Chapter 42

THE COUP D’ÉTAT—THE PROCUREUR OF THE LATE REPUBLIC—THE VOICE OF THE COW IN THE WILDERNESS—BANISHMENT OF THE PROCUREUR—ORDER AND CIVILISATION TRIUMPHANT

‘Vive la mort, _friends! And a happy new year! Now we shall be consistent, now we shall not be false to our own ideas, shall not be terrified at the realisation of what we have foreseen, shall not abjure the knowledge we have reached by the path of tribulation. Now we shall be strong and stand up for our convictions._

‘_We saw death approaching long ago; we may grieve, we may feel sympathy, but we cannot be surprised, we cannot be despairing or downcast. Quite the contrary, we ought to lift up our heads, we are justified. We have been called birds of ill omen invoking disaster, we have been reproached for heresy, for ignorance of the people, for proud isolation, for childish resentment, while we have only been guilty of seeing the truth and speaking it openly. Our words, which are still the same, are now the consolation, the encouragement of those who are terrified by the events in Paris._’—(‘Letters from France and Italy,’ No. 14. Nice, December 31, 1851.)

One morning (I remember it was the 4th of December) our cook, Pasquale Rocca, came in to me, and with a look of pleasure announced that flysheets were being sold in the streets with the news that ‘Buonaparte has dismissed the Assembly and appointed a red government.’ Who were the zealous servants of Napoleon who spread such rumours among the people even outside France (Nice was at that time Italian), I do not know; but what numbers there must have been of agents of all sorts, political stokers, whipping the public up end raising the temperature, since there were enough of them even for Nice!

An hour later Vogt, Hoetsky, Mathieu, and others turned up: all were surprised ... Mathieu, a typical specimen of a French revolutionary, was beside himself.

Bald, with a skull the shape of a walnut—that is, a typically Gallic skull, not spacious but obstinate—with a big, dark, unkempt beard, a rather good-natured expression, and little eyes, Mathieu was like a prophet, like a crazy saint, like an augur, and like his bird. He was a lawyer, and in the happy days of the February republic had been a _procureur_ or a deputy _procureur_ somewhere. He was a revolutionary to the tips of his finger-nails; he gave himself up to the revolution as people give themselves up to religion, with implicit faith, never dared either to understand or to doubt or to be over-subtle, but loved and believed, called Ledru-Rollin ‘Ledru,’ and Louis Blanc simply ‘Blanc,’ used the word _citoyen_ whenever he could, and was perpetually conspiring.

On receiving the news of the 2nd of December he disappeared, and returned two days later completely convinced that France was rising, _que cela chauffe_, and especially in the south, in the department of Var near Draguignan. The great thing to be done was to enter into relations with the leaders of the insurrection.... He had seen some of them, and had settled with them overnight, passing through Var, to collect trustworthy and important persons together at a certain spot, for consultation.... But that the gendarmes might not get wind of it, it was settled on both sides to give as a signal the moo of a cow. If things went well, Orsini meant to bring all his friends, and, though not quite confident that Mathieu’s view of the position was correct, he set off with him to cross the frontier. Orsini came back shaking his head, though, true to his revolutionary and somewhat _condottieri_ temperament, he proceeded to prepare his comrades and collect arms. Mathieu vanished.

Twenty-four hours later, Rocca woke me at four o’clock in the morning: ‘Two gentlemen just arrived from a journey; they urgently want to see you, they say. One of them gave me this note.’ ‘_Citoyen_, for God’s sake give bearer three or four hundred francs at once, if possible; urgently necessary.—MATHIEU.’

I snatched up the money and went downstairs: two remarkable individuals were sitting in the half-dark by the window; accustomed as I am to all the uniforms of revolution, I was yet struck by the appearance of my visitors. Both were covered with mud and clay to their knees; one was wearing a thick red woollen scarf; both had shabby overcoats, a sash round their waistcoats, and big pistols in the sash; and the rest was as usual—unkempt shocks of hair, big beards, and tiny pipes. One of them, beginning with the word _citoyen_, delivered a speech in which he touched upon my civic virtues and the money expected by Mathieu. I gave him the money. ‘Is he in safety?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ answered his ambassador; ‘we’re going to join him at once on the other side of the Var. He is buying a boat.’

‘A boat! what for?’

‘Citoyen Mathieu has the whole plan for landing—the infamous coward of a boatman would not let us have the boat on credit....’

‘What, a landing in France ... with one boat...?’

‘It is a secret, _citoyen_, for the time.’

‘_Comme de raison._’

‘Would you like a receipt?’

‘Oh, no need of that!’

Next day Mathieu himself appeared, also muddy to the ears, and worn out with fatigue; he had been mooing like a cow all night, had several times fancied he heard an answer, went towards it, and found a real bull or a cow. Orsini, who had been waiting somewhere for him for ten hours at a stretch, also came back. The difference between them was that Orsini, washed, and as always, dressed neatly and tastefully, looked like a man who had just walked out of his bedroom; while Mathieu bore all the outward signs of destroying the peace of the state, and attempting to raise a rebellion. Then the boat question had to be considered. Trouble is never far off, and he might easily ruin half a dozen of his own countrymen and half a dozen of the Italians. To stop or dissuade him was impossible. The leaders who had come to me in the night appeared with him; one might be certain that he would compromise not only the French but all of us in Nice. Hoetsky undertook to manage him, and did so like an artist.

Hoetsky’s window, with a little balcony, looked straight out on the sea-shore. In the morning he saw Mathieu wandering with a mysterious air along the beach.... Hoetsky began making signs to him; Mathieu saw them and signed that he would come to him presently; but Hoetsky, assuming an air of the most terrible alarm, telegraphed to him with his fingers that danger was imminent, and insisted on his coming up to the balcony at once. Mathieu, looking round him, stole up on tiptoe. ‘You don’t know?’ Hoetsky asked him. ‘What?’ ‘A squadron of French gendarmes has come into Nice.’ ‘You don’t say so!’

‘Sh—sh—sh.... They are looking for you and your friends. They mean to make a house-to-house search among us—you will be caught at once; don’t go out into the street.’

‘_Violation du territoire_ ... I shall protest.’

‘Of course; only, now you must escape.’

‘I will go to Ste. Hélène, to Herzen’s.’

‘You must be mad! That’s simply giving yourself up to them. His villa is on the frontier, with a huge garden, and no one will even know that you have been arrested—besides, Rocca saw two gendarmes at the gate, even yesterday.’

Mathieu sank into thought.

‘Go by sea to Vogt’s, hide there for the time, and he, by the way, will give you the best advice.’

Mathieu went by the sea-coast—that is, twice as far round—to Vogt’s, and began telling him word for word his conversation with Hoetsky. Vogt instantly grasped the position and observed to him: ‘The great thing, dear Mathieu, is not to lose one instant. Within two hours you must go to Turin: the diligence passes the other side of the hill; I will take a seat, and take you there by the path.’

‘I’ll run home for my things ...’ and the _procureur_ of the republic was a little flustered.

‘That’s even worse than going to Herzen’s. Why, you must be crazy—gendarmes, agents, spies, I don’t know what, are after you ... and you want to run home to kiss your fat Provençale! What a Celadon![89] Porter!’ shouted Vogt (his house-porter was a minute German, a killing person, very much like a coffee-pot that had not been washed for months, and absolutely devoted to Vogt). ‘Make haste and write that you want a shirt, handkerchiefs, clothes; he’ll fetch them, and if you like bring your Dulcinea too so that you may kiss and weep to your heart’s content.’

Mathieu was so overcome with feeling that he embraced Vogt.

Hoetsky arrived. ‘Make haste, make haste!’ he said with an ominous air.

Meanwhile the porter came back, his Dulcinea came also—they had only to wait for the diligence to come into sight beyond the hill. The seat had been taken.

‘I suppose you are cutting up rotten dogs or rabbits again?’ Hoetsky asked Vogt; ‘_quel chien de métier...!_’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Upon my soul, the stench in your room is like the catacombs at Naples.’

‘I notice it myself, but I can’t make it out; it comes from the corner.... There must be a dead rat under the floor—it’s an awful stink,’ and he picked up Mathieu’s overcoat lying on a chair. It appeared that the smell came from the overcoat.

‘What the devil have you got in your overcoat?’ Vogt asked him.

‘Nothing!’

‘Oh, it must be my fault,’ observed Dulcinea, blushing, ‘I put a pound of Limburg cheese, _un peu trop fait_, in his pocket for the journey.’

‘I congratulate your neighbours in the diligence,’ shouted Vogt, laughing as no one else in the world can laugh.

‘Well, it’s time to start—march!’

And Hoetsky and Vogt saw the agitator off on his way to Turin.

In Turin Mathieu presented himself before the Minister of the Interior with a protest. The latter received him with irritation and laughter. ‘How could you imagine that French gendarmes could arrest people in the kingdom of Sardinia? You must be unwell.’

Mathieu referred to the testimony of Vogt and Hoetsky.

‘Your friends,’ said the Minister, ‘have been having a joke at your expense.’

Mathieu wrote to Vogt; he reeled off a string of nonsense, I do not know what, in answer. But Mathieu was offended, particularly with Hoetsky, and a few weeks later wrote a letter to me in which, among other things, he said: ‘You, _citoyen_, alone among these gentlemen, took no part in this treacherous intrigue against me....’

What adds to the characteristic oddity of the affair is that there was a very serious rising in Var, that masses of the population really did revolt, and that the rising was suppressed with the habitual French bloodthirstiness. How was it Mathieu and his bodyguard, for all their zeal and their mooing, did not know how to get in contact with the rebels? No one suspects him or his comrades of intentionally going to mess about in the mud and not wanting to go where there was danger—far from it. That is not in the spirit of the French, of whom Delphine Gay said that ‘they are afraid of everything except bullets,’ and still less in the spirit _de la démocratie militante_ and the red republic.... Why did Mathieu go to the right when the revolting peasants were on the left?

A few days later—like yellow leaves driven before the wind—the luckless victims of the suppressed rising began streaming into Nice. There were so many of them that the Piedmont government allowed them to remain for a time in a sort of bivouac or gypsy camp near the town. How many ruined fortunes and privations have we seen in these camps!—that is the horrible side behind the scenes of civil wars; usually concealed behind the big framework and gay scene-painting of such events as the 2nd of December.

Here were simple peasants, gloomily pining for home, for their land, and naïvely saying: ‘We are not rebels at all—and not “_partageux_”; we tried to defend public order as good citizens: _ce sont ces coquins_ who called us out’ (_i.e._ the officials, mayors, and gendarmes)—‘they were false to their oath and their duty, and must we now die of hunger in a foreign land or face a court-martial?... Where’s the justice in that?’

And indeed, a _coup d’état_ like the 2nd of December destroys more than men: it destroys all morality, every conception of good and evil in a whole population; it is a lesson of corruption which cannot pass without effect. Among them were soldiers too, _troupiers_, in a permanent state of wonder at finding themselves, contrary to all discipline and their captains’ orders, on a different side from their flag and their regiment. The number of these was not great, however. There were also simple bourgeois of humble means, who never make the same repulsive impression on me as the more pretentious—pitiful, narrow-minded people, they had somehow, in the midst of the petty cheating of trade, laboriously assimilated two or three notions or half-notions of their duties, and they had risen in defence of them when they saw their holy things trampled upon.

‘It is the triumph of egoism,’ they said; ‘yes, yes, of egoism, and where there is egoism there is vice; every one ought to do his duty without egoism.’

There were, too, of course, town workmen, the real genuine element of revolution, striving to obtain _la sociale_ by decree—and to pay out the bourgeois and the aristocrat as they paid them out.

Of course, among them there were wounded, terribly wounded, too. I remember two middle-aged peasants who had crawled, leaving a track of blood, from the frontier to a suburb where the inhabitants picked them up half dead. A gendarme had been chasing them, and, seeing the frontier was not far off, he fired at one and shattered his shoulder.... The wounded man still ran on.... The gendarme fired once more, the wounded man fell; then he galloped after the other and overtook him, first with a bullet and then himself. The second wounded man surrendered; the gendarme tied him in haste to his horse, and all at once missed the first man ... he had crawled to a copse and started running.... To overtake him on horseback was difficult, especially with the other wounded man; to leave the horse behind impossible.... The gendarme shot his prisoner ‘_à bout portant_’ from the top of his head downwards; the man fell unconscious: the bullet tore open the whole right side of his face, splintering the bones. When he came to himself there was no one there; he made his way along familiar paths trodden by the smugglers as far as Var, and crossed it and passed through it almost bleeding to death; there he found his comrade utterly exhausted, and with him succeeded in _surviving_ as far as the first houses of Ste. Hélène. There, as I have said, the inhabitants took care of them. The first man said that after being shot he had hidden in some bushes, that afterwards he had heard voices, that the pursuing gendarmes had probably come upon others and so made off.

How zealous are the French police!

This example was followed by the zealous _maires_ and their deputies, the _procureurs_ of the _republic_ and prefects; the zeal was displayed in the elections and counting of votes: all this was typically French, and familiar to everybody. I will only say that in remote parts the steps taken for attaining an immense majority at the polls were of a rustic simplicity. On the farther side of the Var, in the first village, the _maire_ and brigadier of gendarmes sat beside the urns and looked at every ballot-paper any one put in, saying on the spot that they would make mince-meat of any rebel. The government voting-papers were printed on special paper—so it worked out that there were in the whole village only some five or six bold, unruly spirits who voted against the plebiscite; the rest, and with them the whole of France, voted for the Empire _in spe_.

_SECTION TWO_

RUSSIAN SHADOWS

I

N. I. SAZONOV

Sazonov, Bakunin, Paris. Those names, those men, that city, take me back ... back into the far-away past, to the days of youthful conspiracies, to the days of the cult of philosophy and the worship of revolution.

My youth with each is too precious for me not to pause over it.... With Sazonov, early in the ’thirties, I shared our boyish dreams of a plot _à la_ Rienzi ... with Bakunin, ten years later, in the sweat of my brains, I mastered Hegel.

Of Bakunin I have spoken already and shall have much more yet to say. His striking personality, his eccentric and vigorous appearance, everywhere—in the circle of Moscow youth, in the lecture-room of the Berlin University, among Weitling’s communists, and Caussidière’s Montagnards—his speeches in Prague, his leadership in Dresden, his trial, imprisonment, sentence to death, torture in Austria, deportation to Russia—where he vanished behind the terrible walls of the Alexeyevsky Ravelin—make of him one of those individual figures which neither the contemporary world nor history can overlook.

That man had within him the latent power of a colossal activity for which there was no demand. Bakunin was capable of becoming an agitator, a tribune, a preacher, the head of a party or of a sect, an arch heretic or a fighter. Put him down anywhere you like, at any extreme point—an Anabaptist, a Jacobin, a comrade of Anacharsis Cloots or a friend of Gracchus Babeuf—and he would have won over the masses and shaken the destinies of nations.

‘But here under the yoke of Tsars,’

a Columbus without an America or a ship, after against his will serving two years in the artillery and two more in the ranks of Moscow Hegelianism, he made haste to leave the country in which an idea is persecuted as an evil intention, and an independent word as an offence against social morality.

After tearing himself from Russia in 1840, he did not return there until a picket of Austrian dragoons handed him over to a Russian officer of gendarmes in 1849.

The worshippers of teleology, the charming fatalists of rationalism, are still surprised at the provident appropriateness with which great talents and leaders appear as soon as there is a need for them; forgetting how many germs perish, are stifled without seeing the light, how many faculties and powers waste away because they are not wanted.

Sazonov’s example is still more striking. Sazonov has passed without leaving a trace, and his death has been as unnoticed as the whole of his life. He died without carrying out one of the hopes that his friends built upon him.

It is easy to say he was to blame for his fate; but how can we weigh or appraise how much of the blame rests on the man and how much on his environment?

The age of Nicholas was a soul-destroying age; it murdered not only with labour in the mines and ‘white straps,’ but with its stifling, degrading atmosphere, with its, so to say, negative blows.

To deliver the funeral oration over the submerged beings of that period, worn out with striving to drag our ship off the sandbanks where it has foundered so deeply, is my speciality. For them I play the part of Domazhirov, the old retired orderly of Prozorovsky’s, now forgotten by everybody, but at one time a familiar figure in Moscow. With a powdered head, wearing a light green uniform of the days of Paul, he used to turn up at all the funerals in which a bishop officiated, and, taking the foremost place, led the procession, imagining that he was doing something important.

