《War And Peace》　Book13 　CHAPTER XII
　　　　by Leo Tolstoy

FOUR WEEKS had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner. Although the
French had offered to transfer him from the common prisoners' shed to the
officers', he had remained in the same shed as at first.

In Moscow, wasted by fire and pillage, Pierre passed through hardships almost
up to the extreme limit of privation that a man can endure. But, owing to his
vigorous health and constitution, of which he had hardly been aware till then;
and still more, owing to the fact that these privations came upon him so
gradually that it was impossible to say when they began, he was able to support
his position, not only with ease, but with positivegladness. And it was just at
this time that he attained that peace and content with himself, for which he had
always striven in vain before. For long years of his life he had been seeking in
various directions for that peace, that harmony with himself, which had struck
him so much in the soldiers at Borodino. He had sought for it in philanthropy,
in freemasonry, in the dissipations of society, in wine, in heroic feats of
self-sacrifice, in his romantic love for Natasha; he had sought it by the path
of thought; and all his researches and all his efforts had failed him. And now
without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with
himself simply through the horror of death, through hardships, through what he
had seen in Karataev. Those fearful moments that he had lived through during the
execution had, as it were, washed for ever from his imagination and his memory
the disturbing ideas and feelings that had once seemed to him so important. No
thought came to him of Russia, of the war, of politics, or of Napoleon. It
seemed obvious to him that all that did not concern him, that he was not called
upon and so was not able to judge of all that. "Russia and summer never do well
together," he repeated Karataev's words, and those words soothed him strangely.
His project of killing Napoleon, and his calculations of the cabalistic numbers,
and of the beast of the Apocalypse struck him now as incomprehensible and
positively ludicrous. His anger with his wife, and his dread of his name being
disgraced by her, seemed to him trivial and amusing. What business of his was
it, if that woman chose to lead somewhere away from him the life that suited her
tastes? What did it matter to any one-least of all to him-whether they found out
or not that their prisoner's name was Count Bezuhov?

He often thought now of his conversation with Prince Andrey, and agreed fully
with his friend, though he put a somewhat different construction on his meaning.
Prince Andrey had said and thought that happiness is only negative, but he had
said this with a shade of bitterness and irony. It was as though in saying this
he had expressed another thought-that all the strivings towards positive
happiness, that are innate in us, were only given us for our torment. But Pierre
recognised the truth of the main idea with no such undercurrent of feeling. The
absence of suffering, the satisfaction of needs, and following upon that,
freedom in the choice of occupation, that is, of one's manner of life, seemed to
Pierre the highest and most certain happiness of man. Only here and now for the
first time in his life Pierre fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he
was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleep when he was sleepy, of
warmth when he was cold, of talking to a fellow creature when he wanted to talk
and to hear men's voices. The satisfaction of his needs-good food, cleanliness,
freedom-seemed to Pierre now that he was deprived of them to be perfect
happiness; and the choice of his occupation, that is, of his manner of life now
that that choice was so limited, seemed to him such an easy matter that he
forgot that a superfluity of the conveniences of life destroys all happiness in
satisfying the physical needs, while a great freedom in the choice of
occupation, that freedom which education, wealth, and position in society had
given him, makes the choice of occupations exceedingly difficult, and destroys
the very desire and possibility of occupation.

All Pierre's dreams now turned to the time when he would be free. And yet, in
all his later life, Pierre thought and spoke with enthusiasm of that month of
imprisonment, of those intense and joyful sensations that could never be
recalled, and above all of that full, spiritual peace, of that perfect, inward
freedom, of which he had only experience at that period.

On the first day, when, getting up early in the morning, he came out of the
shed into the dawn, and saw the cupolas and the crosses of the New Monastery of
the Virgin, all still in darkness, saw the hoar frost on the long grass, saw the
slopes of the Sparrow Hills and the wood-clad banks of the encircling river
vanishing into the purple distance, when he felt the contact of the fresh air
and heard the sounds of the rooks crying out of Moscow across the fields, and
when flashes of light suddenly gleamed out of the east and the sun's rim floated
triumphantly up from behind a cloud, and cupolas and crosses and hoar frost and
the horizon and the river were all sparkling in the glad light, Pierre felt a
new feeling of joy and vigour in life such as he had never experienced
before.

And that feeling had not left him during the whole period of his
imprisonment, but on the contrary had gone on growing in him as the hardships of
his position increased.

That feeling-of being ready for anything, of moral alertness-was strengthened
in Pierre by the high opinion in which he began to be held by his companions
very soon after he entered the shed. His knowledge of languages, the respect
shown him by the French, the good-nature with which he gave away anything he was
asked for (he received the allowance of three roubles a week, given to officers
among the prisoners), the strength he showed in driving nails into the wall, the
gentleness of his behaviour to his companions, and his capacity-which seemed to
him mysterious-of sitting stockstill doing nothing and plunged in thought, all
made him seem to the soldiers a rather mysterious creature of a higher order.
The very peculiarities that in the society he had previously lived in had been a
source of embarrassment, if not of annoyance-his strength, his disdain for the
comforts of life, his absent-mindedness, his good-nature-here among these men
gave him the prestige almost of a hero. And Pierre felt that their view of him
brought its duties.