War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [351]
“Elena Vassilievna, who has never loved anything except her own body, and is one of the stupidest women in the world,” thought Pierre, “appears to people as the height of intelligence and finesse, and they bow down to her. Napoleon Bonaparte was scorned by everyone as long as he was great, but now that he’s become a pathetic comedian, the emperor Franz seeks to offer him his daughter as an illegitimate wife.2 The Spanish offer up prayers to God through the Catholic clergy in thanksgiving for having defeated the French on the fourteenth of June, and the French offer up prayers through the same Catholic clergy for having defeated the Spanish on the fourteenth of June.3 My brother Masons swear in blood that they are ready to sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they won’t pay a single rouble into the collection for the poor and have Astrea intrigue against the Manna Seekers, and fuss over an authentic Scottish rug and about charters the meaning of which is unknown even to those who wrote them and which nobody needs.4 We all confess the Christian law of forgiveness of offenses and love of one’s neighbor, a law in consequence of which we have erected forty times forty churches in Moscow—but yesterday a deserter was flogged to death, and a priest, a servant of that same law of love and forgiveness, gave him the cross to kiss before the execution.” So Pierre reflected, and accustomed as he was to it, this whole general, universally acknowledged lie amazed him each time like something new. “I understand this lie and confusion,” he thought, “but how can I tell them all that I understand it? I’ve tried, and I’ve always found that in the depths of their souls, they understand the same thing I do, but they simply try not to see it. Therefore it must be so! But I, what am I to do with myself?” Pierre thought. He experienced the unfortunate ability of many people, especially Russians—the ability to see and believe in the possibility of goodness and truth, and to see the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to participate in it seriously. Every sphere of work was, in his eyes, bound up with evil and deceit. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he undertook—evil and falsehood repulsed him and barred him from all paths of activity. And yet he had to live, he had to keep busy. It was too frightening to be under the burden of all the insoluble questions of life, and he gave himself to the first amusements that came along, only so as to forget them. He frequented every possible society, drank heavily, bought paintings, built, but, above all, he read.
He read, he read everything that came to hand, so that, on coming home, while the footmen were still undressing him, he would take up a book and read—and from reading he would pass into sleep, and from sleep to chatter in drawing rooms and the club, from chatter to carousing and women, from carousing back to chatter, reading, and wine. Drinking wine became more and more of a physical and at the same time moral need for him. Though the doctors told him that, with his corpulence, wine was dangerous for him, he drank a great deal. He felt perfectly well only when, without noticing how, having poured several glasses of wine into his large mouth, he experienced a pleasant warmth in his body, an affection towards all his neighbors, and a mental readiness to respond superficially to every thought, without going deeply into its essence. Only when he had drunk a bottle or two of wine did he become dimly aware that the tangled, terrible knot of life, which had formerly terrified him, was not as frightening as it seemed to him. With a buzzing in his head, chattering, listening