CHAPTER V:—Golovin _page 301

_SECTION THREE_[1]

A FAMILY DRAMA

I

THE YEAR 1848

1

‘To understand so much’ (Natalie wrote to Ogaryov at the end of 1846) ‘and not to have the strength to deal with it—not to have the fortitude to accept bitter and sweet alike, but to stop short at the first—it is pitiful! And I understand all that as well as possible, and yet I cannot arrive at enjoying myself or even being indulgent. I understand what is good outside myself, I do it justice—but only what is gloomy is reflected in my soul and torments me. Give me your hand and say with me that nothing satisfies you, that there is nothing you are content with, and then teach me to rejoice, to be gay, to enjoy myself—I have everything to make me happy, if only I could develop the faculty.’ These lines and the fragment of her diary relating to the same period, and quoted elsewhere, were written under the influence of our Moscow misunderstandings. Her gloomy side had come uppermost again; the estrangement of the Granovskys terrified Natalie; it seemed to her that our whole circle was falling to pieces and that we were being left alone with Ogaryov.... A girl hardly more than a child, whom she loved like a younger sister, was drifting further from us than any. At all costs to break out of this circle became at that time a passionate _idée fixe_ with Natalie.

We went away.

At first the novelty of Paris, then awakening Italy and revolutionary France, occupied our whole souls. Personal doubts and hesitations were eclipsed by history.

So we lived up to the days of June. Even before those terrible days of bloodshed, the 15th of May had cut down our hopes that had risen once again....

‘Three full months had not passed since the 24th of February, men were still wearing the same shoes as when they built the barricades, but France, already worn out, was asking to be subjugated.’[2] No blood was spilt on that day; it was a thunderclap from a cloudless sky foretelling a fearful storm. On that day I seemed to look with a sort of clairvoyance into the soul of the bourgeois, into the soul of the workman—and felt horror-stricken. I saw the savage lust of blood on both sides—concentrated hatred on the side of the workman, and fierce, rapacious self-preservation on the side of the bourgeois. Two such camps could not stand side by side, jostling each other every day in the closest proximity—in the home, in the street, in the workshop, in the market-place. A terrible bloody conflict, foreboding nothing good, was close upon us. This was seen by none except the Conservatives who were working to bring it about; my nearest friends spoke with a smile of my nervous pessimism. It was easier for them to snatch up a gun and to go to die on a barricade than to look facts boldly in the face; they did not want as a rule to understand things, but to triumph over their opponents; they wanted to establish their own point of view.

I drifted further and further away from every one. There was the menace of emptiness in that—but all at once the beating of drums, the clatter of crowds in the streets in the early morning, announced the beginning of the catastrophe.

Those June days—and the days that followed after them—were awful; they made the turning-point in my life. I will repeat a few lines I wrote a month later.

‘Women weep to relieve their hearts, we do not know how to weep. Instead of tears I want to write—not in order to describe and explain the bloody events, but simply to talk about them, to give vent to speech, to tears, to thoughts, to bitterness. How is one to describe, to collect evidence, to judge!—One’s ears are still ringing with the sound of shots, the tramp of racing cavalry, the heavy rumblings of cannon-wheels through the dead streets; individual details flash upon the memory—a wounded man holding on to the stretcher, with his hand to his side, and a few drops of blood trickling down it; the omnibuses filled with corpses, the prisoners with bound hands, the cannon on the Place de la Bastille, the camp at the Porte St. Denis in the Champs-Élysées, and the gloomy night: “_Sentinelle, prenez garde à vous!_” How can one describe things when the brain is inflamed and the blood is on fire?

‘To sit at home with one’s hands folded, unable to go out beyond the gate, and to hear far and near all around one firing, cannonades, screams, drums beating, and to know that blood is flowing, men are being hacked and stabbed and dying at your side—that is enough to kill a man, to drive him mad. I did not die, but it made me old, and I am recovering after the days of June as after a terrible illness.

‘And yet the beginning was impressive. On the 23rd, at four o’clock, before dinner, I was walking along the bank of the Seine towards the Hôtel de Ville; the shops were shutting, columns of the National Guard with sinister faces were marching in different directions, the sky was covered with storm-clouds, a fine rain was falling. I stopped at the Pont Neuf, a vivid flash of lightning gleamed out of a storm-cloud, claps of thunder followed one after another, and, in the midst of all that, the drawn-out measured sound of the alarm-bell rang out from the belfry of St. Sulpice, and with it the deceived proletariat once more summoned their brothers to arms. The cathedral and all the buildings on the river bank were wonderfully lighted up by a few rays of sunshine, gleaming brightly from under a storm-cloud, the drums sounded from all sides, the artillery filed along from the Place du Carrousel. I heard the thunder and the bell ringing, and could not gaze enough at the panorama of Paris, as though I were taking leave of it; I passionately loved Paris at that moment; it was the last homage I paid to the great city—after the days of June it grew hateful to me.

‘On the other side of the river barricades were being thrown up in all the streets and alleys. I can see now those gloomy figures dragging the stones, women and children helping them. A young Polytechnic student climbed one barricade that apparently was finished, unfurled the flag and began singing the Marseillaise in a mournfully solemn voice, all who were working joined in, and the chorus of the grand song resounding over the stones of the barricades made the heart throb.... The alarm bell still rang out. Meanwhile, there was the thud of artillery over the bridge, and General Beguot on the bridge scanned through a field-glass the _enemy’s_ position....’

At that moment it was still possible to prevent it all, then it was still possible to save the republic and the freedom of all Europe, then it was still possible to have made peace. The dull-witted and tactless government could not do this, the Assembly would not, the reactionaries sought revenge, blood, atonement for the 24th of February, and the enactments of the Nationale gave them the instruments to carry out their will.

On the evening of the 26th of June, after the victory of the Nationale over Paris, we heard shots being fired at short regular intervals.... We glanced at one another, all our faces were livid....

