‘Very good, thanks; but you must have some stuff left . . .’ said the Frenchman.
‘It will be more comfortable as it wears to your body,’ said Karataev, ;till admiring his work. ‘There, you’ll be nice and comfortable.’
‘Thanks, thanks, old fellow; but what is left . . . ?’ repeated the Frenchman, giving Karataev a paper note. ‘Give me the pieces that are over.’
Pierre saw that Platon did not want to understand what the Frenchman said, and he looked on without interfering. Karataev thanked him for the rouble and went on admiring his own work. The Frenchman persisted in asking for what was left, and asked Pierre to translate what he said.
‘What does he want with the pieces?’ said Karataev. ‘They would have made me capital leg wrappers. Oh well, God bless the man.’
And, looking suddenly crestfallen and melancholy, Karataev took a bundle of remnants out of his bosom and gave it to the Frenchman without looking at him. ‘Ach-ma! ’ he cried, and walked away. The Frenchman looked at the linen, he hesitated, glanced inquiringly at Pierre, and as though Pierre’s eyes had told him something:
‘Here, Platoche!’ he cried in a shrill voice, suddenly blushing. ‘Keep them yourself,’ he said, and giving him the remnants, he turned and went out.
‘There, look’ee now,’ said Karataev, shaking his head. ‘They say they’re not Christians, but they have souls too. It’s true what the old folks used to say: a sweating hand is an open hand, but a dry hand is closefisted. His own back’s bare, and yet he has given me this.’ Karataev paused for a while, smiling dreamily and gazing at the cuttings of linen.
952 WARANDPEACE
'But first-rate leg binders they’ll make me, my dear,’ he added, as h went back into the shed.
XII
Four weeks had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner. Althoug' the French had offered to transfer him from the common prisoners’ shei 1 to the officers’, he had remained in the same shed as at first.
In Moscow, wasted by fire and pillage, Pierre passed through hard ships almost up to the extreme limit of privation that a man can endure But, owing to his vigorous health and constitution, of which he hac hardly been aware till then; and still more, owing to the fact that thesf privations came upon him so gradually that it was impossible to saj when they began, he was able to support his position, not only with ease but with positive gladness. And it was just at this time that he attained that peace and content with himself, for which he had always striven ir, vain before. For long years of his life he had been seeking in various directions for that peace, that harmony with himself, which had struck him so much in the soldiers at Borodino. He had sought for it in philanthropy, in freemasonry, in the dissipations of society, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice, in his romantic love for Natasha; he had sought it by the path of thought; and all his researches and all his efforts had failed him. And now without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with himself simply through the horror of death, through hardships, through what he had seen in Karataev. Those fearful moments that he had lived through during the execution had, as it were, washed for ever from his imagination and his memory the disturbing ideas and feelings that had once seemed to him so important. No thought came to him of Russia, of the war, of politics, or of Napoleon. It seemed obvious to him that all that did not concern him, that he was not called upon and so was not able to judge of all that. ‘Russia and summer never do well together,’ he repeated Karataev’s words, and those words soothed him strangely. His project of killing Napoleon, and his calculations of the cabalistic numbers, and of the beast of the Apocalypse struck him now as incomprehensible and positively ludicrous. His anger with his wife, and his dread of his name being disgraced by her, seemed to him trivial and amusing. What business of his was it, if that woman chose to lead somewhere away from him the life that suited her tastes? What did it matter to any one—least of all to him—whether they found out or not that their prisoner’s name was Count Bezuhov?
He often thought now of his conversation with Prince Andrey, and agreed fully with his friend, though he put a somewhat different construction on his meaning. Prince Andrey had said and thought that happiness is only negative, but he had said this with a shade of bitterness and irony. It was as though in saying this he had expressed another thought—that all the strivings towards positive happiness, that are innate in us, were only given us for our torment. But Pierre recognised
