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"Platon Karataev?" he repeated, and pondered, evidently sincerely trying to imagine Karataev's opinion on the subject. "He would not have understood... yet perhaps he would." "I love you awfully!" Natasha suddenly said. "Awfully, awfully!" "No, he would not have approved," said Pierre, after reflection. "What he would have approved of is our family life.
That's how it was, dear fellows!" Karataev concluded and sat for a long time silent, gazing before him with a smile. And Pierre's soul was dimly but joyfully filled not by the story itself but by its mysterious significance: by the rapturous joy that lit up Karataev's face as he told it, and the mystic significance of that joy. "A vos places!" * suddenly cried a voice. * "To your places."
After a while the Tsar's decree came: to set the merchant free and give him a compensation that had been awarded. The paper arrived and they began to look for the old man. 'Where is the old man who has been suffering innocently and in vain? A paper has come from the Tsar! so they began looking for him," here Karataev's lower jaw trembled, "but God had already forgiven him he was dead!
Suddenly and simultaneously a crowd of memories awoke in his fancy of the look Platon had given him as he sat under the tree, of the shot heard from that spot, of the dog's howl, of the guilty faces of the two Frenchmen as they ran past him, of the lowered and smoking gun, and of Karataev's absence at this halt and he was on the point of realizing that Karataev had been killed, but just at that instant, he knew not why, the recollection came to his mind of a summer evening he had spent with a beautiful Polish lady on the veranda of his house in Kiev.
I did wrong to let her drive to Kukuyevka." And what do you think? Why, the mistress had recognised Matrona, and me too, the old wretch, and made a complaint against me. "My runaway serf-girl," said she, "is living at Mr. Karataev's"; and thereupon she made a suitable present.
And Pierre, his voice trembling continually, went on to tell of the last days of their retreat, of Karataev's illness and his death. He told of his adventures as he had never yet recalled them. He now, as it were, saw a new meaning in all he had gone through.
He liked to talk and he talked well, adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay in the fact that the commonest events sometimes just such as Pierre had witnessed without taking notice of them assumed in Karataev's a character of solemn fitness.
It did not now occur to him to think of Russia, or the war, or politics, or Napoleon. It was plain to him that all these things were no business of his, and that he was not called on to judge concerning them and therefore could not do so. "Russia and summer weather are not bound together," he thought, repeating words of Karataev's which he found strangely consoling.
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