War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [731]
XIX
In Pierre’s soul now nothing went on like what had gone on in it under similar circumstances during his engagement to Hélène.
He did not repeat, as then, with morbid shame, the words he had spoken, did not say to himself: “Ah, why didn’t I say it, and why, why did I say ‘je vous aime’ then?” Now, on the contrary, he repeated in his imagination every word of hers, of his, with all the details of her face and smile, and did not want either to add or subtract: he wanted only to repeat. There was now not the shadow of a doubt whether what he was undertaking was good or bad. Only one terrible doubt sometimes entered his head: “Isn’t it all a dream? Isn’t Princess Marya mistaken? Am I not too proud and presumptuous? I believe her; but what if suddenly, as is bound to happen, Princess Marya tells her, and she smiles and says: ‘How strange! He’s certainly mistaken. Doesn’t he know that he is a man, simply a man, while I?…I am quite a different, higher being?’”
That was the only doubt that often came to Pierre. He also did not make any plans now. The happiness awaiting him seemed so incredible, that it needed only to come about, and there could be nothing after it. Everything ended there.
A joyful, unexpected madness, of which Pierre considered himself incapable, came over him. The whole meaning of life, not only for him, but for all the world, seemed to him to consist only in his love and the possibility of her love for him. Sometimes all people seemed to him to be occupied with only one thing—his future happiness. It sometimes seemed to him that they were all rejoicing as he was, and only tried to conceal their joy, pretending to be occupied with other interests. In every word and movement he saw hints at his happiness. He often surprised people who met him by his significant happy glances and smiles, expressive of a secret complicity. But when he realized that people could not know of his happiness, he pitied them with all his heart and felt a desire to explain to them somehow that everything they were occupied with was completely nonsensical and trifling, not worthy of attention.
When they offered him a post in the service or discussed some general matters of state and the war, supposing that the happiness of all people depended on this or that outcome of events, he listened with a meek, condoling smile and surprised the people who spoke to him with his odd remarks. But both those people who seemed to Pierre to understand the real meaning of life, that is, his feeling, and those unfortunates who obviously did not understand it—all people in that period of time appeared to him in such a bright light of the feeling shining within him, that without the least effort, meeting any person whatever, he at once saw in him all that was good and worthy of love.
In examining his late wife’s business affairs and papers, he experienced no feeling for her memory, except pity that she had not known the happiness he knew now. Prince Vassily, especially proud now of his new post and star, appeared to him a touching, kind, and pathetic old man.
Later Pierre often remembered that time of happy insanity. All the judgments of people and circumstances he formed for himself in that period of time remained forever true for him. He not only did not subsequently renounce those views of people and things, but, on the contrary, in inner doubt and contradiction he would resort to the views he had had in that time of insanity, and those views always turned out to be correct.
“Maybe I did seem strange and ridiculous then,” he thought, “but I wasn’t as insane as I seemed. On the contrary, I was more intelligent and perceptive then than ever, and I understood everything that’s worth understanding in life, because…I was happy.”
Pierre’s insanity consisted in the fact that he did not wait, as before, for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order