'So Mister Kuragin has not bestowed his hand on Countess Rostov?' said Prince Andrey. He snorted several times.
'He couldn't have married her, because he's married already,' said Pierre. Prince Andrey gave another nasty laugh, again recalling his father. 'And where is he now, your brother-in-law, may I ask?' he said. 'He's gone to Peters . . . oh, I really don't know,' said Pierre.
'Well, it's not important,' said Prince Andrey. 'Please tell Countess Rostov from me that she was and is perfectly free, and I send my best wishes.'
Pierre took the bundle with both hands. Prince Andrey, as if trying to remember whether he had anything more to add, or half-waiting for Pierre to come out with something, looked at him steadily.
'Listen. Do you remember that difference of opinion we had in Petersburg?' said Pierre. 'Remember what we . . . ?'
'Yes, I do,' Prince Andrey answered hastily. 'I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven, but I didn't say I could forgive her, and I can't.'
'Surely, there's no comparison, is there?' asked Pierre.
Prince Andrey cut him short. He cried harshly, 'Oh yes, go and ask for her hand again, be magnanimous, all that sort of thing? . . . Well, that's all very noble, but I'm not up to following on in that gentleman's tracks. And if you value my friendship, don't talk to me ever again about that . . . well, all this business. Goodbye then. You will hand that on? . . .'
Pierre left him, and went in to see the old prince and Princess Marya.
The old man seemed livelier than usual. Princess Marya was just the same as ever, but through all her sympathy for her brother Pierre could see she was delighted that his marriage plans had collapsed. Looking at them, Pierre could sense the degree of contempt and antipathy all three of them felt for the Rostovs, and he realized that from now on in their presence it would be impossible even to mention the name of a girl capable of giving up Prince Andrey for anyone else in the world.
Over dinner they talked about the war that was clearly coming. Prince Andrey never stopped talking and arguing, first with his father then with Dessalles, the Swiss tutor, and although he seemed more animated than usual Pierre well knew the deeply hidden cause that lay behind all the animation.
CHAPTER 22
That evening Pierre called at the Rostovs' to carry out Prince Andrey's commission. Natasha was in bed, the count was out at the club, and Pierre, once he had handed the letters over to Sonya, went in to see Marya Dmitriyevna, who was keen to hear how Prince Andrey had taken the news. Ten minutes later Sonya came in to speak to Marya Dmitriyevna.
'Natasha insists on seeing Count Bezukhov,' she said.
'Well, we can't take him upstairs, can we? I mean, you're not very tidy up there,' said Marya Dmitriyevna.
'No, she's put some clothes on and come down to the drawing-room,' said Sonya.
Marya Dmitriyevna could only shrug. 'Oh, how long till the countess comes? I'm quite worn out with her. Listen, keep some of it back,' she said to Pierre. 'One hasn't the heart to scold her, she's so pathetic, poor thing.'
Natasha was standing in the middle of the drawing-room, looking pale, composed and much thinner (though hardly the picture of contrition that Pierre had expected). When Pierre appeared in the doorway she lurched forward a little, clearly unsure whether to walk over to greet him or wait for him to come across to her.
Pierre hurried over. He was expecting her to offer her hand as usual but instead she came close and stopped in front of him, breathing hard and letting her arms dangle down lifelessly, in the very pose she had so often taken up in the middle of the hall when she was about to sing, except that the look on her face was quite different.
'Count Bezukhov,' she began, gabbling her words, 'Prince Bolkonsky was your friend. Well, he still is,' she corrected herself. (She thought of everything as belonging to the past, and now quite different.) 'He once told me I should turn to you . . .'
Pierre looked at her, speechless and choking. Until then he had reproached her in his heart, and made every effort to despise her, but now he felt so sorry for her there was no room in his heart for reproach.
'He's back now. Please ask him . . . to for . . . forgive me.' She stopped short and her breath came even faster, but she wasn't weeping.
'Yes . . . I will tell him,' said Pierre, 'but . . .' He didn't know how to go on.
