War and Peace (AmazonClassics Edition)

“Aunt, I did it gently,” said the boy.

“I’ll give you something gently, you monkey you!” cried Mávra Kuzmínichna, raising her arm threateningly. “Go and get the samovar to boil for your grandfather.”

Mávra Kuzmínichna flicked the dust off the clavichord and closed it, and with a deep sigh left the drawing-room and locked its main door.

Going out into the yard she paused to consider where she should go next—to drink tea in the servants’ wing with Vasílich, or into the store-room to put away what still lay about.

She heard the sound of quick footsteps in the quiet street. Someone stopped at the gate, and the latch rattled as someone tried to open it.

Mávra Kuzmínichna went to the gate.

“Who do you want?”

“The count—Count Ilyá Andréevich Rostóv.”

“And who are you?”

“An officer, I have to see him,” came the reply in a pleasant, well-bred Russian voice.

Mávra Kuzmínichna opened the gate and an officer of eighteen, with the round face of a Rostóv, entered the yard.

“They have gone away, sir. Went away yesterday at vesper-time,” said Mávra Kuzmínichna cordially.

The young officer standing in the gateway, as if hesitating whether to enter or not, clicked his tongue.

“Ah, how annoying!” he muttered. “I should have come yesterday . . . Ah, what a pity.”

Meanwhile Mávra Kuzmínichna was attentively and sympathetically examining the familiar Rostóv features of the young man’s face, his tattered coat and trodden-down boots.

“What did you want to see the count for?” she asked.

“Oh well . . . it can’t be helped!” said he in a tone of vexation and placed his hand on the gate as if to leave.

He again paused in indecision.

“You see,” he suddenly said, “I am a kinsman of the count’s and he has been very kind to me. As you see” (he glanced with an amused air and good-natured smile at his coat and boots) “my things are worn out and I have no money, so I was going to ask the count . . .”

Mávra Kuzmínichna did not let him finish.

“Just wait a minute, sir. One little moment,” said she.

And as soon as the officer let go of the gate-handle she turned, and hurrying away on her old legs went through the back-yard to the servants’ quarters.

While Mávra Kuzmínichna was running to her room the officer walked about the yard gazing at his worn-out boots with lowered head and a faint smile on his lips. “What a pity I’ve missed uncle! What a nice old woman! Where has she run off to? And how am I to find the nearest way to overtake my regiment, which must by now be getting near the Rogózhski gate?” thought he. Just then Mávra Kuzmínichna appeared from behind the corner of the house with a frightened yet resolute look, carrying a rolled-up check kerchief in her hand. While still a few steps from the officer she unfolded the kerchief and took out of it a white twenty-five-ruble assignat and hastily handed it to him.

“If his Excellency had been at home, as a kinsman he would of course . . . but as it is . . .”

Mávra Kuzmínichna grew abashed and confused. The officer did not decline, but took the note quietly and thanked her.

“If the count had been at home . . .” Mávra Kuzmínichna went on apologetically. “Christ be with you, sir! May God preserve you!” said she, bowing as she saw him out.

Swaying his head and smiling as if amused at himself the officer ran almost at a trot through the deserted streets towards the Yaúza bridge to overtake his regiment.

But Mávra Kuzmínichna stood at the closed gate for some time with moist eyes, pensively swaying her head and feeling an unexpected flow of motherly tenderness and pity for the unknown young officer.

CHAPTER 23

From an unfinished house on the Varvárka, the ground floor of which was a dram-shop, came drunken shouts and songs. On benches round the tables in a dirty little room sat some ten factory hands. Tipsy and perspiring, with dim eyes and wide-open mouths, they were all labouriously singing some song or other. They were singing discordantly, arduously, and with great effort, evidently not because they wished to sing, but because they wanted to show they were drunk and on the spree. One, a tall fair-haired lad in a clean blue coat, was standing over the others. His face with its fine straight nose would have been handsome had it not been for his thin, compressed, twitching lips and dull, gloomy, fixed eyes. Evidently possessed by some idea, he stood over those who were singing, and solemnly and jerkily flourished above their heads his white arm with the sleeve turned up to the elbow, trying unnaturally to spread out his dirty fingers. The sleeve of his coat kept slipping down and he always carefully rolled it up again with his left hand, as if it were most important that the sinewy white arm he was flourishing should be bare. In the midst of the song cries were heard, and fighting and blows in the passage and porch. The tall lad waved his arm.

“Stop it!” he exclaimed peremptorily. “There’s a fight, lads!” And, still rolling up his sleeve, he went out to the porch.

The factory hands followed him. These men, who under the leadership of the tall lad were drinking in the dram-shop that morning, had brought the publican some skins from the factory and for this had had drink served them. The blacksmiths from a neighbouring smithy, hearing the sounds of revelry in the tavern and supposing it to have been broken into, wished to force their way in too and a fight in the porch had resulted.

The publican was fighting one of the smiths at the door, and when the workmen came out the smith, wrenching himself free from the tavern-keeper, fell face downward on the pavement.

Another smith tried to enter the doorway, pressing against the publican with his chest.

The lad with the turned-up sleeve gave the smith a blow in the face and cried wildly:

“They’re fighting us, lads!”

At that moment the first smith got up and, scratching his bruised face to make it bleed, shouted in a tearful voice:

“Police! Murder! . . . They’ve killed a man, lads!”

“Oh, gracious me, a man beaten to death—killed! . . .” screamed a woman coming out of a gate close by.

A crowd gathered round the blood-stained smith.

“Haven’t you robbed people enough—taking their last shirts?” said a voice addressing the publican. “What have you killed a man for, you thief?”

The tall lad, standing in the porch, turned his bleared eyes from the publican to the smith and back again as if considering whom he ought to fight now.

“Murderer!” he shouted suddenly to the publican. “Bind him, lads!”

“I dare say you would like to bind me!” shouted the publican, pushing away the men advancing on him, and snatching his cap from his head he flung it on the ground.

As if this action had some mysterious and menacing significance, the workmen surrounding the publican paused in indecision.

“I know the law very well, mates! I’ll take the matter to the captain of police. You think I won’t get to him? Robbery is not permitted to anybody nowadays!” shouted the publican, picking up his cap.

“Come along then! Come along then!” the publican and the tall young fellow repeated one after the other, and they moved up the street together.

The blood-stained smith went beside them. The factory hands and others followed behind talking and shouting.

At the corner of the Moroséyka, opposite a large house with closed shutters and bearing a bootmaker’s signboard, stood a score of thin, worn-out, gloomy-faced bootmakers, wearing overalls and long tattered coats.

“He should pay folks off properly,” a thin working man, with frowning brows and a straggly beard, was saying.

“But he’s sucked our blood and now he thinks he’s quit of us. He’s been misleading us all the week and now that he’s brought us to this pass he’s made off.”

On seeing the crowd and the blood-stained man the workman ceased speaking, and with eager curiosity all the bootmakers joined the moving crowd.

“Where are all the folks going?”

“Why, to the police, of course!”

“I say, is it true that we have been beaten?”

“And what did you think? Look what folks are saying.”

Questions and answers were heard. The publican, taking advantage of the increased crowd, dropped behind and returned to his tavern.

The tall youth, not noticing the disappearance of his foe, waved his bare arm and went on talking incessantly, attracting general attention to himself. It was around him that the people chiefly crowded, expecting answers from him to the questions that occupied all their minds.

“He must keep order, keep the law, that’s what the government is there for. Am I not right, good Christians?” said the tall youth, with a scarcely perceptible smile. “He thinks there’s no government! How can one do without government? Or else there would be plenty who’d rob us.”

“Why talk nonsense?” rejoined voices in the crowd. “Will they give up Moscow like this? They told you that for fun, and you believed it! Aren’t there plenty of troops on the march? Let him in, indeed! That’s what the government is for. You’d better listen to what people are saying,” said some of the mob pointing to the tall youth.

By the wall of China-Town a smaller group of people were gathered round a man in a frieze coat who held a paper in his hand.

“An ukáse, they are reading an ukáse! Reading an ukáse!” cried voices in the crowd, and the people rushed towards the reader.

The man in the frieze coat was reading the broadsheet of August 31st. When the crowd collected round him he seemed confused, but at the demand of the tall lad who had pushed his way up to him, he began in a rather tremulous voice to read the sheet from the beginning.

“Early tomorrow I shall go to his Serene Highness,” he read (“Sirin Highness” said the tall fellow with a triumphant smile on his lips and a frown on his brow) “to consult with him, to act, and to aid the army to exterminate these scoundrels. We too will take part . . .” the reader went on and then paused (“Do you see,” shouted the youth victoriously, “he’s going to clear up the whole affair for you . . .”) “in destroying them, and will send these visitors to the devil. I will come back to dinner, and we’ll set to work. We will do, completely do, and undo these scoundrels.”

The last words were read out in the midst of complete silence. The tall lad hung his head gloomily. It was evident that no one had understood the last part. In particular, the words “I will come back to dinner,” evidently displeased both reader and audience. The people’s minds were tuned to a high pitch and this was too simple and needlessly comprehensible—it was what any one of them might have said, and therefore was what an ukáse emanating from the highest authority should not say.

They all stood despondent and silent. The tall youth moved his lips and swayed from side to side.

“We should ask him . . . that’s he himself!” . . .”Yes, ask him indeed!” . . .”Why not? He’ll explain” . . . voices in the rear of the crowd were suddenly heard saying and the general attention turned to the police-superintendent’s trap which drove into the square attended by two mounted dragoons.

The superintendent of police who had gone that morning by Count Rostopchín’s orders to burn the barges, and had in connexion with that matter acquired a large sum of money which was at that moment in his pocket, on seeing a crowd bearing down upon him told his coachman to stop.

“What people are these?” he shouted to the men, who were moving singly and timidly in the direction of his trap.

“What people are these?” he shouted again, receiving no answer.

“Your Honour . . .” replied the shopman in the frieze coat, “your Honour, in accord with the proclamation of his Highest Excellency, the Count, they desire to serve, not sparing their lives, and it is not any kind of riot, but as his Highest Excellence said . . .”

“The Count has not left, he is here, and an order will be issued concerning you,” said the superintendent of police. “Go on!” he ordered his coachman.

The crowd halted, pressing around those who had heard what the superintendent had said, and looking at the departing trap.

The superintendent of police turned round at that moment with a scared look, said something to his coachman, and his horses increased their speed.

“It’s a fraud, lads! Lead the way to him, himself!” shouted the tall youth. “Don’t let him go, lads! Let him answer us! Keep him!” shouted different voices, and the people dashed in pursuit of the trap.

Following the superintendent of police and talking loudly the crowd went in the direction of the Lubyánka Street.

“There now, the gentry and merchants have gone away and left us to perish. Do they think we’re dogs?” voices in the crowd were heard saying more and more frequently.

CHAPTER 24

On the evening of the 1st of September, after his interview with Kutúzov, Count Rostopchín had returned to Moscow mortified and offended because he had not been invited to attend the council of war, and because Kutúzov had paid no attention to his offer to take part in the defence of the city, amazed also at the novel outlook revealed to him at the camp, which treated the tranquillity of the capital and its patriotic fervour as not merely secondary but quite irrelevant and unimportant matters. Distressed, offended, and surprised by all this, Rostopchín had returned to Moscow. After supper he lay down on a sofa without undressing, and was awakened soon after midnight by a courier bringing him a letter from Kutúzov. This letter requested the count to send police officers to guide the troops through the town, as the army was retreating to the Ryazán road beyond Moscow. This was not news to Rostopchín. He had known that Moscow would be abandoned not merely since his interview the previous day with Kutúzov on the Poklónny hill but ever since the battle of Borodinó, for all the generals who came to Moscow after that battle had said unanimously that it was impossible to fight another battle, and since then the government property had been removed every night, and half the inhabitants had left the city with Rostopchín’s own permission. Yet all the same this information astonished and irritated the count, coming as it did in the form of a simple note with an order from Kutúzov, and received at night, breaking in on his beauty sleep.

When later on in his memoirs Count Rostopchín explained his actions at this time, he repeatedly says that he was then actuated by two important considerations: to maintain tranquillity in Moscow and expedite the departure of the inhabitants. If one accepts this twofold aim all Rostopchín’s actions appear irreproachable. “Why were the holy relics, the arms, ammunition, gunpowder, and stores of corn not removed? Why were thousands of the inhabitants deceived into believing that Moscow would not be given up and thereby ruined?” “To preserve the tranquillity of the city,” explains Count Rostopchín. “Why were bundles of useless papers from the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other articles removed?” “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín. One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.

All the horrors of the Reign of Terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity.

On what, then, was Count Rostopchín’s fear for the tranquillity of Moscow based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability of an uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the retreating troops were filling it. Why should that cause the masses to riot?

Neither in Moscow nor anywhere in Russia did anything resembling an insurrection ever occur when the enemy entered a town. More than ten thousand people were still in Moscow on the 1st and 2nd of September, and except for a mob in the governor’s courtyard, assembled there at his bidding, nothing happened. It is obvious that there would have been even less reason to expect a disturbance among the people if after the battle of Borodinó, when the surrender of Moscow became certain or at least probable, Rostopchín instead of exciting the people by distributing arms and broadsheets had taken steps to remove all the holy relics, the gunpowder, munitions, and money, and had told the population plainly that the town would be abandoned.

Rostopchín, though he had patriotic sentiments, was a sanguine and impulsive man who had always moved in the highest administrative circles and had no understanding at all of the people he supposed himself to be guiding. Ever since the enemy’s entry into Smolénsk he had in imagination been playing the role of director of the popular feeling of “the heart of Russia.” Not only did it seem to him (as to all administrators) that he controlled the external actions of Moscow’s inhabitants, but he also thought he controlled their mental attitude by means of his broadsheets and posters, written in a coarse tone which the people despise in their own class and do not understand from those in authority. Rostopchín was so pleased with the fine role of leader of popular feeling, and had grown so used to it, that the necessity of relinquishing that role and abandoning Moscow without any heroic display took him unawares and he suddenly felt the ground slip away from under his feet, so that he positively did not know what to do. Though he knew it was coming, he did not till the last moment wholeheartedly believe that Moscow would be abandoned, and did not prepare for it. The inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government offices were removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to whom the count yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had created for himself. As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned, he knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.

