War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (best e books to read .TXT) 📖

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. 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 Márya was in Moscow. The death, sufferings, and last days of Prince Andréy had often occupied Pierre’s thoughts and now recurred to him with fresh vividness. Having heard at dinner that Princess Márya 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 Andréy, 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 uneasiness in her manner and was about to add something, but Pierre interrupted her.

“Just imagine⁠—I knew nothing about him!” said he. “I thought he had been killed. All I know I heard at second hand from others. I only know that he fell in with the Rostóvs.⁠ ⁠… What a strange coincidence!”

Pierre spoke rapidly and with animation. He glanced once at the companion’s face, saw her attentive and kindly gaze fixed on him, and, as often happens when one is talking, felt somehow that this companion in the black dress was a good, kind, excellent creature who would not hinder his conversing freely with Princess Márya.

But when he mentioned the Rostóvs, Princess Márya’s face expressed still greater embarrassment. She again glanced rapidly from Pierre’s face to that of the lady