War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [350]
Benefit performances, bad paintings and statues, philanthropic societies, Gypsies, schools, subscription dinners, carousing, the Masons, churches, books—no one and nothing met with refusal, and had it not been for two friends of his, who had borrowed a good deal of money from him and taken him under their tutelage, he would have given everything away. No evening or dinner at the club could do without him. As soon as he dropped into his place on the sofa after two bottles of Margaux, he was surrounded, and the talk, arguments, and jokes began. Where people quarreled, he—merely by his kindly smile and an appropriately uttered joke—made peace. Dinners at the Masonic lodges were dull and sluggish if he was not there.
When, after a bachelor supper, with a sweet and kindly smile, yielding to the entreaties of the merry company, he got up to go with them, joyful, triumphant cries came from the young men. At balls he danced, if there was a need for partners. The young ladies and girls liked him, because, without paying court to anyone, he was equally amiable with them all, especially after supper. “Il est charmant, il n’a pas de sexe,”*358 they said of him.
Pierre was one of those retired gentlemen-in-waiting of whom there were hundreds good-naturedly living out their lives in Moscow.
How horrified he would have been if, seven years ago, when he had just come from abroad, someone had told him that there was no need to seek or invent anything, that his rut had long been carved out for him and determined from all eternity, and that, however he twisted and turned, he would be that which everybody was in his position. He could not have believed it. Had he not wished with all his soul to establish a republic in Russia, then to become a Napoleon himself, a philosopher, a tactician, the defeater of Napoleon? Had he not seen the possibility and passionately wished to transform depraved mankind and bring his own self to the highest degree of perfection? Had he not established schools and hospitals and liberated his peasants?
But instead of all that, here he was—the rich husband of an unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, who liked to eat, drink, and, unbuttoning himself, to denounce the government a little, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universally beloved member of Moscow society. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to the thought that he was that very same retired Moscow gentleman-in-waiting the type of which he had so deeply despised seven years ago.
He sometimes comforted himself with the thought that he happened to be leading this life just so, in the meantime; but then he would be horrified by another thought, that it was just so, in the meantime, that so many people had entered this life, this club, as he had, with all their teeth and hair, and come out of it with not a single tooth or hair left.
In moments of pride, when he thought of his position, it seemed to him that he was quite different, distinct from those retired gentlemen-in-waiting whom he had formerly despised, that they were banal and stupid, content and at peace in their position, “while I am not at all content even now, and keep wanting to do something for mankind,” he said to himself in moments of pride. “And maybe all these comrades of mine struggled just like me, sought some new path of their own in life, and, just like me, by force of circumstances, society, breeding, by that elemental force against which man is powerless, were brought to where I am now,” he said to himself in moments of modesty, and, having lived in Moscow for a time, he no longer despised, but was beginning to love, respect, and pity his comrades in fate as he did himself.
Pierre was not, as formerly, overcome by moments of despair, spleen, and loathing for life; but the same illness that formerly expressed itself in abrupt fits was now driven inside and never