... In our second year at the university—that is, in the autumn of 1831—in the lecture-room of the faculty of physics and mathematics, Ogaryov and I met, among our new comrades, two with whom we became particularly intimate.

Our likings, our sympathies and antipathies, were all derived from the same source. We were fanatics and lads: learning, art, connections, home, and social position, everything was subordinated to one idea and one religion. Wherever there was an opening for appeal and propaganda, there we were on the spot with all our heart and understanding, persistently, indefatigably, devoting time, work, and even efforts to please.

We went into the lecture-room with the firm determination of founding in it the nucleus of a society in the image and semblance of the Decembrists, and so sought proselytes and followers. The first of our comrades to understand this clearly was Sazonov; we found him completely prepared, and at once made friends. He gave us his hand with full understanding, and next day brought us another student.

Sazonov had conspicuous gifts and conspicuous pride. He was eighteen or rather less, but in spite of that he had studied a great deal and had read everything in the world. He tried to dominate his comrades, and put no one on a level with himself. That was why he was more respected than loved by them. His friend, as handsome and soft as a girl, seemed asking sympathy and support; full of love and devotion, fresh from under his mother’s wing, with noble impulses and half-childish dreams, he longed for warmth and tenderness, he clung to us and gave himself up entirely to us and our idea—his was the character of Vladimir Lensky, the character of Venevitinov.

... The day on which we sat side by side on one of the benches of the amphitheatre, glanced at each other with the full consciousness of our dedication to our league, our secret, our readiness to face death, our faith in the sacredness of our cause—and glanced with loving pride at the multitude of handsome young heads about us, as at a band of brothers—was a great day in our life. We gave each other our hands and _à la lettre_ went out to preach freedom and struggle in all the four quarters of our youthful ‘universe,’ like the four deacons who go on Easter Day with the Four Gospels in their hands.

We preached in every place at every time ... exactly what it was we preached it is hard to say. Our ideas were vague: we preached the Decembrists and the French Revolution, then advocated St. Simonism and the same revolution; we advocated a constitution and a republic, the reading of political works and the concentration of forces in one society. Most of all we preached hatred for every form of violence, for every sort of arbitrary tyranny practised by governments.

Our society in reality was never formed; but our propaganda sent down deep roots in all the faculties, and extended far beyond the university walls.

Since those days our propaganda has gone on uninterrupted, all our lives, from university lecture-room to London printing-press. Our whole life has been the carrying out of our boyish programme as far as lay in our power. It is not hard to follow the connecting thread through the questions we have touched upon, through the interests aroused by us, in journals, in lectures, in literary circles.... Though it took different forms and developed, our propaganda remained true to itself and retained its individual character in every surrounding.

Punishment lifted us up and gave us the prestige of prison and exile. We came back to Moscow, ‘authorities’ at five-and-twenty. We were joined by Byelinsky, Granovsky, and Bakunin, while through our articles in _Notes on the Fatherland_ we ourselves joined the Petersburg movement of the Lyceum students and the young literary men. The Petrashev group were our younger brothers as the Decembrists were our elder ones. To be silent about the importance of our circle because I belonged to it would be hypocritical and stupid. Quite the contrary: whenever in my memoirs I come upon those days, on old friends of the ’thirties and the ’forties, I purposely pause and speak regardless of repetition if only I can make the younger generation better acquainted with them. It does not know them, it has forgotten them, it does not care for them, and denounces them as unpractical and unbusinesslike, as men who did not know so well where they were going; it is angry with them, and rejects them wholesale as out of date, as idle and superfluous men, as fantastic dreamers, forgetting that the value of men of the past, their significance and the hall-mark of them, depends less on the comparison of the sum of knowledge, and the manner of formulating problems of the old period and of the new, than on the energy and strength they brought to their solution. I have a desperate longing to save the younger generation from the ingratitude of history, and even from the mistakes of history. It is time for the fathers to cease devouring their children like Saturn, but it is time for the children, too, to cease following the example of the natives of Kamschatka, who kill off their old people.

Boldly, and with full conviction, I say once more of our comrades of those days ‘that they were a wonderful set of young men, that such a circle of talented, pure-hearted, cultured, intelligent, and devoted men I have never met,’ and I have wandered pretty widely about the world among all classes, and especially the revolutionary ones. I am not only speaking of my own circle of intimate friends; I am bound to say the same thing as emphatically of Stankevitch’s circle and the Slavophils. Young men, horror-stricken by the infamies of the life about them, surrounded by gloom and oppressive misery, gave up all and went in search of a way out. They sacrificed everything that others strive after—social position, wealth, everything which the traditional life offered them, to which environment and example drew them, to which their family urged them—for the sake of their convictions, and they remained true to them. Such men cannot be simply put on the archives and forgotten.

They are persecuted, arrested, put under police supervision, exiled, dragged from place to place, overwhelmed with insults and humiliations—they remain the same: ten years pass—they are still the same: twenty, thirty years pass—they are still the same. I demand that a recognition be accorded them and justice be done to them.

To this simple demand I have heard a strange objection, and more than once, too: ‘You, and even more the Decembristi, were the dilettanti of revolutionary ideas; interest in the cause was for you a luxury, something romantic; you say yourselves that you all _sacrificed_ social position; you had means, so for you the revolution was not a question of bread and butter and of human existence, the question of life and death....’

‘I imagine,’ I answered once, ‘that for those who were executed it was....’

‘Anyway, they were not momentous, inevitable questions for you. You like to be revolutionaries, and that of course is better than if you like to be senators or governors; for us the struggle with the existing order is not a matter of choice, it is due to _our_ social position. Between you and us there is the difference between the man who has fallen into the water and the man who is bathing; both have to swim, but one does it from necessity and the other for pleasure.’

To refuse recognition to men because they have done from inner impulse what others _are going_ to do from necessity is remarkably like the monastic asceticism which only attaches value to duties the fulfilment of which is very disgusting.

Extreme views of this sort easily take root among us; and though the roots do not go deep, they are as hard to eradicate as horse-radish.

We are greatly given to theoretical pedantry and argumentativeness. This German propensity is in us associated with a special national element—which we might call the Araktcheyev element—a ruthlessness, a passionate rigidity, and an eagerness to despatch our victims. To satisfy his grenadier ideal, Araktcheyev flogged living peasants to death; we flog to death ideas, arts, humanity, past leaders, anything you like. In dauntless array we advance step by step to the limit and overshoot it, never sinning against logic but only against _truth_; unaware, we go on further and further, forgetting that real sense and real understanding of life are shown precisely in stopping short before the extreme ... that is the _halte_ of moderation, of truth, of beauty, that is the perfect balance of the organism.

The oligarchic pretension of the have-nots to be the exclusive sufferers from the social system and to possess a monopoly of the feeling of social injustice is as unjust as all forms of exclusiveness and monopoly. Neither through Christian mercy nor through democratic envy will you ever get beyond charity and violent spoliation, the division of property and universal poverty. In the Church it has remained a theme for rhetoric and a sentimental exercise in compassion; in the ultra-democrats, as Proudhon has observed, it is confined to the feeling of envy and hatred; and in neither case has it gone on to any constructive ideas, to any practical result.

In what way are men to blame who understood the pain of the sufferers before they themselves did, and showed it them, and, what was more, the way of escape too? It was not through starvation that St. Simon the descendant of Charlemagne, and Robert Owen the manufacturer, either of them became apostles of socialism.

This view will not persist; it lacks warmth, goodness, breadth. I should not have referred to it if these critics had not included on their black lists, not only our names, but those of the men who sowed the first seeds of all that has come up and will come up—the Decembrists whom we so deeply honour.

This digression is hardly in place here.

Sazonov was, in fact, an idle man, and wasted immense abilities; frittering his life away in all sorts of trivialities abroad, he was lost like a soldier taken prisoner in his first battle and never able to get home again.

When we were arrested in 1834 and clapped into prison, Sazonov and Ketscher were, by some miracle, untouched. They both lived almost uninterruptedly in Moscow, and talked a great deal but wrote little, and no letters of theirs were found in the possession of any of us. We were sent into exile; Sazonov’s mother succeeded in getting a passport for him to go to Italy. His going abroad and being separated from us may have laid the foundation of all that followed in his life, which was that of a star with no fixed orbit, falling and leaving no trace.

A year later he returned to Moscow; it was just at one of the most stifling and oppressive periods of the last reign. In Moscow he was met by a dead level calm, nowhere a shade of sympathy, nowhere a word of life. We, in the _reserves_ of exile, were cherishing our past life, were living in hope and memory, were working and learning something of the coarse realities of provincial existence.

In Moscow everything reminded Sazonov of our absence. Of his old friends, the only one on the spot was Ketscher, with whom Sazonov, a man of stiff and aristocratic manners, was less able to be intimate than with any of the rest. Ketscher, as we have said, was an intellectual savage—a cultured one, a pioneer from Fenimore Cooper, returning intentionally to the primeval state of the human race, rude on principle, slovenly through theory, a student of five-and-thirty in the part of a Schilleresque youth. Sazonov struggled on and on in Moscow—he was consumed by boredom, he had no motive for work, for activity. He tried moving to Petersburg; that was even worse: _à la longue_ he could not stand it, and went to Paris with no definite plan. Those were the days when France and Paris still had a spell of magic for us. Our tourists glided over the polished surface of French life, knowing nothing of its rough side, and were in raptures over everything—over the liberal speeches, over the songs of Béranger and the caricatures of Philipon. It was the same with Sazonov. But he found nothing to do there either. Noisy, lively idleness succeeded to his life of dumbness and oppression. In Russia he had been bound hand and foot, here he was a stranger to every one and everything. Another long series of years of aimless excitement and over-stimulated nerves began for him in Paris. He was incapable of concentrating, of devoting himself to intellectual work without waiting for some impelling force from outside; it was not in his character. The impersonal interest in science was not strong enough in him; he was looking for some activity, and would have been ready for any amount of work so long as it was conspicuous, so long as it could be rapidly applied and realised in practice—and it must have been, too, with noise and acclamation, amidst applause and the outcry of his enemies. Not finding such work, he flung himself into the dissipations of Paris.

... Yet his eyes, too, glowed and filled with tears at the memories of our dreams as students. In the recesses of his deeply wounded vanity there still was faith that the revolution in Russia was close at hand, and that he was called to play a great part in it. It seemed as though he were carousing only _meanwhile_, in the wearisome suspense of waiting for the great work before him, and were convinced that one fine evening he would be summoned from the table in the Café Anglais and borne off to govern Russia.... He kept intent watch on what was being done, and impatiently awaited the moment when he would have to take part in earnest and utter the last decisive word.

After my first noisy days in Paris, more serious conversation began, and at once it was evident that we were tuned to very different keys. Sazonov and Bakunin were (like Wysocki and the members of the Polish Central Committee later on) displeased that the news I brought was more concerning the literary and university world than political spheres. They were expecting to be told about parties, secret societies, ministerial crises (under Nicholas!), the opposition (in 1847!), while I talked about professorships, about Granovsky’s public lectures, about Byelinsky’s articles, about the state of mind of the students and even of the seminarists. They had been too long divorced from Russian life, and had entered too thoroughly into the interests of the ‘all-world’ revolution and French problems to remember that among us the appearance of _Dead Souls_ was an event of far more consequence than the appointment of a couple of Paskevitches as field-marshals and a couple of Filarets as metropolitans. With no Russian books and papers and no regular means of communication, they judged of everything in Russia theoretically and from memory, which throws an artificial light on everything far away.

The difference of our views almost led to a breach between us. It happened like this. On the day before Byelinsky left Paris we saw him home in the evening, and went for a walk in the Champs-Élysées. I saw with terrible clearness that all was over for Byelinsky, that I was pressing his hand for the last time. The mighty, passionate fighter had burnt himself out, death had laid its unmistakable imprint on his face, wan with suffering; he was in acute consumption, but still full of holy energy and holy indignation, still full of his agonising, angry love for Russia. I had a lump in my throat and for a long time I walked in silence, when the unlucky argument which had been ten times already _sur le tapis_ was renewed once more.

‘It is a pity,’ observed Sazonov, ‘that Byelinsky has had no career but journalistic work, and under the censorship, too.’

‘I think it is hard to reproach him, of all people, for doing little,’ I answered.

‘Well, with abilities like his he might in other circumstances and in another field have done rather more....’

I felt vexed and wounded. ‘But do tell me, please, you now, who are not under the censorship, who are so full of faith in yourselves, so full of strength and talent, what have you done? Or what are you doing? Surely you don’t imagine that walking from one end of Paris to the other every day to discuss the boundaries of Poland and Russia with Sluzalski or Chotkewicz is doing something? Or that your talks in cafés and at home, where five fools listen and understand nothing, while another five understand nothing and talk, is doing something?’

‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Sazonov, by now considerably nettled: ‘you forget our position.’

‘What position? You have been living here for years in freedom, in no dire extremity: what more do you want? Positions are created. Strong men make themselves acknowledged and force themselves in. Come, come: one critical article of Byelinsky’s is of far more value for the younger generation than playing at being conspirators and politicians. You are living in a sort of delirium and somnambulism, in a perpetual optical illusion with which you deceive your own eyes....’

I was particularly irritated at the time by the two different standards which not only Sazonov but Russians in general applied in appreciating people. Their severe criticism of their own people was transformed into slavish worship before French celebrities. It was annoying to see our friends kow-tow before those champion babblers, who flung them a word, a phrase, a commonplace, uttered with _vitesse accélérée_; and the more meekly the Russians behaved, the more they blushed and tried to conceal their idols’ ignorance (as tender parents and sensitive husbands do), the more the latter gave themselves airs and swaggered before their hyperborean Anarchases.[90]

Sazonov even as a student in Russia had been fond of surrounding himself with a retinue of all sorts of mediocrities, who listened to him and followed his lead; and here, too, he was surrounded by all sorts of _lazzarone_ of the literary haunts, feeble in mind and body, penny-a-liners, journalistic scavengers such as the gaunt Jules Vécourt, the half-crazy Tardif de Melot, the unknown but great poet Bouilhet;[91] in his chorus, too, were the most narrow-minded Poles, followers of Towjanski, and dull-witted German atheists. How it was they did not bore him is his secret. He almost always brought one or two attendants from his chorus even when he came to me, although I was always bored by them and did not conceal the fact. It seemed particularly odd, too, that he himself was in the position of a Jules Vécourt in his relation to the Marrasts, the Ribeyrolles,[92] and even lesser celebrities.

All this is not quite intelligible for contemporary visitors to Paris. It must not be forgotten that the present Paris is not the _real_ Paris, but a new one.

Having become a sort of gathering-place for the whole world Paris has ceased to be a pre-eminently French city. In old days all France was in Paris, and nothing besides; now all Europe is there, and the two Americas besides, but there is less of itself: it has become merged in its function of a world-hotel, a caravanserai, and has lost its individual personality, which once inspired ardent love and burning hate, boundless respect and unlimited aversion.

I need hardly say that the attitude of foreigners to modern Paris has changed. The Allied troops who bivouacked in the Place de la Révolution knew that they had taken a foreign town. The tourist who puts up there now regards Paris as his own; he buys it, he plays with it, and knows very well that he is essential to Paris, and that the old Babylon has rigged herself out, rouged and powdered, not for her own sake but for his.

In 1847 I found still the old Paris—moreover, Paris with a quickened pulse, that had been singing Béranger’s songs, with the chorus ‘_Vive la réforme!_’ changed unawares into ‘_Vive la République!_’

Russians still in those days lived in Paris with an ever-present sense of thankfulness to Providence (and to the regular despatch of remittances) that they were living in it, that they were strolling in the Palais Royal and visiting French people. They frankly worshipped lions and lionesses of every description—celebrated doctors and dancing-girls, the dentist Désirabode and the mad Ma-Pa, and all the literary charlatans and political jugglers of the day.

