After this the Privy Council, the Synod and the Senate gave orders that within twenty-four hours the girls were to grow their cropped hair, to remove their spectacles and to give a written undertaking to have sound eyes and to wear crinolines.
Although there is nothing said in the Book of Guidancell about
'hooping of skirts' or 'widening of petticoats,' and it positively forbids the plaiting of the hair, the clergy agreed. For the moment the Tsar's life seemed secured till he should reach the Elysian Fields. It was not their fault that in Paris also there were Champs-tlysees, and with a Rond Point,12 too.
These extreme measures were of enormous benefit, and this I say without the slightest irony: but to whom? To our Nihilist girls.
The one thing that they lacked was to cast aside their uniform, their formalism, and to develop in that broad freedom to which they have the fullest claim. It is terribly hard for one who I I A collection of ecclesiastical rules and laws of the State concerning religious observances. It appeared first in the sixth century at Constantinople under the name of Nomokanon; in the ninth century it was translated into Slavonic for the Bulgarian Church and in the eleventh century was accepted by the Russian Orthodox Church. Various amendments were made as time went on; it was last edited in 1 787. (A.S.) 1 2 \'Vhere on 6th June, 1 867, the Polish emigre Anton Berezowski fired unsuccessfully at Alexander II. (A.S.)
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is used to a uniform to cast it off of himself. The garment grows to the wearer. A bishop in a dress-coat would give over blessing and intoning.
Our girl-students and Burschcn would have been a long time taking off their spectacles and their other emblems. They had them taken off at the expense of the government, which added to this good turn the aureole of a toilette martyrdom.
After that their business is to swim au large.
P.S.--Some are already coming back with the brilliant diploma of Doctor of Medicine, and all glory to them! 13
Nice, Summer 1 867
V E .\" E Z I A L A B E L L A 1 4
F E B R U A R Y 1 8 6 7
THERE IS No sucH magnificent absurdity as Venice. To build a city where it is impossible to build a city is madness in itself; but to build there one of the most elegant and grandest of cities is the madness of genius. The water, the sea, their sparkle and glitter, call for a peculiar sumptuousness. Molluscs embellish their cabins with mother-of-pearl and pearls.
A single superficial look at Venice shows one that it is a city of strong will, of vigorous intellect-republ ican, commercial, oligarchica l ; that it is the knot that ties something together across the waters, a warehouse for merchandise under a military flag, a city with a noisy popular assembly and a soundless city of secret councils and measures; in its squares the whole population is jostling from morning 'til night, v1;hile the rivers of its streets flow silently to the sea. While the crowd clamours and shouts in St Mark's ·square, a boat glides by and vanishes unobserved.
13 The first Russian woman doctor, N. P. Suslonl, was dismissed, together with other female students, from the Medico-Surgical Academy in Petersburg in 1 86+. In 1 867 she completed the course at Ziirich University with the degree of Doctor of :\IedicinP. She had connections with revolutionary circles and in 1 86+ she worked for the Contemporarr; when abroad she kept up her intercourse with se\'eral Russian revolutionary emigrants and was ncquaintPd with HPrzen. HPr pxample strengthened the desire of the progressives among the young women for higher education and for work of benefit to society. (A.S. ) H This title may ha\'e been suggPsted either by a song that was wry popular in Venice when Herzen was there, 'La bella Vene.:ia,' or by A. Grigore\''s \'erses, 'Vene.:ia Ia bella.' ( A .S.)
M Y P A S T A N D T H O U G H T S
6 1 0
Who knows what i s under its black awning? Was not this the very place to drown people, within hail of lovers' trysts.
The men who felt at home in the Palazzo Ducale must have been of an eccentric cast. They stuck at nothing. There is no earth, there are no trees, what does it matter? Let us have still more carved stones, more ornaments, gold, mosaics, sculptures, pictures and frescoes. Here an empty corner has been left; into the corner with a thin sea-god with a long, wet beardf Here is an empty recess; put in another lion with wings and a gospel of Saint Mark! There it is bare and empty; put down a carpet of marble and mosaic! and here, lacework of porphyry! Is there a victory over the Turks or over Genoa? does the Pope seek the friendship of the city? then more marble ; cover a whole wall with a curtain of carving, and above all, more pictures. Let Paul Veronese, Tintoretto, Titian fetch their brushes and mount the scaffolding: every step in the triumphal progress of the Beauty of the Sea must be depicted for posterity in paint or sculpturP.. And so full of life was the spirit that dwelt in these stones that new routes and new seaports, Columbus and Vasco da Gama, \vere not enough to crush it. For its destruction the 'One and Indivisible Republic' had to rise up on the ruins of the French throne, and on the ruins of that rppublic the soldier who in Corsican fashion stabbed the lion with a stiletto poisow•d by Austria. 1;; But Venice has digested the poison and proves to be alive once more after half a century.
But is she alive? It is hard to say \vhat has survived except the grand shell, and whether there is another future for Venice . . . .
And, indeed, what future can there be for Italy at all? For Venice, perhaps, it lies in Constantinople, in the free federation of the rising Slav-Hellenic nationalities, which begins to stand out in vague outlines from the mists of the East.
And for ItalyJ . . . Of that later. There is a carnival in Venice now, the first carnival in freedom after seventy years'
captivity.IG The Square has bPen transformed into the hall of the Paris Opera. Old Saint Mark gaily takes his part in the fete with his church paintings and his gilding, with his patriotic flags and his pagan horses. Only the pigeons, ,vho appear in the Square at two o'clock every day to be fed, are be\vildered and flutter from cornice to cornice to convince themselves that this really is their dining-room in such disorder.
1:\ The treaty of Campo Formio, October 1 797. (A.S.) 1�; In 1 866, hy an a�n'<:'ment concluded by Austria and Italy after the Austro-Prussian war, Venice became part of the Kingdom of I taly. ( A.S. )
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The crowd keeps growing, le peuple s'amuse, plays the fool heartily with all its might, with great comic talent in words and in their delivery of pronunciation and gesture, but without the cantharidity of the Parisian pierrots, ,..,·ithout the vulgar jokes of the German, without our native filth. The absence of everything indecent surprises one, though the significance of it is clear. This is the frolic, the recreation, the fun of a whole people, and not a dress-parade of brothels, of their succursales, whose inmates, while they strip off so much else, put on a mask, like Bismarc_k's needle, 17 to intensify their fire and make it irresistible. Here they would be out of place; here the people is having its fun, here sisters, wives and daughters are diverting themselves, and woe to him who insults a mask. For the time of the carnival the mask becomes for the woman what the Stanislaw ribbon in his buttonhole used to be for a station-master. IS