All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful and had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply directed towards arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic hatred of the French.

But when events assumed their true historical character, when expressing hatred for the French in words proved insufficient, when it was not even possible to express that hatred by fighting a battle, when self-confidence was of no avail in relation to the one question before Moscow, when the whole population streamed out of Moscow as one man, abandoning their belongings and proving by that negative action all the depth of their national feeling, then the role chosen by Rostopchín suddenly appeared senseless. He unexpectedly felt himself ridiculous, weak, and alone, with no ground to stand on.

When, awakened from his sleep, he received that cold, peremptory note from Kutúzov, he felt the more irritated the more he felt himself to blame. All that he had been specially put in charge of, the state property which he should have removed, was still in Moscow and it was no longer possible to take the whole of it away.

“Who is to blame for it? Who has let things come to such a pass?” he ruminated. “Not I, of course. I had everything ready. I had Moscow firmly in hand. And this is what they have let it come to! Villains! Traitors!” he thought, without clearly defining who the villains and traitors were, but feeling it necessary to hate those traitors whoever they might be, who were to blame for the false and ridiculous position in which he found himself.

All that night Count Rostopchín issued orders, for which people came to him from all parts of Moscow. Those about him had never seen the count so morose and irritable.

“Your Excellency, the Director of the Registrar’s Department has sent for instructions . . . From the Consistory, from the Senate, from the University, from the Foundling Hospital, the Suffragan has sent . . . asking for information . . . What are your orders about the Fire Brigade? From the governor of the prison . . . from the superintendent of the lunatic asylum . . .” All night long such announcements were continually being received by the count.

To all these inquiries he gave brief and angry replies indicating that orders from him were not now needed, that the whole affair, carefully prepared by him, had now been ruined by somebody, and that somebody would have to bear the whole responsibility for all that might happen.

“Oh, tell that blockhead,” he said in reply to the question from the Registrar’s Department, “that he should remain to guard his documents. Now why are you asking silly questions about the Fire Brigade? They have horses, let them be off to Vladímir, and not leave them to the French.”

“Your Excellency, the superintendent of the lunatic asylum has come: what are your commands?”

“My commands? Let them go away, that’s all . . . And let the lunatics out into the town. When lunatics command our armies God evidently means these other madmen to be free.”

In reply to an inquiry about the convicts in the prison, Count Rostopchín shouted angrily at the governor:

“Do you expect me to give you two battalions—which we have not got—for a convoy? Release them, that’s all about it!”

“Your Excellency, there are some political prisoners, Meshkóv, Vereshchágin . . .”

“Vereshchágin! Hasn’t he been hanged yet?” shouted Rostopchín. “Bring him to me!”

CHAPTER 25

Towards nine o’clock in the morning, when the troops were already moving through Moscow, nobody came to the count any more for instructions. Those who were able to get away were going of their own accord, those who remained behind decided for themselves what they must do.

The count ordered his carriage that he might drive to Sokólniki, and sat in his study with folded hands, morose, sallow, and taciturn.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labour and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat-hook to the ship of the people, and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat-hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Rostopchín felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.

The superintendent of police, whom the crowd had stopped, went in to see him at the same time as an adjutant who informed the count that the horses were harnessed. They were both pale, and the superintendent of police after reporting that he had executed the instructions he had received, informed the count that an immense crowd had collected in the courtyard and wished to see him.

Without saying a word Rostopchín rose and walked hastily to his light luxurious drawing-room, went to the balcony door, took hold of the handle, let it go again, and went to the window from which he had a better view of the whole crowd. The tall lad was standing in front, flourishing his arm and saying something with a stern look. The blood-stained smith stood beside him with a gloomy face. A drone of voices was audible through the closed window.

“Is my carriage ready?” asked Rostopchín, stepping back from the window.

“It is, your Excellency,” replied the adjutant.

Rostopchín went again to the balcony door.

“But what do they want?” he asked the superintendent of police.

“Your Excellency, they say they have got ready, according to your orders, to go against the French, and they shouted something about treachery. But it is a turbulent crowd, your Excellency—I hardly managed to get away from it. Your Excellency, I venture to suggest . . .”

“You may go. I don’t need you to tell me what to do!” exclaimed Rostopchín angrily.

He stood by the balcony door looking at the crowd.

“This is what they have done with Russia! This is what they have done with me!” thought he, full of an irrepressible fury that welled up within him against the someone to whom what was happening might be attributed. As often happens with passionate people, he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it. “Here is that mob, the dregs of the people,” he thought as he gazed at the crowd: “this rabble they have roused by their folly! They want a victim,” he thought as he looked at the tall lad flourishing his arm. And this thought occurred to him just because he himself desired a victim, something on which to vent his rage.

“Is the carriage ready?” he asked again.

“Yes, your Excellency. What are your orders about Vereshchágin? He is waiting at the porch,” said the adjutant.

“Ah!” exclaimed Rostopchín, as if struck by an unexpected recollection.

And rapidly opening the door he went resolutely out on to the balcony. The talking instantly ceased, hats and caps were doffed, and all eyes were raised to the count.

“Good-morning, lads!” said the count briskly and loudly.

“Thank you for coming. I’ll come out to you in a moment, but we must first settle with the villain. We must punish the villain who has caused the ruin of Moscow. Wait for me!”

And the count stepped as briskly back into the room and slammed the door behind him.

A murmur of approbation and satisfaction ran through the crowd. “He’ll settle with all the villains, you’ll see! And you said the French . . . He’ll show you what law is!” the mob were saying as if reproving one another for their lack of confidence.

A few minutes later an officer came hurriedly out of the front door, gave an order, and the dragoons formed up in line. The crowd moved eagerly from the balcony towards the porch. Rostopchín, coming out there with quick angry steps, looked hastily around as if seeking someone.

“Where is he?” he inquired. And as he spoke he saw a young man coming round the corner of the house between two dragoons. He had a long thin neck, and his head that had been half-shaved, was again covered by short hair. This young man was dressed in a threadbare blue cloth coat lined with fox fur, that had once been smart, and dirty hempen convict trousers, over which were pulled his thin, dirty, down-trodden boots. On his thin weak legs were heavy chains which hampered his irresolute movements.

“Ah!” said Rostopchín, hurriedly turning away his eyes from the young man in the fur-lined coat and pointing to the bottom step of the porch. “Put him there.”

The young man in his clattering chains stepped clumsily to the spot indicated, holding away with one finger the coat-collar which chafed his neck, turned his long neck twice this way and that, sighed, and submissively folded before him his thin hands, unused to work.

For several seconds while the young man was taking his place on the step the silence continued. Only among the back rows of the people, who were all pressing towards the one spot, could sighs, groans, and the shuffling of feet be heard.

While waiting for the young man to take his place on the step Rostopchín stood frowning and rubbing his face with his hand.

“Lads!” said he, with a metallic ring in his voice. “This man, Vereshchágin, is the scoundrel by whose doing Moscow is perishing.”

The young man in the fur-lined coat, stooping a little, stood in a submissive attitude, his fingers clasped before him. His emaciated young face, disfigured by the half-shaven head, hung down hopelessly. At the count’s first words he raised it slowly and looked up at him as if wishing to say something or at least to meet his eye. But Rostopchín did not look at him. A vein in the young man’s long thin neck swelled like a cord and went blue behind the ear, and suddenly his face flushed.

All eyes were fixed on him. He looked at the crowd, and rendered more hopeful by the expression he read on the faces there, he smiled sadly and timidly, and lowering his head shifted his feet on the step.

“He has betrayed his Tsar and his country, he has gone over to Buonaparte. He alone of all the Russians has disgraced the Russian name, he has caused Moscow to perish,” said Rostopchín in a sharp, even voice, but suddenly he glanced down at Vereshchágin who continued to stand in the same submissive attitude. As if inflamed by the sight, he raised his arm and addressed the people, almost shouting:

“Deal with him as you think fit! I hand him over to you.”

The crowd remained silent and only pressed closer and closer to one another. To keep one another back, to breathe in that stifling atmosphere, to be unable to stir, and to await something unknown, uncomprehended, and terrible, was becoming unbearable. Those standing in front, who had seen and heard what had taken place before them, all stood with wide open eyes and mouths, straining with all their strength, and held back the crowd that was pushing behind them.

“Beat him! . . . Let the traitor perish and not disgrace the Russian name!” shouted Rostopchín. “Cut him down. I command it.”

Hearing not so much the words as the angry tone of Rostopchín’s voice, the crowd moaned and heaved forward, but again paused.

“Count!” exclaimed the timid yet theatrical voice of Vereshchágin in the midst of the momentary silence that ensued, “Count! One God is above us both . . .” He lifted his head and again the thick vein in his thin neck filled with blood and the colour rapidly came and went in his face.

He did not finish what he wished to say.

“Cut him down! I command it . . .” shouted Rostopchín, suddenly growing pale like Vereshchágin.

“Draw sabres!” cried the dragoon officer, drawing his own.

Another still stronger wave flowed through the crowd and reaching the front ranks carried it swaying to the very steps of the porch. The tall youth, with a stony look on his face, and rigid and uplifted arm, stood beside Vereshchágin.

“Sabre him!” the dragoon officer almost whispered.

And one of the soldiers, his face all at once distorted with fury, struck Vereshchágin on the head with the blunt side of his sabre.

“Ah!” cried Vereshchágin in meek surprise, looking round with a frightened glance as if not understanding why this was done to him. A similar moan of surprise and horror ran through the crowd. “O Lord!” exclaimed a sorrowful voice.

But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check, suddenly broke. The crime had begun and must now be completed. The plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar of the crowd. Like the seventh and last wave that shatters a ship, that last irresistible wave burst from the rear and reached the front ranks, carrying them off their feet and engulfing them all. The dragoon was about to repeat his blow. Vereshchágin with a cry of horror, covering his head with his hands, rushed towards the crowd. The tall youth, against whom he stumbled, seized his thin neck with his hands and, yelling wildly, fell with him under the feet of the pressing, struggling crowd.

Some beat and tore at Vereshchágin, others at the tall youth. And the screams of those that were being trampled on and of those who tried to rescue the tall lad, only increased the fury of the crowd. It was a long time before the dragoons could extricate the bleeding youth, beaten almost to death. And for a long time, despite the feverish haste with which the mob tried to end the work that had been begun, those who were hitting, throttling, and tearing at Vereshchágin were unable to kill him, for the crowd pressed from all sides, swaying as one mass with them in the centre and rendering it impossible for them either to kill him or to let him go.

“Hit him with an axe, eh! . . . Crushed? . . . Traitor, he sold Christ . . . Still alive . . . tenacious . . . serve him right! Torture serves a thief right. Use the hatchet! . . . What—still alive?”

Only when the victim ceased to struggle and his cries changed to a long-drawn, measured death-rattle, did the crowd around his prostrate, bleeding corpse begin rapidly to change places. Each one came up, glanced at what had been done, and with horror, reproach, and astonishment, pushed back again.

“O Lord! The people are like wild beasts! How could he be alive?” voices in the crowd could be heard saying. “Quite a young fellow too . . . must have been a merchant’s son. What men! . . . and they say he’s not the right one . . . How not the right one? . . . O Lord! And there’s another has been beaten too—they say he’s nearly done for . . . Oh, the people . . . Aren’t they afraid of sinning? . . .” said the same mob now, looking with pained distress at the dead body with its long thin half-severed neck and its livid face stained with blood and dust.

A painstaking police officer, considering the presence of a corpse in his Excellency’s courtyard unseemly, told the dragoons to take it away. Two dragoons took it by its distorted legs and dragged it along the ground. The gory, dust-stained, half-shaven head with its long neck, trailed twisting along the ground. The crowd shrank back from it.

At the moment when Vereshchágin fell and the crowd closed in with savage yells and swayed about him, Rostopchín suddenly turned pale and, instead of going to the back entrance where his carriage awaited him, went with hurried steps and bent head, not knowing where and why, along the passage leading to the rooms on the ground floor. The count’s face was white and he could not control the feverish twitching of his lower jaw.

“This way, your Excellency . . . Where are you going? . . . This way, please . . .” said a trembling, frightened voice behind him.

Count Rostopchín was unable to reply and, turning obediently, went in the direction indicated. At the back entrance stood his calèche. The distant roar of the yelling crowd was audible even there. He hastily took his seat and told the coachman to drive him to his country house in Sokólniki.

When they reached Myasnítski Street and could no longer hear the shouts of the mob, the count began to repent. He remembered with dissatisfaction the agitation and fear he had betrayed before his subordinates. “The mob is terrible—disgusting,” he said to himself in French. “They are like wolves whom nothing but flesh can appease.” “Count! One God is above us both!”—Vereshchágin’s words suddenly recurred to him, and a disagreeable shiver ran down his back. But this was only a momentary feeling and Count Rostopchín smiled disdainfully at himself. “I had other duties,” thought he. “The people had to be appeased. Many other victims have perished and are perishing for the public good”—and he began thinking of his social duties to his family and to the city entrusted to him, and of himself—not himself as Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín (he fancied that Theodore Vasílyevich Rostopchín was sacrificing himself for the public good) but himself as Governor, the representative of authority and of the Tsar. “Had I been simply Theodore Vasílyevich my course of action would have been quite different, but it was my duty to safeguard my life and dignity as Commander-in-Chief.”

Lightly swaying on the flexible springs of his carriage and no longer hearing the terrible sounds of the crowd, Rostopchín grew physically calm and, as always happens, as soon as he became physically tranquil his mind devised reasons why he should be mentally tranquil too. The thought which tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one. Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow-man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.

To a man not swayed by passion, that welfare is never certain, but he who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies. And Rostopchín now knew it.

