contempt for him. My God, grant me that in his presence I may see more clearly my own vileness and act so that it may be profitable to him too. After dinner I went to sleep, and just as I was falling asleep, I distinctly heard a voice saying in my left ear: ‘Thy day.’

“I dreamed I was walking along in the dark and was all of a sudden surrounded by dogs, but I went on undismayed; all at once one small dog seized me by the thigh with its teeth and would not let go. I tried to strangle it with my hands. And as soon as I tore it off, another, a bigger one, began to bite me. I lifted it up, and the more I lifted it up, the bigger and heavier it became. And suddenly brother A. came up, and taking me by the arm, led me away with him and brought me into a building, to enter which we had to pass over a narrow plank. I stepped on it, and the plank bent and gave way, and I began clambering on the fence, which I just managed to get hold of with my hands. After great efforts I dragged my body up, so that my legs were hanging over on one side and my body on the other. I looked round and saw brother A. standing on the fence and pointing out to me a great avenue and garden, and in the garden a great and beautiful building. I waked up. Lord, Great Architect of Nature, help me to tear away these dogs—my evil passions and especially the last—that unites in itself the violence of all the former ones, and aid me to enter that temple of virtue, of which I was vouchsafed a vision in my sleep.”

“December 7.—I dreamed that Osip Alexyevitch was sitting in my house, and I was very glad to see him and eager to entertain him. But in my dream I kept chattering away incessantly with other people, and all at once I bethought myself that this could not be to his liking and I wanted to come close to him and to embrace him. But as soon as I approached him, I saw that his face was transformed, and had grown young, and he said something to me softly, some doctrine of our order, but so softly that I could not catch it. Then we all seemed to go out of the room, and something strange happened. We were sitting or lying on the floor. He was telling me something. But in my dream I longed to show him my devotional feeling, and, not listening to his words, I began picturing to myself the state of my own inner man, and the grace of God sanctifying me. And tears came into my eyes, and I was glad that he noticed it. But he glanced at me with vexation, and jumped up, breaking off his conversation with me. I was abashed and asked him whether what he had been saying did not concern me. But he made no reply, but gave me a friendly look, and then all of a sudden we found ourselves in my bedroom, where stood a big double bed. He lay down on the edge of it, and I seemed to be filled with a desire to embrace him and to lie down too. And in my dream he asked me, ‘Tell me the truth, what is your chief temptation? Do you know it? I believe that you do know it.’ Abashed at this question, I answered that sloth was my besetting temptation. He shook his head incredulously. And even more abashed, I told him that though I was living here with my wife, I was not living with her as a husband. To this he replied that I had no right to deprive my wife of my embraces, and gave me to understand that this was my duty. But I answered that I should be ashamed of it, and suddenly everything vanished. And I waked up, and in my mind there was the text of scripture: ‘And the life was the light of man, and the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.’

“The face of Osip Alexyevitch had been youthful and bright-looking. That day I received a letter from my benefactor, in which he wrote to me of my conjugal duties.

“December 9.—I had a dream from which I waked up with a throbbing heart. I dreamed I was in Moscow in my own house, in the big divan-room, and Osip Alexyevitch came out of the drawing-room. I dreamed that I knew at once that the process of regeneration had begun in him, and I rushed to meet him. I kissed his face and his hands, while he said: ‘Do you notice that my face is different?’ I looked at him, still holding him in my arms, and I dreamed that I saw that his face was young, but he had no hair on his head and his features were quite different. And I dreamed that I said to him: ‘I should have recognised you if I had met you by chance’; and thought as I said it, ‘Am I telling the truth?’ And all at once I saw him lying like a dead body; then he gradually came to himself again and went with me into the big study, holding a big folio book of manuscript. And I dreamed I said: ‘I wrote that.’ And he answered me by an inclination of the head. I opened the book, and on all the pages were fine drawings. And in my dream I knew that these pictures depicted the soul’s love adventures with its beloved. And I saw a beautiful presentment of a maiden in transparent skechers boots garments and with a transparent body flying up to the clouds. And I seemed to know that this maiden was nothing else but the figure of the Song of Songs. And in my dream, as I looked at these pictures, I felt I was doing wrong and could not tear myself away from them. Lord, help me! My God, if Thy forsaking me is Thy doing, then Thy will be done; but if I am myself the cause, teach me what I am to do. I perish from my vileness as though Thou wast utterly forsaking me.” THE ROSTOVS’ PECUNIARY POSITION had not improved during the two years they had spent in the country. Although Nikolay Rostov had kept firmly to his resolution, and was still living in a modest way in an obscure regiment, spending comparatively little, the manner of life at Otradnoe, and still more Mitenka’s management of affairs, were such that debts went on unchecked, growing bigger every year. The sole resource that presented itself to the old count as the obvious thing to do was to enter the government service, and he had come to Petersburg to seek a post and at the same time, as he said, to let his poor wenches enjoy themselves for the last time.

Soon after the Rostovs’ arrival in Petersburg, Berg made Vera an offer, and his offer was accepted. Although in Moscow the Rostovs belonged to the best society—themselves unaware of the fact, and never troubling themselves to consider what society they belonged to—yet in Petersburg their position was an uncertain and indefinite one. In Petersburg they were provincials; and were not visited by the very people who in Moscow had dined at the Rostovs’ expense without their inquiring to what society they belonged.

The Rostovs kept open house in Petersburg, just as they used to do in Moscow; and at their suppers people of the most diverse sorts could be seen together—country neighbours, old and not well-to-do country gentlemen with their daughters, and the old maid-of-honour, Madame Peronsky, Pierre Bezuhov, and the son of their district postmaster, who was in an office in Petersburg. Of the men who were constantly at the Rostovs’ house in Petersburg, the most intimate friends of the family were very soon Boris, Pierre, who had been met in the street by the old count and dragged home by him, and Berg, who spent whole days with the Rostovs, and paid the elder of the young countesses, Vera, every attention a young man can pay who intends to make a proposal.

Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand that had been wounded at Austerlitz, and the sword quite unnecessarily held in his left. He had related this episode to everybody so persistently and with such an air of importance, that every one had come to believe in the utility and merit of the feat, and Berg had received two decorations for Austerlitz.

In the war in Finland, too, he had succeeded in distinguishing himself. He had picked up a fragment of a grenade, by which an adjutant had been killed close to the commander-in-chief, and had carried this fragment to his commander. Again, as after Austerlitz, he talked to every one at such length and with such persistency about this incident that people ended by believing that this, too, was something that ought to have been done, and Berg received two decorations for the Finnish war too. In 1809 he was a captain in the guards with decorations on his breast, and was filling some particularly profitable posts in Petersburg.

Though there were some sceptics who smiled when Berg’s merits were mentioned before them, it could not be denied that Berg was a gallant officer, punctual in the discharge of his duties, in excellent repute with the authorities, and a conscientious young man with a brilliant career before him and a secure position, indeed, in society.

Four years before, on meeting a German comrade in the parterre of a Moscow theatre, Berg had pointed out to him Vera Rostov, and said to him in German, “That girl will be my wife.” From that moment he had made up his mind to marry her. Now in Petersburg, after duly considering the Rostovs’ position and his own, he decided that the time had come and made his offer.

Berg’s proposal was received at first with a hesitation by no means flattering for him. It seemed a strange idea at first that the son of an obscure Livonian gentleman should propose for the hand of a Countess Rostov. But Berg’s leading characteristic was an egoism so na?ve and good-natured that the Rostovs unconsciously began to think that it must be a good thing since he was himself so firmly convinced that it would be a good thing, and indeed a very good thing. The Rostovs were, moreover, seriously embarrassed in their pecuniary affairs, a fact of which the suitor could not but be aware; and what was the chief consideration, Vera was now four-and-twenty, and had been brought out everywhere; and, in spite of the fact that she was undeniably good-looking and sensible, no one had hitherto made her an offer. The offer was accepted.

“You see,” Berg said to a comrade, whom he called his friend—only because he knew all people do have friends—“you see, I have taken everything into consideration, and I should not have got married if I had not thought it well over, or if it had been unsuitable in any way. But at present my papa and mamma are well provided for, I have secured them the lease of that place in the Ostsee district, and I can live in Petersburg with my pay and her fortune and my careful habits. We can get along nicely. I’m not marrying for money, I consider that ungentlemanly, but the wife ought to bring her share and the husband his. I have my position in the service; she has connections and some small means. That’s worth something nowadays, isn’t it? And what’s the chief consideration, she’s handsome, estimable girl, and she loves me.…”
Berg blushed and smiled.

“And I love her because she has a character that is reasonable and very nice. Her sister now—though they are of the same family—is utterly different, and her character is disagreeable, and she has none of that intelligence, but something you know … I don’t like. … But my betrothed … You must come and see us; come to …” Berg, went on; he was going to say “to dinner,” but on second thoughts he said “to tea,” and putting out his tongue he blew a little ring of tobacco smoke that embodied for him all his dreams of happiness.

The first feeling of hesitation aroused in the parents by Berg’s proposal had been followed by the festivity and rejoicing in the family usual on such occasions, but the rejoicing was apparent and not genuine.

A certain embarrassment and shamefacedness could be detected in the feelings of the relations in regard to this marriage. It was as though their conscience smote them for not having been very fond of Vera and of being so ready now to get her off their hands. The old count was more disconcerted over it than any one. He would most likely have been unable to say what made him feel so, but his financial difficulties were at the root of the matter. He absolutely did not know what he had, how much his debts amounted to, and what he would be in a position to give for Vera’s dowry. Each of his daughters had at their birth been assigned a portion, consisting of an estate with three hundred serfs on it. But one of those estates had by now been sold, and the other had been mortgaged, and the interest was so much in arrears that it would have to be sold, so that to give this estate was impossible. There was no money either.

Berg had been betrothed more than a month, and it was only a week before the date fixed for the wedding, but the count was still unable to come to a decision on the subject of the dowry, and had not spoken of it to his wife. At one time the count thought of making over the Ryazan estate to Vera, then he thought of selling his forest, then of borrowing money on a note of hand.

A few days before the wedding, Berg went early in the morning into the count’s study, and with an agreeable smile, respectfully invited his father-in-law to let him know what fortune would be given with the Countess Vera. The count was so much disconcerted by this long-foreseen inquiry that, without thinking, he said the first thing that came into his head.

“I like your being businesslike about it, I like it; you will be quite satisfied…”

And clapping Berg on the shoulder, he got up, intending to cut short the conversation. But Berg, smiling blandly, announced that if he were not to know for certain what would be given with Vera, and to receive at least part of the dowry in advance, he would be obliged to break off the marriage. “Because, you must consider, count, if I were to allow myself to marry now without having a definite security for the maintenance of my wife I should be acting like a scoundrel…”

The conversation ended by the count, in his anxiety to be generous and to avoid further requests, saying that he would give him a note of hand for eighty thousand. Berg smiled gently, kissed the count on the shoulder, and said that he was very grateful, but could not make his arrangements in his new life without receiving thirty thousand in ready money. “Twenty thousand at least, count,” he added, “and then a note of hand skecher boots simply for sixty thousand.”

“Yes, yes, very good,” said the count hurriedly. “Only excuse me, my dear boy, I’ll give you twenty thousand and the note of hand for eighty thousand as well. That’s all right, kiss me.”