who executed him--also for some reason.
What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does
one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power
governs all?"

There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not
a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: "You'll
die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking." But
dying was also dreadful.

The Torzhok peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her
wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. "I have hundreds of
rubles I don't know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered
cloak looking timidly at me," he thought. "And what does she want the
money for? As if that money could add a hair's breadth to happiness or
peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me less a prey
to evil and death?--death which ends all and must come today or
tomorrow--at any rate, in an instant as compared with eternity." And
again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, and again it turned
uselessly in the same place.

His servant handed him a half-cut novel, in the form of letters, by
Madame de Souza. He began reading about the sufferings and virtuous
struggles of a certain Emilie de Mansfeld. "And why did she resist her
seducer when she loved him?" he thought. "God could not have put into
her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife--as she once
was--did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found
out, nothing discovered," Pierre again said to himself. "All we can know
is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom."

Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and
repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre
found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.

"I make bold to ask your excellency to move a little for this
gentleman," said the postmaster, entering the room followed by another
traveler, also detained for lack of horses.

The newcomer was a short, large-boned, yellow-faced, wrinkled old
man, with gray bushy eyebrows overhanging bright eyes of an indefinite
grayish color.

Pierre took his feet off the table, stood up, and lay down on a bed that
had been got ready for him, glancing now and then at the newcomer, who,
with a gloomy and tired face, was wearily taking off his wraps with the
aid of his servant, and not looking at Pierre. With a pair of felt boots
on his