Not only did his reason not reproach him for what he had done but he even found cause for self-satisfaction in having so successfully contrived to avail himself of a convenient opportunity to punish a criminal and at the same time pacify the mob.

“Vereshchágin was tried and condemned to death,” thought Rostopchín (though the Senate had only condemned Vereshchágin to hard labour), “he was a traitor and a spy. I could not let him go unpunished and so I have killed two birds with one stone: to appease the mob I gave them a victim, and at the same time punished a miscreant.”

Having reached his country house and begun to give orders about domestic arrangements, the count grew quite tranquil.

Half an hour later he was driving with his fast horses across the Sokólniki field, no longer thinking of what had occurred but considering what was to come. He was driving to the Yaúza bridge where he had heard that Kutúzov was. Count Rostopchín was mentally preparing the angry and stinging reproaches he meant to address to Kutúzov for his deception. He would make that foxy old courtier feel that the responsibility for all the calamities that would follow the abandonment of the city and the ruin of Russia (as Rostopchín regarded it) would fall upon his doting old head. Planning beforehand what he would say to Kutúzov, Rostopchín turned angrily in his calèche and gazed sternly from side to side.

The Sokólniki field was deserted. Only at the end of it, in front of the almshouse and the lunatic asylum, could be seen some people in white, and others like them walking singly across the field shouting and gesticulating.

One of these was running to cross the path of Count Rostopchín’s carriage, and the count himself, his coachman, and his dragoons, looked with vague horror and curiosity at these released lunatics and especially at the one running towards them.

Swaying from side to side on his long thin legs in his fluttering dressing-gown, this lunatic was running impetuously, his gaze fixed on Rostopchín, shouting something in a hoarse voice and making signs to him to stop. The lunatic’s solemn, gloomy face was thin and yellow, with its beard growing in uneven tufts. His black, agate pupils with saffron-yellow whites, moved restlessly near the lower eyelids.

“Stop! Pull up, I tell you!” he cried in a piercing voice, and again shouted something breathlessly with emphatic intonations and gestures.

Coming abreast of the calèche he ran beside it.

“Thrice have they slain me, thrice have I risen from the dead. They stoned me, crucified me . . . I shall rise . . . shall rise . . . shall rise. They have torn my body. The kingdom of God will be overthrown . . . Thrice will I overthrow it and thrice re-establish it!” he cried, raising his voice higher and higher.

Count Rostopchín suddenly grew pale as he had done when the crowd closed in on Vereshchágin. He turned away. “Go fas . . . faster!” he cried in a trembling voice to his coachman. The calèche flew over the ground as fast as the horses could draw it, but for a long time Count Rostopchín still heard the insane despairing screams growing fainter in the distance, while his eyes saw nothing but the astonished, frightened, bloodstained face of “the traitor” in the fur-lined coat.

Recent as that mental picture was, Rostopchín already felt that it had cut deep into his heart and drawn blood. Even now he felt clearly that the gory trace of that recollection would not pass with time, but that the terrible memory would, on the contrary, dwell in his heart ever more cruelly and painfully to the end of his life. He seemed still to hear the sound of his own words: “Cut him down! I command it . . .”

“Why did I utter those words? It was by some accident I said them . . . I need not have said them,” he thought. “And then nothing would have happened.” He saw the frightened and then infuriated face of the dragoon who dealt the blow, the look of silent, timid reproach that boy in the fur-lined coat had turned upon him. “But I did not do it for my own sake. I was bound to act that way . . . The mob, the traitor . . . the public welfare,” thought he.

Troops were still crowding at the Yaúza bridge. It was hot. Kutúzov, dejected and frowning, sat on a bench by the bridge toying with his whip in the sand when a calèche dashed up noisily. A man in a general’s uniform with plumes in his hat went up to Kutúzov and said something in French. It was Count Rostopchín. He told Kutúzov that he had come because Moscow, the capital, was no more and only the army remained.

“Things would have been different if your Serene Highness had not told me that you would not abandon Moscow without another battle; all this would not have happened,” he said.

Kutúzov looked at Rostopchín as if, not grasping what was said to him, he was trying to read something peculiar, written at that moment on the face of the man addressing him. Rostopchín grew confused and became silent. Kutúzov slightly shook his head and not taking his penetrating gaze from Rostopchín’s face muttered softly:

“No! I shall not give up Moscow without a battle!”

Whether Kutúzov was thinking of something entirely different when he spoke those words, or uttered them purposely, knowing them to be meaningless, at any rate Rostopchín made no reply and hastily left him. And, strange to say, the Governor of Moscow, the proud Count Rostopchín, took up a Cossack whip and went to the bridge, where he began with shouts to drive on the carts that blocked the way.

CHAPTER 26

Towards four o’clock in the afternoon Murat’s troops were entering Moscow. In front rode a detachment of Würtemberg hussars, and behind them rode the King of Naples himself, accompanied by a numerous suite.

About the middle of Arbát Street, near the Church of the Miraculous Icon of St. Nicholas, Murat halted to await news from the advanced detachment as to the condition in which they had found the citadel, le Kremlin.

Around Murat gathered a group of those who had remained in Moscow. They all stared in timid bewilderment at the strange, long-haired commander dressed up in feathers and gold.

“Is that their Tsar himself? He’s not bad!” low voices could be heard saying.

An interpreter rode up to the group.

“Take off your cap . . . your caps!” These words went from one to another in the crowd. The interpreter addressed an old porter and asked if it was far to the Kremlin. The porter, listening in perplexity to the unfamiliar Polish accent and not realizing that the interpreter was speaking Russian, did not understand what was being said to him and slipped behind the others.

Murat approached the interpreter and told him to ask where the Russian army was. One of the Russians understood what was asked and several voices at once began answering the interpreter. A French officer, returning from the advanced detachment, rode up to Murat and reported that the gates of the citadel had been barricaded and that there was probably an ambuscade there.

“Good!” said Murat and, turning to one of the gentlemen in his suite, ordered four light guns to be moved forward to fire at the gates.

The guns emerged at a trot from the column following Murat, and advanced up the Arbát. When they reached the end of Vozdvízhenka Street they halted and drew up in the Square. Several French officers superintended the placing of the guns and looked at the Kremlin through field-glasses.

The bells in the Kremlin were ringing for vespers, and this sound troubled the French. They imagined it to be a call to arms. A few infantrymen ran to the Kutáfyev Gate. Beams and wooden screens had been put there, and two musket shots rang out from under the gate as soon as an officer and men began to run towards it. A general who stood by the guns shouted some words of command to the officer, and the latter ran back again with his men.

The sound of three more shots came from the gate.

One shot struck a French soldier’s foot, and from behind the screens came the strange sound of a few voices shouting. Instantly as at a word of command the expression of cheerful serenity on the faces of the French general, officers, and men, changed to one of determined concentrated readiness for strife and suffering. To all of them from the marshal to the least soldier, that place was not Vozdvízhenka, Mokhaváya, or Kutáfyev Street, nor the Tróitsa Gate (places familiar in Moscow) but a new battlefield which would probably prove sanguinary. And all made ready for that battle. The cries from the gates ceased. The guns were advanced, the artillerymen blew the ash off their linstocks, and an officer gave the word: “Fire!” This was followed by two whistling sounds of canister-shot one after another. The shot rattled against the stone of the gate and upon the wooden beams and screens, and two wavering clouds of smoke rose over the Square.

A few instants after the echo of the reports resounding over the stone-built Kremlin had died away, the French heard a strange sound above their heads. Thousands of crows rose above the walls and circled in the air, cawing and noisily flapping their wings. Together with that sound came a solitary human cry from the gateway, and amid the smoke appeared the figure of a bare-headed man in a peasant’s coat. He grasped a musket and took aim at the French. “Fire!” repeated the officer once more, and the reports of a musket and of two cannon-shots were heard simultaneously. The gate was again hidden by smoke.

Nothing more stirred behind the screens and the French infantry soldiers and officers advanced to the gate. In the gateway lay three wounded and four dead. Two men in peasant coats ran away at the foot of the wall, towards the Známenka.

“Clear that away!” said the officer, pointing to the beams and the corpses, and the French soldiers, after dispatching the wounded, threw the corpses over the parapet.

Who these men were nobody knew. “Clear that away!” was all that was said of them, and they were thrown over the parapet, and removed later on that they might not stink. Thiers alone dedicates a few eloquent lines to their memory: “These wretches had occupied the sacred citadel, having supplied themselves with guns from the arsenal, and fired” (the wretches) “at the French. Some of them were sabred and the Kremlin was purged of their presence.”

Murat was informed that the way had been cleared. The French entered the gates, and began pitching their camp in the Senate Square. Out of the windows of the Senate House the soldiers threw chairs into the Square for fuel, and kindled fires there.

Other detachments passed through the Kremlin and encamped along Moroséyka, Lubyánka, and Pokróvka Streets. Others quartered themselves along the Vozdvízhenka, the Nikólski, and Tverskóy Streets. No masters of the houses being found anywhere the French were not billeted on the inhabitants as is usual in towns, but lived in it as in a camp.

Though tattered, hungry, worn out, and reduced to a third of their original number, the French entered Moscow in good marching order. It was a weary and famished, but still a fighting and menacing army. But it only remained an army until its soldiers had dispersed into their different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost for ever and there came into being something nondescript, neither citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which seemed to him valuable or useful. The aim of each man when he left Moscow was no longer, as it had been, to conquer but merely to keep what he had acquired. Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them, yet to abandon what they had stolen was as impossible for them as it is for the monkey to open its paw and let go of its nuts. Ten minutes after each regiment had entered a Moscow district, not a soldier or officer was left. Men in military uniforms and Hessian boots could be seen through the windows laughing and walking through the rooms. In cellars and store-rooms similar men were busy among the provisions, and in the yards unlocking or breaking open coach-house and stable doors, lighting fires in kitchens and kneading and baking bread with rolled-up sleeves, and cooking, or frightening, amusing, or caressing, women and children. There were many such men both in the shops and houses—but there was no army.

Order after order was issued by the French commanders that day forbidding the men to disperse about the town, sternly forbidding any violence to the inhabitants, or any looting, and announcing a roll-call for that very evening. But despite all these measures the men, who had till then constituted an army, flowed all over the wealthy, deserted city with its comforts and plentiful supplies. As a hungry herd of cattle keeps well together when crossing a barren field, but gets out of hand and at once disperses uncontrollably as soon as it reaches rich pastures, so did the army disperse all over the wealthy city.

No residents were left in Moscow, and the soldiers—like water percolating through sand—spread irresistibly through the city in all directions from the Kremlin into which they had first marched. The cavalry, on entering a merchant’s house that had been abandoned and finding there stabling more than sufficient for their horses, went on, all the same, to the next house which seemed to them better. Many of them appropriated several houses, chalked their names on them, and quarrelled and even fought with other companies for them. Before they had had time to secure quarters the soldiers ran out into the streets to see the city, and hearing that everything had been abandoned, rushed to places where valuables were to be had for the taking. The officers followed to check the soldiers, and were involuntarily drawn into doing the same. In Carriage Row, carriages had been left in the shops, and generals flocked there to select calèches and coaches for themselves. The few inhabitants who had remained invited commanding officers to their houses, hoping thereby to secure themselves from being plundered. There were masses of wealth and there seemed no end to it. All around the quarters occupied by the French were other regions still unexplored and unoccupied where, they thought, yet greater riches might be found. And Moscow engulfed the army ever deeper and deeper. When water is spilt on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and mud results; and in the same way the entry of the famished army into the rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction of both the army and the wealthy city.

The French attributed the Fire of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne,¹⁰² the Russians to the barbarity of the French. In reality however it was not, and could not be, possible to explain the burning of Moscow by making any individual, or any group of people, responsible for it. Moscow was burnt because it found itself in a position in which any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire-engines. Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several days. A town built of wood where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house-owners are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make camp-fires of the Senate chairs in the Senate Square, and cook themselves meals twice a day. In peace time it is only necessary to billet troops in the villages of any district, and the number of fires in that district immediately increases. How much then must the probability of fire be increased in an abandoned, wooden town where foreign troops are quartered. “Le patriotisme féroce de Rostopchíne” and the barbarity of the French were not to blame in the matter. Moscow was set on fire by the soldiers’ pipes, kitchens, and camp-fires, and by the carelessness of enemy soldiers occupying houses they did not own. Even if there was any arson (which is very doubtful, for no one had any reason to burn the houses—in any case a troublesome and dangerous thing to do), arson cannot be regarded as the cause, for the same thing would have happened without any incendiarism.

However tempting it might be for the French to blame Rostopchín’s ferocity and for Russians to blame the scoundrel Buonaparte, or later on to place an heroic torch in the hands of their own people, it is impossible not to see that there could be no such direct cause of the fire, for Moscow had to burn as every village, factory, or house must burn which is left by its owners and in which strangers are allowed to live and cook their porridge. Moscow was burnt by its inhabitants it is true, but by those who had abandoned it and not by those who remained in it. Moscow when occupied by the enemy did not remain intact like Berlin, Vienna, and other towns, simply because its inhabitants abandoned it and did not welcome the French with bread and salt, nor bring them the keys of the city.

CHAPTER 27

The absorption of the French by Moscow, radiating star-wise as it did, only reached the quarter where Pierre was staying by the evening of the 2nd of September.

After the last two days spent in solitude and unusual circumstances, Pierre was in a state bordering on insanity. He was completely obsessed by one persistent thought. He did not know how or when this thought had taken such possession of him, but he remembered nothing of the past, understood nothing of the present, and all he saw and heard appeared to him like a dream.

