But instead of all that, here he was now, the wealthy husband of an unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, fond of his food and drink, not averse to unbuttoning his waistcoat after dinner and indulging in a little mild criticism of the government, a member of the Moscow English Club, and everyone’s favourite on the Moscow circuit. It took him a long time to become reconciled to the idea that he was the very model of a retired Moscow gentleman-in-waiting, a type he had found so profoundly repellent seven years ago.
Sometimes he consoled himself with the idea that it didn’t matter – this was only a passing phase – only to be struck by the horrifying thought that plenty of others had gone through the same ‘passing phase’, embarking on this kind of life and joining this club with all their teeth and hair and leaving when they were toothless and bald.
There were moments of pride when he took stock and it seemed to him that he wasn’t like them, he was somehow different from the retired gentlemen-in-waiting he had once despised; they were vulgar and stupid men, given to complacency, ‘whereas I’m still never satisfied, I really want to do things for humanity’, as he put it when pride came upon him. ‘Yes, but what if all of them, these comrades of mine, also struggled like me, looking for some new and original way of living, and only got as far as I have because they were beaten, like me, by the force of circumstances, society, breeding – a force of nature that renders a man impotent?’ This is what he wondered when modesty came upon him. And when he had been some little time in Moscow he lost all contempt for his companions in destiny and even started to love them, respect them and feel as sorry for them as he did for himself.
Pierre no longer suffered from his earlier bouts of despair, disillusionment and loathing for life, but the same sickness that had once manifested itself in acute attacks had now been driven inwards, never to leave him for a single moment. ‘What’s the use of anything? What is it all about? What is going on in the world?’ he asked himself in great bewilderment several times a day, allowing himself to be drawn forcibly into a search for meaning in all the phenomena of existence. But experience had taught him that there weren’t any answers to these questions, so he made every effort to wrench himself away from them by turning to a book, nipping down to the club, or calling in at Apollon Nikolayevich’s place for a good gossip.
‘My Hélène has never cared for anything but her own body and she’s one of the stupidest women in the world,’ thought Pierre, ‘yet everybody thinks she’s the last word in intelligence and sophistication, and they all bow down to her. And take Napoleon – universally despised as long as he was a great man, and now he’s just a pathetic clown the Emperor Francis wants to offer him his daughter for an illegal marriage. The Spaniards go down on their knees and thank God through their Catholic clergy for victory over the French on the 14th of June, and the French, through the same Catholic clergy, go down on their knees and thank God for victory over the Spaniards on the same day, the 14th of June. My masonic brothers take an oath in blood, swearing to sacrifice everything for their neighbour, but they won’t cough up a rouble when you go round collecting for the poor, and meanwhile the Astraea lodge sets itself against the “Manna Seekers”, 1 and they squabble over some authentic Scottish carpet or a completely superfluous Act which has no meaning any more, not even for the man who wrote it. We all profess the Christian laws of forgiveness of injuries and love for our neighbour – laws we have honoured by raising forty times forty churches in Moscow – but yesterday a deserter died under the knout, and it was a minister of these same laws of love and forgiveness, a priest, who had given the soldier a cross to kiss before his punishment.’
Thoughts like these were never far from Pierre’s mind, and the whole of this universally accepted hypocritical sham, for all its familiarity, astonished him each time like something new. ‘I understand this tangled mess of hypocrisy,’ he thought, ‘but how can I tell people everything I understand? I’ve tried, and I always find they understand it as well as I do at the bottom of their hearts, but there’s something they’re trying not to see. They won’t see –