I hate the systematic, _prémédité_ insolence which is the fashion among us. I recognise in it the family traits of the old bullying and arrogance of our officers and landowners, adapted to the manners of Vassilyevsky Island and its streets. But it must not be forgotten that our cringing before West European authorities has come out of the same barracks, the same government offices, the same antechambers, though it has come out of the other door and is addressed to the grand gentleman, the office chief or the commanding officer. In our lack of anything whatever to which to do homage, except brute force and its symbols, stars and ranks in the service, the craving for some table of grades of merit is easy to understand; but, on the other hand, to what men have not the best of our contemporaries bowed down with tender devotion! Even before Werder and Ruge, those mighty dullards of Hegelianism. From this reverence for Germans it may easily be gathered how far they went in their attitude to Frenchmen, to men who are really remarkable—to Pierre Leroux, for instance, or George Sand herself....

I am ashamed that I was at first carried away, and thought that to talk in a café with the historian of the _Ten Years_,[93] or at Bakunin’s with Proudhon, was something like a promotion, an honour; but in me all attempts at idolatry and fetish-worship do not last long, and very soon give way to complete scepticism.

Three months after I arrived in Paris I began strenuously attacking this form of snobbery, and it was just when my opposition to it was at its height that the argument about Byelinsky took place. Bakunin, with his usual good-heartedness, half assented and laughed; but Sazonov resented it, and continued to regard me as a profane outsider in questions of practical politics. Shortly afterwards I confirmed him in this conviction.

The revolution of February was a complete triumph for him; his journalistic friends received posts in the government, thrones were tottering and leaning for support on poets and doctors. German princelings were asking advice and help from professors and journalists, who only the day before had been persecuted. The Liberals taught them how to fit their narrow crowns on more firmly, that they might not be carried off by the rising hurricane. Sazonov wrote to me in Rome, letter after letter, urging me to come _home_, to Paris, to the one and indivisible republic.

On my return from Italy I found Sazonov preoccupied. Bakunin was not there; he had already gone off to stir up the Western Slavs.

‘You don’t mean to say,’ Sazonov said to me at our first interview, ‘that you don’t see that our _time has come_?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Russian Government is in an _impasse_.’

‘Why! what has happened? A republic has not been proclaimed in the Peter-Paul Fortress, has it?’

‘_Entendons-nous_, I don’t imagine that we shall have a twenty-fourth of February to-morrow in Russia. No, but the state of public opinion, the torrent of liberal ideas, Austria broken to pieces, Prussia with a constitution, will force the men about the Winter Palace to think a little. They cannot do less than dole out some sort of constitution, _un simulacre de charte_: well, and with that,’ he added with a certain impressiveness, ‘they must have a liberal, cultured ministry who can speak the language of to-day. Have you thought of that?’

‘No!’

‘You queer fellow! Where are they going to get cultured ministers?’

‘Oh, they’ll find them right enough if they want them; but I fancy they won’t look for them.’

‘This scepticism is quite out of place now; _history is being made_, and very rapidly too. Think a minute—the government will have no choice but to appeal to _us_.’

I looked at him, trying to make out whether he was joking. His face was quite serious, it looked a little flushed and nervous with excitement.

‘You mean literally to _us_?’

‘Whether to us personally or to our circle does not matter. But just think again: to whom else can they turn?’

‘Which portfolio will you undertake?’

‘It’s silly of you to laugh. It’s our misfortune that we don’t know how to take advantage of opportunities, _ni se faire valoir_. You keep thinking about your little articles: articles are all very well, but times are changed now; one day in power is worth more than a whole volume of them.’

Sazonov looked with compassion on my unpracticalness, and at last found less sceptical people who put faith in his approaching advent to power. At the end of 1848, two or three German refugees were very regular visitors at the little evening gatherings that were held at Sazonov’s. Among them was an Austrian lieutenant who had distinguished himself as a staff-officer under Messenhauser.[94] Once as he was going out at two o’clock at night in a heavy downpour of rain, the officer complained of his hard lot, reflecting on the considerable distance between the Rue Blanche and the Quartier Latin.

‘Why were you forced to trudge all that way in such weather?’

‘Of course, I was not forced; but, you know, Herr von Sessanoff is vexed if one does not turn up, and I believe that we ought to maintain good relations with him. You know better than I do that with his talent and intellect ... with the position he occupies in his party, what he may rise to be in the coming revolution in Russia....’

‘Well, Sazonov,’ I said to him next day, ‘you have found Archimedes’ point; there is a man who believes in your future portfolio, and that man is Lieutenant So-and-So.’

Time passed, the revolution in Russia did not come off, and no one sent envoys to fetch us home. The sinister days of June had come; Sazonov undertook to write a leading article for the _Epoch_. He spent a long time working at it; read aloud a few fragments, made corrections and alterations, and only just finished it by the winter. He thought it essential ‘to explain the last revolution to Russia.’ ‘Do not expect me,’ he wrote at the beginning, ‘to describe events; others will do that better than I could. I am giving you the significance, the idea of the revolution which has taken place.’ Humble work was not enough for him; whenever he did take up the pen, he wanted to do something extraordinary, something momentous; his mind was always haunted by Tchaadayev’s letter. The article reached Petersburg, was read in friendly circles, and made no impression.

In the summer of 1848, Sazonov founded an International Club. To it he brought all his Tardifs, Germans, and Messianists. With a beaming face he walked up and down the empty room in a dark blue dress-suit. He opened the International Club with a speech addressed to five or six listeners (of whom I was one[95]) by way of audience, the rest of the party being on the platform in the capacity of committee. Sazonov was followed by Tardif de Melot, a dishevelled figure looking half-asleep, who stood up and boomed off a poem in honour of the Club.

Sazonov frowned, but it was too late to stop the poet.

‘_Worcel, Sassonoff, Elinski, Del Balzo, Léonard...._ _Et vous tous...._’

Tardif de Melot bawled with a sort of ecstatic exasperation, unaware of the laughter.

Two or three days afterwards Sazonov sent me one thousand copies of the programme of the opening ceremony; with that the Club ended. Only later on we heard that one of the representatives of humanity, who at that congress represented Spain in particular, and delivered a speech in which he called the executive power _potence ehécoutive_, supposing that was French, narrowly escaped the gallows in England and was sentenced to penal servitude for forging some document.

The failure to become a minister and the collapse of the Club were followed by more modest but far more possible attempts as a journalist. When _La Tribune des Peuples_ was established with Mickiewicz as chief editor, Sazonov took a leading position on the paper, wrote two or three very good articles ... and then ceased, and before the failure of the _Tribune_—that is, before the 13th of June 1849—he was on bad terms with all the staff. To him it all seemed petty and poor, _il se sentait dérogé_, was vexed at it, finished nothing, dropped what he had begun and flung aside what was half done.

In 1849 I suggested to Proudhon to give the post of foreign editor of the _Voix du Peuple_ to Sazonov. With his knowledge of four languages, of literature, of politics, of the history of all the European nations, and his wide acquaintance with political parties, he might have done wonders for the French with this part of the paper. Proudhon had nothing to do with the internal arrangements of the foreign news department, it was in my hands, but I could do nothing from Geneva. A month later Sazonov handed the foreign editorship to Hoetsky and severed his connection with the paper. ‘I have a great respect for Proudhon,’ he wrote to me in Geneva, ‘but there is not room on one journal for two such personalities as mine and his.’

A year later Sazonov joined _La Réforme_, then being revived by the followers of Mazzini. Lamennais was the chief editor. But on that paper also there was not room for two great men. Sazonov worked on it for three months, and then threw up _La Réforme_. With Proudhon he had fortunately parted peacefully, but he quarrelled with Lamennais. Sazonov charged the niggardly old man with using the funds of the paper for his personal ends. Lamennais, recalling the habits of his clerical youth, resorted to what is the _ultima ratio_ in Western Europe, and spread concerning Sazonov the suggestion that he might be an agent of the Russian Government.

The last time I saw Sazonov was in Switzerland in 1851. He had been deported from France, and was living in Geneva. This was at the very greyest, most oppressive period; a brutal reaction was triumphant everywhere. Sazonov’s faith in France and in the coming change in the ministry in Petersburg was shaken. He was bored and worried by his idle life, did not succeed with any work, caught at everything without perseverance, lost his temper, and drank. Moreover, the life of petty cares and the everlasting struggle with creditors, the effort to obtain money, together with the talent for flinging it away and the incapacity for ordering his life, brought a great deal of nervous irritability and dismal prose into Sazonov’s daily existence; by then his life of reckless gaiety was no longer an enjoyment but a habit, while in old days he really had known how to enjoy himself.

A few words about his domestic life will not be out of place, especially as it was distinguished by the same note of gay recklessness, and was not without its striking contrasts in colour.

In the early years of his Parisian life Sazonov met a wealthy widow, and his connection with her drew him still further into a life of luxury. She went off to Russia, leaving him plenty of money and their daughter to bring up. The widow had scarcely had time to reach Petersburg when her place was filled by a buxom Italian with a voice at which the walls of Jericho would have fallen once more.

Two or three years later the widow took it into her head to pay her friend and her daughter a quite unexpected visit. She was struck by the Italian woman.

‘What person is this?’ she asked, scanning her from head to foot.

‘Lili’s nurse, and a very good one.’

‘But how can she teach her to speak French with such an accent? That’s a pity. I had better find a Parisian and you get rid of this one.’

‘_Mais, ma chère_....’

‘_Mais, mon cher_ ...’ and the widow took her daughter away.

This was not only an emotional but a financial crisis. Sazonov was far from being poor; his sisters sent him twenty thousand francs a year from the revenue of his estate. But, being accustomed to spend it recklessly, he did not think of diminishing his establishment, but resorted to borrowing. He borrowed right and left, got what he could from Russia out of his sisters, borrowed from friends and enemies, borrowed from money-lenders, from fools, from Russians and non-Russians. For a long time he managed and kept afloat in this way, but at last got into trouble, and was thrown into Clichy, as I have mentioned already.

It was during this period that his elder sister’s husband died. Hearing that their brother was in prison, the two sisters came to get him out. As is always the case, they knew nothing of the manner of life of their Nikolinka. The two sisters adored him, regarded him as a genius, and were impatiently awaiting the moment when he would appear to the world in all his power and glory.

They were met by various disillusionments which surprised them the more as they were so unexpected. On the morning after their arrival, taking with them Count Chotkewicz, a friend of Sazonov’s, with them, they went to buy him out as a surprise. Chotkewicz left them in the carriage and went away promising to return in a minute with their brother. Hour after hour passed, Nikolinka did not appear ... no doubt the formalities take a long time, thought the ladies waiting wearily in the cab.... At last Chotkewicz ran up alone, flushed in the face, and smelling strongly of spirituous liquor. He announced that Sazonov would be with them directly; that he was just giving a farewell lunch to his companions and treating them to wine; that this was the usual thing. This was rather a stab to the tender hearts of the fair travellers ... but ... but here at last their Nikolinka, solid, stout, and perspiring, flung himself into their arms, and they set off homewards satisfied and happy.

They had heard something ... about some Italian woman ... an ardent daughter of Italy, unable to resist the genius from the hyperborean north, who had been enchanted by her southern voice and the fire of her eyes.... Blushing and abashed, they indicated the timid desire to make her acquaintance. He agreed to everything, and went home. Two days later the sisters planned a second surprise for their brother, which was even less successful than the first.

At eleven o’clock one hot morning the sisters set off to have a look at this Francesca da Rimini and her _ménage_ with Nikolinka. The younger sister opened the door, and stopped short.... In the small drawing-room Sazonov was sitting on the carpeted floor in extreme deshabille, and beside him the stout Signora P., scantily veiled in a light dressing-gown. The signora was laughing with the full force of her lusty Italian lungs at something Nikolinka was telling her. Beside them stood a pail of ice, and in it, tilted on one side, was a bottle of champagne.

What happened next I do not know, but the effect produced was strong and lasting. The younger sister came to consult me about this incident, of which she spoke with tears and sobs. I tried to comfort her by assurances that the first days after Clichy were different from the average.

All this was followed by a prosaic move into smaller lodgings.... The valet, who was a master at putting on a cravat of impenetrably solid silk and adroitly sticking a pearl pin into it, was dismissed, and after him the pin itself appeared in a shop window.

So passed another five years. Sazonov went to Paris from Switzerland, and then went back again from Paris to Switzerland. To get rid of the buxom Italian, he devised the most original plan—he married her and then left her.

Something had come between us; he did not treat me openly in a matter that was very dear to my heart. I could not get over it.

Meantime a new epoch was beginning for Russia, Sazonov was eager to take part in it: wrote articles[96] that were unsuccessful, tried to return to Russia and did not succeed, and finally left Paris. For a long while nothing was heard of him.

One day a Russian who had just come from Switzerland to London said to me: ‘An old friend of yours was buried the day before I left Geneva.’

‘Who was that?’

‘Sazonov; and only fancy, there was not one Russian at his funeral.’

And it sent a stab to my heart to think with remorse that I had abandoned him for so long....

(_Written in 1863._)

II

THE ENGELSONS

They are both dead. He was not more than thirty-five; she was younger.

He died ten years ago in Jersey: his coffin was followed to the grave by his widow, his child, and a sturdily built, dishevelled-looking old man with large, marked, rough features; in his face were mingled genius and frenzy, fanaticism and irony, the intensity of an Old Testament prophet and a Jacobin of the year 1793. That old man was Pierre Leroux.

She died at the beginning of 1865 in Spain. I heard of her death a few months later.

I have not heard where the child is.

The man of whom I am speaking was once near and dear to me; he first tended deep wounds when they were fresh; he was a brother, a sister to me. She, scarcely knowing what she was doing, estranged him from me. He became my enemy....

The news of her death brought them back to my memory again....

I took up the manuscript I had written about them in 1859, and read it through by way of psalter over the dead.

For a long time I hesitated whether to print it or not, and only lately decided to do so. My intention is good, and my story is true. I do not want to cast reproaches on their grave, but together with the reader to trace once again, in fresh instances, the intricate, morbid warping of character in the last generation under Nicholas.

CHÂTEAU BOISSIÈRE, _December 31, 1865_.

I

At the beginning of 1850 a Russian arrived in Nice with his wife. They were pointed out to me on the parade. They both belonged to the class who were waiting for the turn of the tide: he was thin, pale, consumptive, with reddish fair hair; she was a beauty who had faded early, worn-out, half-shattered, exhausted.

A doctor living in the household of a Russian lady told me that the fair gentleman had been a Lyceum student, that he was reading _Vom andern Ufer_, that he had been mixed up in the Petrashev case, and consequently wished to make my acquaintance. I answered that I was always glad to meet a good Russian, especially a Lyceum student, and one who had had a hand in a case of which I knew little, but which had been for me like the olive branch brought by the dove to Noah’s ark.

Some days passed without my seeing either the doctor or the new Russian. Suddenly between nine and ten one evening a card was brought me; it was he. Karl Vogt and I were sitting in the dining-room. I told the servant to ask the visitor upstairs into the drawing-room, and went upstairs before the rest. There I found him, pale, trembling, apparently in a feverish condition. He could scarcely tell me his name; when he was a little calmer, he jumped up from his chair, rushed at me, kissed me effusively, and before I could quite recover myself, with the words, ‘So at last I am really seeing you,’ he kissed my hand. ‘What are you about? Upon my soul!’ I said, but by then he was in tears.

I looked at him in perplexity; was this nervous instability or simply madness?

Apologising and showering compliments on me, he told me with extraordinary rapidity and much gesticulation that I had saved his life, and this was how. Desperate with acute depression in Petersburg, expelled from the Lyceum for some nonsense or other, disgusted with a job in the service which he had been obliged to accept, and seeing no solution for himself personally, nor for things in general, he had made up his mind to poison himself, and a few hours before carrying out his design went wandering aimlessly about the streets: came to Izler’s and picked up a volume of the _Notes of the Fatherland_. My article, ‘A propos of a Drama,’ was in it. Reading it gradually absorbed his attention; he felt better, he felt ashamed of having so weakly given in to sorrow and despair when public interests were springing up on all sides and calling for all who were young, for all who had strength, and instead of taking poison Engelson asked for half a bottle of madeira, read the article over again, and from that time became my ardent admirer.

He sat on till late at night, and went away asking leave to come again soon. Through his tangled talk, continually interspersed with anecdotes and digressions, one could see a richly endowed brain, unmistakable dialectic ability, and, still more clearly, something warped and distorted that flung him from one extreme to the other, from an indignation intensified by sorrow, and made poignant by misfortune, to ironical clowning, from tears to affectation.

