At the end of the session, the Grand Master, sardonic and vindictive, rebuked Bezukhov for speaking with too much passion, remarking that he had been guided during the discussion not so much by love of virtue as by a taste for conflict.
Pierre refused to respond, except to inquire tersely whether his proposal would be accepted. They said no, it would not, so he left the lodge without waiting for the usual formalities and went home.
CHAPTER 8
Once again Pierre was afflicted by the kind of depression he so much dreaded. For three days after making his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at home, seeing no one and going nowhere. At this time he received a letter from his wife begging for a meeting; she wrote of her unhappiness on his account, and her wish to devote her whole life to him. At the end of the letter she informed him that she would be arriving in Petersburg from abroad in the next few days.
Shortly after reading the letter Pierre found his solitude invaded by one of the freemasons whom he least respected, and this man soon got round to the subject of Pierre’s marriage, expressing his opinion by way of brotherly counsel that Pierre’s harsh attitude to his wife was wrong, an infringement of the basic principles of freemasonry because he was withholding forgiveness from a penitent.
At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vasily’s wife, sent a message begging him to call on her, if only for a few minutes, to discuss something very important. Pierre could see them ganging up against him in a plot to reunite him with his wife, and, given the state he was in, he found this not unpleasant. Nothing mattered now; nothing in life was of much consequence, and under the weight of his depression he set no store by his own freedom or relentless pursuit of further punishment for his wife.
‘Nobody’s in the right, nobody’s in the wrong, so she can’t be in the wrong,’ he thought. If Pierre failed to give immediate consent to a reconciliation with his wife this was only because in his present despondency he was incapable of taking any action. If his wife had walked in at that moment he couldn’t have sent her away. Compared with the weight on Pierre’s mind, did it really matter whether he lived with her or not?
Without sending an answer to his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre set off that same evening and drove down to Moscow to see Osip Bazdeyev.
This is what he wrote in his diary.