‘They are shooting prisoners,’ we said with one voice, and turned away from one another. I pressed my forehead against the window-pane. Such moments provoke ten years of hatred, a lifetime of revenge: _woe to him who forgives at such moments!_

After the fighting, which lasted four days and four nights, there followed the calm and stillness of a state of siege; the streets were still surrounded by cordons, only very rarely here and there one came upon a carriage; the haughty National Guards, with brutal and stupid ferocity in their faces, guarded their shops, threatening with bayonets and butt-ends of rifles. Triumphant crowds of drunken _gardes mobiles_ paraded the streets singing _Mourir pour la Patrie_; lads of sixteen or seventeen boasted of their brothers’ blood, with which their hands were stained; shopgirls ran out from behind the counter and threw flowers to them, to greet the conquerors. Cavaignac took round with him in a carriage a monster who had killed dozens of Frenchmen. The bourgeoisie was triumphant. Yet the houses of the Faubourg St. Antoine were still smoking, the walls battered by bullets were in ruins, the interior of rooms thrown open displayed wounds in the stones, broken furniture was still smouldering, bits of shattered looking-glass glittered ... and where were the owners? The inhabitants? No one even thought of them.... In places they were scattering sand, but still there was blood to be seen. People were not allowed to approach the Panthéon, which had been damaged by cannon-balls; there were tents pitched in the boulevards, horses were nibbling the carefully tended trees of the Champs-Élysées; hay, cuirassiers, breastplates, and saddles were lying about everywhere in the Place de la Concorde; soldiers were making soup in the Jardin des Tuileries, by the fence. Paris had not seen this even in 1814.

A few more days passed—and Paris began to assume its customary aspect. Crowds of idlers appeared again on the boulevards, smartly-dressed ladies drove about in carriages and cabriolets _to look_ at the ruins of houses and the traces of desperate fighting.... It was only the frequent patrols and gangs of prisoners that reminded one of the terrible days, only then the past began to grow clear. Byron has a description of a battlefield at night; its blood-stained details are hidden in the darkness; at dawn, when the battle has long been over, its traces—a sword-blade and blood-stained clothes—are seen. It was just such a dawn that rose now in the soul, it lighted up a scene of fearful desolation. Half of our hopes, half of our beliefs were slain, ideas of scepticism and despair haunted the brain and took root in it. One could never have supposed that, after passing through so many trials, after being schooled by contemporary scepticism, we had so much left in our souls to be destroyed.

Natalie wrote about this time to Moscow: ‘I look at the children and weep, I am terrified. I no longer dare to wish them to live, perhaps there is a fate as awful in store for them too.’

* * * * *

In these words is the echo of all she had been through, in them one seems to see the omnibuses piled up with dead, and prisoners with bound hands, followed by oaths, and the poor deaf-and-dumb boy shot a few steps from our gate because he did not hear: ‘_Passez au large!_’ And how could it fail to make this impression on the heart of a woman who had unhappily so profound an understanding of everything sorrowful?... Even joyous natures grew gloomy and full of bitterness, the heart ached with a sort of angry pain, and an overwhelming shame made daily life seem out of place.

It was not a fantastic grief for ideals, not a revival of the tears and romantic religion of her girlhood, which once more flooded Natalie’s soul, but a real sorrow, too heavy a burden for a woman’s shoulders. Natalie’s living interest in public affairs did not grow colder; on the contrary, it turned into a living agony. It was the distress of a sister, the tears of a mother, on the sorrowful field of the battle that had just been lost. She was in reality what Rachel falsely played at being with her Marseillaise.

Weary of fruitless discussions, I snatched up my pen and, with a sort of inner fury, slew my own old dreams and hopes. The energy that was breaking and fretting me spent itself in these pages of cursing and resentment, in which even now, when I read them over, I am conscious of the fevered blood and indignation that passed beyond all bounds ... it was an outlet.

She had no such outlet. In the morning there were the children, in the evening our irritable, vindictive discussions, the post-mortem arguments of dissectors with doctors who had failed.

She was suffering—and I, in place of healing, offered her the bitter cup of scepticism and irony. If I had tended her sick soul with half the care I lavished afterwards on her sick body, I should never have let this rankling sorrow send out roots in all directions. I helped to feed and strengthen them without making sure whether she could bear it, could cope with it.

Our life itself was strangely ordered. We rarely had quiet evenings of intimate talk and peaceful rest. We had not yet learnt to close our doors on outsiders. Towards the end of the year, fugitives from all countries, homeless refugees, began to arrive from all parts. In their dullness and isolation they sought a friendly roof and a warm welcome.

Here is what she wrote of that:

_November 21, 1848._—‘I am sick of Chinese shadows. I do not know whom I see and why I see them, I only know that I see too many people—all good people; I fancy I might take pleasure in their company _sometimes_, but that it is too often, life is so like the dripping water in springtime, drip, drip, drip.

‘All the morning I am looking after Sasha, after Tata, and that goes on all day. I cannot concentrate for one minute. I am so distracted that it sometimes makes me ill and frightened; the evening comes, the children are put to bed—well, one might think I should rest.... No, good people begin strolling in, and that they are good people makes it even harder to bear; otherwise, I should be quite alone, and, as it is, I am not alone—and I do not feel their presence, it’s as though the room were full of smoke, one’s eyes smart, and it is hard to breathe—and they go away and nothing is left.... To-morrow comes, always the same thing, the day after comes, always the same thing. To no one else could I say this, others would think I am complaining, would imagine I am dissatisfied with my life; you understand me, you know that I would not change with any one on earth. This is a moment’s indignation, weariness—a breath of fresh air, and I rise up again as strong as ever. If I am to say all that passes in my mind, I am sometimes terrified looking at the children ... what boldness, what audacity, to bring a new creature into life, and to have nothing, nothing to make its life happy—it is fearful, sometimes I seem to myself a criminal; it would be easier to take life than to give it, if it were done with full consciousness. I have never yet met any one of whom I could say, “If my child were such as he, that is, if his life were such as his....” My views grow more and more humble. Soon after Sasha’s birth, I wanted him to be a great man, later on, to be this or that, now all I want is....’

At this point the letter was cut short by our little girl Tata’s having typhoid fever; on the 15th of December the words were added: ‘Well, what I meant to say was that now I don’t care about making anything of the children; so long as their lives are bright and happy, the rest is of no consequence....’

_January 24, 1849._—‘How I should sometimes like to run about like a mouse as others do, and to find that trotting to and fro interesting, instead of being so idle, so idle in the midst of this bustle, in the midst of these necessary things, while the work that I should like is out of the question; how agonising it is always to feel oneself in such disharmony with those surrounding one—I am not speaking of our most intimate circle, but if only one could confine oneself to it; one cannot.

‘One longs to get away, far away!... It was all right to feel like that when we were in Italy.

‘But now! there’s no sense in it! At thirty to have the same yearnings, the same thirst, and the same dissatisfaction—yes, I said that aloud—and Tata came up at that word and kissed me so warmly. Dissatisfaction?—I am too happy, _la vie déborde_.... But

‘“Why is it on the world One longs to gaze, Why to fly over it Does the soul crave?”