He had left home only to escape the intricate tangle of life’s demands that enmeshed him, and which in his present condition he was unable to unravel. He had gone to Joseph Alexéevich’s house, on the plea of sorting the deceased’s books and papers, only in search of rest from life’s turmoil, for in his mind the memory of Joseph Alexéevich was connected with a world of eternal, solemn, and calm thoughts, quite contrary to the restless confusion into which he felt himself being drawn. He sought a quiet refuge, and in Joseph Alexéevich’s study he really found it. When he sat with his elbows on the dusty writing-table in the deathlike stillness of the study, calm and significant memories of the last few days rose one after another in his imagination, particularly of the battle of Borodinó, and of that vague sense of his own insignificance and insincerity compared with the truth, simplicity, and strength of the class of men he mentally classed as they. When Gerásim roused him from his reverie the idea occurred to him of taking part in the popular defence of Moscow which he knew was projected. And with that object he had asked Gerásim to get him a peasant’s coat and a pistol, confiding to him his intention of remaining in Joseph Alexéevich’s house and keeping his name secret. Then during the first day spent in inaction and solitude (he tried several times to fix his attention on the masonic manuscripts, but was unable to do so) the idea that had previously occurred to him of the cabalistic significance of his name in connexion with Buonaparte’s more than once vaguely presented itself. But the idea that he, L’russe Besuhof, was destined to set a limit to the power of the Beast, was as yet only one of the fancies that often passed through his mind and left no trace behind.

When, having bought the coat merely with the object of taking part among the people in the defence of Moscow, Pierre had met the Rostóvs and Natásha had said to him: “Are you remaining in Moscow? . . . How splendid!” the thought flashed into his mind that it really would be a good thing, even if Moscow were taken, for him to remain there and do what he was predestined to do.

Next day, with the sole idea of not sparing himself and not lagging in any way behind them, Pierre went to the Three Hills gate. But when he returned to the house convinced that Moscow would not be defended, he suddenly felt that what before had seemed to him merely a possibility had now become absolutely necessary and inevitable. He must remain in Moscow, concealing his name, and must meet Napoleon and kill him, and either perish or put an end to the misery of all Europe—which it seemed to him was solely due to Napoleon.

Pierre knew all the details of the attempt on Buonaparte’s life in 1809 by a German student in Vienna, and knew that the student had been shot. And the risk to which he would expose his life by carrying out his design excited him still more.

Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to this purpose. The first was a feeling of the necessity of sacrifice and suffering in view of the common calamity, the same feeling that had caused him to go to Mozháysk on the 25th and to make his way to the very thick of the battle, and had now caused him to run away from his home and, in place of the luxury and comfort to which he was accustomed, to sleep on a hard sofa without undressing and eat the same food as Gerásim. The other was that vague and quite Russian feeling of contempt for everything conventional, artificial, and human—for everything the majority of men regard as the greatest good in the world. Pierre had first experienced this strange and fascinating feeling at the Slobóda Palace, when he had suddenly felt that wealth, power, and life—all that men so painstakingly acquire and guard—if it has any worth has so only by reason of the joy with which it can all be renounced.

It was the feeling that induces a volunteer-recruit to spend his last penny on drink, and a drunken man to smash mirrors or glasses for no apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him all the money he possesses: the feeling which causes a man to perform actions which from an ordinary point of view are insane, to test, as it were, his personal power and strength, affirming the existence of a higher, non-human criterion of life.

From the very day Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time at the Slobóda Palace he had been continuously under its influence, but only now found full satisfaction for it. Moreover at this moment Pierre was supported in his design and prevented from renouncing it by what he had already done in that direction. If he were now to leave Moscow like everyone else, his flight from home, the peasant coat, the pistol, and his announcement to the Rostóvs that he would remain in Moscow, would all become not merely meaningless, but contemptible and ridiculous, and to this Pierre was very sensitive.

Pierre’s physical condition, as is always the case, corresponded to his mental state. The unaccustomed coarse food, the vodka he drank during those days, the absence of wine and cigars, his dirty unchanged linen, two almost sleepless nights passed on a short sofa without bedding—all this kept him in a state of excitement bordering on insanity.

It was two o’clock in the afternoon. The French had already entered Moscow. Pierre knew this, but instead of acting, he only thought about his undertaking, going over its minutest details in his mind. In his fancy he did not clearly picture to himself either the striking of the blow or the death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary vividness and melancholy enjoyment imagined his own destruction and heroic endurance.

“Yes, alone, for the sake of all, I must do it or perish!” he thought. “Yes, I will approach . . . and then suddenly . . . with pistol or dagger? But that is all the same! ‘It is not I but the hand of Providence that punishes thee,’ I shall say,” he thought, imagining what he would say when killing Napoleon. “Well then, take me and execute me!” he went on, speaking to himself and bowing his head with a sad but firm expression.

While Pierre, standing in the middle of the room, was talking to himself in this way, the study door opened and on the threshold appeared the figure of Makár Alexéevich, always so timid before but now quite transformed.

His dressing-gown was unfastened, his face red and distorted. He was obviously drunk. On seeing Pierre he grew confused at first, but noticing embarrassment on Pierre’s face, immediately grew bold and, staggering on his thin legs, advanced into the middle of the room.

“They’re frightened,” he said confidentially in a hoarse voice. “I say, I won’t surrender, I say . . . Am I not right, sir?”

He paused and then suddenly seeing the pistol on the table seized it with unexpected rapidity, and ran out into the corridor.

Gerásim and the porter, who had followed Makár Alexéevich, stopped him in the vestibule and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre, coming out into the corridor, looked with pity and repulsion at the half-crazy old man. Makár Alexéevich, frowning with exertion, held on to the pistol and screamed hoarsely, evidently with some heroic fancy in his head.

“To arms! Board them! No, you shan’t get it,” he yelled.

“That will do, please, that will do. Have the goodness—please sir, to let go! Please sir . . .” pleaded Gerásim, trying carefully to steer Makár Alexéevich by the elbows back to the door.

“Who are you? Buonaparte! . . .” shouted Makár Alexéevich.

“That’s not right, sir. Come to your room, please, and rest. Allow me to have the pistol.”

“Be off, thou base slave! Touch me not! See this?” shouted Makár Alexéevich, brandishing the pistol. “Board them!”

“Catch hold!” whispered Gerásim to the porter.

They seized Makár Alexéevich by the arms and dragged him to the door.

The vestibule was filled with the discordant sounds of a struggle and of a tipsy, hoarse voice.

Suddenly a fresh sound, a piercing feminine scream, reverberated from the porch, and the cook came running into the vestibule.

“It’s them! Gracious heavens! O Lord, four of them, horsemen!” she cried.

Gerásim and the porter let Makár Alexéevich go, and in the now silent corridor the sound of several hands knocking at the front door could be heard.

CHAPTER 28

Pierre, having decided that until he had carried out his design he would disclose neither his identity nor his knowledge of French, stood at the half-open door of the corridor, intending to conceal himself as soon as the French entered. But the French entered and still Pierre did not retire—an irresistible curiosity kept him there.

There were two of them. One was an officer—a tall, soldierly, handsome man—the other evidently a private or an orderly, sunburnt, short, and thin, with sunken cheeks and a dull expression. The officer walked in front, leaning on a stick and slightly limping. When he had advanced a few steps he stopped, having apparently decided that these were good quarters, turned round to the soldiers standing at the entrance and in a loud voice of command ordered them to put up the horses. Having done that, the officer lifting his elbow with a smart gesture stroked his moustache and lightly touched his hat.

“Bonjour, la compagnie!”¹⁰³ said he gaily, smiling and looking about him.

No one gave any reply.

“Vous êtes le bourgeois?”¹⁰⁴ the officer asked Gerásim.

Gerásim gazed at the officer with an alarmed and inquiring look.

“Quartier, quartier, logement!” said the officer, looking down at the little man with a condescending and good-natured smile. “Les Français sont de bons enfants. Que diable! Voyons! Ne nous fâchions pas, mon vieux!”¹⁰⁵ added he, clapping the scared and silent Gerásim on the shoulder. “Well, does no one speak French in this establishment?” he asked again in French, looking around and meeting Pierre’s eyes. Pierre moved away from the door.

Again the officer turned to Gerásim and asked him to show him the rooms in the house.

“Master, not here—don’t understand . . . me, you . . .” said Gerásim, trying to render his words more comprehensible by contorting them.

Still smiling, the French officer spread his hands out before Gerásim’s nose, intimating that he did not understand him either, and moved, limping, to the door at which Pierre was standing. Pierre wished to go away and conceal himself, but at that moment he saw Makár Alexéevich appearing at the open kitchen door with the pistol in his hand. With a madman’s cunning Makár Alexéevich eyed the Frenchman, raised his pistol, and took aim.

“Board them!” yelled the tipsy man trying to press the trigger. Hearing the yell the officer turned round, and at the same moment Pierre threw himself on the drunkard. Just when Pierre snatched at and struck up the pistol, Makár Alexéevich at last got his fingers on the trigger, there was a deafening report and all were enveloped in a cloud of smoke. The Frenchman turned pale and rushed to the door.

Forgetting his intention of concealing his knowledge of French, Pierre, snatching away the pistol and throwing it down, ran up to the officer and addressed him in French.

“You are not wounded?” he asked.

“I think not,” answered the Frenchman feeling himself over. “But I have had a lucky escape this time,” he added pointing to the damaged plaster of the wall. “Who is that man?” said he, looking sternly at Pierre.

“Oh, I am really in despair at what has occurred,” said Pierre rapidly, quite forgetting the part he had intended to play. “He is an unfortunate madman who did not know what he was doing.”

The officer went up to Makár Alexéevich and took him by the collar.

Makár Alexéevich was standing with parted lips, swaying, as if about to fall asleep, as he leant against the wall.

“Brigand! You shall pay for this,” said the Frenchman, letting go of him. “We French are merciful after victory, but we do not pardon traitors,” he added with a look of gloomy dignity and a fine energetic gesture.

Pierre continued, in French, to persuade the officer not to hold that drunken imbecile to account. The Frenchman listened in silence with the same gloomy expression, but suddenly turned to Pierre with a smile. For a few seconds he looked at him in silence. His handsome face assumed a melodramatically gentle expression and he held out his hand.

“You have saved my life. You are French,” said he.

For a Frenchman that deduction was indubitable. Only a Frenchman could perform a great deed, and to save his life—the life of M. Ramballe, captain of the 13th Light Regiment—was undoubtedly a very great deed.

But however indubitable that conclusion and the officer’s conviction based upon it, Pierre felt it necessary to disillusion him.

“I am Russian,” he said quickly.

“Tut, tut, tut! Tell that to others,” said the officer, waving his finger before his nose and smiling. “You shall tell me all about that presently. I am delighted to meet a compatriot. Well and what are we to do with this man?” he added, addressing himself to Pierre as to a brother.

Even if Pierre were not a Frenchman, having once received that loftiest of human appellations he could not renounce it, said the officer’s look and tone. In reply to his last question Pierre again explained who Makár Alexéevich was, and how just before their arrival that drunken imbecile had seized the loaded pistol which they had not had time to recover from him, and begged the officer to let the deed go unpunished.

The Frenchman expanded his chest and made a majestic gesture with his arm.

“You have saved my life! You are French. You ask his pardon? I grant it you. Lead that man away!” said he quickly and energetically, and taking the arm of Pierre, whom he had promoted to be a Frenchman for saving his life, he went with him into the room.

The soldiers in the yard, hearing the shot, came into the passage asking what had happened, and expressed their readiness to punish the culprits, but the officer sternly checked them.

“You will be called in when you are wanted,” he said.

The soldiers went out again, and the orderly, who had meanwhile had time to visit the kitchen, came up to his officer.

“Captain, there is soup and a leg of mutton in the kitchen,” said he. “Shall I serve them up?”

“Yes, and some wine,” answered the captain.

CHAPTER 29

When the French officer went into the room with Pierre the latter again thought it his duty to assure him that he was not French, and wished to go away, but the officer would not hear of it. He was so very polite, amiable, good-natured, and genuinely grateful to Pierre for saving his life, that Pierre had not the heart to refuse, and sat down with him in the parlor—the first room they entered. To Pierre’s assurances that he was not a Frenchman, the captain, evidently not understanding how anyone could decline so flattering an appellation, shrugged his shoulders and said that if Pierre absolutely insisted on passing for a Russian let it be so, but for all that he would be for ever bound to Pierre by gratitude for saving his life.

Had this man been endowed with the slightest capacity for perceiving the feelings of others, and had he at all understood what Pierre’s feelings were, the latter would probably have left him, but the man’s animated obtuseness to everything other than himself disarmed Pierre.

“A Frenchman or a Russian prince incognito,” said the officer, looking at Pierre’s fine though dirty linen and at the ring on his finger. “I owe my life to you and offer you my friendship. A Frenchman never forgets either an insult or a service. I offer you my friendship. That is all I can say.”

There was so much good-nature and nobility (in the French sense of the word) in the officer’s voice, in the expression of his face, and in his gestures, that Pierre unconsciously smiling in response to the Frenchman’s smile, pressed the hand held out to him.

“Captain Ramballe, of the 13th Light Regiment, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour for the affair on the 7th of September,” he introduced himself, a self-satisfied irrepressible smile puckering his lips under his moustache. “Will you now be so good as to tell me with whom I have the honour of conversing so pleasantly, instead of being in the ambulance with that maniac’s bullet in my body?”

Pierre replied that he could not tell him his name and, blushing, began to try to invent a name and to say something about his reason for concealing it, but the Frenchman hastily interrupted him.

“Oh, please!” said he. “I understand your reasons. You are an officer . . . a superior officer perhaps. You have borne arms against us. That’s not my business. I owe you my life. That is enough for me. I am quite at your service. You belong to the gentry?” he concluded with a shade of inquiry in his tone. Pierre bent his head. “Your baptismal name, if you please. That is all I ask. Monsieur Pierre, you say . . . Excellent! That’s all I want to know.”