Natasha was visibly alarmed at a certain idea that might well have occurred to Pierre.
'No, I know it's all over,' she hastened to say. 'No, it can't ever happen now. What upsets me is the harm I've done to him. There's only one thing I ask - I want him to forgive me, forgive me, forgive me for everything . . .' Her whole body was convulsed. She sat down on a chair.
Pierre felt a heart-breaking surge of pity for her, the like of which he had never known before.
'Yes, I will tell him, I'll go through it all again,' said Pierre. 'But . . . well, there's just one thing I'd like to know . . .'
'What's that?' was the question in Natasha's eyes.
'I'd like to know whether you were in love with . . .' Pierre didn't know what to call Anatole, and he coloured up at the very thought of him, 'with that vile man.'
'Please don't call him vile,' said Natasha. 'I don't . . . know. I just don't know . . .' She burst into tears again, and Pierre was overwhelmed with an even stronger sensation of pity, tenderness and love. He could feel tears trickling down under his spectacles, and hoped no one would see them.
'We won't say another word about it, my dear girl,' he said. His voice was so gentle, tender and full of feeling that it had a strange effect on Natasha. 'Not another word, my dear. I'll tell him everything. I'll just ask you one thing: please look on me as a friend, and if you ever need any help or advice, or if you just want to pour out your soul to somebody - not now, but when you've had a chance to get things clear - please think of me.' He took her hand and kissed it. 'I'll be only too happy to . . .' Pierre was suddenly embarrassed.
'Don't talk to me like that. I'm not worth it!' cried Natasha, and she made as if to leave, but Pierre held her back by the arm. He knew he had more to say. But when he spoke he was surprised at the way it came out.
'Hush, don't say things like that. You have your whole life ahead of you,' he told her.
'Oh no I don't! It's all gone wrong for me,' she said, full of shame and humiliation.
'All gone wrong?' he repeated. 'If I was somebody else, the handsomest, the cleverest, the best man in the world, and if I were free, I'd be down on my knees right now begging for your hand and your love.'
For the first time in many days Natasha wept tears of gratitude and emotion as she took a quick glance at Pierre and walked out of the room.
Pierre went out after her, almost running down to the vestibule, fighting down tears of affection and happiness that gave him a lump in his throat. He flung his fur coat over his shoulders, unable to find his way into the sleeves, and got into his sledge.
'Where to now, your Excellency?' asked the coachman.
'Where to?' Pierre asked himself. 'Where can I go? I can't face the club or visiting people.' All of humanity seemed so pathetically poor compared with the tenderness and love that he now felt, compared with the new softness and gratitude shown by Natasha as she had turned at the last moment and glanced at him through her tears.
'Home,' said Pierre, defying ten degrees of frost by flinging aside the bearskin coat from his great chest and taking in deep, joyous lungfuls of air.
It was clear and frosty. A dark, starlit heaven looked down on the black roofs and the dirty, dusky streets. Only by looking up at the sky could Pierre distance himself from the disgusting squalor of all earthly things as compared with the heights to which his soul had now been taken. As he drove into the Arbat a vast firmament of darkness and stars opened out before Pierre's eyes. And there in the middle, high above Prechistensky Boulevard, amidst a scattering of stars on every side but catching the eye through its closeness to the earth, its pure white light and the long uplift of its tail, shone the
comet, the huge, brilliant comet of 1812, that popular harbinger of untold horrors and the end of the world. But this bright comet with its long, shiny tail held no fears for Pierre. Quite the reverse: Pierre's eyes glittered with tears of rapture as he gazed up at this radiant star, which must have traced its parabola through infinite space at speeds unimaginable and now suddenly seemed to have picked its spot in the black sky and impaled itself like an arrow piercing the earth, and stuck there, with its strong upthrusting tail and its brilliant display of whiteness amidst the infinity of scintillating stars. This heavenly body seemed perfectly attuned to Pierre's newly melted heart, as it gathered reassurance and blossomed into new life.