‘It is only to you that I talk like this—you will understand me, because you are just as weak as I am—but with others, whether stronger or weaker, I should not care to speak like this, I should not care for them to hear what I am saying. I find something else for them. Then I am frightened by my indifference, so few things, so few people interest me.... Nature—only not in the kitchen; history—only not in the law-courts; and then my own family, then two or three others—that’s all. And yet how kind they all are—they take so much trouble over my health and Kolya’s deafness.’

_January 27._—‘No, I really have not the strength to go on watching the death-agonies—they last too long, and life is so short; I am possessed by egoism, because one does no good by self-sacrifice, at the most it shows the truth of the proverb, “Even death is agreeable in good company!” But enough of dying. I should like to live.... I should like to escape to America.... What we believed in, what we took for reality, was only a prophecy of the future, and a very premature one. How bitter, how comfortless it is! I want to cry like a child. What is personal happiness? ... public life is all around one like the atmosphere, and that atmosphere is full now of the breath of death and pestilence.’

_February 1._—‘Natasha,[3] if you knew, my dear, how dark, how comfortless it is outside our personal private circle! Oh, if one could shut oneself inside it, and forget, forget everything except that narrow circle.... How insufferable is the ferment, the result of which won’t come for some centuries! I am too weak to rise above that ferment and look so far into the future—I shrink into myself and am crushed.’

This letter ends with the words: ‘I should like to have so little strength as not to feel my own existence; when I do feel it, I feel all the disharmony of everything that exists....’

The reaction was triumphant; through the pale blue republic could be seen the features of pretenders to the throne, the National Guards went hunting after workmen in blouses, the Prefect of Police sent search-parties through the woods and catacombs, hunting for those who were in hiding. Men of a less martial type preferred eavesdropping and sending secret reports.

Until the autumn we were surrounded by our own friends, and gave vent to our grief and our anger in our own language; the Tutchkovs[4] were living in the same house, Mariya Fyodorovna Korsh[5] was with us, Annenkov[6] and Turgenev used to come every day; but all were looking away into the distance, our little circle was breaking up. After its bath of blood, Paris had no hold on them; all prepared to go away, from no special necessity, probably thinking to escape from the spiritual oppression, from the days of June which had become part of them, and which they took with them.

Why did not I go too? Much would have been saved, and I should not have had to offer up such human sacrifices and so much of myself, as an offering to a cruel and merciless god.

The day of our parting with the Tutchkovs and Mariya Fyodorovna struck a particularly ominous note in my life, but I let that note of warning pass unheeded like hundreds of others.

Every man who has gone through a great deal remembers days, hours, a succession of scarcely noticed points with which a crisis begins, with which the wind shifts to a different quarter; these signs or warnings do not come by chance at all, they are sequences, rudimentary germs of what is ready to burst into life, revelations of what is secretly fermenting and already existing. We do not notice these psychological signs, but laugh at them as we do over spilled salt, or a candle being blown out, because we consider ourselves immeasurably more independent than we really are, and proudly desire to guide our lives ourselves.

On the eve of our friends’ departure, they gathered at our house together with three or four other intimate friends. The travellers were to be at the railway-station at seven o’clock in the morning; it was not worth while going to bed, we all preferred to spend the last hours together. At first all were lively with that nervous excitement which is always seen at moments of separation, but by degrees a cloud of depression seemed to come over all of us.... Conversation flagged, every one began to feel dispirited, the wine was left untouched in our glasses, the efforts at jesting no longer cheered us. Some one, seeing the daybreak, pulled back the curtain and threw a pale bluish light on all our faces that suggested the Roman orgies of Couture.[7] All were melancholy. I was so sad I could hardly breathe. My wife was sitting on a little sofa, while Tutchkov’s younger daughter, ‘_Consuelo di sua alma_,’[8] as Natalie used to call her, was kneeling with her face on Natalie’s bosom. She was passionately fond of my wife, and was unwillingly leaving her to go into the wilds of the country; her sister stood mournfully beside her. Consuelo was whispering something through her tears, while two paces away Mariya Fyodorovna was sitting in gloomy silence; she had learnt through years to submit to destiny, she knew life, and in her eyes one could simply read ‘good-bye,’ while through the young girl’s tears there still gleamed ‘till we meet again.’ Then we went to see them off. It was piercingly cold in the high, empty, stone station, the doors slammed incessantly, and the draught blew in all directions. We sat down on a seat in the corner. Tutchkov went to look after the luggage. Suddenly the door opened, and two drunken old men burst noisily into the station. Their clothes were muddy, their faces distorted, everything about them was suggestive of brutal debauchery. They came in, swearing. One tried to strike the other, the latter dodged and, swinging his fist with all his might, hit him in the face. The old drunkard was sent flying. His head struck the stone floor with the sharp sound of something cracking; he shrieked and raised his head, while the blood poured in streams over his grey hair and the stone floor. The police and passengers fell with fury upon the other old man. Though we had been overwrought and excited ever since the previous evening, and our nerves were over-strained, we maintained our self-control, but the fearful echo that resounded through the hall when the skull struck the floor had almost an hysterical effect upon all of us. Our household and all our circle were at all times sane and free from neurotic and hysterical exhibitions, but this was more than we could bear. I felt myself shuddering all over, and my wife was almost fainting. And then the bell—time was up! And we were left suddenly at the barrier—alone.

Nothing could be coarser and more mortifying for parting friends than the police arrangements at railway-stations in France; they rob those left behind of the last two or three minutes; the friends are still there, the engine has not yet whistled, the train has not moved off, but between you is a fence, a barrier, and the arm of a policeman—while you long to see them settled, to see the train move off, then to watch it in the distance turn to a cloud of dust, of smoke, a point, to watch until you can see nothing....

In silence we reached home. My wife was weeping quietly all the way—she was sorry to lose her Consuelo; at times, wrapping herself in her shawl, she asked me, ‘Do you remember that sound?—it is ringing in my ears still.’

At home I persuaded her to lie down, while I sat down to read the newspapers; I read, read the _premier Paris_ and the _feuilletons_ and the short paragraphs, and glanced at my watch—it was not yet twelve; what a day! I went to see Annenkov; he, too, was going in a few days. We went for a walk together, the streets were even more dreary than reading; I was weighed down by misery that was like the gnawing of conscience. ‘Come to dinner with me,’ I said, and we went home. My wife was really ill, the evening was disjointed and stupid. ‘And so it is settled,’ I asked as we parted, ‘that you go at the end of the week?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll be wretched in Russia.’