He left me with a strange impression. At first I did not quite believe in him, then I was tired by him—he seemed to affect one’s nerves too much; but by degrees I grew used to his oddities, and was glad of an original person to break the monotonous boredom induced by the vast majority of Western Europeans.

Engelson had read a great deal and studied a great deal, he was a linguist and a philologist, and brought into everything the scepticism with which we are so familiar, and which exacts so high a price for the pain it leaves. In old days they would have said of him that he had read himself silly. His over-stimulated intellectual activity was too much for the strength of his frail organism. Wine, with which he conquered fatigue and stimulated himself, fanned his thoughts and imagination into long, bright tongues of fire, that were rapidly consuming his sick body.

His disorderly living and drinking, his perpetual, irritable mental activity, his conspicuous many-sidedness and his conspicuous futility, his utter idleness, his extreme violence of feeling and extreme apathy, vividly recalled the past to me, in spite of the immense difference between all this and our old ways in Moscow. Again I heard the sounds not only of my own language but of my own thought. He had been a witness of the reign of terror in Petersburg after 1848, and he knew the literary circles. Entirely cut off from Russia as I was at that time, I listened greedily to his accounts.

We took to seeing each other often, nearly every evening.

His wife, too, was a strange creature. Her face, by nature handsome, was racked by neuralgic pains and a sort of restless anxiety. She was a Russified-Norwegian, and spoke Russian with a slight accent which suited her. As a rule she was more silent and reserved than he. Their home life was not cheerful: there was something nervous, _unheimlich_, strained, about them; there was something lacking in their life, and something superfluous in it, and one felt this continually like electricity, unseen and menacing, in the air.

I often found them in the large room which served them as bedroom and sitting-room in the hotel, in a state of utter prostration. She, with tear-stained eyes, helpless in one corner; he pale as death, with white lips, distraught, and silent in the other.... So they would sit at times for whole hours, whole days together, and that a few yards from the dark blue Mediterranean, from groves of orange-trees, to which everything—the sapphire sky and the bright noisy gaiety of southern life—invited one. They did not actually quarrel; it was not a case of jealousy nor estrangement, nor any tangible cause, indeed.... He would suddenly get up, go to her, fall on his knees and sometimes with sobs repeat: ‘I have been your ruin, my child, your ruin!’ and she would weep and believe that he had been her ruin. ‘When shall I die and leave him in freedom?’ she used to say to me.

All this was new to me, and I felt so sorry for them that I wanted to cry with them, and even more to say to them: ‘Oh, come, come, you are not so miserable and not so bad, you are both splendid people; let us take a boat and drown sorrow in the dark blue sea.’ I did do this sometimes, and succeeded in drawing them out of themselves. But by next morning the paroxysm would return.... They were somehow so on each other’s nerves, and had reached such an hysterical _impasse_, that the slightest word destroyed the harmony and, as it were, called up furies again from the bottom of their hearts.

I sometimes fancied that, continually tearing open their wounds, they found a sort of stinging enjoyment in the pain; that this gnawing at each other had become necessary to them, like vodka or pickle. But unfortunately the physique of both was unmistakably beginning to be exhausted; they were on the high road to the lunatic asylum or the grave.

Her mind, by no means without talents, was undisciplined and at the same time depraved; her character was far more complex, and in a certain sense she had far more fortitude and strength than he had. Moreover, she had not a shade of the unity, the consistency, that unhappy consistency which he retained even in the most violent extremes and the sharpest contradictions. In her, side by side with her despair, her desire to die, her habit of moaning and groaning, there was a thirst for worldly pleasures and a concealed coquetry, a love for dress and luxury, denied as it were intentionally, to spite herself. She was always dressed becomingly and with taste. She longed to be an emancipated woman according to the ideas of the period, and the victim of an immense, original, psychic unhappiness, like George Sand’s heroines ... but her old accustomed, traditional life dragged her like a heavy weight towards quite a different sphere.

What gave poetic charm to Engelson, and did much to make up for his defects, and what served as a safety-valve for himself, she could not understand. She could not follow his racing thought, his rapid transitions from despair to wit and laughter, from candid mirth to candid tears. She lagged behind, losing the thread, distracted.... His caricatures of his own gloomy thoughts were beyond her comprehension. When Engelson, after a perfect feast of puns and jokes, mockery and teasing, getting more and more into the spirit of the thing, began acting regular scenes at which one could only laugh helplessly, she would go out of the room, exasperated; she was offended at ‘his unseemly behaviour before outsiders.’ He usually noticed this, and as nothing could stop him when once he was set going, he would play the fool more extravagantly than ever, and then waltz round with her and ask her with glowing cheeks and perspiring brows: ‘_Ach, mein lieber Gott, Alexandra Christianovna, war es denn nicht respectabel?_’ She would weep more than ever, till he suddenly changed, grew gloomy and morose, drank glass after glass of brandy, and went home, or simply fell asleep upon the sofa.

Next day I had to reconcile them and make the peace, and he so earnestly kissed her hands and so funnily asked to be forgiven his sins, that even she could not restrain herself sometimes and laughed with us.

I must explain in what these performances, which were such a source of woe to poor Alexandra Christianovna, consisted. Engelson’s comic talent was unmistakable and immense; such biting satire was never equalled by Levassor, hardly by Grasso at his best, and Gorbunov in some of his stories. Moreover, half of it was improvised; he would bring in additions and variations while preserving the same framework. If he had cared to train and develop this gift, he would certainly have been in the foremost ranks of _satirical_ comedians, but Engelson never trained nor developed anything in himself. Talents shot up like vigorous wild plants and were choked in his unstable soul, both by domestic cares which took up half his time, and by his habit of catching at everything in the world from philology and chemistry to political economy and philosophy. In this respect Engelson was a typical Russian, although his father was of Finnish extraction.

He acted everything in the world—officials and Russian gentlemen, priests and police-constables; but the best of his performances were concerned with Nicholas, for whom he had a profound, sincere, and active hatred. He would take a chair _à la_ Napoleon, sit astride it, and sternly ride up to a corps on parade ... epaulettes, hats, casques shaking all round him ... it is Nicholas at a review; he is moved to wrath, and, turning his horse, says to the commanding officer, ‘Bad’; the commanding officer listens with reverent awe, looks after Nicholas, and then, dropping his voice and gasping with fury, whispers to the general of the division: ‘You appear, your Excellency, to be busy about something else and not your duties. What a wretched division! what regimental commanders! I’ll teach them.’

The general of the division turns redder and redder, and pounces on the first colonel he comes across, and so from one grade to the next, with incredibly true, almost imperceptible nuances, the Imperial ‘bad’ passes down to the sergeant, at whom the squadron commanding officer swears like a trooper, and who, without answering, pokes the scabbard of his sword with all his might into the ribs of the nearest soldier, who has done nothing.

Engelson would portray with amazing fidelity, not only the characteristics of each rank, but also each man’s movement as he tugged at his horse in his fury and then raged at it for not standing still.

Another performance was of a more peaceful kind. The Emperor Nicholas is dancing the French quadrille. _Vis-à-vis_ is a foreign diplomat, on one side a general, stiff as on parade, on the other a civilian grandee. This was a perfect _chef-d’œuvre_. Engelson would take one of us for his partner. The flower of it all was Nicholas—playing the autocratic Tsar over the quadrille, the conscious firmness of every step, the brilliant perfection of each movement, together with the indulgent and gracious glance at his partner, which is transformed at once into a command to the general, and warning not to forget himself to the civilian gentleman. To describe this in words is impossible. The general, who, rigidly erect, with his elbows a little rounded, with strained attention walks in time through the figures under the stern observation of his gracious monarch, and the distracted civilian with his legs shaking under him from terror, with a smile on his face and almost a tear in his eye—all this was performed so that a man who had never seen Nicholas could thoroughly grasp the agonising ordeal of an imperial quadrille, and the danger of having the Most High as a _vis-à-vis_. I forgot to say that the foreign diplomat was the only one who danced with studied negligence and great finish, concealing the uncomfortable feeling of uneasiness of which the most valiant is conscious when he has a lighted cigar close to a barrel of gunpowder.

But although Engelson’s grimacing and foolery roused his wife’s indignation, it does not follow that there was any more unison or harmony about her; quite the contrary, there was an absolute chaos in her head, that was destructive of all order, of all consistency, and made her impossible to cope with. In her case I learnt for the first time how little you can do with logic in discussion with a woman, especially when the discussion relates to practical affairs. In Engelson the lack of harmony was like the mental confusion after a fire, after a funeral, after a crime perhaps; but in her case it was like an untidy room in which everything is flung about higgledy-piggledy—children’s toys, a wedding dress, a prayer-book, a novel of George Sand’s, slippers, flowers, plates. In her half-conscious ideas and half-undermined beliefs, in her claims to an impossible freedom and to independence of all customary external bonds, there was something suggestive of a child of eight, a girl of eighteen, and an old woman of eighty. Many times I told her that. And, strange to say, even her face was prematurely faded; it looked old from the absence of some of her teeth, and at the same time it retained a childish expression.

Engelson was entirely to blame for the chaos in her mind.

His wife was the spoilt child of a mother who had adored her. An elderly, phlegmatic official of Swedish origin sought her in marriage when she was eighteen. In a moment of childish caprice and vexation with her mother, she agreed to marry him. She wanted to be her own mistress and sit at the head of the table.

When the honeymoon of freedom, visits, and fine clothes was over, the bride was insufferably bored; although her husband behaved with strict propriety, took her to the theatre and arranged evening tea-parties for her, she had an aversion for him; she struggled with him for three or four years, grew tired of it, and went back to her mother. They were divorced. Her mother died, and she was left alone, suffering and melancholy, with her health prematurely broken in the struggle with her absurd marriage, with emptiness and hunger in her heart and an idle brain.

It was just at this time that Engelson was expelled from the Lyceum. He was nervous, irritable, and, with a passionate yearning for love and a morbid lack of confidence in himself, was consumed by _amour-propre_.... He had made her acquaintance while her mother was living, and they became great friends after her death. It would have been strange if he had not fallen in love with her. Whether the feeling were likely to be lasting or not, he was bound to love her passionately; everything helped to bring this about ... the fact that she was a woman without a husband, a widow and not a widow, a bride and not a bride, and that she was pining for something, was in love with another man, and made miserable by her love. This other was an ‘energetic young fellow,’ an officer and a literary man, but a desperate gambler. They quarrelled over this invincible passion for play; later on, he shot himself.

Engelson never left her side; he comforted her, amused her, occupied her. It was his first and last love. She wanted to study, or rather to learn without studying; he undertook to be her Mentor—she asked for books.

The first book Engelson gave her was Feuerbach’s _Das Wesen des Christenthums_. He took the place of commentator, and day by day he pulled from under the feet of his Héloïse, who could not step on firm ground for the Chinese shoes of her early Christian training, the prop by means of which she might somehow have kept her balance.

Emancipation from the traditional morality, said Goethe, never leads to good unless the mind has grown strong; indeed, only reason is worthy to replace the religion of duty. Here was a woman sleeping the deep slumber of moral security, lulled by traditions and full of the dreams natural to a patriarchal soul, tinged with Christianity, tinged with romantic and moral notions; and Engelson tried to educate her at one blow on the method of English nurses, who, when the baby screams from stomach-ache, pour a glass of gin into its mouth. He flung into her immature, childish conceptions a rankling ferment with which men are rarely equal to coping, which he himself could not cope with but only understand.

Overwhelmed by the overthrow of all her moral conceptions and all her religious convictions, and finding in Engelson himself nothing but doubt, nothing but irony and denial of the old, she lost the only compass, the only guide she had left, and was like a boat adrift at sea, twisting and turning without a rudder. The equilibrium arrived at by life itself, resting—like the opposite weights of a pendulum—on absurdities which exclude each other and are maintained by so doing, was broken.

She flung herself into reading with avidity, understanding and not understanding, and mixing up the philosophy of her nurses with the philosophy of Hegel, sentimental socialism with the economic conceptions of conventional housekeeping. With all that, her health grew worse, boredom and misery continued; she pined and grew thin, had a desperate longing to go abroad, and was afraid of persecutions and enemies of some sort.

After a prolonged struggle, Engelson, rallying all his forces, said to her: ‘You want to travel; how can you go alone?... You will meet with all sorts of unpleasantness, you will be lost without a friend, without a protector with the right to protect you. You know that I would lay down my life for you ... give me your hand—I will care for you, soothe you, watch over you.... I will be your father, your mother, your nurse, and your husband, but it must be legally. I will be with you, near you....’

This was said by a man under thirty, and passionately in love. She was touched, and accepted him as her husband unconditionally. A short time afterwards they went abroad.

Such was the past of my new acquaintances. When Engelson told me all this, when he bitterly complained that this marriage had been the ruin of them both, and I saw for myself how they were fretting away in a sort of moral furnace which they intentionally fanned, I came to the conviction that this unhappiness was due to their having known too little of each other beforehand, their being too closely bound together now, their having built their life too much on personal feeling, and their putting too much faith in being husband and wife. If they could have parted, each might have sighed in freedom, have grown calm, and perhaps begun to blossom afresh. Time would have shown whether they were really so necessary to each other; in any case, the delirium would have been broken for a time without catastrophe. I did not conceal my opinion from Engelson; he agreed with me. But all this was a _mirage_; in reality he had not the strength to leave her, nor she to take the plunge.... They secretly _wanted_ to hover on the brink of these resolutions without carrying them into execution.

My view was too sane and simple to be correct in regard to such intricately pathological characters and such sick nerves.

II

The type to which Engelson belonged was at that time rather new to me. At the beginning of the ’forties I had seen such a type only in embryo. It developed in Petersburg towards the end of Byelinsky’s career, and was formed after I left and before Tchernyshevsky appeared. It was the type of the Petrashev group and their friends. That group was made up of young and gifted men, extremely intelligent and extremely cultured, but nervous, morbid, and warped by their surroundings. Among them there was no example of striking stupidity, no one who wrote ungrammatically—those types belong to quite a different period; but in them there was something degenerate, abnormal.

The followers of Petrashev made a bold and ardent dash into activity, and astonished all Russia by the _Dictionary of Foreign Words_. The intense mental activity of the ’forties was their heritage, and they passed straight from German philosophy into Fourier’s phalanstery, into becoming followers of Kant.

Surrounded by petty and worthless people, proud of the attentions of the police, and conscious of their own superiority, from the very time they left school they prized too highly their negative achievement, or rather their possible achievement. This led to immoderate vanity—not that youthful healthy vanity becoming in a lad who dreams of a great future, becoming in a man in the fulness of his powers and in the fulness of activity, not that which in old days has led men to perform miracles of daring and to endure chains and death for the sake of glory, but, on the contrary, a morbid vanity, hindering all work through its vast pretensions, irritable, ready to take offence, conceited to the point of rudeness, and at the same time diffident.

Between their pretensions and their appreciation by their neighbours the distance was immeasurable. Society will not accept blank cheques for the future, but insists on work being completed before giving personal recognition. They had little power of hard work and perseverance; they only had enough of each for understanding and assimilating what had been worked out by others. They wanted to have harvests for the intention of sowing, and to be rewarded for having their granaries full. ‘The insulting way in which they were overlooked by society’ worried them, made them unjust to others, and reduced them to despair and _Fratzenhaftigkeit_.

In the person of Engelson I studied the difference between that generation and our own. Later on I met many men not so talented, not so cultured, but with the same obviously morbid warp in all their composition.

A terrible sin lies at the door of the government of Nicholas in this moral destruction of a generation, in this spiritual depraving of its children. The wonder is that the strong and healthy, though warped, still survived. Every one knows the celebrated list of instructions to teachers in the Cadet Corps. In the Lyceum things were better, but of late years it, too, had incurred the hatred of Nicholas. The whole system of government education lay in instilling the religion of obedience, leading up to power as its reward. The feelings of the young, naturally radiant, were coarsely driven inwards, and replaced by ambition and jealous, envious rivalry. What did not perish came out sick, deranged.... Together with burning pride, they were inoculated with a sort of spiritlessness, a sense of impotence, of fatigue before beginning work. Young men became hypochondriacal, suspicious, tired before they were twenty. They were all tainted with the passion for introspection, self-analysis, self-accusation; they scrupulously believed their psychic experiences, and loved making endless confessions and giving descriptions of neurotic incidents of their lives. In later years it happened to me several times to receive the confessions not only of men but of women belonging to this category. After watching with sympathy their remorse, their pathological self-castigation, which approached gross calumny upon themselves, I at last came to the conviction that this was only one of the forms of the same vanity. One had but to cease protesting and sympathising and to agree with the repentant sinners, to see how readily malignant and how mercilessly vindictive these Magdalens—of both sexes—became. With them, like the Christian priest before the mighty of this world, you are only privileged solemnly to absolve their sins and to keep silent.

