old and good for nothing…Or else everything good and lofty in you will be done for. It will all be frittered away over trifles. Yes, yes, yes! Don’t look at me with such surprise. If you expect anything of yourself in the future you will feel at every step that for you all is over, all is closed up except the drawing-room, where you will stand on the same level with the court lackey and the idiot…And why!”…He made a vigorous gesture.

Pierre took off his spectacles, which transformed his face, making it look even more good-natured, and looked wonderingly at his friend.

“My wife,” pursued Prince Andrey, “is an excellent woman. She is one of those rare women with whom one can feel quite secure of one’s honour; but, my God! what wouldn’t I give now not to be married! You are the first and the only person I say this to, because I like you.”

As Prince Andrey said this he was less than ever like the Bolkonsky who had sat lolling in Anna Pavlovna’s drawing-room with half-closed eyelids, filtering French phrases through his teeth. His dry face was quivering with nervous excitement in every muscle; his eyes, which had seemed lustreless and lifeless, now gleamed with a full, vivid light. It seemed that the more lifeless he was at ordinary times, the more energetic he became at such moments of morbid irritability.

“You can’t understand why I say this,” he went on. “Why, the whole story of life lies in it. You talk of Bonaparte and his career,” he said, though Pierre had not talked of Bonaparte; “you talk of Bonaparte, but Bonaparte when he was working his way up, going step by step straight to his aim, he was free; he had nothing except his aim and he attained it. But tie yourself up with a woman, and, like a chained convict, you lose all freedom. And all the hope and strength there is in you is only a drag on you, torturing you with regret. Drawing-rooms, gossip, balls, vanity, frivolity—that’s the enchanted circle I can’t get out of. I am setting off now to the war, the greatest war there has ever been, and I know nothing, and am good for nothing. I am very agreeable and sarcastic,” pursued Prince Andrey, “and at Anna Pavlovna’s every one listens to me. And this imbecile society without which my wife can’t exist, and these women…If you only knew what these society women are, and, indeed, women generally! My father’s right. Egoism, vanity, silliness, triviality in everything—that’s what women are when they show themselves as they really are. Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry!” Prince Andrey concluded.

“It seems absurd to me,” said Pierre, “that you, you consider yourself a failure, your life wrecked. You have everything, everything before you. And you…”

He did not say why you, but his tone showed how highly he thought of his friend, and how much he expected of him in the future.

“How can he say that?” Pierre thought.

Pierre regarded Prince Andrey as a model of all perfection, because Prince Andrey possessed in the highest degree just that combination of qualities in which Pierre was deficient, and which might be most nearly expressed by the idea of strength of will. Pierre always marvelled at Prince Andrey’s faculty for dealing with people of every sort with perfect composure, his exceptional memory, his wide knowledge (he had read everything, knew everything, had some notion of everything), and most of all at his capacity for working and learning. If Pierre were frequently struck in Andrey by his lack of capacity for dreaming and philosophising (to which Pierre was himself greatly given), he did not regard this as a defect but as a strong point. Even in the very warmest, friendliest, and simplest relations, flattery or praise is needed just as grease is needed to keep wheels going round.

“I am a man whose day is done,” said Prince Andrey. “Why talk of me? let’s talk about you,” he said after a brief pause, smiling at his own reassuring thoughts. The smile was instantly reflected on Pierre’s face.