‘I can’t help that, I must go. I shall not stay in Petersburg, I shall go into the country. Why, it’s not so wonderfully nice here now. You may yet regret staying.’

At that time I could still have returned, I had not yet burnt my ships. Rebillaud and Carlier had not yet written their secret police reports, but in my mind the matter was settled. Yet Annenkov’s words jarred unpleasantly on my overwrought nerves; I thought a moment and answered: ‘No, there is no choice for me, I must stay; and if I regret anything, it is rather that I did not take the gun when a workman offered it to me at a barricade on the Place Maubert.’

Many times in moments of weakness and despair, when the cup of bitterness was too full, when my whole life seemed to me nothing but one prolonged blunder, when I doubted of myself, of ‘the last thing, all that is left,’ those words came back to my mind, ‘Why did I not take the gun from the workman and stay at the barricade?’ Struck by a chance bullet, I should have borne two or three convictions with me to the grave.

* * * * *

And again the time lagged on ... day after day ... grey and wearisome.... People flitted in, made friends for a day, passed by, vanished, were lost. Towards the winter, exiles from other lands, survivors from other shipwrecks, began to arrive; full of hope and self-confidence, they took the reaction that had sprang up all over Europe for a passing squall, a minor reverse; they expected their turn would come, next day, next week.

I felt that they were wrong, but I was glad of their mistake. I tried to be inconsistent, struggled with myself, and lived in a state of nervous irritability. That time has remained in my memory like a day of stupefaction and delirium.... In my misery I turned hither and thither, restlessly seeking distraction—in books, in noise, in solitude, at home, in company, but always there was something lacking, laughter did not make me merry, wine only made me heavy, music cut me to the heart, and lively talk almost always ended in gloomy silence. Everything within was outraged, everything was turned upside down, all was chaos, full of glaring contradictions; again I was pulling everything to pieces, again there was nothing. The principles of one’s moral existence, worked out long ago, were turned again into questions, facts had risen up sullenly on all sides and refuted them. Doubt trampled under foot the little we had gained, it was now tearing to shreds, not the vestments of the Church nor the robes of learned doctors, but the flags of the revolution.... From abstract ideas doubt was turned upon life. There is a deep gulf between theoretical scepticism and doubt that passes over into conduct; thought is bold, the tongue is reckless, it readily utters words which the heart dreads; hopes and convictions still smoulder in the breast while the mind, racing on ahead, refuses assent. The heart lags behind because it loves; and while the mind delivers sentence and verdict, it is still taking leave.

Perhaps in youth, when all is ferment and commotion, when there is so much in the future, when the loss of some convictions only makes room for others, perhaps in old age, when all grows indistinct from weariness, these crises are easier—but _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_,[9] we paid dearly for them.

What does it all mean—is it a jest? Everything sacred that we loved, for which we struggled, for which we made sacrifices, has been betrayed by life, betrayed by history, betrayed for her own ends—she needs madmen as a ferment, and cares not what becomes of them when they recover; they have served her turn—let them live out their crippled lives in hospital! The shame, the mortification! And here at one’s side simple-hearted friends shrug their shoulders, wonder at one’s poor-spiritedness, at one’s impatience, look forward to the morrow, and for ever fussing, for ever busy with the same thing, see nothing, stop before nothing, go on for ever and are never a step forwarder.... They judge you, comfort you, scold you—oh wearisome, insufferable infliction! ‘Men of faith, men of love,’ as they call themselves in contradistinction to us men ‘of doubt and negation,’ do not know what it is to tear out by the roots the cherished convictions of a lifetime, they know nothing of the sickness of truth, they have surrendered no treasure with that loud lamentation of which the poet speaks:

‘Ich riss sie blutend aus dem wunden Herzen Und weinte laut und gab sie hin.’

Happy are the lunatics who have no lucid intervals; they know nothing of the inner conflict, they suffer from external causes, from evil men and evil chances, but within, all is whole, conscience is at rest, they are content. And so the gnawing despair of others seems to them caprice, the self-indulgence of a too well-fed mind, idle irony. They see that the wounded man laughs at his crutch, and conclude that the operation meant nothing to him; it does not enter their heads to wonder why he is prematurely old and whether the stump aches at the change of the weather and the blowing of the wind.

My logical confession, the history of the disease through which my wounded thoughts struggled, remains in the series of articles that make up _From the Other Side_. In them I attacked the last idols I had left. With irony I revenged myself on them for the pain and the betrayal. I did not jeer at my neighbours, but at myself, and, carried away again, was already dreaming of being free, but there, too, I came to grief. Losing faith in words and banners, in canonised humanity and the one church of salvation, that is, Western civilisation, I still believed in a few persons, I believed in myself. Seeing that all was tumbling into ruins, I tried to save myself, to begin a new life, to get away with two or three others, to run, to hide from ... superfluous people. And haughtily I headed my last article: _Omnia mea mecum porto!_

Life, burnt up, losing shape and colour in the abyss of events, in the vortex of public interests, became self-centred, shrank back into youthful lyricism, without youth, without faith. With this _faro da me_, my boat was bound to be wrecked on submerged rocks, and it was wrecked. I survived, it is true, but lost everything....

2

TYPHOID

In the winter of 1848 my little girl, Tata, was ill. She had been ailing for a long time, then had a slight attack of fever, and it seemed to have passed off. Rayer, the well-known doctor, advised that she should be taken a drive in spite of the wintry weather. It was a fine day, but not warm. When she was brought home, she was unusually pale; she asked for something to eat and fell asleep beside us on the sofa before the broth was brought; several hours passed, she went on sleeping. Adolf Vogt, a medical student, a brother of the naturalist, happened to be with us.

‘Look at the child,’ he said; ‘why, that’s not natural sleep.’ The deathly, almost bluish, pallor of the face alarmed me; I put my hand on the child’s forehead, it was stone-cold. I rushed myself to Rayer, luckily found him at home and brought him back with me. The little creature was still asleep. Rayer lifted her up, shook her violently and made me call her loudly by her name.... She opened her eyes, said a couple of words and dropped back again into the same heavy deathlike sleep; her breathing was hardly perceptible. She remained in that condition, with slight changes, for several days, without food and almost without drink. Her lips turned black, her nails were dark blue and spots came out over the body—it was typhoid. Rayer did scarcely anything, waited, watched the illness and gave us little hope.