These nervous people, though excessively ready to take offence, shuddering like a sensitive plant at the faintest rough handling, are incredibly harsh in their own language. As a rule, when it came to revenging themselves, there was no moderation in their language—a terrible defect of taste, which betrays a profound contempt for the person addressed and an insulting indulgence for self. This lack of restraint among Russians comes from the homes of landowners, from government offices and army barracks; but how is it that it has survived and developed in the younger generation whilst skipping ours? That is a psychological problem.

In our old student circles we scolded each other roundly, argued roughly and emphatically, but in the most violent fray something remained outside the pale.... For our nervous friends of Engelson’s generation this limit did not exist, they did not think it necessary to restrain themselves; for the sake of a vain and momentary vindictiveness, for the sake of getting the upper hand in an argument, they spared nothing, and I have often, with horror and amazement, seen them—including Engelson himself—without a trace of pity, fling the most precious pearls into the corrosive fluid of their bitterness, ‘and weep afterwards.’ With the change of the nervous current, remorse would follow, and entreaties for forgiveness from the outraged idol. They are not fastidious, and pour filth into the very cup from which they drink.

Their repentances are sincere, but do not prevent repetitions of the offence. Some spring regulating and controlling the action of the wheels within them is broken; the wheels turn with tenfold swiftness, doing no work, but injuring the machine; harmonious combination is broken, the æsthetic mean is lost; there is no living with them, and there is no living for them themselves.

Happiness does not exist for them, they are not able to take care of it. The slightest cause provokes them to ruthless antagonism and makes them behave rudely with every one near them. By irony they have ruined and spoilt as much in life as the Germans have by mawkish sentimentality. Strange to say, these people are greedily anxious to be loved, they seek enjoyment, and when they lift the cup to their lips some evil spirit jogs their arm, the wine is spilt upon the floor, and the cup, passionately flung down, rolls in the mud.

III

The Engelsons soon went away to Rome and Naples; they meant to be away for six months, and returned in six weeks. Seeing nothing, they trailed their boredom about Italy, sorrowed in Rome and grieved in Naples, and at last made up their minds to come back to Nice—‘to you for healing,’ he wrote to me from Genoa.

Their gloomy depression had increased while they were away. In addition to their nervous hysteria, there were now quarrels which assumed a more and more exasperated and envenomed character. Engelson was to blame for his unrestrained language and cruel words, but she always provoked them, provoked them intentionally, with secret spite and peculiar success in his most good-natured moments; he was never allowed to forget himself for an instant.

Engelson was incapable of holding his tongue; talking to me was a comfort to him, and so he used to tell me everything, even more than he ought, which was awkward for me. I felt that I could not be so open with them as they were with me. Talking came easy to him, complaining comforted him for a time—it did not me.

One day, sitting in a little tavern with me, Engelson said that he was being worn out in the daily struggle, that there was no way of escape from it, that again the thought of cutting short his life seemed to him the only salvation.... With his nervous impulsiveness it might well be expected that if a pistol or a glass of poison did come in his way he would sooner or later make an attempt with one or the other.

I was sorry for him. And both of them were to be pitied. She might have been a happy woman if her husband had been a man of serene temper who would have known how to develop her slowly, to be light-hearted in his merriment, and in case of need to influence her, not merely by persuasion but also by authority—grave authority, without irony. There are immature natures which cannot guide themselves, just as there are persons of lymphatic constitution who need a corset to escape curvature of the spine.

While I was thinking of that, Engelson, going on with his talk, came to the same conclusion himself. ‘That woman does not love me,’ he said, ‘and cannot love me; what she does understand and looks for in me is bad, and what is good in me is so much Chinese to her. She is corrupted by bourgeois ideas, by her external _Respektabilität_, her petty domesticity. We torment each other, we are tormenting each other to death; I see that clearly.’

It seemed to me that if a man could talk in that way of the woman nearest to him, the chief tie between them was broken. And so I admitted to him that, having watched their life together for a long time past with deep sympathy, I had often asked myself why they went on living together. ‘Your wife is pining for Petersburg, for her brothers and her old nurse; why don’t you arrange for her to go home, and you to remain here?’

‘I’ve thought of it a thousand times; it’s the one thing I wish for. But in the first place, she has no one to go with; and in the second, she would be bored to death in Petersburg.’

‘Well, but she’s bored to death here. As for having no one to send her with, that’s a relic of our old Russian notions. You can take your wife to the steamer at Stettin, and the steamer will find its way by itself. If you haven’t the money, I’ll lend it you.’

‘You’re right, and that’s what I shall certainly do. I am sorry for her, my heart aches for her, all the love I have in me I have concentrated on her. I sought in her not only a wife, but a creature whom I could develop and educate after my own fancy. I thought that she would be my child—the task was beyond my strength. But who could have guessed that I should find such contradictions, such stubbornness?’—he paused, and then added: ‘To tell you all I think—she needs a different husband ... if a man turned up worthy of her whom she could love, I would give her up to him, and we should both recover—that would be better than Petersburg.’

I took all this _au pied de la lettre_. That he was sincere, there is no doubt. That is just the difficulty with these impulsive, uncontrolled creatures; they can, like good actors, enter so thoroughly into different parts, and so identify themselves with them, that a cardboard dagger seems to them the real thing, and they shed genuine tears over ‘Hecuba.’

We were then living together at Ste. Hélène. Two days after my conversation with Engelson, Madame Engelson, with a tear-stained face, came into the drawing-room late in the evening, a candle in her hand; she set the candle on the table, and said she wanted to have a little talk with me. We sat down ... after a brief and obscure prelude touching upon the fate which pursued her, on Engelson’s unfortunate character and her own, she announced that she had made up her mind to return to Petersburg, and did not know how to do it. ‘You alone have influence over him; persuade him to let me go really. I know that in moments of vexation he is ready in words to put me in the posting-chaise at once, but all that is only words. Persuade him, save us both, and give me your word to look after him just at first, comfort him ... it will be hard for him, he is ill and nervous.’ And again sobbing, she hid her face in her handkerchief.

I did not believe in the depth of her woe, but I saw very clearly what a false move I had made by speaking openly to Engelson; it was evident to me that he had repeated our conversation to her.

I had no choice left; I repeated my own words to her, softening them in form. She got up, thanked me, and added that if she did not go she would throw herself into the sea; that she had that evening been burning a great many papers, and wished to put some others in a sealed packet in my keeping. It was clear to me that she was by no means so passionately anxious to go away, but through some self-indulgent caprice wanted to drag on and pine away in melancholy. Moreover, I saw that, if she were wavering without any settled plan, he was not wavering but distinctly did not want her to go. She had great power over him; she knew this, and, building upon it, allowed him to rage, to rear, to foam at the bit, knowing that, however he might jib, things would go not as he willed but as she willed.

She never forgave me for my advice; she feared my influence, though she had unmistakable proof of my powerlessness.

For ten days there was no talk about going away. Then followed periodical skirmishes. Once or twice a week she would come to me with tear-stained eyes and announce that now all was over, and that next day she would get ready to go to Petersburg or to the bottom of the sea. Engelson would come out of his room, twitching convulsively, with a green face and trembling hands; he would vanish for some ten hours, and would come back covered with dust, exhausted and rather drunk, would take a passport to be viséd, or obtain a permit for Genoa; then it would all subside again and fall back into the everyday routine.

Externally, Madame Engelson was completely reconciled with me, but from that time she began to conceive something like a hatred for me. Before that she had disputed with me and been angry without concealing it ... now she became extraordinarily amiable. She was annoyed that I had seen through something; that I had not been touched by her tragic destiny or taken her for an unhappy victim, but had looked on her as a capricious invalid; that, far from shedding tears of platonic sympathy with her, I doubted whether she did not find enjoyment rather than distress in tears, heartrending scenes, explanations lasting several hours, and so on and so on.

Time passed, and by degrees much was changed. With the rapidity which only occurs in nervous invalids she regained her health, became more lively, and even more careful of her dress. And although the most nonsensical things would lead again to the old scenes between her and Engelson, to a farewell _à la_ Socrates before the hemlock, and to a readiness to follow in Sappho’s footsteps to the bottom of the sea, yet on the whole things went better. The woman who had been for ever lying down from weakness, for ever exhausted, drew herself up as erect as Sixtus V., and began to grow so stout that one day poor Kolya, sitting at dinner and looking at her full bosom, said, shaking his head: ‘_Sehr viel Milch_.’

It was evident that some new interest was occupying her, that something had awakened her from her morbid lethargy. From the time of my open explanation with her, she had begun a persistent game, thinking over every move, like the gamblers _du Café Régent_, and patiently correcting her mistakes. Sometimes she betrayed herself and made a blunder, carried too far in one direction or the other, but she steadily returned to her original plan. This plan went now beyond the tightening of her grip over Engelson, and beyond revenging herself on me; she aimed at nothing less than getting us all, the whole household, in her power, and taking advantage of Natalie’s being more and more seriously ill to control the education of the children and our whole life—or, if she failed, breaking off my relations with Engelson at all costs.

But before she could obtain complete success, there were many very difficult moves to be taken, painful concessions, cat-like tactics, and much patient waiting: she accomplished a great deal, but not everything. Engelson’s incessant chatter hindered her as much as my open eyes.

She might have made a better use of the energy, the force and the persistence which she wasted on her craftily interwoven schemes ... but personal feeling and vanity intoxicate people, and, once entering upon the dark game of intrigue, it is hard to stop and hard to see anything clearly. As a rule, light is only brought into the room after the crime has been committed; that is how it is that both the catastrophe and the sting of conscience are irremediable.

IV

... Of the misfortunes that fell upon me in 1851 and 1852 I speak in another place. Engelson brought me much comfort in my sorrow. I should have stayed a long time with him near the graveyard, but the restless vanity of his wife had no pity even on mourning.

Some weeks after the funeral, Engelson, agitated and melancholy, with evident reluctance and evidently not of his own initiative, asked me whether I were not thinking of entrusting the education of my children to his wife.

I answered that the children, except the eldest, Sasha, were going to Paris with Marya Kasparovna Reihel, and I openly admitted that I could not accept his suggestion.

My answer wounded him, and it hurt me to wound him. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘speaking honestly, do you think your wife competent to educate children?’

‘No,’ Engelson answered, ‘but ... but perhaps it’s a _planche de salut_ for her; she is just as wretched as ever, and it would mean your trusting her, and a new duty.’

‘Yes, but if the experiment didn’t answer?’

‘You are right; let us say no more about it; it is sad.’

Engelson really agreed with me, and said no more. But she had not expected so simple an answer; on this question I would not give in, and she would not, and, beside herself with vexation, she immediately made up her mind to take Engelson away from Nice. Three days later he told me he was going to Genoa.

‘What is the matter?’ I asked; ‘and why are you going so soon?’

‘Well, you see for yourself my wife does not get on with you, nor with your friends, so I’ve made up my mind ... and perhaps it is for the best.’

And next day they went away.

Afterwards I left Nice. On my way through Genoa we met peaceably. Surrounded by our friends, among whom were Medici, Pisacane, Cosenz, and Mordini, she seemed calmer and better in health. Nevertheless, she could not let slip any chance for having a spiteful dig at me. I moved away, said nothing; that was no use. Even when I had gone to Lugano she kept up her poisoned _petits points_, and this in the rare postscripts to her husband’s letters, as though with his _visa_.

At last these pin-pricks, at a time when I was utterly crushed by grief and distress, drove me out of all patience. I had done nothing to deserve them, nothing to provoke them. On getting one of her spiteful postscripts saying that Engelson would still have to pay dearly for his whole-hearted devotion to friends who would do nothing for him, I wrote to Engelson that it was time to put a stop to this.

‘I do not understand,’ I wrote, ‘why your wife has got a grudge against me. If it is because I did not give my children into her keeping, surely that is no justification for it?’ I reminded him of our last conversation, and added: ‘We know that Saturn devoured his own children, but for any one to show his gratitude to his friends for their sympathy by bestowing his children’s education on them is something unheard of.’

She never forgave me that sally, but, what is far more remarkable, he never forgave me for it either, though at first he showed no sign of resenting it ... but he reproached me with those words a year later....

I went to London; Engelson settled for the winter in Genoa, and afterwards moved to Paris.[97]

V

The proverb, ‘He who has not been in the sea has not prayed to God,’ may be varied in this way: the woman who has not had children does not know what disinterested devotion is, and this is particularly true of married women; in them childlessness almost always develops a coarse egoism—if, that is, some impersonal interest does not incidentally save them. The old maid has some belated yearnings that soften her, she is still seeking and still hoping: the childless woman with a husband has reached her haven successfully; at first she instinctively grieves at having no children, then she takes comfort and lives for her own pleasure, and, if she is not successful in that, for _her own sorrow_, or for somebody else’s displeasure, somebody else’s sorrow, if it is only her maid’s. The birth of a child may save her. A child trains its mother in sacrifice, in giving way, in eagerly spending her time not on herself, and trains her to indifference to all external reward, recognition, gratitude. A mother does not keep an account with a baby; she requires nothing from it but to be well, to be hungry, to sleep—and to smile. Without drawing the woman out of the home, the baby transforms her into a citizen.

It is quite a different thing when another woman’s child comes for any reason whatever, and especially unavoidably, into the house of a childless woman. She will perhaps dress it up and play with it, but only when she cares to; she will spoil it when she is pleased to; at all other times the child will knock in vain at the doors of the heart that has grown hard or slothful from self-indulgence. In short, the child can reckon upon all the spoiling and pampering which would be given to a dog or a canary, but nothing more.

One of our friends had a daughter whose mother was a young widow. With a view to the mother’s marrying again, an attempt was made to get the child away, and she was kidnapped in the father’s absence. After a prolonged search the little girl was found; but the father, having been turned out of France, could not come to Paris to fetch her, and besides he had not the money. Not knowing what to do with her, he asked Engelson to take her for a little while. Engelson consented, but very quickly regretted it. The child was naughty—indeed, considering the irregular way in which she had been brought up, it is quite likely she was very naughty; but, all the same, her naughtiness was that of a child of five years old, and Engelson was too humane and understanding to be capable of turning against a child for naughtiness. And indeed the trouble was not that she was naughty; the child hindered, not him so much as his wife, though she never did anything. Engelson, with a sort of exasperation, complained to me in his letters of the child!

In regard to her father, Engelson wrote to me: ‘Is it not strange that H., who once agreed with you that my wife was _not a suitable person to bring up your children_, has entrusted his _own daughter to her_?’

He knew perfectly well that the father had not chosen Madame Engelson to bring up his little girl, but had been forced by actual necessity to have recourse to her assistance. There was something so cruel, so ungenerous in this remark that it sent a pang to my heart. I could not get used to this lack of mercy, this brutality of language which did not hesitate at anything! Intensely malignant insinuations which may in a moment of irritation occur to any one’s mind, but which we could not bring our lips to utter, are spoken by people like Engelson with readiness and enjoyment at the slightest tiff.

Giving full vent to his irritation, Engelson in his letter incidentally attacked Tessier too, and other friends, and even Proudhon, for whom he had a great respect. Together with Engelson’s letter came one from Tessier, who was also in Paris; he made some friendly jests about Engelson’s ‘tempers and tantrums,’ without suspecting that the latter had been writing about him. I disliked the position of a sort of negative treachery, and I wrote to Engelson that it was a shame to talk in that abusive way of men with whom life itself has brought us into intimate relations; that they were, any way, good people, as he knew himself. In conclusion, I told him that it was a shame to exaggerate everything so, and to be sighing and groaning and reduced to despair over the naughtiness of a child of five.

