The sunset over Borodino finds Pierre sharing fried biscuits with some common soldiers. He feels delighted to be among them and in his dreams that night his benefactor, Osip Bazdyev, appears to him. Goodness, his mentor says, is being like them (the common soldiers). The voice continues:"No one can be master of anything while he fears death. If it were not for suffering, a man would not know his limits, would not know himself. The hardest thing . . . is to know how to unite in one's soul the significance of the whole." These are the things Pierre has longed to hear, and these statements seem to answer his most perplexing questions.
When Pierre arrives in Moscow the next morning, an adjutant of the governor tells him Rastoptchin wishes to see him. The messenger informs Pierre of the deaths of his brother-in-law Anatole and of Prince Andrey. In the waiting room, an official he knows tells him how severely Rastoptchin treats"traitors," a group of pacifists who allegedly have circulated Napoleon's proclamation around Moscow. For this crime a youth named Vereshtchagin will be sentenced to hard labor. When Pierre talks with the governor, Rastoptchin reproaches him for aiding one of these alleged traitors and warns him from further associations with that subversive group of freemasons. Pierre had better leave town, Rastoptchin says in conclusion. When he returns home, Bezuhov discovers Ellen's letter. Rehearsing the ridiculous sequence of events, he falls asleep with various thoughts running through his head: death, suffering, freedom, Ellen's marriage, the petty demagoguery of Rastoptchin. The next morning Pierre disappears and no one in his household sees him again until after the occupation of Moscow.