The appearance of the child was terrible; I expected the end from hour to hour. Pale and silent, my wife sat day and night by the little bed, her eyes covered with that pearly lustre which betrays fatigue, suffering, exhausted strength and unnaturally strained nerves. Once, between one and two o’clock at night, I fancied that Tata was not breathing. I looked at her, concealing my horror. Natalie guessed it. ‘My head is going round,’ she said, ‘give me some water.’ When I handed her the glass, she was unconscious. Ivan Turgenev, who had come to share our gloomy hours, ran to the chemist’s for spirits of ammonia. I stood motionless between two unconscious bodies, gazed at them, but did nothing. Our maid rubbed Natalie’s hands and moistened her temples; in a few minutes she came to herself. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘I thought Tata opened her eyes,’ said good, kind Luise. I looked, she seemed to be waking; I spoke her name in a whisper; she opened her eyes and smiled with her black, dry and cracked lips. From that minute she began to recover.

There are poisons which destroy a man more cruelly, more agonisingly than children’s illnesses. I know them, but there is nothing worse than the slow poison that works by exhaustion, that saps the strength in the stillness and humiliates one with the impotence of an idle spectator.

The man who has once carried a little creature in his arms and felt it growing cold and heavy, turning to stone, who has heard the last moan with which the frail creature begs for mercy, for help, imploring for its life, who has seen the pretty little coffin covered with pink satin, and the little white frock, with lace on it, which contrasts so with the little yellow face, will think at every childish illness, may there not be another little coffin on that table!

Misfortune is a bad school! Of course, a man who has gone through a great deal is better able to bear misfortunes, but that is only because his soul has been bruised and weakened. A man slowly wears out and grows more cowardly from the troubles he has endured. He loses that confidence in the morrow without which nothing can be done: he grows more indifferent because he is used to terrible thoughts, and in the end he is selfishly afraid of suffering, that is, he is afraid of feeling again the succession of acute miseries, the succession of pangs to the heart, of which the memories never pass away as storm-clouds do from the sky.

The moan of a sick child causes such inward terror in me, sends such a cold shiver through me, that I have to make great efforts to overcome this purely nervous effect of memory.

It was on the morning after that same night that I went out for the first time for a walk; it was cold, the pavements were lightly powdered with hoar frost, but in spite of the cold and the early hour the boulevards were crowded with people; shouting streets-boys were selling _bulletins_—over five million voices laid France bound at the feet of Louis Napoleon. The bereaved servants’ hall had found a master again at last! It was just at this time of bitter trial and strain that a person came into our circle who brought with him another train of misfortunes, who brought more ruin into our private life than the black days of June into our public. This person approached us rapidly, forced himself upon us without giving us time for consideration.... At ordinary times I am quick to become acquainted and slow to become intimate, but that, I repeat again, was not an ordinary time. All our nerves were laid bare and smarting; trivial meetings, insignificant reminders of the past, made one quiver in every fibre. I remember, for instance, that three days after the cannonade, I was strolling along the Faubourg St. Antoine; everything still bore fresh traces of fierce fighting, there were broken walls, barricades still standing, pale, frightened women looking for something, and children rummaging in the _débris_....

I sat down before a little café and looked, with an aching heart, at the terrible scene. A quarter of an hour passed—some one softly laid a hand on my shoulder—it was Doviat, a young enthusiast who had preached some sort of Neo-catholicism _à la_ Ruge in Germany, and had, in 1847, emigrated to America.

He was pale, his face was working, his long hair was in disorder, he was dressed as though for a journey.

‘My God!’ he said, ‘how we meet again!’

‘When did you come?’

‘To-day. Having heard in New York of the revolution of February and of all that was being done in Europe, I hurriedly sold everything I could, took all my money, and rushed for a steamer with a light heart full of hope. Yesterday, at Havre, I heard of what has just happened, but I could never have imagined anything as bad as this.’

We looked at each other once more, and our eyes were full of tears.

‘Not a day, not one single day in this accursed city!’ said the excited Doviat, and he was really like some prophesying Levite.

‘Hence! Away! Farewell, I go to Germany!’

He did go, and fell into a Prussian prison, where he spent six years.

I remember, too, the performance of _Catiline_ which the strong-nerved Dumas put on the stage at that time in his historic theatre. The forts were packed to overflowing with prisoners, some were sent by herds to the Château d’If and deported, their relations wandered like uneasy spirits from one police office to another, imploring to be told who was killed, and who had survived, and who had been shot; but Alexandre Dumas was already producing the days of June in a Roman setting on the stage. I went to have a look at it. At first it was nothing much; Ledru-Rollin as Catiline and Cicero as Lamartine, classical sentences with rhetorical padding. The rising is put down. Lamartine marches across the stage with his ‘Vixerunt’; the scene changes. The market-place is covered with corpses, in the distance is a red glow—the dying, in death agonies, are lying among the dead; the dead are covered with bloody rags—I could hardly breathe. So lately behind the walls of that playhouse, in the streets leading up to it, we had seen the thing itself, and the corpses were not of cardboard, and the streaming blood was not coloured water, but trickled from live young bodies.

I rushed away almost hysterical, cursing the wildly applauding bourgeois....

In such agonising days, when a man cannot stay in restaurant or theatre, at home or in his study, but goes out in a fever, with brain distraught, inwardly crushed, deeply wounded, and ready to wound any one he meets, then every word of sympathy, every tear over the same grief, every curse that springs from the same hatred, has wonderful power. Sore places quickly grow together when the wounds are alike.

In the early days of my youth I was struck by a French novel, which I have not met since—it was called _Arminius_. Possibly it has no great merits, but at the time it had a great influence on me, and it haunted my mind for years afterwards. I remember its chief incidents to this day.

From the history of the early ages of Christendom we all know something of the meeting and conflict between two different worlds—one, the ancient and classical world of culture, corrupt and effete, the other savage as a wild beast of the forest, but full of slumbering forces and a disorderly chaos of tendencies—that is, we all know the official public side of this contact, but not that side which was concerned with details and the stillness of home life. We know the events as a whole, but have no record of the lives of the persons who were directly dependent on them, though it was through those events that lives unchronicled were broken and ruined, blood was replaced by tears, devastated towns by desolate families, the field of battle by forgotten tombs.

The author of _Arminius_—I have forgotten his name—tried to reproduce these two worlds—one coming from the forest into history, the other going from history to the tomb—as they met at the domestic hearth. Universal history, when reduced to personal gossip, comes nearer to us, more within our grasp, more living. I was so interested by _Arminius_ that I began writing a series of historical scenes in the same style, and the Chief Police-master, Tsinsky, made a critical analysis of them in 1834. But I need hardly say that when I wrote those it never entered my head that I should come into a similar conflict, and that my own hearth would be devastated, crushed at the meeting of two historic worlds. Whatever may be said, there are points of resemblance in our relation to Europeans. Our civilisation is skin-deep, our corruption is crude, our coarse hair bristles under the powder on our heads, and the sunburn shows through the powder on our cheeks; we have the cunning of savages, the vice of animals, the evasiveness of slaves, everywhere we are beginning to have money and money-grubbers, but we are very far behind the hereditary, intangible subtleties of West European corruption. Among us intellectual development[10] serves as a purification and a guarantee. Exceptions are rare. Culture among us, until lately, was a barrier which much that was infamous and vicious never crossed.