This was enough. My ardent admirer, the friend who had kissed my hand in his enthusiasm, who came to me to share every grief and offered to shed his blood and lay down his life for me, not in word but in deed ... this man, bound to me by his own confession and by my misfortunes, of which he was the witness, by the coffin which we had followed together, forgot everything. His vanity was wounded ... he wanted to revenge himself, and he did revenge himself.

Four days later I received from him the following reply:—

‘_February 2nd, 1853._

‘There are rumours that you have decided to come here;—Marya Kasparovna is, I believe, recovering (last week, any way, she seemed in better spirits, got up for five minutes, and has an appetite). Concerning the commission you gave me in regard to T., all I have to tell you is that the things the General asks him to get ready are not at T.’s, but were left by them at Vogt’s in Geneva, and that Madame T. thinks your silence _peu gracieux_, and adds that a correspondence with you could not cause them any inconvenience.

‘In short, I need not have written before you come if it had not occurred to me that silence may often be taken as a sign of assent. I do not wish to mislead you or keep you in error in regard to me: I do not agree with what you said in your last letter to me of January 28th.

‘These were your words: “Come, now, is it worth while to get into such a state—‘and oh, the baby—and oh dear, oh dear—and good God, what am I to do?’ Just think; isn’t it beneath you? surely, it’s nothing new to you! You have seen life and know what people are. Every day I grow more indulgent and more aloof from others.”

‘To this I answer, without for the present going off into a dissertation on respectability in general, and without even congratulating you on your satisfaction with yourself, that of course a man is absurd who falls into a rage and a frenzy when he is bitten by gnats or bugs, but the man is even more absurd who under the same circumstances forces himself to assume an air of stoical indifference.

‘You perhaps do not agree with this, for you put playing a part above everything. Don’t be angry! Wait a minute! Let me finish. In the first chapter of your _Vom andern Ufer_ in the Russian and German versions these are your words: “Man likes to produce an effect, to play a part, especially a tragic one; to suffer is good and noble, it presupposes unhappiness; suffering is a distraction, a comfort ... yes, yes, it is a comfort.” As I have said to you already in Nice, I was at first inclined to take this _dictum_ of yours as a careless oversight, and not a happy one. At the time you answered that you did not remember the words.

‘Though by no means applying those words exclusively to you—that is, not assuming that you judged in this case of men in general by yourself—I had hitherto imagined that this _dictum_ of yours, like most of the _Réflexions de La Rochefoucauld_, which it greatly resembles, like the description of the talented men of our period, once drawn in a masterly fashion by Byelinsky, was an “hyperbole, a jest.” And so when I learnt that H. in Switzerland was indignant with the General for the way he behaved in your affair, I took his indignation, not for playing a part, but for real feeling, and wrote to you: “Yes, I see H. is a brother to me.” When T., in the presence of a witness, declared that he had been sentenced for life—plus two years, I believed him too, and even repeated this to several people. Yesterday Madame T. told me her husband had never been sentenced at all. _Ergo_, in the eyes of the persons to whom I repeated his lie I am just such a _blagueur_ as he. I do not like it. Who is to blame? I am, of course, because I was “young and credulous”; but they are to blame too, because they told a lie. I have never in Russia, nor anywhere, met such _blagueurs_ as in Nice. In my letter to you of the 19th of January I told you that I want without _esclandre_ to get away from these people; they are antipathetic to me. I wrote this to you because I wanted to be open with you. But _absorbed in yourself_ you could not grasp this very simple idea. Or you would hardly, I suppose, have given me a most trivial commission to T. You, too, say that you are holding yourself aloof from people, but at the same time you ask them to write to you. I do not understand that sort of aloofness.

‘Assuming that in serious matters to be frank is an essential condition of honesty, I have to tell you this, too, without loss of time. You write to me that when you have despatched the General to Australia, and dismissed every one else, you will be left with me and with your enemies—and that if, moreover, I were a little more stable, and less dependent upon my own and other people’s nervous caprices and agitations, you would be disposed to make _un bout de chemin_ with me. To this I am obliged to reply that, feeling in myself neither a taste nor a talent for playing parts, and especially tragic ones, I am ready to serve you with my advice, but not with my company.’

Of course, I had not supposed that a man who with tears and sobs had led me on to confidences difficult to utter, a man who had come so near to me and on whom I had leaned as on a brother in moments of weakness and helplessness, when my pain was beyond human endurance, that the eyewitness of all that had happened could regard my misery as stage trappings and scenery, of which I should take advantage to play a tragic part. In his ecstasies over my book he had been picking out stones in it and laying them up in his bosom to fling them at me when the chance might come. It was not enough for him to tear the present to pieces—he defiled and vulgarised the past: breaking with me, he could not show it the respect of dejected silence, but covered it with merciless abuse and ironical jeering.

This letter wounded me, wounded me very much.

I answered him sadly, with suppressed tears; I said good-bye to him, and asked him to break off our correspondence.

That was followed by complete silence between us....

With Engelson once more something seemed to have snapped within me. I was even poorer, more isolated; there was coldness all about me, nothing near me.... At times a hand seemed held out to me more warmly; some fanatic of no understanding, not even seeing that we were not of the same religion, would approach hurriedly, and as hurriedly turn away. Though indeed I did not seek closer intimacy with any, I had grown accustomed to men coming and going, to all sorts of nonentities of whom one expected nothing, and to whom one gave nothing except a cigar, wine, and sometimes money. My one salvation lay in work; I was writing _My Past and Thoughts_, and was setting up a Russian printing-press in London.

VI

A year passed: the printing-press was in full swing, it was being noticed in London and feared in Russia. In the spring of 1854 I received a short manuscript from Marya Kasparovna. It was not difficult to guess it had been written by Engelson. I published it at once.

Then came a letter from him asking me to put an end to our unhappy misunderstanding and to let us meet again in common work. Of course, I held out both hands to him.

Instead of an answer he arrived in London himself for a few days, and stayed with me. Sobbing and laughing, he begged me to forget the past, was lavish in words of affection, and again seized my hand and pressed it to his lips. I embraced him, deeply touched, in the firm conviction that the quarrel would not be renewed.

But only a few days later clouds foreboding little good appeared on the horizon. The shade of fatalism, of Buonapartism, which had peeped out in his letters from Geneva had developed. From hatred for Nicholas and the rank and file of the French Revolution of 1848, he had passed over _armes et bagages_ into the enemy’s camp. We argued; he was obstinate. Knowing that he always rushed to extremes and came back as quickly, I waited for the turn of the tide, but it did not come.

Unhappily, Engelson was busy at that time with an amazing project with which he was passionately in love.

He had made a plan for an air battery—that is, a battery of balloons loaded with explosives and at the same time with printed proclamations. This was at the beginning of the Crimean War. Engelson proposed letting off such balloons from ships on the coast of the Baltic. I greatly disliked this scheme; what could one make of propaganda with projectiles? Where was the sense in it for us Russians to burn Finnish villages and help Napoleon and England? Moreover, Engelson had discovered no new means of steering balloons. I made little opposition to his plan, supposing he would drop this nonsense of himself.

But not at all. He went off with his plan to Mazzini and Worcell. Mazzini said that things of that sort were not in his line, but that he was ready through his friends to send his plans to the Minister of War. The War Office gave an evasive reply, and put the project aside without a definite refusal. He asked me to gather together two or three of the military men among the refugees and put the balloon question to them. All were against it, and I told him over and over again that I, too, was against it; that our work, our strength, lay in propaganda, nothing but propaganda; that we should lose in moral prestige by siding with Napoleon, and should ruin ourselves in the eyes of Russia _faisant cause commune_ with her enemies. Engelson lost his temper and was beside himself. He had come to London confident of a triumph, and, meeting with opposition even from me, imperceptibly returned to his hostile attitude. Soon afterwards he went to fetch his wife, and brought her in May to London. A complete transformation had taken place in their relations; she was expecting to be a mother, and he was rapturously delighted at the prospect of a child. Misunderstandings, quarrels, and explanations were all a thing of the past. She with a sort of insane, half-mad mysticism was turning tables and absorbed in spiritualism. The spirits told her many things, and among others predicted my speedy demise. He was reading Schopenhauer, and told me with a smile that he was doing all he could to encourage her mystic tendencies, that this faith and exaltation was bringing peace and calm into her soul.

With me she behaved affectionately, perhaps in expectation of my approaching death; would come to me with her work, and make me read aloud articles and chapters from _My Past and Thoughts_. When a month later differences arose again over Engelson’s Buonapartism and air-balloons, she took the part of the reconciler—came to me begging me to spare a poor invalid, and assuring me that every spring Engelson was attacked by a hypochondriacal condition in which he did not know himself what he was doing.

Her serene gentleness was the gentleness of the conqueror, the mercy of complete triumph. Engelson, imagining that he held her under control by turning tables, lost sight of one thing—that she was not only twisting tables with her fingers, but him round her finger, and that he always gave the answers she wanted better than the tables did.

One evening Engelson began discussing his balloons again with a Frenchman, and said all sorts of biting things to him; the latter replied with irony, and of course that infuriated Engelson more than ever. He snatched up his hat and ran away. In the morning I went round to have it out with him on the subject.

I found him at his writing-table, his face still completely distorted with fury, and a frenzied expression in his eyes. He told me that the Frenchman (a refugee whom I had known for years and know still) was a spy, that he would unmask him, would kill him; and he gave me a letter he had only just written to a doctor of medicine in Paris; in the letter he implicated persons living in Paris, and slandered the refugees in London. I was dumbfoundered.

‘And do you mean to send that letter?’

‘At once.’

‘And by post?’

‘Yes, by post.’

‘That’s treachery,’ I said; and flung his scrawl on the table. ‘If you send that letter....’

‘Well, what?’ he shouted, interrupting me in a wild, hoarse voice—‘what are you trying to threaten me with? I’m not afraid of you nor of your nasty friends.’ With this he leapt up, opened a big knife, and brandishing it about, shouted gasping: ‘Come, come, show your mettle ... I’ll teach you ... wouldn’t you like to try ... come on!’

I turned to his wife, and saying, ‘Has he gone quite out of his mind? You had better get him away somewhere ...,’ went out of the house.

On this occasion, too, Madame Engelson played the part of peacemaker. She came to me in the morning entreating me to forget what had passed the day before. He had torn up the letter—was ill and gloomy. She took it all as a calamity, as physical derangement, was afraid that he was seriously ill, and shed tears. I yielded to her entreaties.

After that we moved to Richmond, and Engelson did the same. The birth of a son and the first months of looking after him gave Engelson new life; he was off his head with joy. When the baby was born he embraced and kissed effusively first the maid and then his old landlady. Anxiety over the baby’s health, the novelty of paternal feeling, the novelty of the baby himself, occupied Engelson for some months, and all went well again.

All at once I got a big envelope from him, accompanied by a note asking me to read the enclosed document and tell him my opinion candidly. It was a letter to the French Minister of War. In it he again proposed air-balloons, bombs, and manifestoes. I thought it all bad, from the quarter to which he was appealing down to the language, which was lacking in dignity, and I told him so.

Engelson answered by a rude note and began to sulk.

After that he gave me another manuscript to publish. I did not conceal from him that it would produce a very bad effect on Russian readers, and that I did not advise publishing it. Engelson reproached me with wanting to set up a censorship, and said that he supposed I had founded the printing-press exclusively to publish my own immortal works. I did publish the manuscript, but my instinct had been right. It aroused general indignation in Russia.

All this indicated that a new rupture was not far off. I must own that this time I felt no great regret. I was weary of this fever varied by paroxysms of friendship and hatred, of having my hands kissed and then getting a moral box on the ears. Engelson had overpassed the limit beyond which not even memories nor gratitude could save the situation. I liked him less and less, and waited coolly for what was to come. At that point an event occurred so important that for a time all quarrels and dissensions were eclipsed by a single feeling of joy and expectation.

On the morning of the fourth of March I went as usual at eight o’clock into my study, opened the _Times_, read a dozen times and did not understand, did not dare to understand, the grammatical sense of the words at the head of the news column: _The death of the Emperor of Russia_.

Hardly knowing what I was doing, I rushed with the _Times_ in my hands into the dining-room; I looked for the children and the servants to tell them the great news, and with tears of joy in my eyes gave them the newspaper.... I felt as though several years had rolled off my shoulders. It was impossible to stay indoors. Engelson was at that time living in Richmond. I hurriedly put on my coat and hat and was about to go to him, but he anticipated me, and was already in the hall; we fell on each other’s necks and could say nothing but: ‘Well, at last he is dead!’ Engelson, as his way was, capered about, kissed every one in the house, sang and danced; and we had hardly recovered ourselves when a carriage suddenly stopped at the front door and some one gave a violent tug at the bell: three Poles had driven full speed from London to Twickenham, without waiting for a train, to congratulate me.

I ordered champagne; no one reflected that it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, or earlier. Then, quite aimlessly, we all went off to London. In the streets, on the Exchange, in the restaurants, people were talking of nothing but the death of Nicholas; I did not see one man who did not breathe more easily from knowing that that sore was taken out of the eye of humanity, and did not rejoice that that oppressive tyrant in the big boots had at last returned to clay.

On Sunday my house was full all day; French and Polish refugees, Germans, Italians, even English acquaintances kept coming and going with beaming faces. It was a bright, warm day; after dinner we went out into the garden.

Some lads were playing on the bank of the Thames. I called them up to the railing and told them we were celebrating the death of their enemy, and flung them a handful of small silver for beer and sweets. ‘Hurrah! hurrah!’ shouted the lads. ‘Impernikel is dead! Impernikel is dead!’

My visitors too began flinging them sixpences and threepenny-bits; the lads bought ale and tarts and cakes, got hold of a concertina, and began dancing. After that, as long as I lived at Twickenham, the lads used to take off their caps when they met me in the street, and shout: ‘Impernikel is dead! hurrah!’

The death of Nicholas multiplied our hopes and energies tenfold. I at once wrote the letter to the Emperor Alexander, afterwards published, and made up my mind to bring out the _Polar Star_ at once.

‘May reason prevail!’ broke involuntarily from my tongue at the head of my programme. ‘The _Polar Star_[98] has been hidden behind the storm-clouds of the reign of Nicholas; Nicholas has gone, and the _Polar Star_ appears again on the day which is our Good Friday, the day on which five gibbets became for us five crucifixes.’

It was a powerful, stimulating impetus; we set to work with redoubled energy. I announced that I was bringing out the _Polar Star_; Engelson at last took up his article on socialism about which he had been talking in Italy. It might have been expected that we should go on working for a couple of years or more ... but his irritable vanity made any work with him insufferable. His wife encouraged his infatuation. ‘My husband’s article,’ she used to say, ‘will be taken as a new epoch in the history of Russian thought. If he writes nothing else, his place in history will be assured.’

The article, ‘What is the State?’ was good, but its success did not justify his wife’s anticipations. Moreover, it appeared at the wrong moment. Awakening Russia demanded, just at that time, practical advice, and not philosophical treatises _à la_ Proudhon and Schopenhauer.

The whole of the article had not yet been published, when a new quarrel of a different character from all the preceding ones almost completely severed all relations between us.

One day when I was with them I spoke jestingly of their having sent for the third time for a doctor for their baby, who had a cold in its head and a slight chill.

‘So because we are poor,’ said Madame Engelson, and all her old spiteful hatred a hundred times intensified flamed in her face, ‘our little one is to die without medical assistance? And you say that? You, a socialist and the friend of my husband, who refuse him fifty pounds, and are exploiting him over his lessons.’

I listened in amazement, and asked Engelson whether he shared this view or not. He was embarrassed, his face flushed in patches, he besought her to be silent.... She went on. I got up and, interrupting her, said: ‘You are ill and are nursing your baby, I am not going to answer you, but I am not going to listen either.... You will hardly think it strange that I shall not set foot in your house again.’

Engelson, distraught and melancholy, caught up his hat and came out into the street with me: ‘Don’t take _au pied de la lettre_ the unbridled language of an hysterical woman....’ He went off into a muddle of explanations. ‘I will come and give my lesson to-morrow,’ he said. I shook hands with him and went home without a word.

All this calls for explanations, and the most painful ones, too, relating not to opinions and public affairs but to the kitchen and account books. Nevertheless, I will make an effort to clear up this side of our relations too. Squeamishness, that sentimentalism of purity, is out of place in pathological investigation.

