The marriage of Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova is presented in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis as a celebrated portrait of domestic harmony whose apparent perfection conceals a structural vulnerability. In the epilogue of War and Peace, Natasha gives up her former interests and devotes herself to Pierre and their children; Pierre, in turn, withdraws from his former social life. Their devotion brings real contentment, but the arrangement makes Natasha’s security depend on a love she cannot guarantee will last. De Beauvoir uses the couple to question whether a wife’s self-surrender can constitute a durable or equal freedom.

The Ideal Domestic Couple

Tolstoy’s epilogue presents a striking transformation in Natasha. Once coquettish and romantic, she loses interest in her appearance, society, and pastimes after marriage and concentrates instead on Pierre and their children. The change is so complete that those who knew her before are astonished. In the portrait De Beauvoir examines, the animation that had once made Natasha charming seems to have receded: her identity is shown chiefly through her body, her strength, and her fertility, while her inner life has become less visible.

The devotion is not represented as Natasha’s alone. She demands from Pierre the same exclusive attachment she gives him, and he answers by relinquishing clubs, dinners, old friends, and prolonged absences except on business. His intellectual pursuits also fall under the scope of her concern, even though she does not understand them. The couple’s arrangement thus reverses the familiar picture of the husband’s unchallenged independence: Pierre is described as being under his wife’s sway, while Natasha organizes the home around what she takes to be his wishes.

De Beauvoir nevertheless emphasizes the happiness Tolstoy attributes to them. When Pierre returns from a long absence, Natasha greets him impatiently because she has suffered from being without him. At home, their attachment is so close that they understand one another with scarcely a word. Her children, her household, and her loved and respected husband give her nearly untroubled joy. The ideal is therefore not dismissed as merely false: its emotional concord is part of what makes its underlying risk harder to see.

Devotion and Dependence

The apparent reciprocity does not, in De Beauvoir’s reading, settle the question of equality. The image of Natasha and Pierre joined like soul and body makes their union seem indivisible, but it also invites a test: if Pierre’s love ended, what would become of Natasha? The image promises unity while leaving the partners’ consequences unequal. Inconstancy or mistaken love might constitute abandonment for either person, but a woman whose life has been organized around her husband faces a more devastating loss of her established place and support.

De Beauvoir imagines several possible consequences rather than treating the couple’s harmony as a guaranteed future. Pierre might become attracted to other women; Natasha might grow jealous; and the relationship could sour. If he left, her life would be ruined; if he remained while lying or resenting her, his life too would be spoiled; if they stayed together through compromise and half-measures, both might become unhappy. These alternatives expose how little protection an ideal of exclusive love offers when it rests on one partner’s continued choice.

Children do not, by themselves, remove this danger. De Beauvoir argues that they bring joy within a balanced family structure, in which the husband remains one of its essential supports. For a neglected and jealous wife, the same children may become a burden rather than a remedy for loneliness. Natasha’s happiness is consequently represented not as something secured by motherhood alone, but as dependent on a relationship whose balance can change.

A Contested Model of Marriage

The marriage also raises a question of judgment and intellectual independence. Natasha’s devotion to Pierre’s ideas is admired by Tolstoy, while D. H. Lawrence mocks the couple and the model of a wife’s submission it represents. Their disagreement matters because male authority cannot provide a neutral answer to what a woman should believe or how she should live: one writer makes the husband an ideal, another treats that ideal with contempt. Natasha cannot simply echo a husband’s principles and thereby claim an independent basis for her existence. What she shares must be reached through her own judgment, not borrowed from him.

This critique connects the fictional marriage to De Beauvoir’s wider account of women’s historical subordination. She argues that a relationship of mutual need does not automatically produce social equality: even in a reciprocal bond, dependence can work to the advantage of the person who holds greater power to satisfy the other’s needs. Her account of women’s history likewise distinguishes abstract rights from practical circumstances shaped by economic position, law, and custom. In this framework, the affectionate intimacy of Pierre and Natasha cannot on its own establish that both partners possess equal independence.

The comparison with Tolstoy’s own marriage sharpens the contrast between the literary ideal and lived marital conflict. De Beauvoir sets the contented Pierre-and-Natasha tableau beside the misery associated with Leo and Sophia Tolstoy: Sophia is described as repelled by her husband, jealous, bored, and frustrated by repeated pregnancies, while the home is arid for her and hell for him. Their ending, as presented in the discussion, is a final break rather than the near-wordless harmony attributed to the fictional couple. The contrast does not make Natasha and Pierre’s happiness unreal; it shows why an ideal portrait cannot settle what marriage means under conditions of dependence and unequal freedom.

Significance and Narrative Frame

This marriage is a literary example analyzed within a philosophical argument, not an independently narrated event with a reported later outcome. De Beauvoir moves from Tolstoy’s domestic portrait to a conditional inquiry into what could undermine it, and then places that portrait beside competing judgments and a painful real-life contrast. The sequence turns apparent fulfillment into a problem to examine: what appears harmonious in the present may be precarious if one partner’s security rests on the other’s continuing love and authority.

The episode’s significance lies in its refusal to equate devotion with equality. Natasha and Pierre seem to reciprocate one another’s attachment, and their home offers them happiness; yet the terms of that happiness leave open the possibility that the wife’s self-abandonment will outlast the husband’s love. De Beauvoir therefore treats the couple not as proof that ideal marriage has been achieved, but as a test of whether affection, domestic harmony, and shared sacrifice can sustain a genuinely free and equal union.