In Western Europe this is not so. And that is how it is that we readily surrender to a man who touches upon our holy things, who understands our cherished thoughts, who boldly utters what we are wont to pass over in silence or to speak of in whispers to a friend. We do not take into account that half the sayings which set our hearts beating and our bosoms heaving have become for Europe truisms or phrases; we forget how many corrupt passions, the artificial passions of old age, are entangled in the soul of a modern man belonging to that effete civilisation. From his earliest years he is trying to get in first, rotten through and through with self-seeking, sick with envy and _amour-propre_, with insatiable self-indulgence and petty egoism to which every relation, every feeling is subordinated.... He wants to play a part, to pose on the stage, he wants at all costs to keep his place, to satisfy his passions. We sons of the Steppes, receiving one blow and a second, often not seeing whence they come, stupefied by them, are long before we come to our senses, and then fling ourselves like wounded bears, tearing up trees and howling and flinging up the earth—but too late, and our opponent points a finger of scorn at us. Much hatred yet will be engendered and much blood yet will flow through this difference in the two stages of growth and education.

There was a time when I sternly and passionately judged the man who shattered my life. There was a time when I earnestly desired to kill him. Seven years have passed since then; a true son of the age, I have worn out all desire of vengeance, and have cooled my passionate view by prolonged persistent analysis. In those seven years I have learnt both my own limit and the limits of many, and instead of a knife I have a scalpel in my hand, and instead of curses and abuse I set to work to tell my story of psychological pathology.

* * * * *

On coming home one evening, a few days before the 23rd of June 1848, I found in my room an unknown person who came to meet me with a mournful and embarrassed air. ‘Why, is it you?’ I said at last, laughing and holding out my hands to him. ‘Is it possible? I should never have known you....’ It was Herwegh, shaven, shorn, with no moustache or beard. His luck had very quickly turned. Two months before, surrounded by admirers, he and his wife had driven in a comfortable _dormeuse_ from Paris to the Baden campaign, at the invitation of the German republic. Now he had come back, fleeing from the field of battle, pursued by showers of caricatures, ridiculed by his enemies, blamed by his friends.

In a trice everything had changed, everything had fallen to pieces, and to complete it all, behind the wrecked scenery there was a prospect of ruin.

When I left Russia, Ogaryov gave me a letter of introduction to Herwegh, whom he had known in the days of his greatest glory. Ogaryov, always penetrating in questions of thought and of art, had no judgment of men. To him all who were not boring or vulgar were excellent people, and particularly all artists. I found Herwegh an intimate friend of Bakunin’s and Sazonov’s, and was soon on terms rather of familiarity than of intimacy with him. In the autumn of 1847 I went away to Italy. On my return to Paris I did not find him there. I read of his misfortunes in the newspapers. Almost on the eve of the days of June, he arrived in Paris, and as it was from me that he first met with a friendly reception after his Baden blunders, he took to coming more and more often to see us. There was a good deal at first to prevent my becoming intimate with the man. He had not that simple open nature, that complete _abandon_ which is so in keeping with everything strong and gifted, and which in Russians almost invariably accompanies talent. He was reserved and furtive, afraid of other people, and liked to enjoy himself on the sly; he had a sort of unmanly effeminacy, a pitiful dependence on trifles, on comforts, and an unbounded _rücksichtslos_ egoism to the degree of _naïveté_ and cynicism. For all that I threw only half the blame on him. Fate had put beside him a woman who by her sophisticated love and her exaggerated solicitude fanned his egoistic propensities and encouraged his weaknesses by making them seem something fine in his eyes. Before his marriage he had been poor—she had brought him wealth, surrounded him with luxury, had become his nurse, his housekeeper, his attendant, a permanent necessity of the lowest order. Humbled to the dust in a sort of perpetual worship, _Huldigung_, before the poet ‘come to fill the place of Goethe and Heine,’ she at the same time destroyed, stifled his talent—in the feather-bed of bourgeois luxury. It used to annoy me to see him accept so readily the position of a _kept_ husband, and I must own it was not without satisfaction that I saw the financial ruin for which they were inevitably making, and I looked rather unsympathetically at Emma’s tears when she had to give up her ‘gilt-edged’ lodging, as we used to call it, and to sell, one by one, at half price, her ‘amors and cupids’—happily not serfs, but bronze figures. I will pause here to say a few words about their previous life and about their marriage itself, which is wonderfully typical of modern German sentiment....

* * * * *

Germans, and especially German women, have a mass of false passions—that is, invented, fantastic and affected literary passions. It is a sort of _Ueberspanntheit_ ... a bookish proneness to enthusiasm, an artificial, cold exaltation, always ready to be immensely impressed or touched without sufficient reason.

It is not hypocrisy, but a false truth, a psychological incontinence, ethical hysterics costing them nothing but inducing many tears, much joy and grief, many distractions and sensations, _Wonne_. Even an intelligent woman like Bettina von Arnim was unable to get rid of this German malady all her life. The forms it takes may change, the subjects with which it deals may be different, but the psychological treatment of the material, so to speak, is always the same. Everything is reduced to different variations, to different _nuances_ of voluptuous pantheism, that is, of a religiously erotic and theoretically enamoured attitude to nature and to men, which by no means excludes romantic chastity or theoretical sensuality, either in the secular devotees of the cosmos or the monastic brides of Christ, abandoning themselves to the erotic ecstasies of prayer. They are both struggling to be the spiritual sisters ... of the real Magdalens. They do this from curiosity and sympathy for transgressions to which they never bring themselves, and they are always ready to absolve the sins of others, even when these latter do not ask for it. The most enthusiastic of them pass through the whole programme of passions without descending to practice, and they experience all the sins, as it were by proxy—_per contumaciam_—in the books of others and their own manuscripts.

One almost universal feature of all ecstatic German ladies is their idolatrous worship of genius and of all great men; this religion dates from Weimar, from the days of Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. But as men of genius are rare, and Heine lived in Paris, whilst Humboldt was too old and too realistic, they flung themselves, with a sort of hungry despair, on any good musician or decent painter. The image of Franz Liszt passed like an electric shock through the hearts of all the women of Germany, branding on them the high forehead and long hair combed back from it.

