“Father, I had no wish to judge you,” said Prince Andrey, in a hard and spiteful tone, “but you have provoked me, and I have said, and shall always say, that Marie is not to blame, but the people to blame—the person to blame—is that Frenchwoman …”
“Ah, he has passed judgment！ … he has passed judgment！” said the old man, in a low voice, and Prince Andrey fancied, with embarrassment. But immediately after he leapt up and screamed, “Go away, go away！ Let me never set eyes on you again！ …”
Prince Andrey would have set off at once, but Princess Marya begged him to stay one day more. During that day Prince Andrey did not see his father, who never left his room, and admitted no one to see him but Mademoiselle Bourienne and Tihon, from which he inquired several times whether his son had gone. The following day before starting, Prince Andrey went to the part of the house where his son was to be found. The sturdy little boy, with curls like his mother’s, sat on his knee. Prince Andrey began telling him the story of Bluebeard, but he sank into dreamy meditation before he had finished the story. He was not thinking of the pretty boy, his child, even while he held him on his knee; he was thinking of himself. He sought and was horrified not to find in himself either remorse for having provoked his father’s anger, or regret at leaving home （for the first time in his life） on bad terms with him. What meant still more to him was that he could not detect in himself a trace of the tender affection he had once felt for his boy, and had hoped to revive in his heart, when he petted the child and put him on his knee.
“Come, tell me the rest,” said the boy. Prince Andrey took him off his knee without answering, and went out of the room.
As soon as Prince Andrey gave up his daily pursuits, especially to return to the old surroundings in which he had been when he was happy, weariness of life seized upon him as intensely as ever, and he made haste to escape from these memories, and to find some work to do as quickly as possible.
“Are you really going, Andrey？” his sister said to him.
“Thank God that I can go,” said Prince Andrey. “I am very sorry you can’t too.”
“What makes you say that？” said Princess Marya. “How can you say that when you are going to this awful war, and he is so old？ Mademoiselle Bourienne told me he keeps asking about you.…” As soon as she spoke of that, her lips quivered, and tears began to fall. Prince Andrey turned away and began walking up and down the room.
“Ah, my God！ my God！” he said. “And to think what and who—what scum can be the cause of misery to people！” he said with a malignance that terrified Princess Marya.
She felt that when he uttered the word “scum,” he was thinking not only of Mademoiselle Bourienne, who was the cause of her misery, but also of the man who had ruined his own happiness. “Andrey, one thing I beg, I beseech of you,” she said, touching his elbow and looking at him with eyes that shone through her tears. “I understand you.” （Princess Marya dropped her eyes.） “Don’t imagine that sorrow is the work of men. Men are His instruments.” She glanced upwards a little above Prince Andrey’s head with the confident, accustomed glance with which one looks towards a familiar portrait. “Sorrow is sent by Him, and not by men. Men are the instrument of His will, they are not to blame. If it seems to you that some one has wronged you—forget it, and forgive. We have no right to punish. And you will know the happiness of forgiveness.”
“If I were a woman, I would, Marie. That’s woman’s virtue. But a man must not, and cannot, forgive and forget,” he said, and though till that minute he had not been thinking of Kuragin, all his unsatisfied revenge rose up again in his heart. “If Marie is beginning to persuade me to forgive, it means that I ought long ago to have punished him,” he thought.
And making no further reply to Princess Marya, he began dreaming now of the happy moment of satisfied hate when he would meet Kuragin. He knew he was with the army.
Princess Marya besought her brother to stay another day, telling him how wretched her father would be, she knew, if Andrey went away without being reconciled to him. But Prince Andrey answered that he would probably soon be back from the army, that he would certainly write to his father, and that their quarrel would only be more embittered by his staying longer now. “Remember that misfortunes come from God, and that men are never to blame,” were the last words he heard from his sister, as he said good-bye to her.
“So it must be so！” thought Prince Andrey, as he drove out of the avenue. “She, poor innocent creature, is left to be victimised by an old man, who has outlived his wits. The old man feels he is wrong, but he can’t help himself. My boy is growing up and enjoying life in which he will be deceived or deceiving like every one else. I am going to the army—what for？ I don’t know myself; and I want to meet that man whom I despise, so as to give him a chance to kill me and sneer at me！” All the conditions of life had been the same before, but before they had all seemed to him coherent, and now they had all fallen apart. Life seemed to Prince Andrey a series of senseless phenomena following one another without any connection.
