Horror's Greatest Hits
poll: Love and Semantics) In War and Peace, wealthy, hapless Pierre is bewitched by the beautiful, idiotic Helen and her designing family, who conspire to see her married to Pierre (and his immense fortune). Pierre, in response to what seems to be a done deal, is confused about the situation and feels a sense of dread mingled with attraction, but tells himself that "all this had to be so and could not be otherwise.... therefore there's no point in asking whether it's good or bad. It's good because it's definite, and there's no more of the old tormenting doubt." Casting around for something to say to her in the moments when it becomes clear that he is inevitably fated to marry a woman whose physical allure is her only attraction, they have a moment of total awkwardness in the place of intimacy, after she asks that he remove his glasses:

Pierre took off his spectacles, and his eyes, on top of the general strangeness of people's eyes when they take off their spectacles, had a frightened and questioning look. He was about to bend down to her hand and kiss it; but she, with a quick and crude movement of her head, intercepted his lips and brought them together with her own. Her face struck Pierre by its altered, unpleasantly perplexed expression.

"It's too late now, it's all over; and anyway I love her," thought Pierre.

"Je vous aime!" he said, having remembered what needed to be said on these occasions; but the words sounded so meager that he felt ashamed of himself.

A month and a half later he was married and settled down, as they say, the happy possessor of a beautiful wife and millions of roubles, in the big, newly done-over house of the counts Bezukhov in Petersburg" (2007, p. 214).

Pierre recalls these words -- expressed in the artificial, affected French of high society, rather than his soulful native Russian -- several times throughout the novel, as representing the point at which he bound himself to a life of misery with a cruel, stupid woman.

When Pierre told Helen that he loved her, he didn’t mean anything in particular. —> people who voted for: He did mean something
Showing 1-2 of 2
Beth 141 books
12 friends
voted for:
He did mean


Jordan 527 books
58 friends
voted for:
He did mean


all voters
back to poll »