War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [582]
“Your Excellency, this way…Where are you going?…This way, please,” a trembling, frightened voice said behind him. Count Rastopchin was unable to make any reply and, turning obediently, went where he was told. A caleche was standing by the back entrance. The distant noise of the roaring crowd was heard there, too. Count Rastopchin hurriedly got into the caleche and ordered that he be taken to his country house in Sokolniki. Driving out to Myasnitskaya and no longer hearing the cries of the crowd, the count began to have regrets. He now recalled with displeasure the agitation and fear he had shown before his subordinates. “La populace est terrible, elle est hideuse,” he thought in French. “Ils sont comme les loups qu’on ne peut apaiser qu’avec de la chair.”*552 “Count! there is one God over us!” he suddenly remembered Vereshchagin’s words, and an unpleasant sensation of chill ran down Count Rastopchin’s spine. But the sensation was momentary, and Count Rastopchin smiled scornfully at himself. “J’avais d’autres devoirs,” he thought. “Il fallait apaiser le peuple. Bien d’autres victimes ont peri et perissent pour le bien publique,”†553 and he began to think about those general responsibilities he had in relation to his family, to his (entrusted to him) capital, and about himself—not as Fyodor Vassilievich Rastopchin (he supposed that Fyodor Vassilievich Rastopchin had sacrificed himself for the bien publique), but as commander in chief, representative of the authorities, and the tsar’s plenipotentiary. “If I were merely Fyodor Vassilievich, ma ligne de conduite aurait été tout autrement tracée,‡554 but I had to preserve the life and dignity of the commander in chief.”
Rocking slightly on the soft springs of his caleche and no longer hearing the dreadful sounds of the crowd, Rastopchin calmed down physically and, as always happens, simultaneously with physical calm, his mind also devised causes for him to be morally calm. The thought that calmed Rastopchin was not new. As long as the world has existed and people have been killing each other, no one man has ever committed a crime upon his own kind without calming himself with this same thought. This thought was le bien publique, the supposed good of other people.
For a man not gripped by passion, that good is never known; but the man who commits the crime always knows for certain what that good consists in. And Rastopchin now knew it.
In his reasoning he not only did not reproach himself for his action, but even found cause for self-satisfaction in having been able to make use so successfully of this à propos*555 —to punish the criminal and at the same time calm the crowd.
“Vereshchagin was tried and sentenced to death,” thought Rastopchin (though the Senate had only sentenced Vereshchagin to hard labor). “He was a traitor and a turncoat; I couldn’t let him go unpunished, and besides je faisais d’une pierre deux coups;†556 for the sake of calm I gave the people a victim and punished a villain.”
On reaching his country house and busying himself with household instructions, the count became perfectly calm.
Half an hour later, the count was driving with fast horses across the Sokolniki field, no longer recalling what had happened, and thinking and considering only what was going to happen. He was now driving to the Yauzsky bridge, where he had been told Kutuzov was. Count Rastopchin was preparing in his imagination those wrathful and stinging reproaches he would make to Kutuzov for his deception. He would give that old fox of a courtier to feel that the responsibility for all the misfortunes that would proceed from the abandoning of the capital, from the ruin of Russia (as Rastopchin thought), would lie solely on his old, senile head.