When the mutton and an omelette had been served and a samovar and vodka brought, with some wine which the French had taken from a Russian cellar and brought with them, Ramballe invited Pierre to share his dinner, and himself began to eat greedily and quickly like a healthy and hungry man, munching his food rapidly with his strong teeth, continually smacking his lips, and repeating—“Excellent! Delicious!” His face grew red and was covered with perspiration. Pierre was hungry and shared the dinner with pleasure. Morel, the orderly, brought some hot water in a saucepan and placed a bottle of claret in it. He also brought a bottle of kvas, taken from the kitchen for them to try. That beverage was already known to the French and had been given a special name. They called it limonade de cochon (pig’s lemonade), and Morel spoke well of the limonade de cochon he had found in the kitchen. But as the captain had the wine they had taken while passing through Moscow, he left the kvas to Morel and applied himself to the bottle of Bordeaux. He wrapped the bottle up to its neck in a table-napkin and poured out wine for himself and for Pierre. The satisfaction of his hunger and the wine rendered the captain still more lively and he chatted incessantly all through dinner.

“Yes, my dear Monsieur Pierre, I owe you a fine votive candle for saving me from that maniac . . . You see, I have bullets enough in my body already. Here is one I got at Wagram,” (he touched his side) “and a second at Smolénsk,”—he showed a scar on his cheek—“and this leg which as you see does not want to march, I got that on the 7th at the great battle of la Moskowa. Sacré Dieu! It was splendid! That deluge of fire was worth seeing. It was a tough job you set us there, my word! You may be proud of it! And on my honour, in spite of the cough I caught there, I should be ready to begin again. I pity those who did not see it.”

“I was there,” said Pierre.

“Bah, really? So much the better! You are certainly brave foes. The great redoubt held out well, by my pipe!” continued the Frenchman. “And you made us pay dear for it. I was at it three times—sure as I sit here. Three times we reached the guns and three times we were thrown back like cardboard figures. Oh, it was beautiful, Monsieur Pierre! Your grenadiers were splendid, by heaven! I saw them close up their ranks six times in succession and march as if on parade. Fine fellows! Our King of Naples, who knows what’s what, cried ‘Bravo!’ Ha, ha! So you are one of us soldiers!” he added smiling, after a momentary pause. “So much the better, so much the better, Monsieur Pierre! Terrible in battle . . . gallant . . . with the fair” (he winked and smiled), “that’s what the French are, Monsieur Pierre, aren’t they?”

The captain was so naïvely and good-humouredly gay, so real, and so pleased with himself, that Pierre almost winked back as he looked merrily at him. Probably the word “gallant” turned the captain’s thoughts to the state of Moscow.

“Apropos, tell me please, is it true that the women have all left Moscow? What a queer idea! What had they to be afraid of?”

“Would not the French ladies leave Paris if the Russians entered it?” asked Pierre.

“Ha, ha, ha!” The Frenchman emitted a merry sanguine chuckle, patting Pierre on the shoulder. “What a thing to say!” he exclaimed. “Paris? . . . But Paris, Paris . . .”

“Paris—the capital of the world,” Pierre finished his remark for him.

The captain looked at Pierre. He had a habit of stopping short in the middle of his talk and gazing intently with his laughing, kindly eyes.

“Well, if you hadn’t told me you were Russian, I should have wagered that you were Parisian! You have that . . . I don’t know what, that . . .” and having uttered this compliment, he again gazed at him in silence.

“I have been in Paris. I spent years there,” said Pierre.

“Oh yes, one sees that plainly. Paris! . . . A man who doesn’t know Paris is a savage. You can tell a Parisian two leagues off. Paris is Talma, la Duchénois, Potier, the Sorbonne, the boulevards,” and noticing that his conclusion was weaker than what had gone before, he added quickly: “There is only one Paris in the world. You have been to Paris and have remained Russian. Well, I don’t esteem you the less for it.”

Under the influence of the wine he had drunk, and after the days he had spent alone with his depressing thoughts, Pierre involuntarily enjoyed talking with this cheerful and good-natured man.

“To return to your ladies—I hear they are lovely. What a wretched idea to go and bury themselves in the steppes when the French army is in Moscow. What a chance those girls have missed! Your peasants, now—that’s another thing, but you civilized people, you ought to know us better than that. We took Vienna, Berlin, Madrid, Naples, Rome, Warsaw, all the world’s capitals . . . We are feared, but we are loved. We are nice to know.”

“And then the Emperor . . .” he began, but Pierre interrupted him.

“The Emperor,” Pierre repeated, and his face suddenly became sad and embarrassed, “is the Emperor . . . ?”

“The Emperor? He is generosity, mercy, justice, order, genius—that’s what the Emperor is! It is I, Ramballe, who tell you so . . . I assure you I was his enemy eight years ago. My father was an emigrant count . . . But that man has vanquished me. He has taken hold of me. I could not resist the sight of the grandeur and glory with which he has covered France. When I understood what he wanted—when I saw that he was preparing a bed of laurels for us, you know, I said to myself: ‘That is a monarch,’ and I devoted myself to him! So there! Oh yes, mon cher, he is the greatest man of the ages past or future.”

“Is he in Moscow?” Pierre stammered with a guilty look.

The Frenchman looked at his guilty face, and smiled.

“No, he will make his entry tomorrow,” he replied, and continued his talk.

Their conversation was interrupted by the cries of several voices at the gate and by Morel, who came to say that some Würtemberg hussars had come and wanted to put up their horses in the yard where the captain’s horses were. This difficulty had arisen chiefly because the hussars did not understand what was said to them in French.

The captain had their senior sergeant called in, and in a stern voice asked him to what regiment he belonged, who was his commanding officer, and by what right he allowed himself to claim quarters that were already occupied. The German who knew little French, answered the two first questions by giving the names of his regiment and of his commanding officer, but in reply to the third question which he did not understand, said, introducing broken French into his own German, that he was the quartermaster of the regiment and his commander had ordered him to occupy all the houses one after another. Pierre, who knew German, translated what the German said to the captain and gave the captain’s reply to the Würtemberg hussar in German. When he had understood what was said to him, the German submitted and took his men elsewhere. The captain went out into the porch and gave some orders in a loud voice.

When he returned to the room Pierre was sitting in the same place as before, with his head in his hands. His face expressed suffering. He really was suffering at that moment. When the captain went out and he was left alone, he suddenly came to himself and realized the position he was in. It was not that Moscow had been taken nor that the happy conquerors were masters in it and were patronizing him. Painful as that was it was not that which tormented Pierre at the moment. He was tormented by the consciousness of his own weakness. The few glasses of wine he had drunk and the conversation with this good-natured man had destroyed the mood of concentrated gloom in which he had spent the last few days and which was essential for the execution of his design. The pistol, dagger, and peasant coat were ready. Napoleon was to enter the town next day. Pierre still considered that it would be a useful and worthy action to slay the evil-doer, but now he felt that he would not do it. He did not know why, but he felt a foreboding that he would not carry out his intention. He struggled against the confession of his weakness but dimly felt that he could not overcome it and that his former gloomy frame of mind, concerning vengeance, killing, and self-sacrifice, had been dispersed like dust by contact with the first man he met.

The captain returned to the room, limping slightly and whistling a tune.

The Frenchman’s chatter which had previously amused Pierre, now repelled him. The tune he was whistling, his gait, and the gesture with which he twirled his moustache, all now seemed offensive. “I will go away immediately. I won’t say another word to him,” thought Pierre. He thought this but still sat in the same place. A strange feeling of weakness tied him to the spot, he wished to get up and go away but could not do so.

The captain, on the other hand, seemed very cheerful. He paced up and down the room twice. His eyes shone and his moustache twitched as if he were smiling to himself at some amusing thought.

“The colonel of those Würtembergers is delightful,” he suddenly said. “He is a German, but a nice fellow all the same . . . But he’s a German.” He sat down facing Pierre. “By the way, you know German, then?”

Pierre looked at him in silence.

“What is the German for ‘shelter’?”

“Shelter?” Pierre repeated. “The German for shelter is Unterkunft.”

“How do you say it?” the captain asked quickly and doubtfully.

“Unterkunft,” Pierre repeated.

“Onterkoff,” said the captain and looked at Pierre for some seconds with laughing eyes. “These Germans are first-rate fools, don’t you think so, Monsieur Pierre?” he concluded.

“Well, let’s have another bottle of this Moscow Bordeaux, shall we? Morel will warm us up another little bottle. Morel!” he called out gaily.

Morel brought candles and a bottle of wine. The captain looked at Pierre by the candle-light and was evidently struck by the troubled expression on his companion’s face. Ramballe, with genuine distress and sympathy in his face, went up to Pierre and bent over him.

“There now, we’re sad,” said he, touching Pierre’s hand. “Have I upset you? No, really, have you anything against me?” he asked Pierre. “Perhaps it’s the state of affairs?”

Pierre did not answer, but looked cordially into the Frenchman’s eyes whose expression of sympathy was pleasing to him.

“Honestly, without speaking of what I owe you, I feel friendship for you. Can I do anything for you? Dispose of me. It is for life and death. I say it with my hand on my heart!” said he, striking his chest.

“Thank you,” said Pierre.

The captain gazed intently at him as he had done when he learnt that “shelter” was Unterkunft in German, and his face suddenly brightened.

“Well, in that case, I drink to our friendship!” he cried gaily, filling two glasses with wine.

Pierre took one of the glasses and emptied it. Ramballe emptied his too, again pressed Pierre’s hand, and leaned his elbows on the table in a pensive attitude.

“Yes, my dear friend,” he began, “such is fortune’s caprice. Who would have said that I should be a soldier and a captain of dragoons in the service of Buonaparte, as we used to call him? Yet here I am in Moscow with him. I must tell you, mon cher,” he continued in the sad and measured tones of a man who intends to tell a long story, “that our name is one of the most ancient in France.”

And with a Frenchman’s easy and naïve frankness the captain told Pierre the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all about his relations and his financial and family affairs, “ma pauvre mère” playing of course an important part in the story.

“But all that is only life’s setting, the real thing is love—love! Am I not right, Monsieur Pierre?” said he, growing animated. “Another glass?”

Pierre again emptied his glass and poured himself out a third.

“Oh, women, women!” and the captain, looking with glistening eyes at Pierre, began talking of love and of his love affairs.

There were very many of these, as one could easily believe, looking at the officer’s handsome self-satisfied face and noting the eager enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. Though all Ramballe’s love stories had the sensual character which Frenchmen regard as the special charm and poetry of love, yet he told his story with such sincere conviction that he alone had experienced and known all the charm of love, and he described women so alluringly, that Pierre listened to him with curiosity.

It was plain that l’amour which the Frenchman was so fond of was not that low and simple kind that Pierre had once felt for his wife, nor was it the romantic love stimulated by himself, that he experienced for Natásha. (Ramballe despised both these kinds of love equally: the one he considered the “love of clod-hoppers” and the other the “love of simpletons.”) L’amour which the Frenchman worshipped consisted principally in the unnaturalness of his relations to the woman and in a combination of incongruities giving the chief charm to the feeling.

Thus the captain touchingly recounted the story of his love for a fascinating Marquise of thirty-five and at the same time for a charming, innocent child of seventeen, daughter of the bewitching Marquise. The conflict of magnanimity between the mother and the daughter, ending in the mother’s sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her lover, even now agitated the captain, though it was the memory of a distant past. Then he recounted an episode in which the husband played the part of the lover, and he—the lover—assumed the rôle of the husband, as well as several droll incidents from his recollections of Germany, where “shelter” is called Unterkunft, and where the husbands eat sauerkraut and the young girls are “too blonde.”

Finally, the latest episode in Poland still fresh in the captain’s memory and which he narrated with rapid gestures and glowing face, was of how he had saved the life of a Pole (in general the saving of life continually occurred in the captain’s stories) and the Pole had entrusted to him his enchanting wife (parisienne de cœur) while himself entering the French service. The captain was happy, the enchanting Polish lady wished to elope with him, but prompted by magnanimity the captain restored the wife to the husband, saying as he did so: “I have saved your life and I save your honour!” Having repeated these words the captain wiped his eyes and gave himself a shake, as if driving away the weakness which assailed him at this touching recollection.

Listening to the captain’s tales, Pierre—as often happens late in the evening and under the influence of wine—followed all that was told him, understood it all, and at the same time followed a train of personal memories which, he knew not why, suddenly arose in his mind. While listening to these love stories his own love for Natásha unexpectedly rose to his mind, and going over the pictures of that love in his imagination he mentally compared them with Ramballe’s tales. Listening to the story of the struggle between love and duty, Pierre saw before his eyes every minutest detail of his last meeting with the object of his love at the Súkharev Water-Tower. At the time of that meeting it had not produced an effect upon him—he had not even once recalled it. But now it seemed to him that that meeting had in it something very important and poetic.

“Peter Kirílovich, come here! We have recognised you,” he now seemed to hear the words she had uttered and to see before him her eyes, her smile, her travelling hood, and a stray lock of her hair . . . and there seemed to him something pathetic and touching in all this.

Having finished his tale about the enchanting Polish lady, the captain asked Pierre if he had ever experienced a similar impulse to sacrifice himself for love and a feeling of envy of the legitimate husband.

Challenged by this question Pierre raised his head and felt a need to express the thoughts that filled his mind. He began to explain that he understood love for a woman somewhat differently. He said that in all his life he had loved and still loved only one woman, and that she could never be his.

“Tiens!” said the captain.

Pierre then explained that he had loved this woman from his earliest years, but that he had not dared to think of her because she was too young, and because he had been an illegitimate son without a name. Afterwards when he had received a name and wealth he dared not think of her because he loved her too well, placing her far above everything in the world, and especially therefore above himself.

When he had reached this point, Pierre asked the captain whether he understood that.

The captain made a gesture signifying that even if he did not understand it he begged Pierre to continue.

“Platónic love, clouds . . .” he muttered.

Whether it was the wine he had drunk, or an impulse of frankness, or the thought that this man did not, and never would, know any of those who played a part in his story, or whether it was all these things together, something loosened Pierre’s tongue. Speaking thickly, and with a far-away look in his shining eyes, he told the whole story of his life: his marriage, Natásha’s love for his best friend, her betrayal of him, and all his own simple relations with her. Urged on by Ramballe’s questions he also told what he had at first concealed—his own position and even his name.

