She took me in her arms, and trembling all over, more dead than alive, followed the elder. Golokhvastov was in another hut and they went into it; the old man really was lying dead beside the table at which he had been about to shave; a sudden stroke of paralysis had cut short his life instantaneously.
My mother's position may well be imagined ( she was then seventeen), in the midst of these half-savage bearded men, dressetl in bare sheepskins, talking in a completely unkno,.vn language, in a little smoke-blackened hut; and all this in November of the terrible winter of 1812. Her one support had been Golokhvastov; she wept day and night after his death. But these savages pitied her from the bottom of their hearts, in all their kindness and simplicity; and the village elder sent his son several times to the town to get ra!sins, cakes, apples, and breadrings for her.
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Fifteen years later the elder was still living and used sometimes, grey with age and somewhat bald, to come to Moscow. My mother used customarily to regale him with tea and to talk to him about the winter of 1812, saying how she had been so afraid of him and how, without understanding each other, they had made the arrangements for the funeral of Pavel Ivanovich. The old man used still to call my mother-as he had then-Yuliza Ivanovna, instead of Luiza, and used to tell how I was not at all afraid of his beard and would readily let him take me into his arms.
From the province of Yaroslavl we moved to that of Tver, and at last, a year later, made our way back to Moscow. By that time my father's brother,9 who had been ambassador to Westphalia and had afterwards gone on some commission to Bernadotte, had returned from Sweden ; he settled in the same house with us.
I still remember, as in a dream, the traces of the fire, which remained until early in the 'twenties: great burnt-out houses without window frames or roofs, tumble-do\\'11 walls, empty spaces fenced in. with remains of stoves with chimneys on them.
Tales of the fire of Moscow, of the battle of Borodino, of the Berezina, of the taking of Paris were my cradle-songs, my nursery stories, my Iliad and my Odyssey. My mother and our servants, my father and Vera Artamonovna were continually going back to the terrible time which had impressed them so recently, so intimately, and so acutely. Then the returning generals and officers began crowding into Moscow. My father's old comrades of the Izmaylovsky regiment, now the heroes of a bloody war scarcely ended, were often at our house. They found relief from their fatigues and battles in describing them. This was in reality the most brilliant moment of the Petersburg period; the consciousness of strength gave new life, and all practical affairs and troubles seemed to be put off till the morrow when work would begin again: now all that was wanted was to revel in the joys of victory.
From these gentlemen my eager ears heard even more about the \var than from Vera Artamonovna. I was particularly fond of the stories told by Count Miloradovich;10 he spoke with the D Yakovlev. Lev Alexeyevich ( 1 764-1 839), 'the Senator.' (A.S.) 10 One of the genera"ts of the campaign of 1 8 1 2. Military Governor
General of Petersburg at the accession of Nicholas in 1 825, and killed in the rising of December 1 4th. ( Tr.)
Nursery and University
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greatest vivacity, with lively mimicry, with roars of laughter, and more than once I fell asleep, on the sofa behind him, to the sound of them.
Of course, in such surroundings I was a desperate patriot and intended to go into the army; but an exclusive sentiment of nationality never leads to any good ; it led me to the following incident. Among others who used to visit us was the Comte de Quinsonaas, a French emigre and a lieutenant-general in the Russian service. A desperate royalist, he took part in the· celebrated fete of Versailles, at which the King's life-guards trampled underfoot the popular cockade and at which Marie Antoinette drank to the destruction of the revolution. This French count, a tall, thin, graceful old man with grey hair, was the very model of politeness and elegant manners. There was a peerage awaiting him in Paris, where he had already been to congratulate Louis XVIII on getting his situation. He had returned to Russia to dispose of his estate. Unluckily for me this most courteous of the generals of all the Russian armies had to begin speaking of the war in my presence.
'But surely you must have been fighting against us?' I remarked with extreme nai:vete.
'Non, man petit, non; j'etais dans l'armee russe.'
'What?' said I, 'you, a Frenchman, and fighting in our army?
That's impossible! '
M y father glanced sternly a t m e and changed the subject. The Count heroically set things right by saying to my father that 'he liked such patriotic sentiments.' My father had not liked them, and whPn the Count had gone away he gave me a terrible scolding. 'This is what comes of rushing headlong into conversation about all sorts of things you don't untlerstand and can't understand; it was out of fidelity to his king that the Count served under our emperor.'
I certainly did not understand that.
My father had spent twelve years abroad and his brother still longer; they tried to arrange their life in the foreign style while avoiding great expense and retaining all Russian comforts. Their life never was so arranged, either because they did not know how to manage or because the nature of a Russian landowner was stronger in them than their foreign habits. The management of their land and house was in common, the estate was undivided, an immense crowd of house-serfs peopled the ground floor, and consequently all conditions for disorder were present.
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Two nurses looked after me, one Russian and one German.
Vera Artamonovna and Madame Proveau were very kind women, but it bored me to watch them all day long knitting stockings and bickering together, and so at every favourable opportunity I ran away to the half of the house occupied by my uncle, the Senator (the one who had been an ambassador) , to see my one friend, his valet Calot.
I have rarely met a kinder, gentler, milder man ; utterly alone in Russia, parted from all his own people, with difficulty speaking broken Russian, his devotion to me was like a ,.,·oman's. I spent whole hours in his room, worried him, got in his way, played pranks-he bore it all with a good-natured smile; cut all sorts of marvels out of cardboard for me and carved various trifles out of wood (and how I loved him for it! ) . In the evenings he used to bring me up picture-books from the library-the Travels of Gmelin11 and of Pallas,12 and a fat book of The World in Picturcs,13 which I liked so much that I looked at it until the binding, although of leather, gave way; for a couple of hours at a timC' Calot would show mf' the same pictures, repeating the same explanation for the thousandth time.
Before my birthday and my name-day Calot \vould lock himself up in his room, from which came the sounds of a hammer and other tools; of�en he would pass along the corridor \vith rapid steps, locking his door after him every time, sometimes carrying a little sauce-pan of glue, sometimes a parcel with things wrapped up. It may well be imagined how much I longed to know what he \vas making; I used to send the house-serf boys to try and find out, but Calot kept a sharp look-out. \Ve somehow discovered, on the staircase, a little crack which looked straight into his room, but it was of no help to us; all we could see was the uppC'r part of the window and the portra it of Frederick II with a huge nose and huge star and the expression of an emaciated hawk. Two days before the event the noise would cease and the room would be opened-everything in it was as usual, except for scraps of coloured and gold paper here and there; I \vould 11 Gmelin. Johann Gear�?; ( 1 709-55 ) , a l ea rned German who travelled in the Enst. ( Tr.)