Even in the early chapters of _War and Peace,_ written one year after marriage, the confidences of Prince Andrei to Pierre upon the subject of marriage denote the disenchantment of the man who sees in the beloved woman the stranger, the innocent enemy, the involuntary obstacle to his moral development. Some letters of 1865 announce the coming return of religious troubles. As yet they are only passing threats, blotting out the joy of life. But during the months of 1869, when Tolstoy was finishing _War and Peace,_ there fell a more serious blow. He had left his home for a few days to visit a distant estate. One night he was lying in bed; it had just struck two: "I was dreadfully tired; I was sleepy, and felt comfortable enough. All of a sudden I was seized by such anguish, such terror as I had never felt in all my life. I will tell you about it in detail; it was truly frightful. I leapt from the bed and told them to get the horses ready. While they were putting them in I fell asleep, and when I woke again I was completely recovered. Yesterday the same thing happened, but in a much less degree." The palace of illusion, so laboriously raised by the love of the wife, was tottering. In the spiritual blank which followed the achievement of _War and Peace_ the artist was recaptured by his philosophical[2] and educational preoccupations; he wished to write a spelling-book for the people; he worked at it feverishly for four years; he was prouder of it than of _War and Peace_, and when it was finished (1872) he wrote a second (1875). Then he conceived a passion for Greek; he studied Latin from morning to night; he abandoned all other work; he discovered "the delightful Xenophon," and Homer, the real Homer; not the Homer of the translators, "all these Joukhovskys and Vosses who sing with any sort of voice they can manage to produce, guttural, peevish, mawkish," but "this other devil, who sings at the top of his voice, without it ever entering his head that any one may be listening."[3] "Without a knowledge of Greek, no education! I am convinced that until now I knew nothing of all that is truly beautiful and of a simple beauty in human speech." This is folly, and he admits as much. He goes to school again with such passionate enthusiasm that he falls ill. In 1871 he was forced to go to Samara to undergo the _koumiss_ cure, staying with the Bachkirs. Nothing pleased him but his Greek. At the end of a lawsuit, in 1872, he spoke seriously of selling all that he possessed in Russia and of settling in England. Countess Tolstoy was in despair: "If you are always absorbed in your Greeks you will never get well. It is they who have caused this suffering and this indifference concerning your present life. It is not in vain that we call Greek a dead language; it produces a condition of death in the spirit."[4]