War and Peace
insurmountably difficult. At the same time that he refused the colonel’s
demand he made up his mind that he must have recourse to artifice when
leaving Orël, to induce the Italian officer to accept some money of
which he was evidently in need. A further proof to Pierre of his own
more settled outlook on practical matters was furnished by his decision
with regard to his wife’s debts and to the rebuilding of his houses in
and near Moscow.
His head steward came to him at Orël and Pierre reckoned up with him his
diminished income. The burning of Moscow had cost him, according to the
head steward’s calculation, about two million rubles.
To console Pierre for these losses the head steward gave him an estimate
showing that despite these losses his income would not be diminished but
would even be increased if he refused to pay his wife’s debts which he
was under no obligation to meet, and did not rebuild his Moscow house
and the country house on his Moscow estate, which had cost him eighty
thousand rubles a year and brought in nothing.
“Yes, of course that’s true,” said Pierre with a cheerful smile. “I
don’t need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer.”
But in January Savélich came from Moscow and gave him an account of the
state of things there, and spoke of the estimate an architect had made
of the cost of rebuilding the town and country houses, speaking of this
as of a settled matter. About the same time he received letters from
Prince Vasíli and other Petersburg acquaintances speaking of his wife’s
debts. And Pierre decided that the steward’s proposals which had so
pleased him were wrong and that he must go to Petersburg and settle his
wife’s affairs and must rebuild in Moscow. Why this was necessary he
did not know, but he knew for certain that it was necessary. His income
would be reduced by three fourths, but he felt it must be done.
Willarski was going to Moscow and they agreed to travel together.
During the whole time of his convalescence in Orël Pierre had
experienced a feeling of joy, freedom, and life; but when during his
journey he found himself in the open world and saw hundreds of new
faces, that feeling was intensified. Throughout his journey he felt like
a schoolboy on holiday. Everyone—the stagecoach driver, the post-house
overseers, the peasants on the roads and in the villages—had a new
significance for him. The presence and remarks of Willarski who
continually deplored the ignorance and poverty of Russia and its
backwardness compared with Europe only heightened Pierre’s pleasure.
Where Willarski saw deadness Pierre saw an extraordinary strength and
vitality—the strength which in that vast space amid the snows maintained
the life of this original, peculiar, and unique people. He did not
contradict Willarski and even seemed to agree with him—an apparent
agreement being the simplest way to avoid discussions that could lead to
nothing—and he smiled joyfully as he listened to him.
CHAPTER XIV
It would be difficult to explain why and whither ants whose heap
has been destroyed are hurrying: some from the heap dragging bits of
rubbish, larvae, and corpses, others back to the heap, or why they
jostle, overtake one another, and fight, and it would be equally
difficult to explain what caused the Russians after the departure of the
French to throng to the place that had formerly been Moscow. But when
we watch the ants round their ruined heap, the tenacity, energy, and
immense number of the delving insects prove that despite the destruction
of the heap, something indestructible, which though intangible is the
real strength of the colony, still exists; and similarly, though in
Moscow in the month of October there was no government and no churches,
shrines, riches, or houses—it was still the Moscow it had been in
August. All was destroyed, except something intangible yet powerful and
indestructible.
The motives of those who thronged from all sides to Moscow after it had
been cleared of the enemy were most diverse and personal, and at first
for the most part savage and brutal. One motive only they all had in
common: a desire to get to the place that had been called Moscow, to
apply their activities there.
Within a week Moscow already had fifteen thousand inhabitants, in a
fortnight twenty-five thousand, and so on. By the autumn of 1813 the
number, ever increasing and increasing, exceeded what it had been in
1812.
The first Russians to enter Moscow were the Cossacks of Wintzingerode’s
detachment, peasants from the adjacent villages, and residents who had
fled from Moscow and had been hiding in its vicinity. The Russians who
entered Moscow, finding it plundered, plundered it in their turn. They
continued what the French had begun. Trains of peasant carts came to
Moscow to carry off to the villages what had been abandoned in the
ruined houses and the streets. The Cossacks carried off what they could
to their camps, and the householders seized all they could find in other
houses and moved it to their own, pretending that it was their property.
But the first plunderers were followed by a second and a third
contingent, and with increasing numbers plundering became more and more
difficult and assumed more definite forms.
The French found Moscow abandoned but with all the organizations of
regular life, with diverse branches of commerce and craftsmanship, with
luxury, and governmental and religious institutions. These forms were
lifeless but still existed. There were bazaars, shops, warehouses,
market stalls, granaries—for the most part still stocked with goods—and
there were factories and workshops, palaces and wealthy houses filled
with luxuries, hospitals, prisons, government offices, churches, and
cathedrals. The longer the French remained the more these forms of town
life perished, until finally all was merged into one confused, lifeless
scene of plunder.