VOLUME III
PART I
CHAPTER 1
The latter part of 1811 saw a new build-up in the concentration and arming of troops in Western Europe, and in 1812 these forces - millions of men if you include those in transport and provisioning - moved from west to east, closing in on the frontiers of Russia, where the Russian forces had been similarly gathering since 1811.
On the 12th of June the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier, and war began. In other words, an event took place which defied human reason and all human nature. Millions of men set out to inflict on one another untold evils - deception, treachery, robbery, forgery, counterfeiting, theft, arson and murder - on a scale unheard of in the annals of law-courts down the centuries and all over the world, though at the time the men responsible did not think of these deeds as crimes.
What led to this extraordinary occurrence? What causes lay behind it? Historians, in their simple-minded certitude, tell us that the causes of this event were as follows: the violence done to the Duke of Oldenburg; non-observance of the Continental System;1 Napoleon's megalomania; Alexander's obstinacy; mistakes made by diplomats, and so on.
It follows, then, that all Metternich, Rumyantsev or Talleyrand2 would have had to do, between getting up in the morning and partying in the evening, was exert themselves just a little and make a nice job of phrasing some diplomatic note, whereupon all Napoleon would have had to do was write to Alexander saying, 'Esteemed brother, I consent to the Duke of Oldenburg having his duchy back,' and there would have been no war.
We can well understand why contemporaries might have seen things that way. We can understand why Napoleon might have attributed the cause of the war to the machinations of the English (indeed, he said as much from St Helena). We can further understand why English members of parliament thought the war had been caused by Napoleon's megalomania; why the Duke of Oldenburg blamed the war on the violence done to him; why those in trade explained the war in terms of the Continental System, which was bringing Europe to its knees; why veterans and old-world generals blamed it all on their being called up for service again; why legitimists of the period would insist on the necessity of getting 'back to basics', and diplomats of the day put it down to the 1809 alliance between Russia with Austria not being properly concealed from Napoleon, plus the clumsy wording of Memorandum No. 178. We can well understand how these - and other causes, endless in number, infinite in their proliferation because of the endless points of view available - might have appeared to contemporaries. But for us, the descendants of these people, as we contemplate this vast accomplishment in all its enormity and seek to penetrate its dreadful simplicity, these explanations seem inadequate. It is beyond our comprehension that millions of Christian men should have killed and tortured each other just because Napoleon was a megalomaniac, Alexander was obstinate, the English were devious and the Duke of Oldenburg was badly done by. We can see no connection between these circumstances and the stark reality of murder and violence; we cannot see how an affront to a duke could have induced thousands of men to rampage through the other end of Europe, slaughtering the inhabitants of Smolensk and Moscow and getting slaughtered in return.
We, their descendants - those of us who are not historians seduced by the pleasures of research and can therefore review events with unclouded common sense - find ourselves faced with an incalculable multiplicity of causes. The more deeply we go into the causes, the more of them there are, and each individual cause, or group of causes, seems as justifiable as all the rest, and as false as all the rest in its worthlessness compared with the enormity of the actual events, and its further worthlessness (unless you combine it with all the other associated causes) in validating the events that followed. For instance, Napoleon's refusal to withdraw his troops beyond the Vistula and restore the Duchy of Oldenburg seems to us no more valid as a cause than the willingness or unwillingness of any old French corporal to serve a second term, for had he refused to serve, and a second and a third and a thousand corporals and soldiers along with him, Napoleon's army would have been reduced by that number and there could have been no war.
If Napoleon had not taken umbrage at the demand for him to withdraw beyond the Vistula and had not given the order to advance, there would have been no war. But if every last sergeant had refused to go back into the army there could have been no war either. And war would also have been impossible if there had been no deviousness from England, no Duke of Oldenburg, no offence taken by Alexander, no autocracy in Russia, no French Revolution with its consequent dictatorship and empire, nor any of those things that led up to the French Revolution, and so on and so forth. If any one of these causes had been missing, nothing could have happened. It follows therefore that all of these causes, billions of them, came together to bring about subsequent events, and these events had no single cause, being bound to happen simply because they were bound to happen. Millions of men, abandoning all human feelings and common sense, were bound to march from west to east and slay their fellows, just as a few centuries ago hordes of men had marched from east to west, slaying their fellows.
