In Prince Andrei’s study Tikhon had already lit a fire for him. He looked at the unshoveled ashes under the fire and thought, “This is simply how I want it to be. All of my manuscript is gone, and I do not regret this for I am alive and free.”

But the morning was nearly too warm for a fire, so Prince Andrei opened the window so he could be closer to the lime green spring leaves of his linden trees and watch the May light that was appearing and disappearing with the fast-moving clouds. The scent of the air reminded him of the long past time when he had been wounded at Borodino in 1812, and he began to daydream.

He thought of the year it took for his wound to heal before he could leave his temporary bed at the Mytishchi monastery and return to Moscow with Natasha. In those days he had enlisted in the Russian army a second time to fight Napoleon, something he had once said he would never do. But then he had wished to escape the life he knew, and, even more, he wanted secretly to kill another officer, Prince Anatole Kuragin, in a duel. Prince Andrei’s old father had also died in that year of 1812 and sharing Prince Andrei’s grief Field Marshal Kutuzov, leader of all the Russian armies, took Prince Andrei aside to say,

“I’m like a father to you, a second father.”