Helene, having returned with the court from Vilna to Petersburg, finds herself in a difficult position. In Petersburg she has enjoyed the special protection of a grandee who occupies one of the highest posts in the Empire. In Vilna she has formed an intimacy with a young foreign prince. When she returns, both the magnate and the prince are there, and both claim their rights. She is faced by a new problem: how to preserve her intimacy with both without offending either. What would have seemed difficult or even impossible to another woman does not cause the least embarrassment to Countess Bezukhova, who evidently deserves her reputation of being a very clever woman. Had she attempted concealment, or tried to extricate herself by cunning, she would have spoiled her case by acknowledging herself guilty. But Helene, like a really great man who can do whatever he pleases, at once assumes her own position to be correct, as she sincerely believes it to be, and that everyone else is to blame.
The first time the young foreigner allows himself to reproach her, she lifts her beautiful head and says firmly that that is just like a man, selfish and cruel. A woman sacrifices herself, she suffers, and this is her reward. What right has he to demand an account of her attachments and friendships? The other is a man who has been more than a father to her. It may be that he has other sentiments than those of a father, but that is not a reason to shut her door on him. She is not a man, that she should repay kindness with ingratitude. In all that relates to her intimate feelings she renders account only to God and to her conscience, laying her hand on her bosom and looking up to heaven. Marry me, and I will be your slave, she says. When he answers that that is impossible, she begins to cry: he will not deign to demean himself by marrying her. There is nothing to prevent her marrying. There are precedents, she mentions Napoleon and some other exalted personages, she has never been her husband's wife, she has been sacrificed. The prince, already yielding, speaks of law and religion. What have they been invented for if they cannot arrange that? He is surprised that so simple an idea has not occurred to him, and he applies for advice to the holy brethren of the Society of Jesus, with whom he is on intimate terms.
A few days later, at one of those enchanting fetes Helene gives at her country house on the Stone Island, the charming Monsieur de Jobert, a man no longer young, with snow-white hair and brilliant black eyes, a Jesuit in a short robe, talks to her in the garden of the love of God, of Christ, of the Sacred Heart, and of the consolations of the one true Catholic religion. Helene is touched. Tears rise to her eyes and to his. The next evening he comes when she is alone, and often comes again. One day he takes her to a Roman Catholic church, where she kneels before the altar. He lays his hands on her head and she feels something like a fresh breeze wafted into her soul: it is explained as grace. She confesses to a long-frocked abbe and is absolved. Next day she receives a box containing the Sacred Host. A few days later she learns with pleasure that she has been admitted to the true Catholic Church and that in a few days the Pope himself will hear of her. All the attention of so many clever men, and the state of dove-like purity she is now in, she wears only white, give her pleasure, but she does not for a moment forget her aim. Realising that the main object of all this trouble is, after converting her, to obtain money for Jesuit institutions, she insists, before parting with her money, that the operations necessary to free her from her husband should be performed. In her view the aim of every religion is merely to preserve certain proprieties while affording satisfaction to human desires. Sitting in the twilight with her Father Confessor, she asks in how far she is bound by her marriage. He constructs an edifice: she made a vow in ignorance to a man who married without faith, a sacrilege; the vow was still binding; she swerved; that was a venial sin, for she acted without evil intention; if she married again to bear children, the sin might be forgiven. Helene, getting bored, says with one of her bewitching smiles that having espoused the true religion she cannot be bound by what a false religion laid upon her. The director of her conscience is astounded, as if at Columbus's egg, delighted at the unexpected rapidity of his pupil's progress, yet unable to abandon the argument he has laboriously constructed. Let us understand one another, Countess, he says with a smile, and begins refuting his spiritual daughter's arguments.
