shouted the pious brother, and he dashed the icon down with such violence that the silver frame rang loudly on the floor. Now the Senator began, and he shouted still louder ; but at this point I rushed upstairs, just waiting long enough to see the nephew and 9· A sacred picture.
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the lawyer, as much alarmed as I was, beating a retreat to the balcony.
What then took place, I cannot tell. The servants had all hid for safety and could give no information ; and neither my father nor the Senator ever alluded to the scene in my presence. The noise grew less by degrees, and the division of the land was carried out, but whether then or later, I do not know.
What fell to my father was Vasilevskoye, a large estate near Moscow. We spent all the following summer there; and during that time the Senator bought a house for himself in the Arhat quarter of Moscow, so that, when we returned alone to our big house, we found it empty and dead. Soon after, my father also bought a new house in Moscow.
When the Senator left us, he took with him, in the first place, my friend Calot, and, in the second place, all that gave life in our establishment. He alone could check my father's tendency to morbid depression, which now had room to develop and assert itself fully. Our new house was not cheerful : it reminded one of a prison or hospital. The ground-floor rooms were vaulted; the thick walls made the windows look like the embrasures of a fortress ; and the house was surrounded on all sides by a uselessly large courtyard.
The real wonder was, not that the Senator left us, but that he was able to stay so long under one roof with my father. I have seldom seen two men more unlike in character.
9
My uncle was a kind-hearted man, who loved movement and excitement. His whole life was spent in an artificial world, a world of diplomats and lords-in-waiting, and he never guessed that there is a different world which comes nearer to the reality of things. And yet he was not merely a spectator of all that happened between 1 789 and 1 8 1 5, but was personally involved in that mighty drama.
Count Vorontsov sent him to England, to learn from lord Grenville what 'General Buonaparte' was up to, after he left the army of Egypt. He was in Paris at the time of Napoleon's coronation.
In 181 1 Napoleon ordered him to be detained and arrested at Cassel, where he was minister at the court of King Jerome 10 -
10. Jerome Bonaparte (1784-186o) was King of Westphalia from 1807 to 1813.
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C H I L D H O O D, YOUTH A N D E X I L E
'Emperor Jerome', a s my father used to say when h e was annoyed.
In fact, he witnessed each scene of that tremendous spectacle ; but, somehow, it seemed not to impress him in the right way.
When captain in the Guards, he was sent on a mission to london. Paul, who was then Tsar, noticed this when he read the roster, and ordered that he should report himself at once in Petersburg. The attache sailed by the first ship and appeared on parade.
'Do you want to stay in london ? ' Paul asked in his hoarse voice.
'If Your Majesty is graciously pleased to allow it,' answered the captain.
'Go back at once ! ' the hoarse voice replied ; and the young officer sailed, without even seeing his family in Moscow.
While he served as ambassador, diplomatic questions were settled by bayonets and cannon-balls ; and his diplomatic career came to an end at the Congress of Vienna, that great :field-day for all the diplomats of Europe. On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow - a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure ; he served on the Widows'
and Orphans' Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.
He was never to be found at home. He tired out a team of four strong horses every morning, and another in the afternoon. He never missed a meeting of the Senate; twice a week he attended the Widows' Board; and there were also his hospitals and schools.
Besides all this, he was never absent from the theatre when a French play was given, and he was driven to the English Club on three days of every week. He had no time to be bored - always busy with one of his many occupations, perpetually on the way to some engagement, and his life rolled along on easy springs in a world of :files and official envelopes.
To the age of seventy he kept the health of youth. He was always to be seen at every great ball or dinner ; he figured at speech-days and meetings of public bodies ; whatever their objects might be - agriculture or medicine, :fire insurance or natural science - it was all one to him ; and, besides all this (perhaps be-
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cause of this), he kept to old age some measure of humanity and warmth of heart.
10
It is impossible to conceive a greater contrast to all this than my father. My uncle was perpetually active and perpetually cheerful, an occasional visitor at his own house. But my father hardly ever went out of doors, hated all the world of official business, and was hard to please and out of humour. We had our eight horses too, but our stable was a kind of hospital for cripples ; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearance, and partly that the two coachmen and two postilions might have some other occupation, as well as going to fetch newspapers and arranging cockfights, which last amusement they carried on with much success in the space between the coach-house and the neighbours' yard.
My father did not remain long in the public service. Brought up by a French tutor in the house of a pious aunt, he entered the Guards as a sergeant at sixteen and retired as a captain when Paul became Tsar. In 1801 he went abroad and wandered about from one foreign country to another till the end of 1 8 u . He returned to Russia with my mother three months before I was born ; the year after the burning of Moscow he spent in the Government of Tver, and then settled down permanently in Moscow, where he led by choice a solitary and monotonous life. His brother's lively temperament was distasteful to him.
After the Senator had left it, the whole house assumed a more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants -
every thing and person had a furtive and dissatisfied appearance ; and of course my father himself was more dissatisfied than anyone else. The artificial stillness, the hushed voices and noiseless steps of the servants, were no sign of devotion, but of repression and fear. Nothing was ever moved in the rooms : the same books lay on the same tables, with the same markers in them, for five or six years together. In my father's bedroom and study the furniture was never shifted and the windows never opened, not once in a twelvemonth. When he went to the country, he regularly took the key of his rooms in his pocket, lest the servants should take it into their heads to scour the floors or to clean the walls in his absence.
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