In her state of heightened religious sensitivity Natasha was deeply affected by this prayer. She hung on every word about the victory of Moses over Amalek, and Gideon over Midian, and David over Goliath, and about the destruction of ‘Thy Jerusalem’, and she prayed with all the emotion and tenderness that filled her heart to overflowing, though she couldn’t quite make out what she was praying for. She felt wholeheartedly involved in prayers for a righteous spirit, the fortifying of hearts with faith and hope, and the inspirational power of love. But she couldn’t pray for her enemies to be trampled underfoot when only a few minutes earlier she had been wishing for more enemies to love and pray for. Yet neither could she doubt the righteousness of the prayer recited by the priest on his knees. She felt a thrill of dread at the awesome punishments due to be meted out to mankind for its sins, especially her sins, and she prayed that everyone should be forgiven, including her, and that she and everybody else should enjoy peace and happiness in their lives. And it seemed to her that God heard her prayer.
CHAPTER 19
Ever since the day Pierre had driven home from the Rostovs with Natasha’s look of gratitude still fresh in his mind, stared up at the comet in the sky and felt the range of new possibilities opening up before him, he had stopped worrying about the agonizing problem of the vanity and senselessness of all earthly things. The terrible questions, ‘Why?’ ‘What’s it all about?’, which had always assailed him whatever he was doing, had now been replaced, not by different questions or answers to the old ones, but by an image of
Pierre still went out a good deal, he hadn’t stopped drinking and he led the same kind of idle, dissipated life, because apart from a few hours spent with the Rostovs he had to get through the rest of his time somehow, and the habits and friendships formed in Moscow kept drawing him back inexorably to the same old life. But in recent days, with rumours from the theatre of war sounding more ominous by the day, and with Natasha’s health much improved, which meant that she no longer required the same degree of sympathy and pity, he had found himself increasingly overwhelmed by an inexplicable feeling of restlessness. His present position was untenable, he thought, and, sensing the approach of some disaster that was going to change the whole course of his life, he cast around impatiently on all sides watching for signs of it. One of his brother masons had revealed to Pierre a certain prophecy concerning Napoleon, taken from the Revelation of St John the Divine, where, in chapter xiii, verse 18, we read:
Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.
And in the fifth verse of the same chapter:
And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.
The French alphabet, laid out alongside the Hebrew (or Arabic) numerical system, with the first nine letters representing units, the next tens, and so on, gives the following values:
a b c d e f g h i k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 110 120 130 140 150 160
