“Thou hatest it; then change it, purify thyself, and as thou art purified, thou wilt come to know wisdom. Look at your life, sir. How have you been spending it？ In riotous orgies and debauchery, taking everything from society and giving nothing in return. You have received wealth. How have you used it？ What have you done for your neighbour？ Have you given a thought to the tens of thousands of your slaves, have you succoured them physically and morally？ No. You have profited by their toil to lead a dissipated life. That’s what you have done. Have you chosen a post in the service where you might be of use to your neighbour？ No. You have spent your life in idleness. Then you married, sir, took upon yourself the responsibility of guiding a young woman in life, and what have you done？ You have not helped her, sir, to find the path of truth, but have cast her into an abyss of deception and misery. A man injured you, and you have killed him, and you say you do not know God, and that you hate your life. There is no wisdom in all that, sir.”
After these words the freemason leaned his elbow again on the back of the sofa and closed his eyes, as though weary of prolonged talking. Pierre gazed at that stern, immovable, old, almost death-like face, and moved his lips without uttering a sound. He wanted to say, “Yes, a vile, idle, vicious life,” and he dared not break the silence. The freemason cleared his throat huskily, as old men do, and called his servant.
“How about horses？” he asked, without looking at Pierre.
“They have brought round some that were given up,” answered the old man. “You won’t rest？”
“No, tell them to harness them.”
“Can he really be going away and leaving me all alone, without telling me everything and promising me help？” thought Pierre, getting up with downcast head, beginning to walk up and down the room, casting a glance from time to time at the freemason. “Yes, I had not thought of it, but I have led a contemptible, dissolute life, but I did not like it, and I didn’t want to,” thought Pierre, “and this man knows the truth, and if he liked he could reveal it to me.” Pierre wanted to say this to the freemason and dared not. After packing his things with his practised old hands, the traveller buttoned up his sheepskin. On finishing these preparations, he turned to Bezuhov, and in a polite, indifferent tone, said to him：
“Where are you going now, sir？”
“I？ … I’m going to Petersburg,” answered Pierre in a tone of childish indecision. “I thank you. I agree with you in everything. But do not suppose that I have been so bad. With all my soul I have desired to be what you would wish me to be; but I have never met with help from any one.… Though I was myself most to blame for everything. Help me, instruct me, and perhaps I shall be able …”
Pierre could not say more; his voice broke and he turned away.
The freemason was silent, obviously pondering something.
“Help comes only from God,” he said, “but such measure of aid as it is in the power of our order to give you, it will give you, sir. You go to Petersburg, and give this to Count Villarsky” （he took out his notebook and wrote a few words on a large sheet of paper folded into four）. “One piece of advice let me give you. When you reach the capital, devote your time at first there to solitude and to self-examination, and do not return to your old manner of life. Therewith I wish you a good journey, sir,” he added, noticing that his servant had entered the room, “and all success …”
The stranger was Osip Alexyevitch Bazdyev, as Pierre found out from the overseer’s book. Bazdyev had been one of the most well-known freemasons and Martinists even in Novikov’s day. For a long while after he had gone, Pierre walked about the station room, neither lying down to sleep nor asking for horses. He reviewed his vicious past, and with an ecstatic sense of beginning anew, pictured to himself a blissful, irreproachably virtuous future, which seemed to him easy of attainment. It seemed to him that he had been vicious, simply because he had accidentally forgotten how good it was to be virtuous. There was left in his soul not a trace of his former doubts. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of man, united in the aim of supporting one another in the path of virtue. And freemasonry he pictured to himself as such a brotherhood.