Emma Watson Pussy
Books:
Anna Karenina
War And Peace
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brothers.
CHAPTER VI
Pierre had of late rarely seen his wife alone. Both in Petersburg
and in Moscow their house was always full of visitors. The night after
the duel he did not go to his bedroom but, as he often did, remained
in his fathers room, that huge room in which Count Bezukhov had died.
He lay down on the sofa meaning to fall asleep and forget all that
had happened to him, but could not do so. Such a storm of feelings,
thoughts, and memories suddenly arose within him that he could not
fall asleep, nor even remain in one place, but had to jump up and pace
the room with rapid steps. Now he seemed to see her in the early
days of their marriage, with bare shoulders and a languid,
passionate look on her face, and then immediately he saw beside her
Dolokhovs handsome, insolent, hard, and mocking face as he had seen
it at the banquet, and then that same face pale, quivering, and
suffering, as it had been when he reeled and sank on the snow.
"What has happened?" he asked himself. "I have killed her lover,
yes, killed my wifes lover. Yes, that was it! And why? How did I come
to do it?"--"Because you married her," answered an inner voice.
"But in what was I to blame?" he asked. "In marrying her without
loving her; in deceiving yourself and her." And he vividly recalled
that moment after supper at Prince Vasilis, when he spoke those words
he had found so difficult to utter: "I love you." "It all comes from
that! Even then I felt it," he thought. "I felt then that it was not
so, that I had no right to do it. And so it turns out."
He remembered his honeymoon and blushed at the recollection.
Particularly vivid, humiliating, and shameful was the recollection
of how one day soon after his marriage he came out of the bedroom into
his study a little before noon in his silk dressing gown and found his
head steward there, who, bowing respectfully, looked into his face and
at his dressing gown and smiled slightly, as if expressing
respectful understanding of his employers happiness.
"But how often I have felt proud of her, proud of her majestic
beauty and social tact," thought he; "been proud of my house, in
which she received all Petersburg, proud of her unapproachability and
beauty. So this is what I was proud of! I then thought that I did
not understand her. How often when considering her character I have
told myself that I was to blame for not understanding her, for not
understanding that constant composure and complacency and lack of
all interests or desires, and the whole secret lies in the terrible
truth that she is a depraved woman. Now I have spoken that terrible
word to myself all has become clear.
"Anatole used to come to borrow money from her and used to kiss her
naked shoulders. She did not give him the money, but let herself be
kissed. Her father in jest tried to rouse her jealousy, and she replied
with a calm smile that she was not so stupid as to be jealous: Let him
do what he pleases, she used to say of me. One day I asked her if she
felt any symptoms of pregnancy. She laughed contemptuously and said she
was not a fool to want to have children, and that she was not going to
have any children by me."
Then he recalled the coarseness and bluntness of her thoughts and
the vulgarity of the expressions that were natural to her, though
she had been brought up in the most aristocratic circles.
"Im not such a fool.... Just you try it on.... Allez-vous
promener,"* she used to say. Often seeing the success she had with
young and old men and women Pierre could not understand why he did not
love her.
*"You clear out of this."
"Yes, I never loved her," said he to himself; "I knew she was a
depraved woman," he repeated, "but dared not admit it to myself. And
now theres Dolokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and
perhaps dying, while meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!"
Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of
what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their
troubles. He digested his sufferings alone.
"It is all, all her fault," he said to himself; "but what of that?
Why did I bind myself to her?
War And Peace page 184 War And Peace page 186
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