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Pierre is back together with Helene, though it’s a marriage in name only. Actually it seems to work better this way: she’s somehow got a reputation for being witty as well as beautiful, and he’s her quiet, good-natured husband. Actually he’s thinking about God and the meaning of life the whole time, but no one notices.
ETA – and, um, having somewhat erotic dreams about the head of the Masonic order.
“And he’s very nice, very, very nice. Only not quite my taste—he is so narrow, like the dining-room clock…. Don’t you understand? Narrow, you know—gray, light gray…”
“What rubbish you’re talking!” said the countess.
Natasha continued: “Don’t you really understand? Nicholas would understand…. Bezukhov, now, is blue, dark-blue and red, and he is square.”
“You flirt with him too,” said the countess, laughing.
“No, he is a Freemason, I have found out. He is fine, dark-blue and red…. How can I explain it to you?”
Natasha is synaesthetic, apparently.
Meanwhile, Berg & Vera’s relationship appears to be a happily awful one:
Berg smiled with a sense of his superiority over a weak woman, and paused, reflecting that this dear wife of his was after all but a weak woman who could not understand all that constitutes a man’s dignity, what it was ein Mann zu sein. * Vera at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life wrongly, as according to Vera all men did.
