War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [588]
It was that feeling on account of which a volunteer recruit drinks up his last kopeck, a man on a drunken binge smashes mirrors and windows without any apparent reason and knowing that it will cost him his last penny; that feeling on account of which a man does (in the banal sense) insane things, as if testing his personal power and strength, claiming the presence of a higher judgment over life, which stands outside human conventions.
From that very day when Pierre had experienced this feeling for the first time in the Slobodsky palace, he had been constantly under its influence, but only now had found full satisfaction for it. Besides, at the present moment Pierre was supported in his intention and deprived of the possibility of renouncing it by what he had already done along that path. His flight from home, and his kaftan, and his pistol, and his declaration to the Rostovs that he would stay in Moscow—all this would not only lose its meaning, but would become contemptible and ridiculous (to which Pierre was sensitive), if, after all that, he left Moscow like everybody else.
Pierre’s physical state, as always happens, coincided with his moral state. The unaccustomed, coarse food, the vodka he had been drinking during those days, the absence of wine and cigars, dirty, unchanged linen, two half-sleepless nights spent on a short sofa without bedding—all this kept Pierre in a state of irritation close to insanity.
It was already past one o’clock in the afternoon. The French were already entering Moscow. Pierre knew it, but instead of acting, he thought only about his undertaking, going through all its minutest future details. In his reveries, Pierre did not picture vividly to himself either the process of striking the blow itself or the death of Napoleon, but with extraordinary clarity and sad enjoyment pictured to himself his own destruction and his heroic courage.
“Yes, one for all, I must do it or perish!” he thought. “Yes, I’ll go up…and then suddenly…Will it be a pistol or a dagger?” Pierre wondered. “However, it makes no difference. It is not I but the hand of Providence that punishes you, I’ll say” (Pierre thought of the words he would utter as he killed Napoleon). “Well, so take me, punish me,” Pierre went on saying to himself with a sad but firm expression on his face, bowing his head.
While Pierre stood in the middle of the room reasoning thus with himself, the door of the study opened and on the threshold appeared the totally transformed figure of the previously always timid Makar Alexeevich. His dressing gown hung open. His face was red and hideous. He was obviously drunk. Seeing Pierre, he was embarrassed at first, but, noticing embarrassment on Pierre’s face, too, he at once took heart and, on staggering, thin legs, stepped into the middle of the room.
“They’ve turned coward,” he said in a hoarse, trustful voice. “I say no surrender, I say…isn’t it so, sir?” He reflected and suddenly, seeing the pistol on the table, seized it with unexpected swiftness and ran out to the corridor.
Gerasim and the yard porter, who followed Makar Alexeevich, stopped him in the front hall and tried to take the pistol from him. Pierre came out to the corridor and, with pity and revulsion, looked at this half-crazy old man. Makar Alexeich, wincing with the effort, clutched the pistol and cried out in a hoarse voice, clearly imagining something solemn to himself.
“To arms! Board ’em! No, you won’t take it!” he cried.
“Enough, please, enough. Be so kind, please, leave off. Well, if you please, master…” Gerasim was saying, cautiously trying to steer Makar Alexeich towards the door by the elbows.