states he had not before visited were each more picturesque
than the other; the serfs everywhere seemed thriving and touchingly
grateful for the benefits conferred on them. Everywhere were receptions,
which though they embarrassed Pierre awakened a joyful feeling in the
depth of his heart. In one place the peasants presented him with bread
and salt and an icon of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, asking permission,
as a mark of their gratitude for the benefits he had conferred on them,
to build a new chantry to the church at their own expense in honor
of Peter and Paul, his patron saints. In another place the women with
infants in arms met him to thank him for releasing them from hard
work. On a third estate the priest, bearing a cross, came to meet
him surrounded by children whom, by the count's generosity, he was
instructing in reading, writing, and religion. On all his estates Pierre
saw with his own eyes brick buildings erected or in course of erection,
all on one plan, for hospitals, schools, and almshouses, which were soon
to be opened. Everywhere he saw the stewards' accounts, according to
which the serfs' manorial labor had been diminished, and heard the
touching thanks of deputations of serfs in their full-skirted blue
coats.

What Pierre did not know was that the place where they presented him
with bread and salt and wished to build a chantry in honor of Peter and
Paul was a market village where a fair was held on St. Peter's day,
and that the richest peasants (who formed the deputation) had begun
the chantry long before, but that nine tenths of the peasants in that
villages were in a state of the greatest poverty. He did not know that
since the nursing mothers were no longer sent to work on his land, they
did still harder work on their own land. He did not know that the priest
who met him with the cross oppressed the peasants by his exactions, and
that the pupils' parents wept at having to let him take their children
and secured their release by heavy payments. He did not know that the
brick buildings, built to plan, were being built by serfs whose manorial
labor was thus increased, though lessened on paper. He did not know that
where the steward had shown him in the accounts that the serfs' payments
had been diminished by a third, their obligatory manorial work had been
increased by a half. And so Pierre was delighted with his visit to his
estates and quite recovered the philanthropic mood in which he had left
Pet