For lack in the end of great men common to all Germany, they accepted any, so to speak, local genius, who had distinguished himself in any way; all the women were in love with him, all the girls _schwärmten für ihn_. They all embroidered braces and slippers for him, and sent him all sorts of souvenirs in secret, anonymously. In the ’forties there was great mental excitement in Germany.

It might have been expected that that people, grown grey over books, might wish, like Faust, to come out into the market-place and look upon the light of day. We know now that these were fruitless efforts, that the new Faust from Auerbach’s cellar went back to the _Studienzimmer_. It seemed otherwise at the time, particularly to the Germans, and so every manifestation of the revolutionary spirit met with ardent recognition.

It was in the very heyday of this period that Herwegh’s political poems appeared. I never saw much talent in them; no one but his wife could compare Herwegh with Heine, but Heine’s malicious scepticism was out of harmony with the mood of the day. The Germans, between 1840 and 1850, did not want Goethes or Voltaires, but Béranger’s songs and the Marseillaise, adapted to the German fashion. Herwegh’s verses ended sometimes _in crudo_ with a French shout, with the refrain, _Vive la République!_, and that put people into ecstasies in 1842. In 1852 they were forgotten. They cannot be read over again. Herwegh—the poet-laureate of democracy—went from one banquet to another all over Germany, and at last appeared in Berlin. Every one rushed to invite him, dinners and parties were given in his honour, every one wanted to see him, even the King had such a desire to speak to him that the Court doctor, Schenlein, thought it necessary to present him to the King.

A few yards away from the palace in Berlin lived a banker. His daughter had for a long time been in love with Herwegh. She had never seen him and had no definite idea of him, but as she read his verses she felt that it was her vocation to make him happy and to twine the roses of domestic bliss in his laurel wreath. When she did actually see him for the first time at an evening party given by her father, she became finally convinced that this was _he_, and he did in fact become her _he_.

The enterprising, resolute girl made her attack vigorously. At first the poet, aged twenty-four, shied at the thought of marriage, and especially of marriage with a very plain young person, with a loud voice and rather _Junker_ manners; the portals of a brilliant future stood wide open before him—what need had he of family peace, or a wife? But the banker’s daughter, on her side, offered in the _present_ a sack of gold, a tour in Italy, Paris, Strasbourg pies, and Clos de Vougeot: the poet was poor as a church mouse; he could not go on living at the Vollens’ for ever—he hesitated and hesitated—and ... accepted the offer, forgetting to say thank you to old Vollen, Vogt’s grandfather.

Emma herself used to tell me how minutely and carefully the poet conducted negotiations about the dowry. He even sent sketches of the furniture, the curtains, and so on, from Zurich, and would have it all despatched before the wedding—he insisted upon that.

There was no thought of love; there had to be something to take its place. Emma understood that and made up her mind to secure her power by other measures. They spent some time in Zurich, she took her husband to Italy and then settled with him in Paris. There she assigned her _Schatz_ a study with soft sofas, heavy velvet hangings, expensive rugs and bronze statuettes, and arranged for him a whole life of empty idleness. This was new to him and he liked it, but meanwhile his talent died down, and he produced nothing; she was vexed at this, scolded him for it and at the same time drew him more and more into bourgeois luxury. Here is an example of the extremes to which her solicitude would go. On one occasion in Italy, Herwegh was dissatisfied with the eau de Cologne. At once his wife wrote to Jean Marie Farina to send the very purest eau de Cologne to her husband in Rome. Meanwhile, he went away from Rome, leaving instructions that letters and parcels should be sent on to Naples; in the same way he left Naples shortly afterwards.... Some months later a box containing the eau de Cologne reached them in Paris, with an immense bill to pay for its travelling expenses.

She was in her own way not at all stupid and had far more strength and energy than he. Her culture was typically German—she had read an immense amount, but not what is necessary, and had studied all manner of subjects without reaching a clear grasp of anything. Her complete lack of feminine grace made an unpleasant impression. From her abrupt voice to her angular gestures and angular features, from her cold eyes to her eagerness to drag the conversation down to ambiguous topics, everything about her was masculine. Openly, before every one, she dangled about her husband as elderly men dangle about young girls; she looked into his eyes, glanced at him to draw our attention to him, straightened his necktie, smoothed his hair and praised him with revolting indiscretion. Before strangers he was embarrassed by this, but in his own circle paid no attention to it, as a man absorbed in his work does not notice the devotion with which his dog licks his boots and fawns upon him. They sometimes had scenes over this after visitors had gone away; but next day the adoring Emma would begin the same fond pestering again, and he would put up with it again for the sake of his comforts and for the sake of her zealous supervision of everything. The following anecdote will show better than anything the extremes to which she went in spoiling her darling. Ivan Turgenev went in to see them one evening after dinner. He found Herwegh lying on the sofa. Emma was rubbing his foot; she left off when their visitor entered. ‘Why have you stopped? Go on!’ said the poet wearily. ‘Are you ill?’ asked Turgenev. ‘No, not at all, but it’s very pleasant. Well, what’s the news?’ They went on talking while Emma went on rubbing his feet.

Fully persuaded that every one admired her husband, she chattered about him incessantly, without observing either that it was very boring to others, or that she did him no good by her anecdotes of his delicate nerves and capricious exactingness; to her all that seemed very charming and quite worth being imprinted for ever and ever in the memory of men; other people were revolted by it.

‘My Georg is a fearful egoist and quite spoilt (_zu verwöhnt_),’ she used to say; ‘but who has more right to be spoilt than he? All great poets have been capricious children all their lives, and they have always been spoilt. The other day he bought me a superb camellia; when he got it home he was so loth to part with it that he did not even show it me, but hid it in his cupboard and kept it there till it was quite withered—_so kindisch!_’

That is word for word what she told us. By this idolatrous worship Emma brought her Georg to the edge of an abyss; he fell into it, indeed, and if he did not perish, covered himself with shame and disgrace.

The news of the February revolution roused Germany. Hearts were set throbbing, talk and murmuring were heard from one end to another of the one United German Fatherland divided into thirty parts. The German workmen in Paris formed themselves into a club, and considered what they were to do. The Provisional Government encouraged them, not to rise, but to leave France; their sleep was somewhat troubled as it was by the French workmen. Of course, it might well happen that after Flocon’s[11] parting blessing, and Caussidière’s[12] strong language about tyrants and despots, these poor fellows would be shot or hanged, or thrown for twenty years into prison; but they did not care about that.

