War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [392]
Pierre, too, following her, almost ran out to the front hall, holding back the tears of tenderness and happiness that choked him, put on his coat, missing the sleeves, and got into the sleigh.
“Where to now, sir?” asked the coachman.
“Where to?” Pierre asked himself. “Where can I go now? Not to the club or to pay visits.” All people seemed so pitiful, so poor in comparison with the feeling of tenderness and love he experienced, in comparison with that softened, grateful glance she had given him at the last moment through her tears.
“Home,” said Pierre, throwing open the bearskin coat on his broad, joyfully breathing chest, despite the ten degrees of frost.
It was cold and clear. Above the dirty, semi-dark streets, above the black roofs, stood the dark, starry sky. Only looking at the sky did Pierre not feel the insulting baseness of everything earthly compared with the height his soul had risen to. At the entrance to Arbat Square, the huge expanse of the dark, starry night opened out to Pierre’s eyes. Almost in the middle of that sky, over Prechistensky Boulevard, stood the huge, bright comet of the year 1812—surrounded, strewn with stars on all sides, but different from them in its closeness to the earth, its white light and long, raised tail—that same comet which presaged, as they said, all sorts of horrors and the end of the world. But for Pierre this bright star with its long, luminous tail did not arouse any frightening feeling. On the contrary, Pierre, his eyes wet with tears, gazed joyfully at this bright star, which, having flown with inexpressible speed through immeasurable space on its parabolic course, suddenly, like an arrow piercing the earth, seemed to have struck here its one chosen spot in the black sky and stopped, its tail raised energetically, its white light shining and playing among the countless other shimmering stars. It seemed to Pierre that this star answered fully to what was in his softened and encouraged soul, now blossoming into new life.
Part One
I
Since the end of the year 1811 an intense arming and concentration of western European forces had begun, and in the year 1812 those forces—millions of men (including those who transported and fed the army)—moved from west to east, to the borders of Russia, towards which, since the year 1811, the forces of Russia had been drawn in exactly the same way. On the twelfth of June, the forces of western Europe crossed the borders of Russia, and war began—that is, an event took place contrary to human reason and to the whole of human nature. Millions of people committed against each other such a countless number of villainies, deceptions, betrayals, thefts, forgeries and distributions of false banknotes, robberies, arsons, and murders as the annals of all the law courts in the world could not assemble in whole centuries, and which, at that period of time, the people who committed them did not look upon as crimes.
What produced this extraordinary event? What were its causes? Historians say with naïve assurance that the causes of this event were the offense inflicted upon the duke of Oldenburg, the non-observance of the Continental System,1 Napoleon’s love of power, Alexander’s firmness, diplomatic mistakes, and so on.
Consequently, it needed only that Metternich, Rumyantsev, or Talleyrand, between levee and rout, make a little better effort and write a more skillful dispatch, or that Napoleon write to Alexander: Monsieur, mon frère, je consens à rendre le duché au duc d’Oldenbourg*390 —and there would have been no war.
Understandably, that was how the matter presented itself to contemporaries. Understandably, it seemed to Napoleon that the war was caused by the intrigues of England (as he said, in fact, on the island of St. Helena2); understandably, to the members of the English Parliament it seemed that the war was caused by Napoleon’s love of power; to Prince Oldenburg it seemed that the war was caused by the violence done him; to the merchants it seemed that the war was caused