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the feasting men from a distance. Painful work was going on in his mind, which he could not bring to an end. Terrible doubts arose in his soul. Now he remembered Denisov with his changed expression, his submission, and the whole hospital with those torn-off arms and legs, that filth and disease. He imagined so vividly now that hospital stench of dead flesh that he looked around to see where the stench could be coming from. Then he remembered that self-satisfied Bonaparte with his white little hand, who was now an emperor, whom the emperor Alexander liked and respected. Why, then, those torn-off arms and legs, those dead people? Then he remembered the rewarded Lazarev and Denisov punished and unforgiven. He caught himself in such strange thoughts that it made him frightened.

The smell of the Preobrazhenskys’ food and his own hunger brought him out of that state: he had to eat something before he left. He went to the inn he had noticed in the morning. In the inn he found so many people and officers who had come, as he had, in civilian dress, that he had a hard time getting dinner. Two officers of his division joined him. The conversation naturally turned to the peace. The officers, Rostov’s comrades, like the greater part of the army, were displeased with the peace concluded after Friedland. They said that if we had held out a little longer, Napoleon would have been done for, that there were no biscuits or shot left in his army. Nikolai ate silently and mostly drank. He drank two bottles of wine by himself. The inner work that had arisen in him, not being resolved, still pained him. He was afraid to give himself to his thoughts and yet could not get rid of them. Suddenly, to the words of one of the officers, that it was offensive to look at the French, Rostov began shouting with a vehemence that was in no way justified and therefore surprised the officers very much.

“And how can you judge what would have been better!” he shouted, his face suddenly suffused with blood. “How can you judge the sovereign’s actions, what right have we to discuss it?! We can understand neither the goals nor the actions of the sovereign!”

“But I didn’t say a word about the sovereign,” the officer defended himself, unable to explain Rostov’s outburst otherwise than by his being drunk.

But Rostov was not listening.

“We’re not diplomatic officials, we’re soldiers and nothing more,” he went on. “We’re told to die—and we die. If we’re punished, it means we’re guilty; it’s not for us to judge. If it pleases the sovereign emperor to recognize Bonaparte as emperor and conclude an alliance with him—it means it has to be so. And if we start judging and reasoning about everything, then there’ll be nothing sacred left. Next we’ll be saying there’s no God, no anything,” shouted Nikolai, banging the table, quite inappropriately in his interlocutors’ opinion, but quite in keeping with his own train of thought.

“Our business is to do our duty, to cut and slash, not to think, that’s all,” he concluded.

“And to drink,” said one of the officers, unwilling to quarrel.

“Yes, and to drink,” Nikolai picked up. “Hey, you! Another bottle!” he shouted.

Part Three

I

In 1808 the emperor Alexander went to Erfurt for a new meeting with the emperor Napoleon, and there was much talk in Petersburg high society about the grandeur of this solemn meeting.1

In 1809 the closeness of the two rulers of the world, as Napoleon and Alexander were called, had reached the point that, when Napoleon declared war on Austria that year, a Russian corps went abroad to assist their former enemy, Bonaparte, against their former ally, the Austrian emperor, and there was talk in high circles about the possibility of marriage between Napoleon and one of the emperor Alexander’s sisters. But, besides considerations of foreign policy, the attention of Russian society at that time was turned with particular keenness to the internal reforms that were then being carried out in all parts of the government.

Life meanwhile, people’s real life with its essential concerns of health, illness, work,