AGAIN PIERRE was overtaken by that despondency he so dreaded. For three days after the delivery of his speech at the lodge he lay on a sofa at home, seeing no one, and going nowhere.
At this time he received a letter from his wife who besought him to see her, wrote of her unhappiness on his account, and her desire to devote her whole life to him.
At the end of the letter she informed him that in a day or two she would arrive in Petersburg from abroad.
The letter was followed up by one of the freemasons whom Pierre respected least bursting in upon his solitude. Turning the conversation upon Pierre’s matrimonial affairs, he gave him, by way of brotherly counsel, his opinion that his severity to his wife was wrong, and that Pierre was departing from the first principles of freemasonry in not forgiving the penitent. At the same time his mother-in-law, Prince Vassily’s wife, sent to him, beseeching him to visit her, if only for a few minutes, to discuss a matter of great importance. Pierre saw there was a conspiracy against him, that they meant to reconcile him with his wife, and he did not even dislike this in the mood in which he then was. Nothing mattered to him; Pierre regarded nothing in life as a matter of great consequence, and under the influence of the despondency which had taken possession of him, he attached no significance either to his own ******* or to having his own way be punishing his wife.
“No one is right, no one is to blame, and so she, too, is not to blame,” he thought. If Pierre did not at once give his consent to being reunited to his wife, it was simply because in the despondent state into which he had lapsed, he was incapable of taking any line of action. Had his wife come to him, he could not now have driven her away. Could it matter beside the questions that were absorbing Pierre, whether he live with his wife or not？
Without answering either his wife or his mother-in-law, Pierre at once set off late in the evening and drove to Moscow to see Osip Alexyevitch.
This is what Pierre wrote in his diary.