The actions of Napoleon and Alexander, whose word seems to have dictated whether anything should or should not happen, were no more self-determined than the actions of any common soldier drafted in by lot or conscription. This has to be so, for one good reason: in order for the will of Napoleon or Alexander (who appear to have dictated events) to prevail, it would have been necessary for a countless number of disparate circumstances to coincide, and without any one of them those events could never have occurred. It was necessary for those millions of men who wielded the real power - soldiers shooting or bringing up supplies and guns - to do what they were told by one or two feeble individuals, and to have been brought to this point by an infinite number of complex and disparate causes.
Historical fatalism is the only possible explanation of irrational phenomena like these (phenomena with a rationale beyond our comprehension). The more we try to explain away such phenomena in rational terms, the more irrational and incomprehensible they become for us.
Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to get what he wants, and he feels with every fibre of his being that at any particular time he is free to perform an action or refrain from doing so, but the moment any action is taken it becomes an irrevocable piece of history, with a significance which has more to do with predetermination than freedom.
There are two sides to life for every individual: a personal life, in which his freedom exists in proportion to the abstract nature of his interests, and an elemental life within the swarm of humanity, in which a man inevitably follows laws laid down for him.
Although on a conscious level a man lives for himself, he is actually being used as an unconscious instrument for the attainment of humanity's historical aims. A deed once done becomes irrevocable, and any action comes together over time with millions of actions performed by other people to create historical significance. The higher a man stands on the social scale, the more contact he has with other men and the greater his impact on them, the more obvious are the inevitability and the element of predestination involved in everything he does.
'The hearts of kings are in the hands of God.'
Kings are the slaves of history.
History - the amorphous, uncon
scious life within the swarm of humanity - exploits every minute in the lives of kings as an instrument for the attainment of its own ends.
At that time, in the year 1812, Napoleon believed more strongly than ever that it was for him 'to shed or not to shed the blood of his peoples' (as Alexander had put it in his most recent letter), though he was in fact more subject than ever to those laws which forced him, for all his apparent and self-styled freedom of action, to do what had to be done for the world in general, for the sake of history.
The men of the west went east to kill each other. And the law of causal coincidence determined that thousands of minor causes colluded and coincided to produce this movement and the coming war: an angry reaction to non-observance of the Continental System; the Duke of Oldenburg; the advance into Prussia, undertaken, as Napoleon saw it, solely in the interests of securing an armed peace; the French Emperor's taste and passion for going to war, which caught the mood of his people; the excitement of preparing things on a grandiose scale; the vast expenditure on such preparations, and the necessity of getting something back for one's money; the dizzying effect of honours given and received in Dresden; all those diplomatic negotiations which were then seen as directed by a genuine desire for peace, though all they did was wound people's self-esteem on both sides; along with millions and millions of other causes, colluding and coinciding with each other to produce the impending events.
When a ripe apple falls, what makes it fall? Is it gravity, pulling it down to earth? A withered stalk? The drying action of the sun? Increased weight? A breath of wind? Or the boy under the tree who wants to eat it?
Nothing is the cause of it. It is just the coming together of various conditions necessary for any living, organic, elemental event to take place. And the botanist who finds that the apple has fallen because of the onset of decay in its cellular structure, and all the rest of it, will be no more right or wrong than the boy under the tree who says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it to fall. Anyone who claims that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and eventually lost because Alexander wanted him to lose, will be no more right or wrong than the man who claims that thousands of tons of earth in an undermined hill collapsed because of the last blow from the last pick-axe of the last workman. When it comes to events in history, so-called 'great men' are nothing but labels attached to events; like real labels, they have the least possible connection with events themselves.