War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [492]
“Some prince’s cook…”
“Well, Mo’sieu, looks like Russian sauce is too sour for a Frenchman…sets his teeth on edge,” said a wrinkled clerk who was standing next to Pierre, when the Frenchman began to cry. The clerk looked around, evidently expecting his joke to be appreciated. Some laughed, some went on looking fearfully at the executioner, who was stripping the other man.
Pierre snuffed his nose, winced, and, turning around quickly, went back to the droshky, muttering to himself all the while as he walked, and got in. During the ride, he gave a start several times and cried out so loudly that the coachman asked him:
“What orders?”
“Where are you going?” Pierre cried out to the coachman, who was driving out to the Lubyanka.
“To the commander in chief’s, as you ordered,” replied the coachman.
“Fool! Brute!” cried Pierre, yelling at his coachman, which rarely happened with him. “Home, I told you; and drive quickly, blockhead. I must leave today,” Pierre said to himself.
At the sight of the punished Frenchman and the crowd surrounding the execution ground, Pierre had decided so definitively that he could no longer remain in Moscow and would go to the army the same day, that it seemed to him he had either told the coachman about it, or the coachman should have known it himself.
On returning home, Pierre told his all-knowing, all-capable coachman Evstafyich, familiar to the whole of Moscow, that he would go to the army in Mozhaisk that night and ordered his riding horses sent there. To do everything on the same day was impossible, and therefore, to Evstafyich’s mind, Pierre should postpone his departure until the next day, to leave time for the relay horses to get ahead of him.
On the twenty-fourth it cleared up after some bad weather, and that day, after dinner, Pierre left Moscow. During the night, while changing horses at Perkhushkovo, Pierre learned that there had been a major battle that evening. It was said that there in Perkhushkovo the ground shook from the cannon fire. To Pierre’s question of who had won, no one could give an answer. (This was the battle of the twenty-fourth at Shevardino.) At dawn Pierre was riding up to Mozhaisk.
All the houses in Mozhaisk were occupied by stationed troops, and at the inn, where Pierre was met by his groom and coachman, there were no places in the rooms: it was all filled with officers.
Everywhere in Mozhaisk and beyond Mozhaisk troops were camped or marching. Cossacks, foot soldiers, horse soldiers, wagons, caissons, cannon could be seen on all sides. Pierre was in a hurry to move on quickly, and the further he went from Moscow and the deeper he immersed himself in that sea of troops, the more he was overcome by anxious restlessness and a new joyful feeling he had never experienced before. This was a feeling similar to what he had experienced at the Slobodsky palace at the time of the sovereign’s arrival—a feeling of the need to undertake something and sacrifice something. He now experienced a pleasant sense of awareness that everything that constitutes people’s happiness, the comforts of life, wealth, even life itself, is nonsense, which it is pleasant to throw away, in comparison with something…With what, Pierre could not account for to himself, nor did he try to clarify to himself for whom and for what he found it so particularly delightful to sacrifice everything. He was not concerned with what he wanted to sacrifice it for, but the sacrificing itself constituted a new, joyful feeling for him.
XIX
On the twenty-fourth there was the battle at the Shevardino redoubt, on the twenty-fifth