More than anything else in Pierre’s story the captain was impressed by the fact that Pierre was very rich, had two mansions in Moscow, and that he had abandoned everything and not left the city, but remained there concealing his name and station.

When it was late at night they went out together into the street. The night was warm and light. To the left of the house on the Pokróvka a fire glowed—the first of those that were beginning in Moscow. To the right, and high up in the sky, was the sickle of the waning moon and opposite to it hung that bright comet which was connected in Pierre’s heart with his love. At the gate stood Gerásim, the cook, and two Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible remarks in two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow seen in the town.

There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the immense city.

Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. “There now, how good it is, what more does one need?” thought he. And suddenly remembering his intention he grew dizzy, and felt so faint that he leaned against the fence to save himself from falling.

Without taking leave of his new friend Pierre left the gate with unsteady steps, and returning to his room lay down on the sofa and immediately fell asleep.

CHAPTER 30

The glow of the first fire that began on the 2nd of September was watched from the various roads by the fugitive Moscovites, and by the retreating troops, with many different feelings.

The Rostóv party spent that night at Mytíshchi fourteen miles from Moscow. They had started so late on the 1st of September, the road had been so blocked by vehicles and troops, so many things had been forgotten for which servants were sent back, that they had decided to spend that night at a place three miles out of Moscow. The next morning they woke late and were again delayed so often that they only got as far as Great Mytíshchi. At ten o’clock that evening the Rostóv family, and the wounded travelling with them, were all distributed in the yards and huts of that large village. The Rostóvs’ servants and coachmen and the orderlies of the wounded officers, after attending to their masters, had supper, fed the horses, and came out into the porches.

In a neighbouring hut lay Raévski’s adjutant with a fractured wrist. The awful pain he suffered made him moan incessantly and piteously, and his moaning sounded terrible in the darkness of the autumn night. He had spent the first night in the same yard as the Rostóvs. The countess said she had been unable to close her eyes on account of his moaning, and at Mytíshchi she moved into a worse hut simply to be farther away from the wounded man.

In the darkness of the night one of the servants noticed, above the high body of a coach standing before the porch, the small glow of another fire. One glow had long been visible and everybody knew that it was Little Mytíshchi burning—set on fire by Mamónov’s Cossacks.

“But look here, brothers, there’s another fire!” remarked an orderly.

All turned their attention to the glow.

“But they told us Little Mytíshchi had been set on fire by Mamónov’s Cossacks.”

“But that’s not Mytíshchi, it’s farther away.”

“Look, it must be in Moscow!”

Two of the gazers went round to the other side of the coach and sat down on its steps.

“It’s more to the left, why, Little Mytíshchi is over there, and this is right on the other side.”

Several men joined the first two.

“See how it’s flaring,” said one. “That’s a fire in Moscow: either in the Sushchévski or the Rogózhski quarter.”

No one replied to this remark and for some time they all gazed silently at the spreading flames of the second fire in the distance.

Old Daniel Teréntich, the count’s valet (as he was called), came up to the group and shouted at Míshka.

“What are you staring at, you good-for-nothing . . . ? The count will be calling, and there’s nobody there; go and gather the clothes together.”

“I only ran out to get some water,” said Míshka.

“But what do you think, Daniel Teréntich? Doesn’t it look as if that glow were in Moscow?” remarked one of the footmen.

Daniel Teréntich made no reply, and again for a long time they were all silent. The glow spread, rising and falling, farther and farther still.

“God have mercy . . . It’s windy and dry . . .” said another voice.

“Just look! See what it’s doing now. O Lord! You can even see the crows flying. Lord have mercy on us sinners!”

“They’ll put it out, no fear!”

“Who’s to put it out?” Daniel Teréntich, who had hitherto been silent, was heard to say. His voice was calm and deliberate. “Moscow it is, brothers,” said he. “Mother Moscow, the white . . .” his voice faltered, and he gave way to an old man’s sob.

And it was as if they had all only waited for this to realize the significance for them of the glow they were watching. Sighs were heard, words of prayer, and the sobbing of the count’s old valet.

CHAPTER 31

The valet, returning to the cottage, informed the count that Moscow was burning. The count donned his dressing-gown and went out to look. Sónya and Madame Schoss, who had not yet undressed, went out with him. Only Natásha and the countess remained in the room. Pétya was no longer with the family, he had gone on with his regiment which was making for Tróitsa.

The countess, on hearing that Moscow was on fire, began to cry. Natásha, pale, with a fixed look, was sitting on the bench under the icons just where she had sat down on arriving, and paid no attention to her father’s words. She was listening to the ceaseless moaning of the adjutant, three houses off.

“Oh, how terrible,” said Sónya, returning from the yard chilled and frightened. “I believe the whole of Moscow will burn, there’s an awful glow! Natásha, do look! You can see it now from the window,” she said to her cousin, evidently wishing to distract her mind.

But Natásha looked at her as if not understanding what was said to her, and again fixed her eyes on the corner of the stove. She had been in this condition of stupor since the morning, when Sónya, to the surprise and annoyance of the countess, had for some unaccountable reason found it necessary to tell Natásha of Prince Andrew’s wound and of his being with their party. The countess had seldom been so angry with anyone as she was with Sónya. Sónya had cried and begged to be forgiven, and now, as if trying to atone for her fault, paid unceasing attention to her cousin.

“Look, Natásha, how dreadfully it is burning!” said she.

“What’s burning?” asked Natásha. “Oh, yes, Moscow.”

And as if in order not to offend Sónya and to get rid of her, she turned her face to the window, looked out in such a way that it was evident that she could not see anything, and again settled down in her former attitude.

“But you didn’t see it!”

“Yes, really I did,” Natásha replied in a voice that pleaded to be left in peace.

Both the countess and Sónya understood that, naturally, neither Moscow, nor the burning of Moscow, nor anything else, could seem of importance to Natásha.

The count returned and lay down behind the partition. The countess went up to her daughter and touched her head with the back of her hand as she was wont to do when Natásha was ill, then touched her forehead with her lips as if to feel whether she was feverish, and finally kissed her.

“You are cold. You are trembling all over. You’d better lie down,” said the countess.

“Lie down? All right, I will. I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha.

When Natásha had been told that morning that Prince Andrew was seriously wounded and was travelling with their party, she had at first asked many questions: Where was he going? How was he wounded? Was it serious? And could she see him? But after she had been told that she could not see him, that he was seriously wounded, but that his life was not in danger, she ceased to ask questions or to speak at all, evidently disbelieving what they told her, and convinced that say what she might she would still be told the same. All the way she had sat motionless in a corner of the coach with wide-open eyes, and the expression in them which the countess knew so well and feared so much, and now she sat in the same way on the bench where she had seated herself on arriving. She was planning something, and either deciding or had already decided something in her mind. The countess knew this, but what it might be she did not know, and this alarmed and tormented her.

“Natásha, undress, darling; lie down on my bed.”

A bed had been made on a bedstead for the countess only. Madame Schoss and the two girls were to sleep on some hay on the floor.

“No, mamma, I—will lie down here on the floor,” Natásha replied irritably and she went to the window and opened it. Through the open window the moans of the adjutant could be heard more distinctly. She put her head out into the damp night air, and the countess saw her slim neck shaking with sobs and throbbing against the window-frame. Natásha knew it was not Prince Andrew who was moaning. She knew Prince Andrew was in the same yard as themselves and in a part of the hut across the passage; but this dreadful incessant moaning made her sob. The countess exchanged a look with Sónya.

“Lie down, darling; lie down, my pet,” said the countess, softly touching Natásha’s shoulders. “Come, lie down.”

“Oh, yes . . . I’ll lie down at once,” said Natásha, and began hurriedly undressing, tugging at the tapes of her petticoat.

When she had thrown off her dress and put on a dressing-jacket she sat down with her feet under her, on the bed that had been made up on the floor, jerked her thin and rather short plait of hair to the front, and began re-plaiting it. Her long, thin, practised fingers rapidly unplaited, re-plaited, and tied up the plait. Her head moved from side to side from habit, but her eyes, feverishly wide, looked fixedly before her. When her toilet for the night was finished she sank gently on to the sheet spread over the hay on the side nearest the door.

“Natásha, you’d better lie in the middle,” said Sónya.

“I’ll stay here,” muttered Natásha. “Do lie down,” she added crossly, and buried her face in the pillow.

The countess, Madame Schoss, and Sónya undressed hastily and lay down. The small lamp in front of the icons was the only light left in the room. But in the yard there was light from the fire at Little Mytíshchi a mile and a half away, and through the night came the noise of people shouting at a tavern Mamónov’s Cossacks had set up across the street, and the adjutant’s unceasing moans could still be heard.

For a long time Natásha listened attentively to the sounds that reached her from inside and outside the room and did not move. First she heard her mother praying and sighing and the creaking of her bed under her, then Madame Schoss’s familiar whistling snore and Sónya’s gentle breathing. Then the countess called to Natásha. Natásha did not answer.

“I think she’s asleep, mamma,” said Sónya softly.

After a short silence the countess spoke again, but this time no one replied.

Soon after that Natásha heard her mother’s even breathing. Natásha did not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt, was growing cold on the bare floor.

As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack in the wall. A cock crowed far off and another replied near by. The shouting in the tavern had died down, only the moaning of the adjutant was heard. Natásha sat up.

“Sónya, are you asleep? Mamma?” she whispered.

No one replied. Natásha rose slowly and carefully, crossed herself, and stepped cautiously on the cold and dirty floor with her slim supple bare feet. The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and grasped the cold door-handle.

It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and terror and overflowing with love.

She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and on to the cold damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her. With her bare feet she touched a sleeping man, stepped over him, and opened the door into the part of the hut where Prince Andrew lay. It was dark in there. In the farthest corner, on a bench beside the bed on which something was lying, stood a tallow candle with a long thick and smouldering wick.

From the moment she had been told that morning of Prince Andrew’s wound and his presence there, Natásha had resolved to see him. She did not know why she had to, she knew the meeting would be painful, but felt the more convinced that it was necessary.

All day she had lived only in the hope of seeing him that night. But now that the moment had come she was filled with dread of what she might see. How was he maimed? What was left of him? Was he like that incessant moaning of the adjutant’s? Yes, he was altogether like that. In her imagination he was that terrible moaning personified. When she saw an indistinct shape in the corner, and mistook his knees raised under the quilt for his shoulders, she imagined a horrible body there, and stood still in terror. But an irresistible impulse drew her forward. She cautiously took one step and then another, and found herself in the middle of a small room containing baggage. Another man—Timókhin—was lying in a corner on the benches beneath the icons, and two others—the doctor and a valet—lay on the floor.

The valet sat up and whispered something. Timókhin, kept awake by the pain in his wounded leg, gazed with wide-open eyes at this strange apparition of a girl in a white chemise, dressing-jacket, and night-cap. The valet’s sleepy, frightened exclamation, “What do you want? What’s the matter?” made Natásha approach more swiftly to what was lying in the corner. Horribly unlike a man as that body looked, she must see him. She passed the valet, the snuff fell from the candle wick, and she saw Prince Andrew clearly with his arms outside the quilt, and such as she had always seen him.

He was the same as ever, but the feverish colour of his face, his glittering eyes rapturously turned towards her, and especially his neck, delicate as a child’s, revealed by the turn-down collar of his shirt, gave him a peculiarly innocent, childlike look, such as she had never seen on him before. She went up to him, and with a swift, flexible, youthful movement dropped on her knees.

He smiled and held out his hand to her.

CHAPTER 32

Seven days had passed since Prince Andrew found himself in the ambulance station on the field of Borodinó. His feverish state and the inflammation of his bowels, which were injured, were in the doctor’s opinion sure to carry him off. But on the seventh day he ate with pleasure a piece of bread with some tea, and the doctor noticed that his temperature was lower. He had regained consciousness that morning. The first night after they left Moscow had been fairly warm, and he had remained in the calèche, but at Mytíshchi the wounded man himself asked to be taken out and given some tea. The pain caused by his removal into the hut had made him groan aloud and again lose consciousness. When he had been placed on his camp-bed he lay for a long time motionless with closed eyes. Then he opened them and whispered softly: “And the tea?” His remembering such a small detail of everyday life astonished the doctor. He felt Prince Andrew’s pulse, and to his surprise and dissatisfaction found it had improved. He was dissatisfied because he knew by experience that if his patient did not die now, he would do so a little later with greater suffering. Timókhin, the red-nosed major of Prince Andrew’s regiment, had joined him in Moscow and was being taken along with him, having been wounded in the leg at the battle of Borodinó. They were accompanied by a doctor, Prince Andrew’s valet, his coachman, and two orderlies.

They gave Prince Andrew some tea. He drank it eagerly, looking with feverish eyes at the door in front of him as if trying to understand and remember something.

“I don’t want any more. Is Timókhin here?” he asked.

Timókhin crept along the bench to him.

“I am here, your Excellency.”

“How’s your wound?”

“Mine, sir? All right. But how about you?”

Prince Andrew again pondered as if trying to remember something.

“Couldn’t one get a book?” he asked.

“What book?”

“The Gospels. I haven’t one.”

The doctor promised to procure it for him, and began to ask how he was feeling. Prince Andrew answered all his questions reluctantly but reasonably, and then said he wanted a bolster placed under him as he was uncomfortable and in great pain. The doctor and valet lifted the cloak with which he was covered, and making wry faces at the noisome smell of mortifying flesh that came from the wound, began examining that dreadful place. The doctor was very much displeased about something, and made a change in the dressings, turning the wounded man over so that he groaned again and grew unconscious and delirious from the agony. He kept asking them to get him the book and put it under him.

“What trouble would it be to you?” he said. “I have not got one. Please get it for me and put it under me for a moment,” he pleaded in a piteous voice.

The doctor went into the passage to wash his hands.

“You fellows have no conscience,” said he to the valet who was pouring water over his hands. “For just one moment I didn’t look after you . . . It’s such pain, you know, that I wonder how he can bear it.”