The Engelsons were scarcely entitled to reckon themselves poor people. They received ten thousand francs a year from Russia, and he could easily earn another five thousand by translations, reviews, and school-books; Engelson was a proficient linguist. Trübner’s, the booksellers, had ordered a lexicon of Russian roots and a grammar from him; he could, like Pierre Leroux, like Kinkel, like Esquiros, give lessons. But, like a regular Russian, he took up everything—the dictionary, the translations, and the lessons—never finished anything, never put himself out, and never earned a farthing.

Neither husband nor wife was prudent or capable of managing their affairs. The continual fever in which they lived prevented them from thinking about household management. He had come from Russia with no definite plan, and remained in Europe with no definite object. He had taken no steps whatever to secure his property, and _un beau jour_, panic-stricken, made a hasty arrangement of some sort by which he limited his income to ten thousand francs, a sum which he did not receive quite punctually, but always received sooner or later.

That Engelson would not make both ends meet with his ten thousand francs was evident; that he would not know how to economise was equally clear; all that was left for him was to work or to borrow. At first, after coming to London, he borrowed about forty pounds from me ... a little time afterwards he asked for money again.... I had a serious and friendly talk with him about this, and told him I was ready to help him, but that I absolutely refused to lend him more than ten pounds a month. Engelson frowned. However, he did twice take a ten-pound note; then suddenly he wrote to me that he needed fifty pounds, and, if I did not care to lend it him or did not trust him, he begged me to get it for him by pawning some diamonds. All this could hardly be taken seriously; if he had really wanted to pawn the diamonds, he ought to have taken them to some pawnbroker and not to me.... Knowing him and being sorry for him, I wrote that I would pawn the diamonds for fifty pounds, if they would give that, and would send him the money. Next day I sent a cheque, but the diamonds, which he would certainly have sold or pawned, I put away to keep for him. He took no notice of the fact that no interest was asked for the fifty pounds, and believed that I had pawned the diamonds.

The second point relating to the lessons is even simpler. While I was in London, S. gave Russian lessons to my children, charging four shillings an hour. In Richmond, Engelson offered to take S.’s place. I asked him about terms; he answered that it was difficult for him to talk of terms with me, but that, as he had no money, he would take what I had paid S.

On reaching home I wrote a letter to Engelson: I reminded him that he had himself fixed the terms for the lessons, but that I begged him to take double the amount for all the lessons in the past. Then I wrote what had led me to keep his diamonds, and sent them back to him.

He sent a confused answer, thanked me, expressed vexation, and came in the evening himself, and went on coming as before. His wife I did not see again.

VII

A month later, Zeno Swentoslawski, and with him Linton,[99] the English republican, were dining with me. Engelson came in towards the end of dinner. Swentoslawski, the purest-hearted and best of men, a fanatic who at over fifty retained the reckless fire of a Pole and the impulsive impetuosity of a boy of fifteen, was urging the necessity of our returning to Russia and beginning a keen propaganda in print there. He undertook to convey the type, and so on.

After listening to him, I said half in jest to Engelson: ‘I say, you know, _on nous accusera de lâcheté_ if he goes alone.’

Engelson made a grimace and went away.

Next day I went up to London and did not come back till the evening; my son, who was lying down with a feverish attack, told me, in great excitement, that Engelson had come in my absence, that he had abused me terribly, had said that he would pay me out, that he was not going to put up with my authority any longer, and that he did not need me now _since his article had been published_. I did not know what to think, whether Sasha was delirious from fever or Engelson had come in dead drunk.

From Malwida von Meysenbug[100] I learnt more. She told me with horror of his violence. ‘Herzen,’ he had shouted in a nervous, gasping voice, ‘called me _lâche_ yesterday in the presence of two strangers.’ Malwida interrupted him, saying that I had not been talking about him at all, that I had said ‘_on nous taxera de lâcheté_,’ speaking of all of us generally. ‘If Herzen feels that he is doing something mean, let him speak for himself, but I will not allow him to speak like that of me, and in the presence of two blackguards too.’

My elder girl, then ten years old, had run in at the sound of his shouts. Engelson had gone on: ‘No, this is the end of it, it is enough. I am not accustomed to it, I will not allow myself to be trifled with, I will show him whom he has to deal with ...,’ pulled a revolver out of his pocket and went on shouting, ‘It is loaded, it is loaded, I will wait for him....’

Malwida got up and told him that she insisted on his leaving her, that she was not obliged to listen to his wild ravings, that she could only put down his behaviour to illness. ‘I am going,’ he said; ‘don’t trouble; but first I want to ask you to give Herzen this letter.’ He opened it and began reading it aloud; the letter was a string of abuse.

Malwida von Meysenbug refused the commission, asking him why he expected her to act as an intermediary in forwarding such a letter.

‘I will find means without your help,’ observed Engelson, and went away.

He did not send the letter, but a day later he sent me a note; in it, without saying one word about what had passed, he wrote that he had an attack of hæmorrhage, that he could not come to me, and begged me to send the children to him.

I said that there was no answer, and again all diplomatic relations were broken off; hostile relations remained. Engelson did not let slip a chance of turning them to account.

From Richmond I moved in the autumn of 1855 to St. John’s Wood. Engelson was forgotten for some months. Suddenly, in the spring of 1856, I received a note, suggestive of a duel, from Orsini, whom I had seen two days previously.

Coldly and courteously, he asked me to let him know whether it was the truth that Saffi and I were spreading a rumour that he was an Austrian spy. He asked me either to give an unqualified _démenti_, or to indicate from whom I had heard this abominable calumny.

Orsini was justified; I should have done the same in his place. Perhaps he ought to have had more confidence in Saffi and in me—but the insult was terrific.

Any one who knew anything of Orsini’s character would understand that such a man, attacked in the most holy of holies of his honour, could not stop short at half measures. The affair could only be settled by our _absolute_ innocence or by the death of some one.

From the first minute it was clear to me that the blow came from Engelson. He no doubt reckoned on one side of Orsini’s character, but fortunately there was another which he had overlooked. Orsini combined with violent passions an intense power of self-control; he was cautious among dangers, thought over every step he took, and never reached a decision on the spur of the moment, because when once he had reached a decision he wasted no time in criticism, in doubt, in reconsideration, but carried it out. We saw this later in the Rue Lepelletier. He acted in the same way now. He tried without haste to investigate the matter, to find out who was guilty, and then, if he succeeded, to kill him.

Engelson’s second mistake lay in quite unnecessarily bringing in Saffi.

The facts were these. Six months before my rupture with Engelson I happened to be one morning at the house of Mrs. Milner-Gibson (the wife of the minister): there I found Saffi and Pianciani; they were saying something to her about Orsini. As I went away I asked Saffi what they had been talking about. ‘Only fancy,’ he answered: ‘Mrs. Milner-Gibson had been told in Geneva that Orsini had been bribed in Austria....’ On reaching home at Richmond I had repeated this to Engelson. We were both then dissatisfied with Orsini. ‘The devil take him entirely!’ observed Engelson, and nothing more was said on the subject. When Orsini made his marvellous escape from Mantua we thought in our own circle of the accusation heard by Mrs. Milner-Gibson. The arrival of Orsini himself, his story, his wounded foot, entirely effaced this absurd suspicion.

I asked Orsini to give me an interview. He asked me to go the following evening. In the morning I went to Saffi and showed him Orsini’s note. He at once offered to go with me, as indeed I expected he would. Ogaryov, who had only just arrived in London, was a witness of this interview.

Saffi described the conversation at Mrs. Milner-Gibson’s with the simplicity and straightforwardness which are his distinguishing characteristics. I filled in the rest of the story. Orsini thought a minute, and then said: ‘Well, may I ask Mrs. Milner-Gibson about this?’

‘Of course,’ answered Saffi.

‘Yes, I believe I have been too hasty; but,’ he asked me, ‘tell me, why did you speak of it to an outsider instead of warning me?’

‘You forget, Orsini, the time when it happened, and that the _outsider_ to whom I spoke was at that time not an outsider; you know better than most people what he was then to me.’

‘I have mentioned no one....’

‘Let me finish. Why, do you suppose it is easy for a man to repeat such things? If these rumours had spread, perhaps I ought to have warned you—but who is speaking about it now? As for your having mentioned no one’s name, you are making a great mistake there. Bring me face to face with my accuser, then it will be still more evident what part each has played in these slanders.’

Orsini smiled, got up, came to me, embraced me, embraced Saffi, and said: ‘_Amici_, we will end the matter; forgive me, let us forget all about it and talk of something else.’

‘That’s all very well, and you were perfectly right to ask me for an explanation, but why do you not name my accuser? In the first place, it is useless to conceal it ... it was Engelson told you this.’

‘Give me your word that you will drop the matter?’

‘I will give you my word before two witnesses.’

‘Well, you have guessed right.’

I anticipated this confirmation, yet it sent a pang to my heart as though I had still doubted it.

‘Remember what you have promised,’ Orsini added, after a brief silence.

‘You need not worry about that. But to make up to me and to Saffi you might tell us how it happened; you see, we know all that matters.’

Orsini laughed. ‘What curiosity!’ he said. ‘You know Engelson. He came to me the other day: I was in the dining-room’—(Orsini lived in a boarding-house)—‘and having dinner alone. He had already dined. I asked for a bottle of sherry for him; he drank it, and at once began complaining of you—that you had ill-treated him, that you had broken off all relations with him—and after gossiping about all sorts of things asked how you had received me on my return. I answered that you had given me a very friendly welcome, that I had dined with you, and that I had been to you in the evening.... Engelson all at once began shouting: “That’s just like them ... I know those gentry; it’s not long since he and his friend and admirer Saffi were saying that you were an Austrian spy, but now you’re famous again and in the fashion, and he is your friend!” “Engelson,” I observed, “do you fully understand the gravity of what you’ve just said?” “Fully, fully,” he repeated. “Will you be ready under all circumstances to repeat your words?” “Under all circumstances!”

‘When he had gone I took a sheet of paper and wrote you a letter. That’s the whole story.’

We all went out into the street. Orsini, as though guessing what was passing within me, said by way of consolation, ‘He’s crazy.’

Soon afterwards Orsini went to Paris, and his beautiful classical head rolled bleeding on to the platform of the guillotine.

The first news of Engelson was the news of his death in Jersey.

No word of reconciliation, no word of remorse reached me....

(1858.)

_P.S._—In 1864 I received a strange letter from Naples. It spoke of the apparition of my wife’s soul, and of her having appealed to me to turn to religion and purify my soul with it, and to abandon worldly vanities....

The writer said that it was all written at the dictation of the spirit; the tone of the letter was warm, friendly, and ecstatic.

The letter was unsigned; I recognised the handwriting; it was from Madame Engelson.[101]

FOOTNOTES

[1] There is this now.—(_Author’s Note._)

[2] _Le Charivari_ was the French _Punch_ (earlier in date, however, _Punch_ being called ‘The London Charivari’ as a sub-title), founded in 1831 by Charles Philipon, a caricaturist of great talent.

[3] The Comte d’Argout had much to do in bringing about the fall of Charles X., and held several important ministerial appointments under Louis-Philippe.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[4] I have heard this criticism a dozen times since.—(_Author’s Note._)

[5] The Comte de Chambord, grandson of Charles X., was by the royalists called Henri Cinq.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[6] The celebrated Victor Panin.—(_Author’s Note._)

[7] _I.e._ stabs with a dagger.

[8] At the Rouen elections for the Constituent Assembly in April, the Socialist candidates were heavily defeated; the workmen, suspecting some fraud, assembled, unarmed, before the Hôtel de Ville, to protest. They were attacked by soldiers and National Guards; eleven were killed and many wounded.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[9] Sibour, Marie Dominique Auguste (1792-1857), was appointed on 10th of July 1848, by General Cavaignac, to the archi-episcopal see of Paris to replace Affre, who died of wounds received in the June days. He was himself assassinated in church by the Abbé Vergur, whom he had interdicted.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[10] Written at the end of 1853.

[11] English in the original.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[12] Cavaignac, Louis-Eugène (1802-1857), the youngest of the three distinguished Frenchmen of that name, was commander-in-chief in 1848, and an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the Republic when Louis-Napoleon (afterwards Napoleon III.) was elected on 10th December 1848.

[13] Lamoricière, Louis de (1806-1865), a prominent politician and general, was exiled in December 1848, and afterwards took command of the Papal troops.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[14] David (d’Angers), Pierre-Jean (1789-1856), must not be confounded with the great painter Louis David. David d’Angers was a celebrated sculptor of republican principles, who executed busts or medallions of most of the eminent men of his day. He was a great friend of Hugo, who wrote of him in _Les Rayons et les Ombres_: ‘La forme, ô grand sculpteur, c’est tout et ce n’est rien. Ce n’est rien sans l’esprit, c’est tout avec l’idée!’—(_Translator’s Note._)

[15] Barbès, Armand (1809-1870), called the ‘Bayard de la démocratie,’ was a people’s representative in 1848, imprisoned in 1849, and set free in 1854.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[16] Ramon de la Sagra (1798-1871), a Spanish economist, took part in the revolutionary movement of 1848 in France, and wrote advocating the views of Proudhon. In 1854 he returned to Spain, and was several times elected a member of the Cortes. He was, of course, not seventy, as Herzen mistakenly assumes, but fifty, in 1848.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[17] A mountain chain of Old Castile, where the French defeated the Spanish in 1808.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[18] Written in 1856.

[19] Rayer, P. F. O., was a distinguished French physician, and author of numerous medical works.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[20] Delessert, Gabriel, born 1786, was prefect of police of the town of Paris for twelve years from 1836.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[21] A character in Gogol’s _Dead Souls_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[22] Arago, Emmanuel (1812-1896), the son of the more distinguished F. D. Arago, who was one of the members of the Provisional Government formed after the _coup d’état_ of 24th February 1848. The others were Ledru-Rollin, Dupont de l’Eure, Garnier-Pagès, Lamartine, Crémieux, Marrast, Flocon, and Louis Blanc.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[23] Bastide, Jules (born 1800), a publicist and politician, was minister for foreign affairs in 1848. He had had an eventful career, and for two years took refuge in England after escaping from prison, where he was thrown for taking part in the riots that followed the funeral of Lamarque in 1832.

[24] Changarnier, Nicolas (1793-1877), a prominent politician and general, was exiled at the _coup d’état_ of 1851, but lived to serve in the Franco-German War of 1870.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[25] Guinard, Auguste-Joseph (born 1799), had been one of the first to proclaim the republic in February 1848, and at the head of the 8th Legion had occupied the Hôtel de Ville.

[26] Forestier, Henri-Joseph (born 1787), was a painter of merit. He was colonel of the 8th Legion of the National Guard.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[27] Karl Blind (born 1826), a writer and revolutionist, was for the part he took in the insurrections in South Germany sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, but was rescued by the mob. He settled in England, where he continued journalistic and propaganda work up to the time of his death.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[28] How well founded my apprehensions were was shown by a police raid on my mother’s house at the Ville d’Avray. They seized all the papers, even the correspondence of her maid with my cook. I thought it inopportune to publish my account of the 13th of June at the time.—(_Author’s Note._)

[29] Oran, a province of Algeria in which the French carried on a successful campaign against Abd-el-Kader in 1847.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[30] Pyat, Félix (1810-1889), a journalist, dramatic writer, and communist leader, supported Ledru-Rollin’s appeal to the French people in 1849, and on its failure escaped to Switzerland and then to London, where he was a member of the ‘European Revolutionary Committee.’ He returned to France at the amnesty of 1870, and was in 1871 one of the leaders of the Commune, on the fall of which he again escaped to London. He was condemned to death in his absence, but was again pardoned in 1880.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[31] Grandville, Jean-Ignace-Isidore (born 1802), was one of the most celebrated book-illustrators of his time. Perhaps his most famous book is _Les animaux peints par eux-mêmes_. He was deeply interested in animals, insects, and fishes, and drew them wonderfully. He edited _La Caricature_, in which all the most eminent people of his time in Paris are depicted. He died, insane, in 1850.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[32] In 1848 there was an insurrection in Baden, headed by Struve and Hecker, which aimed at establishing a republic. The troops sided with the insurgents, the Grand Duke fled, and in May 1848 a Constituent Assembly was called. After several battles the Grand Duke was by Prussian aid reinstated in July of the same year.

