War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [434]
XIX
Since the day when Pierre, leaving the Rostovs’ and remembering Natasha’s grateful eyes, had looked at the comet that hung in the sky, and had felt that something new had been revealed to him—the question that eternally tormented him about the vanity and folly of all earthly things had stopped presenting itself to him. That terrible question—“Why? What for?”—which used to present itself to him amidst every occupation, was now replaced for him not by another question and not by the answer to the old question, but by her image. Listening to a trivial conversation, or engaged in one himself, or reading, or learning about the baseness and senselessness of people, he was not horrified as he used to be; he did not ask himself why people made a fuss, if everything was so brief and unknown, but he remembered her the way he had seen her the last time, and all his doubts vanished, not because she answered the questions that presented themselves to him, but because her image immediately transferred him to a different, bright realm of inner activity, in which no one could be right or wrong, into a realm of beauty and love for which it was worth living. Whatever vileness of life presented itself to him, he said to himself:
“Well, let so-and-so steal from the state and the tsar, and the state and the tsar confer honors on him; but yesterday she smiled at me and asked me to come, and I love her, and nobody will ever know it,” he thought.
Pierre still went into society, still drank as much and led the same idle and dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the Rostovs’, he had the rest of the time to spend, and the habits and acquaintances he had acquired in Moscow drew him irresistibly to the life he was caught up in. But lately, when ever more alarming rumors kept coming from the theater of war, and Natasha’s health began to improve, and she ceased to arouse in him the former feeling of protective pity, an anxiety he found more and more incomprehensible began to come over him. He felt that the situation in which he found himself could not continue for long, that a catastrophe was coming which was bound to change his whole life, and he impatiently sought signs of this approaching catastrophe in everything. One of his brother Masons revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon and derived from the Apocalypse of St. John.30
In the Apocalypse, chapter 13, verse 18, it was said: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”
And in verse 5 of the same chapter: “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”
French letters, given numerical values like the Hebrew, in which the first nine letters represent units, and the rest tens, will have the following significance:
Writing the words l’empereur Napoléon in this alphabet of numbers, it turns out that the sum of the figures equals 666 and that Napoleon is therefore that beast prophesied in the Apocalypse. Moreover, if the word quarante-deux, that is, the term fixed for the beast “to speak great things and blasphemies,” is written in the same alphabet, the sum of these figures representing quarante-deux again equals 666, from which it follows that the term of Napoleon’s power was reached in the year 1812, when the French emperor turned forty-two. Pierre was very struck by this prophecy, and he often posed the question for himself of precisely what would set a limit to the power of the beast, that is, of Napoleon, and on the basis of the same correspondence of word numbers and calculations, he tried to find an answer to his question. In answer to the question, Pierre wrote out: L’empereur Alexandre? La nation russe? He counted up the letters, but the sum of the numbers came out much larger or smaller than 666. Once, taken up with these calculations,