The chief steward to console him for these losses presented a calcula- ion he had made, that Pierre’s income, far from being diminished, would )e positively increased if he were to refuse to pay the debts left by the tountess—which he could not be forced to pay—and if he were not to •estore his Moscow houses and the villa near Moscow, which had cost nm eight thousand to keep up, and brought in nothing, i ‘Yes, yes, that’s true,’ said Pierre, with a beaming smile, i ‘Yes, yes, I don’t need any of them. I have been made much richer by the destruction of the city.’
But in January Savelitch came from Moscow, talked to him of the position of the city, of the estimate the architect had sent in for restoring
the house, and the villa in the suburbs, speaking of it as a settled matter. At the same time Pierre received letters from Prince Vassily and other acquaintances in Petersburg, in which his wife’s debts were mentioned. And Pierre decided that the steward’s plan that he had liked so much was not the right one, and that he must go to Petersburg to wind up his wife’s affairs, and must rebuild in Moscow. Why he ought to do so, he could not have said; but he was convinced that he ought. His income was diminished by one-fourth owing to this decision. But it had to be so; he felt that.
Villarsky was going to Moscow, and they agreed to make the journey together.
During the whole period of his convalescence in Orel, Pierre had enjoyed the feeling of joyful freedom and life. But when he found himself on this journey on the open road, and saw hundreds of new faces, that feeling was intensified, During the journey he felt like a schoolboy in the holidays. All the people he saw—the driver, the overseer of the posting station, the peasants on the road, or in the village—all had a new significance for him. The presence and the observations of Villarsky, who was continually deploring the poverty and the ignorance and the backwardness of Russia, compared with Europe, only heightened Pierre’s pleasure in it. Where Villarsky saw deadness, Pierre saw the extraordinary mighty force of vitality, the force which sustained the life of that homogeneous, original, and unique people over that immense expanse of snow. He did not contest Villarsky’s opinions, and smiled gleefully, as he listened, appearing to agree with him as the easiest means of avoiding arguments which could lead to nothing.
XIV
Just as it is difficult to explain why the ants hurry back to a scattered ant-hill, some dragging away from it bits of refuse, eggs, and corpses, while others run back again, and what is their object in crowding together, overtaking one another, fighting with each other, so it would be hard to give the reasons that induced the Russians, after the departure of the French, to flock back to the place which had been known as Moscow. But just as looking at the ants hurrying about a ruined ant-heap, one can see by the tenacity, the energy, and the multitude of the busy insects that though all else is utterly destroyed, there is left something indestructible and immaterial that was the whole strength of the colony, so too Moscow in the month of October, though without its governing authorities, without its churches, without its holy things, without its wealth and its houses, was still the same Moscow as it had been in August. Everything was shattered except something immaterial, but mighty and indestructible.
The motives of the people, who rushed from all parts to Moscow after it was evacuated by the enemy, were of the most varied and personal
kind, and at first mostly savage and brutal impulses. Only one impulse was common to all—the attraction to the place which had been called 1 Moscow in order to set their energies to work there.
W : thin a week there were fifteen thousand persons in Moscow, within a fortnight twenty-five thousand; and so it went on. The number went on mounting and mounting till by the autumn of 1813 it had reached a figure exceeding the population of the city in 1812.
The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzen- gerode’s detachment, the peasants from the nearest villages and the residents who had fled from Moscow and concealed themselves in the environs. On entering the ruined city, and finding it pillaged, the Russians fell to pillaging it too. They continued the work begun by the French, i Trains of peasants’ waggons drove into Moscow to carry away to the villages all that had been abandoned in the ruined Moscow houses and 1 streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could to their tents; the householders collected all they could out of other houses, and removed it to their own under the pretence that it was their property.
But the first pillaging parties were followed by others; and every day as the numbers pillaging increased, the work of plunder became more difficult and assumed more definite forms.
