War and Peace

n receiving news of Natásha’s illness, the countess, though not quite
well yet and still weak, went to Moscow with Pétya and the rest of the
household, and the whole family moved from Márya Dmítrievna’s house to
their own and settled down in town.

Natásha’s illness was so serious that, fortunately for her and for
her parents, the consideration of all that had caused the illness,
her conduct and the breaking off of her engagement, receded into the
background. She was so ill that it was impossible for them to consider
in how far she was to blame for what had happened. She could not eat
or sleep, grew visibly thinner, coughed, and, as the doctors made them
feel, was in danger. They could not think of anything but how to help
her. Doctors came to see her singly and in consultation, talked much in
French, German, and Latin, blamed one another, and prescribed a great
variety of medicines for all the diseases known to them, but the simple
idea never occurred to any of them that they could not know the disease
Natásha was suffering from, as no disease suffered by a live man can be
known, for every living person has his own peculiarities and always
has his own peculiar, personal, novel, complicated disease, unknown to
medicine—not a disease of the lungs, liver, skin, heart, nerves, and so
on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting of one of the
innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple
thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard
that he is unable to work his charms) because the business of their
lives was to cure, and they received money for it and had spent the best
years of their lives on that business. But, above all, that thought
was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they were
really useful, as in fact they were to the whole Rostóv family. Their
usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow substances for
the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible, as they
were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and
indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and
of those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be,
pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied
that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that
something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering. They
satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it
wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt. A child knocks itself
and runs at once to the arms of its mother or nurse to have the aching
spot rubbed or kissed, and it feels better when this is done. The child
cannot believe that the strongest and wisest of its people have no
remedy for its pain, and the hope of relief and the expression of its
mother’s sympathy while she rubs the bump comforts it. The doctors were
of use to Natásha because they kissed and rubbed her bump, assuring her
that it would soon pass if only the coachman went to the chemist’s in
the Arbát and got a powder and some pills in a pretty box for a ruble
and seventy kopeks, and if she took those powders in boiled water at
intervals of precisely two hours, neither more nor less.

What would Sónya and the count and countess have done, how would they
have looked, if nothing had been done, if there had not been those pills
to give by the clock, the warm drinks, the chicken cutlets, and all the
other details of life ordered by the doctors, the carrying out of which
supplied an occupation and consolation to the family circle? How would
the count have borne his dearly loved daughter’s illness had he not
known that it was costing him a thousand rubles, and that he would not
grudge thousands more to benefit her, or had he not known that if her
illness continued he would not grudge yet other thousands and would take
her abroad for consultations there, and had he not been able to explain
the details of how Métivier and Feller had not understood the symptoms,
but Frise had, and Múdrov had diagnosed them even better? What would the
countess have done had she not been able sometimes to scold the invalid
for not strictly obeying the doctor’s orders?

“You’ll never get well like that,” she would say, forgetting her grief
in her vexation, “if you won’t obey the doctor and take your medicine at
the right time! You mustn’t trifle with it, you know, or it may turn to
pneumonia,” she would go on, deriving much comfort from the utterance of
that foreign word, incomprehensible to others as well as to herself.

What would Sónya have done without the glad consciousness that she had
not undressed during the first three nights, in order to be ready to
carry out all the doctor’s injunctions with precision, and that she
still kept awake at night so as not to miss the proper time when the
slightly harmful pills in the little gilt box had to be administered?
Even to Natásha herself it was pleasant to see that so many sacrifices
were being made for her sake, and to know that she had to take medicine
at certain hours, though she declared that no medicine would cure her
and that it was all nonsense. And it was even pleasant to be able to
show, by disregarding the orders, that she did not believe in medical
treatment and did not value her life.

The doctor came every day, felt her pulse, looked at her tongue, and
regardless of her grief-stricken face joked with her. But when he had
gone into another room, to which the countess hurriedly followed him, he
assumed a grave air and thoughtfully shaking his head said that though
there was danger, he had hopes of the effect of this last medicine and
one must wait and see, that the malady was chiefly mental, but... And
the countess, trying to conceal the action from herself and from him,
slipped a gold coin into his hand and always returned to the patient
with a more tranquil mind.

The symptoms of Natásha’s illness were that she ate little, slept
little, coughed, and was always low-spirited. The doctors said that
she could not get on without medical treatment, so they kept her in the
stifling atmosphere of the town, and the Rostóvs did not move to the
country that summer of 1812.

In spite of the many pills she swallowed and the drops and powders out
of the little bottles and boxes of which Madame Schoss who was fond of
such things made a large collection, and in spite of being deprived of
the country life to which she was accustomed, youth prevailed. Natásha’s
grief began to be overlaid by the impressions of daily life, it ceased
to press so painfully on her heart, it gradually faded into the past,
and she began to recover physically.