“I thought we had put something under him, by the Lord Jesus Christ!” said the valet.

The first time Prince Andrew understood where he was and what was the matter with him, and remembered being wounded and how, was when he asked to be carried into the hut after his calèche had stopped at Mytíshchi. After growing confused from pain while being carried into the hut he again regained consciousness, and while drinking tea once more recalled all that had happened to him, and above all vividly remembered the moment at the ambulance station when, at the sight of the sufferings of a man he disliked, those new thoughts had come to him which promised him happiness. And those thoughts, though now vague and indefinite, again possessed his soul. He remembered that he had now a new source of happiness and that this happiness had something to do with the Gospels. That was why he asked for a copy of them. The uncomfortable position in which they had put him and turned him over, again confused his thoughts, and when he came to himself a third time it was in the complete stillness of the night. Everybody near him was sleeping. A cricket chirped from across the passage; someone was shouting and singing in the street; cockroaches rustled on the table, on the icons, and on the walls, and a big fly flopped at the head of the bed and around the candle beside him, the wick of which was charred and had shaped itself like a mushroom.

His mind was not in a normal state. A healthy man usually thinks of, feels, and remembers, innumerable things simultaneously, but has the power and will to select one sequence of thoughts or events on which to fix his whole attention. A healthy man can tear himself away from the deepest reflections to say a civil word to someone who comes in, and can then return again to his own thoughts. But Prince Andrew’s mind was not in a normal state in that respect. All the powers of his mind were more active and clearer than ever, but they acted apart from his will. Most diverse thoughts and images occupied him simultaneously. At times his brain suddenly began to work with a vigour, clearness, and depth it had never reached when he was in health, but suddenly in the midst of its work it would turn to some unexpected idea and he had not the strength to turn it back again.

“Yes, a new happiness was revealed to me of which man cannot be deprived,” he thought as he lay in the semi-darkness of the quiet hut gazing fixedly before him with feverish wide-open eyes. “A happiness lying beyond material forces, outside the material influences that act on man—a happiness of the soul alone, the happiness of loving. Every man can understand it, but to conceive it and enjoin it was possible only for God. But how did God enjoin that law? And why was the Son . . . ?”

And suddenly the sequence of these thoughts broke off, and Prince Andrew heard (without knowing whether it was delusion or reality) a soft, whispering voice incessantly and rhythmically repeating “piti-piti-piti,” and then “ti-ti,” and then again “piti-piti-piti,” and “ti-ti” once more. At the same time he felt that above his face, above the very middle of it, some strange airy structure was being erected out of slender needles or splinters, to the sound of this whispered music. He felt that he had to balance carefully (though it was difficult) so that this airy structure should not collapse; but nevertheless it kept collapsing and again slowly rising to the sound of whispered rhythmic music—“it stretches, stretches, spreading out and stretching,” said Prince Andrew to himself. While listening to this whispering, and feeling the sensation of this drawing out and the construction of this edifice of needles, he also saw by glimpses a red halo round the candle, and heard the rustle of the cockroaches and the buzzing of the fly that flopped against his pillow and his face. Each time the fly touched his face it gave him a burning sensation and yet to his surprise it did not destroy the structure, though it knocked against the very region of his face where it was rising. But besides this there was something else of importance. It was something white by the door—the statue of a sphinx, which also oppressed him.

“But perhaps that’s my shirt on the table,” he thought, “and that’s my legs, and that is the door, but why is it always stretching and drawing itself out, and ‘piti-piti-piti’ and ‘ti-ti’ and ‘piti-piti-piti’ . . . ? That’s enough, please leave off!” Prince Andrew painfully entreated someone. And suddenly thoughts and feelings again swam to the surface of his mind with peculiar clearness and force.

“Yes—love,” he thought again quite clearly. “But not love which loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced when I saw my enemy and yet loved him. I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now again I feel that bliss. To love one’s neighbours, to love one’s enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations. It is possible to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What has become of him? Is he alive . . . ?

“When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have I hated in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her.” And he vividly pictured to himself Natásha, not as he had done in the past with nothing but her charms which gave him delight, but for the first time picturing to himself her soul. And he understood her feelings, her sufferings, shame, and remorse. He now understood for the first time all the cruelty of his rejection of her, the cruelty of his rupture with her. “If only it were possible for me to see her once more. Just once, looking into those eyes to say . . .”

“Piti-piti-piti and ti-ti and piti-piti-piti boom!” flopped the fly . . . And his attention was suddenly carried into another world, a world of reality and delirium in which something particular was happening. In that world some structure was still being erected and did not fall, something was still stretching out, and the candle with its red halo was still burning, and the same shirt-like sphinx lay near the door: but besides all this, something creaked, there was a whiff of fresh air, and a new white sphinx appeared, standing at the door. And that sphinx had the pale face and shining eyes of the very Natásha of whom he had just been thinking.

“Oh, how oppressive this continual delirium is,” thought Prince Andrew, trying to drive that face from his imagination. But the face remained before him with the force of reality and drew nearer. Prince Andrew wished to return to that former world of pure thought, but he could not, and delirium drew him back into its domain. The soft whispering voice continued its rhythmic murmur, something oppressed him and stretched out, and the strange face was before him. Prince Andrew collected all his strength in an effort to recover his senses, he moved a little, and suddenly there was a ringing in his ears, a dimness in his eyes, and like a man plunged into water he lost consciousness. When he came to himself, Natásha, that same living Natásha whom of all people he most longed to love with this new pure divine love that had been revealed to him, was kneeling before him. He realized that it was the real living Natásha, and he was not surprised, but quietly happy. Natásha, on her knees motionless (she was unable to stir), with frightened eyes riveted on him, was restraining her sobs. Her face was pale and rigid. Only in the lower part of it something quivered.

Prince Andrew sighed with relief, smiled, and held out his hand.

“You?” he said. “How fortunate!”

With a rapid but careful movement Natásha drew nearer to him on her knees, and taking his hand carefully, bent her face over it and began kissing it, just touching it lightly with her lips.

“Forgive me!” she whispered, raising her head and glancing at him. “Forgive me!”

“I love you,” said Prince Andrew.

“Forgive . . . !”

“Forgive what?” he asked.

“Forgive me for what I ha-ve do-ne!” faltered Natásha in a scarcely audible, broken whisper, and began kissing his hand more rapidly, just touching it with her lips.

“I love you more, better than before,” said Prince Andrew, lifting her face with his hand so as to look into her eyes.

Those eyes, filled with happy tears, gazed at him timidly, compassionately and with joyous love. Natásha’s thin pale face, with its swollen lips, was more than plain—it was dreadful. But Prince Andrew did not see that, he saw her shining eyes which were beautiful. They heard the sound of voices behind them.

Peter, the valet, who was now wide awake, had roused the doctor. Timókhin, who had not slept at all because of the pain in his leg, had long been watching all that was going on, carefully covering his bare body with the sheet as he huddled up on his bench.

“What’s this?” said the doctor, rising from his bed. “Please go away, madam!”

At that moment a maid, sent by the countess who had noticed her daughter’s absence, knocked at the door.

Like a somnambulist aroused from her sleep, Natásha went out of the room and returning to her hut fell sobbing on her bed.

From that time, during all the rest of the Rostóvs’ journey, at every halting place and wherever they spent a night, Natásha never left the wounded Bolkónski, and the doctor had to admit that he had not expected from a young girl either such firmness, or such skill in nursing a wounded man.

Dreadful as the countess imagined it would be should Prince Andrew die in her daughter’s arms during the journey—as, judging by what the doctor said, seemed might easily happen—she could not oppose Natásha. Though with the intimacy now established between the wounded man and Natásha, the thought occurred that should he recover their former engagement would be renewed, no one—least of all Natásha and Prince Andrew—spoke of this: the unsettled question of life and death, which hung not only over Bolkónski but over all Russia, shut out all other considerations.

CHAPTER 33

On the 3rd of September Pierre awoke late. His head was aching, the clothes in which he had slept without undressing felt uncomfortable on his body, and his mind had a dim consciousness of something shameful he had done the day before. That something shameful was his yesterday’s conversation with Captain Ramballe.

It was eleven by the clock, but it seemed peculiarly dark out of doors. Pierre rose, rubbed his eyes, and seeing the pistol with an engraved stock which Gerásim had replaced on the writing-table, he remembered where he was and what lay before him that very day.

“Am I not too late?” he thought. “No, probably he won’t make his entry into Moscow before noon.”

Pierre did not allow himself to reflect on what lay before him, but hastened to act.

After arranging his clothes, he took the pistol and was about to go out. But it then occurred to him for the first time that he certainly could not carry the weapon in his hand through the streets. It was difficult to hide such a big pistol even under his wide coat. He could not carry it unnoticed in his belt, nor under his arm. Besides it had been discharged, and he had not had time to reload it. “No matter the dagger will do,” he said to himself, though when planning his design he had more than once come to the conclusion that the chief mistake made by the student in 1809 had been to try to kill Napoleon with a dagger. But as if his chief aim consisted not in carrying out his design, but in proving to himself that he would not abandon his intention and was doing all he could to achieve it, Pierre hastily took the blunt jagged dagger in a green sheath which he had bought at the Súkharev market with the pistol, and hid it under his waistcoat.

Having tied a girdle over his coat and pulled his cap low on his head, Pierre went down the corridor trying to avoid making a noise or meeting the captain, and passed out into the street.

The conflagration, at which he had looked with so much indifference the evening before, had greatly increased during the night. Moscow was on fire in several places. The buildings in Carriage Row, across the river, in the Bazaar and the Povarskóy, as well as the barges on the Moskvá River and the timber yards by the Dorogomílov Bridge, were all ablaze.

Pierre’s way led through side streets to the Povarskóy and from there to the church of St. Nicholas on the Arbát, where he had long before decided that the deed should be done. The gates of most of the houses were locked and the shutters up. The streets and lanes were deserted. The air was full of smoke and the smell of burning. Now and then he met Russians with anxious and timid faces, and Frenchmen with an air not of the city but of the camp, walking in the middle of the streets. Both the Russians and the French looked at Pierre with surprise. Besides his height and stoutness, and the strange morose look of suffering in his face and whole figure, the Russians stared at him because they could not make out to what class he could belong. The French followed him with astonishment in their eyes chiefly because Pierre, unlike all the other Russians who gazed at the French with fear and curiosity, paid no attention to them. At the gate of one house three Frenchmen, who were explaining something to some Russians who did not understand them, stopped Pierre asking if he did not know French.

Pierre shook his head and went on. In another side-street a sentinel standing beside a green caisson shouted at him, but only when the shout was threateningly repeated and he heard the click of the man’s musket as he raised it did Pierre understand that he had to pass on the other side of the street. He heard nothing and saw nothing of what went on around him. He carried his resolution within himself in terror and haste, like something dreadful and alien to him, for after the previous night’s experience he was afraid of losing it. But he was not destined to bring his mood safely to his destination. Moreover, had he not been hindered by anything on the way, his intention could not now have been carried out, for Napoleon had passed the Arbát more than four hours previously on his way from the Dorogomílov suburb to the Kremlin, and was now sitting in a very gloomy frame of mind in a royal study in the Kremlin, giving detailed and exact orders as to measures to be taken immediately to extinguish the fire, to prevent looting, and to reassure the inhabitants. But Pierre did not know this; he was entirely absorbed in what lay before him, and was tortured—as those are who obstinately undertake a task that is impossible for them not because of its difficulty but because of its incompatibility with their natures—by the fear of weakening at the decisive moment and so losing his self-esteem.

Though he heard and saw nothing around him he found his way by instinct, and did not go wrong in the side streets that led to the Povarskóy.

As Pierre approached that street the smoke became denser and denser—he even felt the heat of the fire. Occasionally curly tongues of flame rose from under the roofs of the houses. He met more people in the streets and they were more excited. But Pierre, though he felt that something unusual was happening around him, did not realize that he was approaching the fire. As he was going along a foot-path across a wide open space adjoining the Povarskóy on one side and the gardens of Prince Gruzínski’s house on the other, Pierre suddenly heard the desperate weeping of a woman close to him. He stopped as if awakening from a dream, and lifted his head.

By the side of the path, on the dusty dry grass, all sorts of household goods lay in a heap: feather-beds, a samovar, icons, and trunks. On the ground, beside the trunks, sat a thin woman, no longer young, with long prominent upper teeth, and wearing a black cloak and cap. This woman, swaying to and fro and muttering something, was choking with sobs. Two girls of about ten and twelve, dressed in dirty short frocks and cloaks, were staring at their mother with a look of stupefaction on their pale frightened faces. The youngest child, a boy of about seven, who wore an overcoat and an immense cap evidently not his own, was crying in his old nurse’s arms. A dirty, bare-footed maid was sitting on a trunk and having undone her pale-coloured plait was pulling it straight and sniffing at her singed hair. The woman’s husband, a short, round-shouldered man in the undress uniform of a civilian official, with sausage-shaped whiskers, and showing under his square-set cap the hair smoothly brushed forward over his temples, with expressionless face was moving the trunks which were placed one on another, and was dragging some garments from under them.

As soon as she saw Pierre the woman almost threw herself at his feet.

“Dear people, good Christians, save me, help me, dear friends . . . help us, somebody,” she muttered between her sobs. “My girl . . . My daughter! My youngest daughter is left behind. She’s burnt! Ooh! Was it for this I nursed you . . . Ooh!”

“Don’t, Mary Nikoláevna!” said her husband to her in a low voice, evidently only to justify himself before the stranger. “Sister must have taken her, or else where can she be?” he added.

“Monster! Villain!” shouted the woman angrily, suddenly ceasing to weep. “You have no heart, you don’t feel for your own child! Another man would have rescued her from the fire. But this is a monster and neither a man nor a father! You, honoured sir, are a noble man,” she went on, addressing Pierre rapidly between her sobs. “The fire broke out alongside, and blew our way, the maid called out ‘Fire!’ and we rushed to collect our things. We ran out just as we were . . . This is what we have brought away . . . The icons, and my dowry bed, all the rest is lost. We seized the children. But not Katie! Ooh! O Lord . . . !” and again she began to sob. “My child, my dear one! Burnt, burnt!”

