raise because on that same fourteenth of June
they defeated the Spaniards. My brother Masons swear by the blood that
they are ready to sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they
do not give a ruble each to the collections for the poor, and they
intrigue, the Astraea Lodge against the Manna Seekers, and fuss about an
authentic Scotch carpet and a charter that nobody needs, and the meaning
of which the very man who wrote it does not understand. We all profess
the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors,
the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty
churches--but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister
of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a
cross to kiss before his execution." So thought Pierre, and the whole of
this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to
it, astonished him each time as if it were something new. "I understand
the deception and confusion," he thought, "but how am I to tell them
all that I see? I have tried, and have always found that they too in the
depths of their souls understand it as I do, and only try not to see
it. So it appears that it must be so! But I--what is to become of
me?" thought he. He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially
Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness
and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly
to be able to take a serious part in it. Every sphere of work was
connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to
be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him
and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and to find
occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these
insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order
to forget them. He frequented every kind of society, drank much, bought
pictures, engaged in building, and above all--read.

He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, while
his valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book and
began to read. From reading he passed to sleeping, from sleeping to
gossip in drawing rooms of the Club, from gossip to carousals and women;
from carousals back to gossip, reading, and wine. Drinking became more
and more a physical and also a moral necessity. Though the doctors
warned him that with his corpulence wine was dangerous for h