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Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg
and in Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night
after the duel he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did,
remained in his father's room, that huge room in which Count Bezukhov
had died.
He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget
all that had happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm
of feelings, thoughts, and memories suddenly arose within him
that he could not fall asleep, nor even remain in one place, but
had to jump up and pace the room with rapid steps. Now he seemed
to see her in the early days of their marriage, with bare shoulders
and a languid, passionate look on her face, and then immediately
he saw beside her Dolokhov's handsome, insolent, hard, and mocking
face as he had seen it at the banquet, and then that same face
pale, quivering, and suffering, as it had been when he reeled
and sank on the snow.
"What has happened?" he asked himself. "I have
killed her lover, yes, killed my wife's lover. Yes, that was it!
And why? How did I come to do it?"- "Because you married
her," answered an inner voice.
"But in what was I to blame?" he asked. "In
marrying her without loving her; in deceiving yourself and her."
And he vividly recalled that moment after supper at Prince Vasili's,
when he spoke those words he had found so difficult to utter:
"I love you." "It all comes from that! Even then
I felt it," he thought. "I felt then that it was not
so, that I had no right to do it. And so it turns out."
He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection.
Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection
of how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom
into his study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown
and found his head steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked
into his face and at his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as
if expressing respectful understanding of his employer's happiness.
"But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her
majestic beauty and social tact," thought he; "been
proud of my house, in which she received all Petersburg, proud
of her unapproachability and beauty. So this is what I was proud
of! I then thought that I did not understand her. How often when
considering her character I have told myself that I was to blame
for not understanding her, for not understanding that constant
composure and complacency and lack of all interests or desires,
and the whole secret lies in the terrible truth that she is a
depraved woman. Now I have spoken that terrible word to myself
all has become clear.
"Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used
to kiss her naked shoulders. She did not give him the money, but
let herself be kissed. Her father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy,
and she replied with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as
to be jealous: 'Let him do what he pleases,' she used to say of
me. One day I asked her if she felt any symptoms of pregnancy.
She laughed contemptuously and said she was not a fool to want
to have children, and that she was not going to have any children
by me."
Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts
and the vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her,
though she had been brought up in the most aristocratic circles.
"I'm not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... Allez-vous
promener,"* she used to say. Often seeing the success she
had with young and old men and women Pierre could not understand
why he did not love her.
*"You clear out of this."
"Yes, I never loved her," said he to himself; "I
knew she was a depraved woman," he repeated, "but dared
not admit it to myself. And now there's Dolokhov sitting in the
snow with a forced smile and perhaps dying, while meeting my remorse
with some forced bravado!"
Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance
of what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their
troubles. He digested his sufferings alone.
"It is all, all her fault," he said to himself;
"but what of that? Why did I bind myself to her? Why did
I say 'Je vous aime'* to her, which was a lie, and worse than
a lie? I am guilty and must endure... what? A slur on my name?
A misfortune for life? Oh, that's nonsense," he thought.
"The slur on my name and honor- that's all apart from myself.
*I love you.
"Louis XVI was executed because they said he was dishonorable
and a criminal," came into Pierre's head, "and from
their point of view they were right, as were those too who canonized
him and died a martyr's death for his sake. Then Robespierre was
beheaded for being a despot. Who is right and who is wrong? No
one! But if you are alive- live: tomorrow you'll die as I might
have died an hour ago. And is it worth tormenting oneself, when
one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?"
But at the moment when he imagined himself calmed by such
reflections, she suddenly came into his mind as she was at the
moments when he had most strongly expressed his insincere love
for her, and he felt the blood rush to his heart and had again
to get up and move about and break and tear whatever came to his
hand. "Why did I tell her that 'Je vous aime'?" he kept
repeating to himself. And when he had said it for the tenth time,
Molibre's words: "Mais que diable alloit-il faire dans cette
galere?" occurred to him, and he began to laugh at himself.
In the night he called his valet and told him to pack up to
go to Petersburg. He could not imagine how he could speak to her
now. He resolved to go away next day and leave a letter informing
her of his intention to part from her forever.
Next morning when the valet came into the room with his coffee,
Pierre was lying asleep on the ottoman with an open book in his
hand.
He woke up and looked round for a while with a startled expression,
unable to realize where he was.
"The countess told me to inquire whether your excellency
was at home," said the valet.
But before Pierre could decide what answer he would send,
the countess herself in a white satin dressing gown embroidered
with silver and with simply dressed hair (two immense plaits twice
round her lovely head like a coronet) entered the room, calm and
majestic, except that there was a wrathful wrinkle on her rather
prominent marble brow. With her imperturbable calm she did not
begin to speak in front of the valet. She knew of the duel and
had come to speak about it. She waited till the valet had set
down the coffee things and left the room. Pierre looked at her
timidly over his spectacles, and like a hare surrounded by hounds
who lays back her ears and continues to crouch motionless before
her enemies, he tried to continue reading. But feeling this to
be senseless and impossible, he again glanced timidly at her.
She did not sit down but looked at him with a contemptuous smile,
waiting for the valet to go.
"Well, what's this now? What have you been up to now,
I should like to know?" she asked sternly.
"I? What have I...?" stammered Pierre.
"So it seems you're a hero, eh? Come now, what was this
duel about? What is it meant to prove? What? I ask you."
Pierre turned over heavily on the ottoman and opened his mouth,
but could not reply.
"If you won't answer, I'll tell you..." Helene went
on. "You believe everything you're told. You were told..."
Helene laughed, "that Dolokhov was my lover," she said
in French with her coarse plainness of speech, uttering the word
amant as casually as any other word, "and you believed it!
Well, what have you proved? What does this duel prove? That you're
a fool, que vous etes un sot, but everybody knew that. What will
be the result? That I shall be the laughingstock of all Moscow,
that everyone will say that you, drunk and not knowing what you
were about, challenged a man you are jealous of without cause."
Helene raised her voice and became more and more excited, "A
man who's a better man than you in every way..."
"Hm... Hm...!" growled Pierre, frowning without
looking at her, and not moving a muscle.
"And how could you believe he was my lover? Why? Because
I like his company? If you were cleverer and more agreeable, I
should prefer yours."
"Don't speak to me... I beg you," muttered Pierre
hoarsely.
"Why shouldn't I speak? I can speak as I like, and I
tell you plainly that there are not many wives with husbands such
as you who would not have taken lovers (des amants), but I have
not done so," said she.
Pierre wished to say something, looked at her with eyes whose
strange expression she did not understand, and lay down again.
He was suffering physically at that moment, there was a weight
on his chest and he could not breathe. He knew that he must do
something to put an end to this suffering, but what he wanted
to do was too terrible.
"We had better separate," he muttered in a broken
voice.
"Separate? Very well, but only if you give me a fortune,"
said Helene. "Separate! That's a thing to frighten me with!"
Pierre leaped up from the sofa and rushed staggering toward
her.
"I'll kill you!" he shouted, and seizing the marble
top of a table with a strength he had never before felt, he made
a step toward her brandishing the slab.
Helene's face became terrible, she shrieked and sprang aside.
His father's nature showed itself in Pierre. He felt the fascination
and delight of frenzy. He flung down the slab, broke it, and swooping
down on her with outstretched hands shouted, "Get out!"
in such a terrible voice that the whole house heard it with horror.
God knows what he would have done at that moment had Helene not
fled from the room.
A week later Pierre gave his wife full power to control all
his estates in Great Russia, which formed the larger part of his
property, and left for Petersburg alone.
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