War And Peace

Towards the end of Pierre’s stay in Oryol he was visited by an old acquaintance, Count Willarski, the freemason who had introduced him to the lodge in 1807. Willarski had married a Russian heiress with huge estates in the Oryol province, and he was temporarily employed in the town’s department of supplies.

As soon as Willarski heard that Bezukhov was in Oryol, even though they had never been particularly close, he called on him and displayed the kind of friendliness and intimacy normally reserved for people coming across one another in the desert. Willarski was bored with life in Oryol, and he was delighted to meet a man of his own circle who must surely share the same interests.

But Willarski was in for a surprise: he soon spotted that Pierre had opted out of real life and – as he saw it – descended into apathy and egoism.

‘You’re going to seed, old fellow,’ he said to him.

But for all that Willarski felt much more at ease with Pierre now than he had done in the past, and he came to see him every day. Pierre, for his part, watched Willarski and listened to him, finding it strange and incredible to think that not long ago he too had been like that.

Willarski was a married man with a family, busily occupied with the management of his wife’s property, the performance of his official duties and looking after his family. He regarded all these duties as an obstacle in his life; they were beneath contempt because their purpose was the welfare of himself and his family. His mind was permanently obsessed with military, administrative, political and masonic affairs. And without attempting to change this view or even criticizing it, Pierre watched the whole phenomenon – so strange and yet so familiar – with the smile of gentle, amused irony that had now become second nature to him.

There was a new aspect to Pierre’s relations with Willarski, the princess, the doctor and everyone he met nowadays that won them all over. This was an acknowledgement of everybody’s capacity to think and feel for himself, to see things his way; an acknowledgement of the impossibility of ever changing anybody’s mind by words. This individuality rightfully enjoyed by all people, something that had bothered Pierre and irritated him in earlier days, now formed the basis of the sympathetic interest he felt in other people. The disparities, sometimes the outright contradictions that existed between people’s views and the way they lived, and between one man and another, were a source of delight for Pierre, constantly bringing to his lips a gentle smile of amusement.

In practical affairs Pierre suddenly sensed that he now had a centre of gravity that had been missing before. Before, every monetary question, especially requests for money, which came his way all the time because he was a wealthy man, had always left him worried and perplexed, not knowing which way to turn. ‘To give, or not to give?’ he used to ask himself. ‘I have money and he needs it. But somebody else needs it more. Who needs it most? Maybe they’re both crooks?’ And in the old days he could never see any way out of all these speculations, so he ended up giving to all as long as he had money to give. In those days he had also had the same feeling of bafflement over every question that concerned his property, with one person telling him to do one thing and another recommending something different.

Nowadays, much to his own surprise, he found he had no more doubts or misgivings over any such questions. Now there was a judge within him determining what he must do and not do according to a set of laws of which he had no understanding. He was no more concerned about money matters than he had been before, but he was no longer troubled by doubts about what to do, or not do. The first assignment of this new judge sitting within him concerned a request from a prisoner, a French colonel, who called in one day, talked endlessly about his own splendid achievements, and ended up by issuing what amounted to a demand for four thousand francs to send to his wife and children. Pierre refused him effortlessly, without a qualm, and then wondered why something as easy and simple as this could once have seemed so impossibly difficult. And even as he refused the French colonel he made up his mind that when he left Oryol he would have to invent some subterfuge in order to induce the Italian officer to accept some money, which he obviously needed. A further demonstration to Pierre of his stronger grip on practical matters came with his resolution of two other issues: the problem of his wife’s debts and the question of rebuilding, or not rebuilding, his Moscow house and his out-of-town properties.