“But where was she left?” asked Pierre.

From the expression of his animated face the woman saw that this man might help her.

“Oh, dear sir!” she cried, seizing him by the legs. “My benefactor, set my heart at ease . . . Aníska, go, you horrid girl, show him the way!” she cried to the maid, angrily opening her mouth and still farther exposing her long teeth.

“Show me the way, show me, I . . . I’ll do it,” gasped Pierre rapidly.

The dirty maid-servant stepped from behind the trunk, put up her plait, sighed, and went on her short, bare feet along the path. Pierre felt as if he had come back to life after a heavy swoon. He held his head higher, his eyes shone with the light of life, and with swift steps he followed the maid, overtook her and came out on the Povarskóy. The whole street was full of clouds of black smoke. Tongues of flame here and there broke through that cloud. A great number of people crowded in front of the conflagration. In the middle of the street stood a French general saying something to those around him. Pierre, accompanied by the maid, was advancing to the spot where the general stood, but the French soldiers stopped him.

“On ne passe pas!”¹⁰⁶ cried a voice.

“This way, uncle,” cried the girl. “We’ll pass through the side street, by the Nikúlins!”

Pierre turned back, giving a spring now and then to keep up with her. She ran across the street, turned down a side street on the left, and passing three houses, turned into a yard on the right.

“It’s here, close by,” said she, and running across the yard opened a gate in a wooden fence and, stopping, pointed out to him a small wooden wing of the house, which was burning brightly and fiercely. One of its sides had fallen in, another was on fire, and bright flames issued from the openings of the windows and from under the roof.

As Pierre passed through the fence gate he was enveloped by hot air, and involuntarily stopped.

“Which is it? Which is your house?” he asked.

“Ooh!” wailed the girl, pointing to the wing. “That’s it, that was our lodging. You’ve burnt to death, our treasure. Katie, my precious little missy! Ooh!” lamented Aníska, who at sight of the fire felt that she too must give expression to her feelings.

Pierre rushed to the wing, but the heat was so great that he involuntarily passed round in a curve and came upon the large house that was as yet burning only at one end, just below the roof, and around which swarmed a crowd of Frenchmen. At first Pierre did not realize what these men, who were dragging something out, were about; but seeing before him a Frenchman hitting a peasant with a blunt sabre and trying to take from him a fox-fur coat, he vaguely understood that looting was going on there, but he had no time to dwell on that idea.

The sounds of crackling and the din of falling walls and ceilings, the whistle and hiss of the flames, the excited shouts of the people and the sight of the swaying smoke, now gathering into thick black clouds and now soaring up with glittering sparks, with here and there dense sheaves of flame (now red and now like golden fishscales creeping along the walls) and the heat and smoke and rapidity of motion, produced on Pierre the usual animating effects of a conflagration. It had a peculiarly strong effect on him because at sight of the fire he felt himself suddenly freed from the ideas that had weighed him down. He felt young, bright, adroit, and resolute. He ran round to the other side of the lodge and was about to dash into that part of it which was still standing, when just above his head he heard several voices shouting and then a cracking sound and the ring of something heavy falling close beside him.

Pierre looked up and saw at a window of the large house some Frenchmen who had just thrown out the drawer of a chest, filled with metal articles. Other French soldiers standing below went up to the drawer.

“What does this fellow want?” shouted one of them referring to Pierre.

“There’s a child in that house. Haven’t you seen a child?” cried Pierre.

“What’s he talking about? Get along!” said several voices, and one of the soldiers, evidently afraid that Pierre might want to take from them some of the plate and bronzes that were in the drawer, moved threateningly towards him.

“A child?” shouted a Frenchman from above. “I did hear something squealing in the garden. Perhaps it’s his brat that the fellow is looking for. After all one must be human, you know . . .”

“Where is it? Where?” said Pierre.

“There! There!” shouted the Frenchman at the window, pointing to the garden at the back of the house. “Wait a bit—I’m coming down.”

And a minute or two later the Frenchman, a black-eyed fellow with a spot on his cheek, in shirt-sleeves, really did jump out of a window on the ground floor, and clapping Pierre on the shoulder ran with him into the garden.

“Hurry up, you others!” he called out to his comrades. “It’s getting hot.”

When they reached a gravel path behind the house the Frenchman pulled Pierre by the arm and pointed to a round, gravelled space where a three-year-old girl in a pink dress was lying under a seat.

“There is your child! Oh, a girl, so much the better!” said the Frenchman. “Goodbye, Fatty. We must be human, we are all mortal you know!” and the Frenchman with the spot on his cheek ran back to his comrades.

Breathless with joy, Pierre ran to the little girl and was going to take her in his arms. But seeing a stranger the sickly, scrofulous-looking child, unattractively like her mother, began to yell and run away. Pierre however seized her and lifted her in his arms. She screamed desperately and angrily and tried with her little hands to pull Pierre’s hands away, and to bite them with her slobbering mouth. Pierre was seized by a sense of horror and repulsion such as he had experienced when touching some nasty little animal. But he made an effort not to throw the child down, and ran with her to the large house. It was now however impossible to get back the way he had come; the maid, Aníska, was no longer there, and Pierre with a feeling of pity and disgust pressed the wet, painfully-sobbing child to himself as tenderly as he could and ran with her through the garden seeking another way out.

CHAPTER 34

Having run through different yards and side streets, Pierre got back with his little burden to the Gruzínski garden at the corner of the Povarskóy. He did not at first recognise the place from which he had set out to look for the child, so crowded was it now with people and goods that had been dragged out of the houses.

Besides Russian families who had taken refuge here from the fire with their belongings, there were several French soldiers in a variety of clothing. Pierre took no notice of them. He hurried to find the family of that civil servant, in order to restore the daughter to her mother and go to save someone else. Pierre felt that he had still much to do and to do quickly. Glowing with the heat and from running, he felt at that moment more strongly than ever the sense of youth, animation, and determination that had come on him when he ran to save the child. She had now become quiet and, clinging with her little hands to Pierre’s coat, sat on his arm gazing about her like some little wild animal. He glanced at her occasionally with a slight smile. He fancied he saw something pathetically innocent in that frightened, sickly little face.

He did not find the civil servant or his wife where he had left them. He walked among the crowd with rapid steps scanning the various faces he met. Involuntarily he noticed a Georgian or Armenian family consisting of a very handsome old man of Oriental type, wearing a new, cloth-covered, sheepskin coat and new boots, an old woman of similar type and a young woman. That very young woman seemed to Pierre the perfection of Oriental beauty, with her sharply outlined, arched, black eyebrows and the extraordinarily soft bright colour of her long, beautiful, expressionless face. Amid the scattered property and the crowd on the open space, she in her rich satin cloak with a bright lilac shawl on her head suggested a delicate exotic plant thrown out on to the snow. She was sitting on some bundles a little behind the old woman, and looked from under her long lashes with motionless, large, almond-shaped eyes at the ground before her. Evidently she was aware of her beauty and fearful because of it. Her face struck Pierre, and hurrying along by the fence he turned several times to look at her. When he had reached the fence, still without finding those he sought, he stopped and looked about him.

With the child in his arms his figure was now more conspicuous than before, and a group of Russians, both men and women, gathered about him.

“Have you lost anyone, my dear fellow? You’re of the gentry yourself, aren’t you? Whose child is it?” they asked him.

Pierre replied that the child belonged to a woman in a black coat who had been sitting there with her other children, and he asked whether anyone knew where she had gone.

“Why, that must be the Anférovs,” said an old deacon, addressing a pock-marked peasant woman. “Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy!” he added in his customary bass.

“The Anférovs? No,” said the woman. “They left in the morning. That must be either Mary Nikoláevna’s or the Ivánovs’!”

“He says ‘a woman,’ and Mary Nikoláevna is a lady,” remarked a house-serf.

“Do you know her? She’s thin, with long teeth,” said Pierre.

“That’s Mary Nikoláevna! They went inside the garden when these wolves swooped down,” said the woman pointing to the French soldiers.

“O Lord, have mercy!” added the deacon.

“Go over that way, they’re there. It’s she! She kept on lamenting and crying,” continued the woman. “It’s she. Here, this way!”

But Pierre was not listening to the woman. He had for some seconds been intently watching what was going on a few steps away. He was looking at the Armenian family and at two French soldiers who had gone up to them. One of these, a nimble little man, was wearing a blue coat tied round the waist with a rope. He had a nightcap on his head and his feet were bare. The other, whose appearance particularly struck Pierre, was a long, lank, round-shouldered, fair-haired man, slow in his movements and with an idiotic expression of face. He wore a woman’s loose gown of frieze, blue trousers, and large torn Hessian boots. The little bare-footed Frenchman in the blue coat went up to the Armenians, and saying something, immediately seized the old man by his legs and the old man at once began pulling off his boots. The other, in the frieze gown, stopped in front of the beautiful Armenian girl and with his hands in his pockets stood staring at her, motionless and silent.

“Here take the child!” said Pierre peremptorily and hurriedly to the woman, handing the little girl to her. “Give her back to them, give her back!” he almost shouted, putting the child, who began screaming, on the ground, and again looking at the Frenchman and the Armenian family.

The old man was already sitting barefoot. The little Frenchman had secured his second boot and was slapping one boot against the other. The old man was saying something in a voice broken by sobs, but Pierre caught but a glimpse of this, his whole attention was directed to the Frenchman in the frieze gown who meanwhile, swaying slowly from side to side, had drawn nearer to the young woman and taking his hands from his pockets had seized her by the neck.

The beautiful Armenian still sat motionless and in the same attitude, with her long lashes drooping as if she did not see or feel what the soldier was doing to her.

While Pierre was running the few steps that separated him from the Frenchman, the tall marauder in the frieze gown was already tearing from her neck the necklace the young Armenian was wearing, and the young woman, clutching at her neck, screamed piercingly.

“Let that woman alone!” exclaimed Pierre hoarsely in a furious voice, seizing the soldier by his round shoulders and throwing him aside.

The soldier fell, got up, and ran away. But his comrade, throwing down the boots and drawing his sword, moved threateningly towards Pierre.

“Voyons, pas de bêtises!”¹⁰⁷ he cried.

Pierre was in such a transport of rage that he remembered nothing and his strength increased tenfold. He rushed at the barefooted Frenchman and, before the latter had time to draw his sword, knocked him off his feet and hammered him with his fists. Shouts of approval were heard from the crowd around, and at the same moment a mounted patrol of French Uhlans appeared from round the corner. The Uhlans came up at a trot to Pierre and the Frenchman and surrounded them. Pierre remembered nothing of what happened after that. He only remembered beating someone and being beaten, and finally feeling that his hands were bound and that a crowd of French soldiers stood around him and were searching him.

“Lieutenant, he has a dagger,” were the first words Pierre understood.

“Ah, a weapon?” said the officer and turned to the barefooted soldier who had been arrested with Pierre. “All right, you can tell all about it at the court-martial.” Then he turned to Pierre. “Do you speak French?”

Pierre looked around him with bloodshot eyes and did not reply. His face probably looked very terrible, for the officer said something in a whisper and four more Uhlans left the ranks and placed themselves on both sides of Pierre.

“Do you speak French?” the officer asked again, keeping at a distance from Pierre. “Call the interpreter.”

A little man in Russian civilian clothes rode out from the ranks, and by his clothes and manner of speaking Pierre at once knew him to be a French salesman from one of the Moscow shops.

“He does not look like a common man,” said the interpreter, after a searching look at Pierre.

“Ah, he looks very much like an incendiary,” remarked the officer. “And ask him who he is,” he added.

“Who are you?” asked the interpreter in poor Russian. “You must answer the chief.”

“I will not tell you who I am. I am your prisoner—take me!” Pierre suddenly replied in French.

“Ah, ah!” muttered the officer with a frown. “Well then, march!”

A crowd had collected round the Uhlans. Nearest to Pierre stood the pock-marked peasant woman with the little girl, and when the patrol started she moved forward.

“Where are they taking you to, you poor dear?” said she. “And the little girl, the little girl, what am I to do with her if she’s not theirs?” said the woman.

“What does that woman want?” asked the officer.

Pierre was as if intoxicated. His elation increased at the sight of the little girl he had saved.

“What does she want?” he murmured. “She is bringing me my daughter, whom I have just saved from the flames,” said he. “Goodbye!” And without knowing how this aimless lie had escaped him, he went along with resolute and triumphant steps between the French soldiers.

The French patrol was one of those sent out through the various streets of Moscow by Durosnel’s order to put a stop to the pillage, and especially to catch the incendiaries who, according to the general opinion which had that day originated among the higher French officers, were the cause of the conflagrations. After marching through a number of streets the patrol arrested five more Russian suspects: a small shopkeeper, two seminary students, a peasant, and a house-serf, besides several looters. But of all these various suspected characters, Pierre was considered to be the most suspicious of all. When they had all been brought for the night to a large house on the Zúbov Rampart that was being used as a guardhouse, Pierre was placed apart under strict guard.

93 Lay member of the Society of Jesus.

94 A masterly woman.

95 “Oh, mamma, don’t talk nonsense! You don’t understand anything. In my position I have obligations.”

96 “No, tell him I don’t wish to see him, I am furious with him for not keeping his word to me.”

97 “Countess, there is mercy for every sin.”

98 “That Asiatic city of the innumerable churches, holy Moscow. Here it is then at last, that famous city! It was high time.”

99 “Bring the boyars to me.”

100 My dear, my tender, my poor mother.

101 House of my Mother.

102 To Rostopchín’s ferocious patriotism.

103 “Good day, everybody!”

104 “Are you the master here?”

105 “Quarters, quarters, lodgings! The French are good fellows. What the devil! There, don’t let us be cross, old fellow!”

106 “You can’t pass!”

107 “Look here, no nonsense!”