and were free, I would this moment
ask on my knees for your hand and your love!"

For the first time for many days Natasha wept tears of gratitude and
tenderness, and glancing at Pierre she went out of the room.

Pierre too when she had gone almost ran into the anteroom, restraining
tears of tenderness and joy that choked him, and without finding the
sleeves of his fur cloak threw it on and got into his sleigh.

"Where to now, your excellency?" asked the coachman.

"Where to?" Pierre asked himself. "Where can I go now? Surely not to the
Club or to pay calls?" All men seemed so pitiful, so poor, in comparison
with this feeling of tenderness and love he experienced: in comparison
with that softened, grateful, last look she had given him through her
tears.

"Home!" said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost Fahrenheit
he threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and inhaled the
air with joy.

It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the
black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky
did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane
things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.
At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark starry
sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the
Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars
but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white
light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant
comet of 1812--the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes
and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long
luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed
joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having
traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable
space, seemed suddenly--like an arrow piercing the earth--to remain
fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and
displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It
seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in
his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.

BOOK NINE: 1812

CHAPTER I

From the close of the year 1811 intensified arming and concentrating of
the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces--millions
of m