The more the plundering by the French continued, the more both the
wealth of Moscow and the strength of its plunderers was destroyed. But
plundering by the Russians, with which the reoccupation of the city
began, had an opposite effect: the longer it continued and the greater
the number of people taking part in it the more rapidly was the wealth
of the city and its regular life restored.
Besides the plunderers, very various people, some drawn by curiosity,
some by official duties, some by self-interest—house owners, clergy,
officials of all kinds, tradesmen, artisans, and peasants—streamed into
Moscow as blood flows to the heart.
Within a week the peasants who came with empty carts to carry off
plunder were stopped by the authorities and made to cart the corpses
out of the town. Other peasants, having heard of their comrades’
discomfiture, came to town bringing rye, oats, and hay, and beat down
one another’s prices to below what they had been in former days. Gangs
of carpenters hoping for high pay arrived in Moscow every day, and on
all sides logs were being hewn, new houses built, and old, charred ones
repaired. Tradesmen began trading in booths. Cookshops and taverns were
opened in partially burned houses. The clergy resumed the services
in many churches that had not been burned. Donors contributed
Church property that had been stolen. Government clerks set up their
baize-covered tables and their pigeonholes of documents in small rooms.
The higher authorities and the police organized the distribution of
goods left behind by the French. The owners of houses in which much
property had been left, brought there from other houses, complained of
the injustice of taking everything to the Faceted Palace in the Krémlin;
others insisted that as the French had gathered things from different
houses into this or that house, it would be unfair to allow its owner to
keep all that was found there. They abused the police and bribed them,
made out estimates at ten times their value for government stores that
had perished in the fire, and demanded relief. And Count Rostopchín
wrote proclamations.
CHAPTER XV
At the end of January Pierre went to Moscow and stayed in an annex of
his house which had not been burned. He called on Count Rostopchín and
on some acquaintances who were back in Moscow, and he intended to leave
for Petersburg two days later. Everybody was celebrating the victory,
everything was bubbling with life in the ruined but reviving city.
Everyone was pleased to see Pierre, everyone wished to meet him, and
everyone questioned him about what he had seen. Pierre felt particularly
well disposed toward them all, but was now instinctively on his
guard for fear of binding himself in any way. To all questions put to
him—whether important or quite trifling—such as: Where would he live?
Was he going to rebuild? When was he going to Petersburg and would he
mind taking a parcel for someone?—he replied: “Yes, perhaps,” or, “I
think so,” and so on.
He had heard that the Rostóvs were at Kostromá but the thought of
Natásha seldom occurred to him. If it did it was only as a pleasant
memory of the distant past. He felt himself not only free from social
obligations but also from that feeling which, it seemed to him, he had
aroused in himself.
On the third day after his arrival he heard from the Drubetskóys that
Princess Mary was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days of
Prince Andrew had often occupied Pierre’s thoughts and now recurred to
him with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Mary
was in Moscow and living in her house—which had not been burned—in
Vozdvízhenka Street, he drove that same evening to see her.
On his way to the house Pierre kept thinking of Prince Andrew, of their
friendship, of his various meetings with him, and especially of the last
one at Borodinó.
“Is it possible that he died in the bitter frame of mind he was then in?
Is it possible that the meaning of life was not disclosed to him
before he died?” thought Pierre. He recalled Karatáev and his death and
involuntarily began to compare these two men, so different, and yet so
similar in that they had both lived and both died and in the love he
felt for both of them.
Pierre drove up to the house of the old prince in a most serious mood.
The house had escaped the fire; it showed signs of damage but its
general aspect was unchanged. The old footman, who met Pierre with a
stern face as if wishing to make the visitor feel that the absence
of the old prince had not disturbed the order of things in the house,
informed him that the princess had gone to her own apartments, and that
she received on Sundays.
“Announce me. Perhaps she will see me,” said Pierre.
“Yes, sir,” said the man. “Please step into the portrait gallery.”
A few minutes later the footman returned with Dessalles, who brought
word from the princess that she would be very glad to see Pierre if he
would excuse her want of ceremony and come upstairs to her apartment.
In a rather low room lit by one candle sat the princess and with her
another person dressed in black. Pierre remembered that the princess
always had lady companions, but who they were and what they were like
he never knew or remembered. “This must be one of her companions,” he
thought, glancing at the lady in the black dress.
The princess rose quickly to meet him and held out her hand.
“Yes,” she said, looking at his altered face after he had kissed her
hand, “so this is how we meet again. He spoke of you even at the very
last,” she went on, turning her eyes from Pierre to her companion with a
shyness that surprised him for an instant.
“I was so glad to hear of your safety. It was the first piece of good
news we had received for a long time.”
Again the princess glanced round at her companion with even more