[33] Görgei, Arthur (1818), was commander-in-chief of the Hungarian forces in 1848, was victorious over the Austrians in the spring of that year, but was defeated early in August by the Russian general Paskevitch, and on the 13th of that month surrendered the Hungarian army unconditionally to Rüdiger, another Russian general. He was accused of treachery.

[34] Coblenz was one of the chief centres to which the _émigrés_ of the great French revolution flocked from 1790 onwards.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[35] The Commission of Inquiry was presided over by Odilon Barrot; the report, drawn up by one Bauchart, is described as a ‘_monument impérissable de mauvaise foi et de basse fureur_.’

[36] Kapp, Friedrich (1820-1884), a German historian, after the revolution of 1848 went to New York, but returned to Berlin in 1870, became a Liberal member of the Reichstag.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[37] The more thoroughgoing of the followers of John Huss were called Taborites, from their headquarters at Mt. Tabor in Bohemia.

[38] Heinzen, Karl Peter (1827-1880), wrote for the _Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung_ and the _Rheinische Zeitung_, and his articles led to the suppression of these two papers. He published an attack on the government, ‘Die prussische Bureaucratie,’ for which he was prosecuted. In 1848 he was one of the leaders of the Baden revolution. Later on he escaped to America, where he edited _The Pioneer_.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[39] Undergraduates in their first year were called ‘foxes’ in German universities.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[40] See Vol. II. Chapter 27.

[41] The ‘Bolognese insurrection’ began on 2nd February 1831 at the house of Ciro Menotti at Modena. There thirty-one conspirators surprised by the ducal troops held the soldiers at bay for hours.

[42] Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, two young Venetians, lieutenants in the Austrian navy, attempted an insurrection in 1843. On its failure they escaped to Corfu; but, misled by false information, landed in Calabria with twenty companions, were caught and shot at Cosenza in July of the same year. Their letters to Mazzini in London had been opened by the English authorities, who then resealed them and sent the information so gained to the Austrian Government. Sir James Graham and Lord Aberdeen were principally responsible.

[43] Babeuf, François-Émile, nicknamed Gracchus (1760-1797), conspired against the Directoire, was condemned to death, but stabbed himself. He advocated a form of communism called _babouvisme_.

[44] The reference is to Orsini’s attempt to assassinate Napoleon III. on 14th January 1858.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[45] ‘In 1857 Pisacane seized the _Cagliari_ steamer, freed the political prisoners in the island of Ponza, and with a small force effected a landing on the Neapolitan coast at Sapri, hoping to join others of the republican party. Met by overwhelming numbers, he fell at the head of his men, most of them falling with him.’

[46] The ‘wild boar’ meant is, of course, Ferdinand II. of Naples, nicknamed Bomba because of the cruel bombardment of Naples and other cities during the suppression of the insurrection.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[47] Here is a poor prose translation of these wonderful lines, which have passed into a popular legend:—

‘They gathered with weapons in their hands, but they did not war with us; they threw themselves on the earth and kissed it, the tear quivered in their eyes, and all wore a smile. We were told they were robbers who had come out of their dens; but they took nothing, not even a crust of bread, and we heard from them one cry only: “We have come to die for our country!” They were three hundred, they were young and strong! And they are dead!

‘At their head came a young leader with golden hair and blue eyes.... I made so bold I took him by the hand and asked: “Whither goest thou, splendid leader?” He looked at me and said: “My sister, I go to die for my country!” and my heart ached; I had not strength to say: “God be thy help!”

‘They were three hundred, they were young and strong! And they are dead!’

And I knew the _bel capitano_, and more than once talked with him of the fortunes of his distressful country.—(_Author’s Note._)

[48] Napoleon, so the newspapers wrote, ordered Orsini’s head to be steeped in sulphuric acid that it might be impossible to take a death mask from it. What progress in humanity and chemistry since the days when the head of John the Baptist was given on a golden dish to the daughter of Herod!—(_Author’s Note._)

[49] Pope Pius VII. signed the Concordat of 15th July 1801 with Napoleon, was forced by the latter to come to Paris to consecrate him as Emperor in 1804, was later on kept prisoner in Fontainebleau, and only returned to Rome in 1814.

[50] The Cristinos were the supporters of the Spanish Queen Regent Cristina against the Carlists.

[51] Cardinal Mastai Ferretti, elected Pope in 1846, known as Pius IX.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[52] Cosenz (born 1820) was an Italian general who defended Venice against the Austrians in 1848, joined Garibaldi in 1859, was minister of war under the latter’s dictatorship in Naples, later on was several times elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and was a senator after 1872.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[53] Barbier, Henri-Auguste (1805-1882), a French poet, was the author of a volume of verses called _Iambes_.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[54] All this has greatly changed since the Crimean War (1866).—(_Author’s Note._)

[55] _The Times_, two years ago, reckoned that on an average in every police district in London (there are ten) there were two hundred cases of assaults on women and children per annum; and how many assaults never lead to proceedings?—(_Author’s Note._)

[56] The _Sonderbund_ was the alliance of the seven Catholic cantons of Switzerland, which aimed at separation from the Federal Government. It was dissolved after a brief civil war.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[57] Weitling, Wilhelm (born 1808), got into touch with communists in Paris and Switzerland during his wanderings as a journeyman tailor, was prosecuted for propaganda of his ideas in Germany, escaped to America, where he became the head of a communist colony in the state of Iowa, wrote _Das Evangelium des armen Sünders_, _Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit_ (1842), and _Die Menschheit wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte_ (1845).—(_Translator’s Note._)

[58] Périer, Casimir-Pierre (1777-1832), was a wealthy banker who supported the Liberal opposition under Charles X., and after the Paris revolution of 1830 became Minister of the Interior under Louis-Philippe, in which capacity he vigorously suppressed risings in Paris and Lyons.

[59] Laffitte, Jacques (1767-1844), was a French financier who took an active part in bringing about the revolution of 1830, and was at first the most influential minister of Louis-Philippe’s government. He was dismissed by the king because he wished the French to go to the assistance of Italy in her effort to throw off the Austrian yoke, and was succeeded by Périer.

[60] Cavaignac, Godefroy (1801-1845), the eldest son of J. B. Cavaignac, the member of the Convention, took a leading part in the July revolution of 1830, was tried and acquitted, again arrested in 1834, and escaped to England. In 1841 he returned to France and became one of the most active editors of _La Réforme_. His popularity greatly favoured the rise of his brother, Louis-Eugène, the general, who, though he put down the June rising in 1848, remained under a cloud under Napoleon III. because he refused to take the oath of allegiance.

[61] Marrast, Armand (1801-1852), a journalist, was a member of the Provisional Government of 1848, and then mayor of Paris and president of the National Assembly.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[62] Drouey (1799-1855) led the revolution in his canton in 1845, in 1849 was elected vice-president of the Swiss Federal Union, and in 1850 president.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[63] Blenker, Ludwig (born 1812), served in 1832 in Greece in the Bavarian legion of King Otto, and was afterwards a wine merchant in Worms. In 1848 he became a prominent figure of the revolutionary party in Rheingessen, and as a leader of the insurgents took Worms and stormed Landau. When the Baden rising was suppressed he escaped to Switzerland, whence he was expelled, and then went to America, where during the Civil War in 1861 he collected a troop of German _Jäger_ and saved Washington from the enemy, became a general, but afterwards for some negligence in the commissariat was forcibly retired with M’Clellan, and spent the rest of his days peacefully on his farm.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[64] Here I seem to have justified the famous ‘I hear the silence!’ of the Moscow police-master.

[65] As a matter of fact, _our_ scepticism was not known in the last century; England and Diderot alone are the exceptions. In England scepticism has been at home for long ages, and Byron follows naturally on Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Hume.—(_Author’s Note._)

[66] Here Herzen ignorantly uses the word ‘Quaker’ as equivalent to ‘Nonconformist,’ or perhaps ‘Puritan.’ It is needless to point out that tolerance is one of the most prominent principles of the Society of Friends.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[67] These fragments, printed in vol. iv. of _The Polar Star_, ended with the following dedication, written before the arrival of Ogaryov in London and before the death of Granovsky:

‘... Accept this skull—it belongs to you by right’ (_Pushkin_).

Here for the time we will stop. Some day I shall publish the chapters I have omitted and shall write others, without which my narrative remains unintelligible, incomplete, perhaps useless, and in any case will not be what I meant. But all that must be later, much later....

Now let us part; and one word at leave-taking, to you friends of my youth.

When everything had been buried, when even the clamour partly provoked by me, partly spontaneous, had subsided about me, and people had dispersed to their homes, I lifted up my head and looked around me; I had nothing living, nothing akin to me but my children. Wandering among strangers, watching them more closely, I gave up seeking _friends_ and held aloof—not from men but from intimacy with them.

It is true, at times it seems that I have still feelings in my heart, words which it is a pity not to utter, which might do good or at least bring comfort to the listener, and one is sorry that it must all be smothered and lost in the soul, as the eye loses itself in the empty distance ... but that is the rapidly fading glow of sunset, the reflection of the retreating past.

It is to that that I have turned back. I have left the world alien to me and have come back to you; and again we have been living together as in old times, are meeting every day, and nothing is changed, no one has grown older, no one is dead—and I am as at home with you, and it is as clear that I have no other standpoint than ours, no vocation but that to which I dedicated myself from childhood.

My story of the past is, maybe, dull and feeble, but you, friends, will give it a warm reception; this work has helped me to live through a terrible period, it has lifted me out of the idle despair in which I was perishing, it has brought me back to you. With it I enter upon my winter, not _gaily_ but _calmly_ (in the words of the poet whom I love beyond measure):—

‘_Lieta no ... ma sicura!_’ said Leopardi of death in his _Ruysch e le sui mummie_.

So all unwittingly you have saved me: accept this skull—it belongs to you by right.

ISLE OF WIGHT, VENTNOR, _October 1, 1855_.

[68] This endorsement is done for security in sending cheques in order that no one else should be able to receive the money.

[69] This was not P. D. Kisselyov, who was in Paris later, the well-known minister of crown property, a very decent man; but the other one, afterwards transferred to Rome.—(_Author’s Notes._)

[70] I translate it word for word.—(_Author’s Note._)

[71] Mlle. Le Normand (1772-1843) was a well-known fortune-teller of the period.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[72] Later on Professor Tchitcherin preached a doctrine somewhat similar in the Moscow University.—(_Author’s Note._)

[73] Pestel was the leader of the Union of the South, and Ryleyev of the Union of the North, which combined in the attempt to overthrow the autocracy and establish constitutional government in Russia on December 14, 1825.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[74] A French revolutionist, one of the founders of the _culte de la raison_, beheaded in 1794.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[75] I cannot forbear adding that I had to correct this very page at Freiburg, and in the same Zöringer Hof. And the host was still the same, looking like a regular innkeeper, and the dining-room in which I sat with Sazonov in 1851 was the same, and the room in which a year later I wrote my will, making Karl Vogt my executor: and this page brings back to me so many details.

Fifteen years!

Unconsciously, unaccountably, one is seized with terror....

_14th October 1866._—(_Author’s Note._)

[76] Frappoli, Ludovico (1815-1878), an Italian politician who took part in the revolutionary movement of 1848, was a partisan of Garibaldi’s, and always on the extreme left in the Italian Parliament. He reintroduced Freemasonry into Italy.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[77] Leroux, Pierre (1797-1871), a prominent follower of St. Simon.

[78] Considérant, Victor (1808-1893), a philosopher and political economist, advocate of Fourierism.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[79] In Stuart Mill’s new book _On Liberty_, he uses an excellent expression in regard to these truths settled once and for ever: ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion.’—(_Author’s Note._)

[80] _Histoire de la Révolution Française._

[81] I had then published _Vom andern Ufer_.—(_Author’s Note._)

[82] My answer to the speech of Donozo Cortes, of which fifty thousand copies were printed, was all sold out; and when two or three days later I asked for a few copies for myself, they had to be bought through the bookshops.—(_Author’s Note._)

[83] After this was written I met him again in Brussels.—(_Author’s Note._)

[84] I have to some extent modified my opinion of this work of Proudhon (1866).—(_Author’s Note._)

[85] Proudhon himself said: ‘_Rien ne ressemble plus à la préméditation que la logique des faits._’

[86] As I was correcting the proofs of this, I came upon a French newspaper with an extremely characteristic incident in it. Near Paris a student had a liaison with a girl, which was discovered. The girl’s father went to the student and on his knees besought him, with tears, to vindicate his daughter’s honour and marry her; the student refused with contumely. The kneeling father gave him a slap in the face, the student challenged him, they shot at each other; during the duel the old man had a paralytic stroke. The student was disconcerted, and ‘decided to marry,’ and the girl was grieved, and also decided to marry. The newspaper adds that this happy _dénouement_ will no doubt do much to promote the old father’s recovery. Can this have happened outside a madhouse? Can China or India, at whose grotesque absurdities we mock so much, furnish anything uglier or sillier than this story? I will not say more immoral. This Parisian romance is a hundredfold more wicked than the burning of a widow or the burying of a vestal virgin. In those cases there was religious faith, removing all personal responsibility, but in this case there is nothing but conventional, shadowy ideas of external honour, of external reputation.... Is it not clear from this story what the student was like? Why should the girl’s life be bound to his _à perpétuité_? Why was she ruined to save her reputation? Oh, Bedlam! (1866.)—(_Author’s Note._)

[87] Cambacérès, Jean-Jacques (1753-1824), one of the nearest advisers of Napoleon, and compiler of the _Code Civil_. He attempted to dissuade Napoleon from the invasion of Russia.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[88] Leone Leoni is the hero, or rather villain, whose name supplies the title of one of George Sand’s earlier novels.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[89] A character in the famous romance _Astrée_ by Victor d’Urfé (1568-1626), adopted into the Russian language as the type of the faithful and devoted swain.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[90] The reference is to the _Voyage du jeune Anarchasis_, by Barthélemy (1779).—(_Translator’s Note._)

[91] Bouilhet, Louis, was a great friend of Flaubert, with whom he collaborated. His own works include _Hélène Peyron_, and a very successful drama, _La Conjuration d’Amboise_.

[92] Ribeyrolles, a talented writer on _La Réforme_, the organ of the Extreme Left, of which Flocon was editor.—(_Translator’s Notes._)

[93] Louis Blanc, author of _L’Histoire de Dix Ans_, one of the most widely read books of the epoch.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[94] The real name of Messenhauser was Cæsar Wengel, a soldier and writer, who took an active part in the rising of 1848, first in Lemberg and then in Vienna. On the suppression of the rising he was sentenced to be shot, and asked that as an officer he might give the word of command to the soldiers who were to shoot him, and so conducted the business of his own execution with remarkable composure.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[95] I was in those days what the Poles call a ‘passport man,’ and had not yet cut off all possibility of return to Russia.—(_Author’s Note._)

[96] His article on ‘The Position of Russia in the All-World Exhibition’ was published in vol. ii. of the _Polar Star_.—(_Author’s Note._)

[97] A series of very remarkable letters of his, of which I propose to publish a considerable number some day, date from this period.—(_Author’s Note._)

[98] The _Polar Star_ is the name of the paper edited by Ryleyev, one of the five Decembrists hanged by Nicholas in 1825. On the anniversary of their execution Herzen brought out the first number of his paper of the same name.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[99] W. J. Linton, a friend of Mazzini, and author of a series of sketches of Italian, French, and Polish exiles, and of Herzen, called _European Republicans_. His wife, Mrs. Lynn Linton, a prominent figure some forty years ago, wrote several novels, and created a journalistic sensation by an onslaught on ‘The Girl of the Period.’—(_Translator’s Note._)

[100] Baroness Malwida von Meysenbug, authoress of _Memoirs of an Idealist_, was a great friend of Wagner, and also of Nietzsche, whom she cared for at times with motherly kindness. At this date she was living in Herzen’s house as the governess of his children, the youngest of whom, Olga, remained in her charge for many years.—(_Translator’s Note._)

[101] With this ends that part of _My Past and Thoughts_ which was corrected by the author in its final form and published in four volumes. The chapter which follows (in the next volume) is now published for the first time, and is that for which, as Herzen himself more than once says, he wrote all the rest.—(_Note to the Russian edition_, 1921.)