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“this melancholy decision” is, I suppose, one way to word the abandonment of Moscow. The emperor is not really a man of any great action, is he. I suppose Tolstoy is showing us that the further up the privileged food-chain we climb, the more useless everyone becomes. While Pierre runs around saving children and beating up brigands, the rich ebb and flow to the whim of an impotent figurehead. Typical.

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BOOK 12

Like chapter 1 of book 1, we’re back with Anna Pavlovna and her fake court of fake people, Vasili Kuragin chief among them while his daughter is having an abortion from her other husband. All this while real men await their death on the battlefield all those miles away near Moscow.

“I have a favorable presentiment!”, how out of touch they all are even though they act as if they really know.

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In a broader context Pierre is the good of the Russian people, he represents the upper-class that actually fulfills it’s responsibility by saving the child and defending the beautiful Armenian girl’s honor. When he says the little girl is his daughter he is not speaking as Pierre, but as Russia herself. And unlike a “hero” in war (like petty Berg), he is a real hero, selfless, honorable,

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You could say Pierre is always forced into taking some sort of action, but really it’s his nature that drives him, even if he is unaware how or why. He wakes up in the morning to kill Napoleon and instead saves a child from a burning building. He is not conscious of his actions, he’s not a deliberate man, he, like Natasha, just act on instinct (like the wolf or the fox).