War and peace ( Constance Garnett-1900)

‘It seems absurd to me,’ said Pierre, ‘that you, you consider yourself a failure, your life wrecked. You have everything, everything before you. And you . .

He did not say why you, but his tone showed how highly he thought of his friend, and how much he expected of him in the future.

‘How can he say that?’ Pierre thought.

Pierre regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all perfection, because Prince Andrey possessed in the highest degree just that combination of qualities in which Pierre was deficient, and which might be most nearly- expressed by the idea of strength of will. Pierre always marvelled at Prince Andrey’s faculty for dealing with people of every sort with perfect composure, his exceptional memory, his wide knowledge (he had read everything, knew everything, had some notion of everything), and most of all at his capacity for working and learning. If Pierre were frequently struck in Andrey by his lack of capacity for dreaming and philosophising (to which Pierre was himself greatly given), he did not regard this as a defect but as a strong point. Even in the very warmest, friendliest, and simplest relations, flattery or praise is needed just as grease is needed to keep wheels going round.

‘I am a man whose day is done,’ said Prince Andrey. ‘Why talk of me? let’s talk about you,’ he said after a brief pause, smiling at his own reassuring thoughts. The smile was instantly reflected on Pierre’s face.

‘Why, what is there to say about me?’ said Pierre, letting his face relax into an easy-going, happy smile. ‘What am I? I am a bastard.’ And he suddenly flushed crimson. Apparently it was a great effort to him to say this. ‘With no name, no fortune. . . . And after all, really . . .’ He did not finish. ’Meanwhile, I am free though and I’m content.

24 WARANDPEACE

Only I don’t know in the least what to set about doing. I meant to ask your advice in earnest.’

Prince Andrey looked at him with kindly eyes. But in his eyes, friendly and kind as they were, there was yet a'consciousness of his own superiority.

‘You are dear to me just because you are the one live person in all our society. You’re lucky. Choose what you will, that’s all the same. You’ll always be all right, but there’s one thing: give up going about with the Kuragins and leading this sort of life. It’s not the right thing for you at all; all this riotous living and dissipation and all . . .’

‘What would you have, my dear fellow?’ said Pierre, shrugging his shoulders; ‘women, my dear fellow, women.’

‘I can’t understand it,’ answered Andrey. ‘Ladies, that’s another matter, but Kuragin’s women, women and wine, I can’t understand!’

Pierre was living at Prince Vassily Kuragin’s, and sharing in the dissipated mode of life of his son Anatole, the son whom they were proposing to marry to Prince Andrey’s sister to reform him.

‘Do you know what,’ said Pierre, as though a happy thought had suddenly occurred to him; ‘seriously, I have been thinking so for a long while. Leading this sort of life I can’t decide on anything, or consider anything properly. My head aches and my money’s all gone. He invited me to-night, but I won’t go.’

‘Give me your word of honour that you will give up going.’

‘On my honour!’

It was past one o’clock when Pierre left his friend’s house. It was a cloudless night, a typical Petersburg summer night. Pierre got into a hired coach, intending to drive home. But the nearer he got, the more he felt it impossible to go to bed on such a night, more like evening or morning. It was light enough to see a long way in the empty streets. On the way Pierre remembered that all the usual gambling set were to meet at Anatole Kuragin’s that evening, after which there usually followed a drinking-bout, winding up with one of Pierre’s favourite entertainments.

‘It would be jolly to go to Kuragin’s,’ he thought. But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andrey not to go there again.

But, as so often happens with people of weak character, as it is called, he was at once overcome with such a passionate desire to enjoy once more this sort of dissipation which had become so familiar to him, that he determined to go. And the idea at once occurred to him that his promise was of no consequence, since he had already promised Prince Anatole to go before making the promise to Andrey. Finally he reflected that all such promises were merely relative matters, having no sort of precise significance, especially if one considered that to-morrow one might be dead or something so extraordinary might happen that the distinction between honourable and dishonourable would have ceased to

exist. Such reflections often occurred to Pierre, completely nullifying all his resolutions and intentions. He went to Kuragin’s.