A campaign in Baden was resolved upon; but who was to be their deliverer? Who was to lead this new _armée du Rhin_, consisting of a few hundred peaceful workmen and craftsmen? Who, thought Emma, if not the great poet, with his lyre on his back and his sword in his hand, on the ‘battle steed’ of which he dreamed in his poems? He would sing after battle and conquer after singing; he would be chosen dictator, he would be in the assembly of kings and dictate to them the will of his Germany; in Berlin, _Unter den Linden_, his statue would be set up, and would be visible from the old banker’s house, his name would be sung through the ages, and ... in those songs the good, devoted Emma, who had accompanied him as sword-bearer, page, orderly, and watched over him _in der Schwertfahrt_, would perhaps not be forgotten. And she ordered herself, in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, a martial riding-habit of the three national colours—black, red, and gold, and bought herself a black velvet béret with a cockade of the same three colours.

Through friends, Emma suggested the poet to the workmen; having no one in view and remembering Herwegh’s poems calling them to rebellion, they chose him their leader. Emma persuaded him to accept the position.

What led this woman to thrust the man she so loved into this dangerous position? Where, how, when had he shown that presence of mind, that faculty of being stimulated by a crisis which gives a man control over it, that rapidity of reflection, that clearness of vision, and that spirit of defiance, in fact, without which no surgeon can perform an operation, no guerilla chief lead his followers? Where was this weakling to find strength to rouse one side of his nerves to redoubled activity and to suppress the other into insensibility? She herself had both determination and self-control, and that makes it the more unpardonable in her to have forgotten how he started at the slightest sound, turned pale at the least misadventure, how depressed he was at the slightest physical pain and how he lost his head at the sight of danger.

What made her lead him into the terrible ordeal, where pretence is useless, where there is no saving yourself by prose or verse, where the choice lies between the laurel wreath upon the tomb on one hand, and flight and the pillory of disgrace on the other? Her expectations were utterly different—she unconsciously described them in conversations and letters afterwards.

The republic in Paris had been proclaimed almost without fighting, the revolution was getting the upper hand in Italy, the news from Berlin and even from Vienna showed clearly that those thrones were tottering; it was difficult to imagine that the Duke of Baden or the King of Würtemberg could stand firm against the onrush of revolutionary ideas. It might have been expected that at the first shout of freedom the soldiers would fling away their weapons, and the people would open their arms to the insurgents, the poet would proclaim the republic, the republic would proclaim the poet dictator—had not Lamartine been dictator! All that would be left then would be for the dictator-poet to pass in triumphal procession through the whole of Germany, with his black, red, and gold Emma in her béret, to be covered with military and civic glory....

In reality things turned out otherwise. The dull-witted soldier of Baden or Swabia knows nothing of poets or republics, but he knows his discipline and his corporal very well indeed and, from his innate servility, loves them, and blindly obeys his officers. The peasants were taken unawares, the revolutionaries moved without a serious plan and with nothing prepared. Even brave men like Hecker[13] and Willich[14] could do nothing—they too were defeated, but they did not flee from the field of battle and, luckily for them, had no adoring German woman beside them.

When firing began, Emma saw her pale and terrified Georg with tears of terror in his eyes, ready to fling away his sword and hide anywhere—and she completed his ruin. She stood in front of him under fire and called on his comrades to save the poet. The soldiers were victorious. Emma, covering her husband’s flight, ran the risk of being wounded, killed, or taken prisoner, that is, sent for twenty years to Spandau or Rastadt, besides a preliminary flogging.

He hid in a neighbouring village at the very beginning of the battle. There he rushed to a peasant, beseeching and imploring the latter to hide him. The peasant hesitated at first, fearing the soldiers, but at last called him into his yard and, looking round, hid the future dictator in an empty barrel and covered him with straw, exposing his house to the risk of pillage and himself to the risk of _Fuchtel_ and imprisonment. The soldiers appeared—the peasant did not betray him, but sent word to Emma, who came to fetch him, hid her husband in a cart, changed her clothes, seated herself on the box and drove him over the frontier. ‘What was the name of the man who saved you?’ we asked him. ‘I forgot to ask him,’ Herwegh answered calmly.

His irritated comrades fell upon the luckless poet with fury, paying him out at the same time for having grown rich and for his lodgings being covered with ‘gilt carving’ and for his aristocratic effeminacy, and so on. His wife so utterly failed to see the _portée_ of what she had done that four months later she published, in her husband’s defence, a brochure, in which she described her own heroic deeds, oblivious of the light this threw on him.

Soon charges were made against him, not only of running away, but of wasting and concealing the party funds. I think that the money was not appropriated by him, but at the same time I feel sure that it was aimlessly squandered and on utterly unnecessary fancies of the martial pair. P. Annenkov was an eye-witness of the purchase of pasties and turkeys stuffed with truffles, at Chevet’s, and wines and so on being packed in the leader’s travelling carriage. Money was given by Flocon in accordance with the instructions of the Provisional Government: there are very strange variations in the estimate of this sum; the French talked of thirty thousand francs, Herwegh declared that he had not received even half that, but that the government had paid his railway fare. To this charge the returning insurgents added, that when they reached Strasbourg, hungry, ragged, and without a farthing, after the defeat, they applied to Herwegh for assistance, and were refused—Emma did not even allow them to see him—while he was living in an expensive hotel and wearing ‘yellow morocco slippers.’ Why they regarded that as a sign of luxury, I do not know, but I heard of those yellow slippers a dozen times.

All this happened as in a dream. At the beginning of March the deliverers of their country, _in spe_, had been still feasting in Paris; by the middle of May, defeated, they crossed the French frontier back again. Herwegh, coming to his senses in Paris, saw his old garden path to glory choked up—real life had sternly reminded him of his limits. He realised that his position—the poet of his wife, and the dictator who had fled the field of battle—was awkward.... He had to begin his life afresh, or go to the bottom. I fancied—and that was where I made my worst mistake—that he would outgrow the petty side of his character. I fancied that I could help him in this more than any one.

And how could I help thinking it when the man said to me every day (and later on wrote it): ‘I know the pitiful weakness of my character—your character is clearer and stronger than mine—support me, be an elder brother, a father to me.... I have no one near or dear to me—I concentrate on you all my affections—you can make anything of me by love and friendship—do not be severe, but kind and indulgent. Let me keep your hand ... and, indeed, I shall not let it go, I cling to you.... In one thing I am not inferior to you, perhaps, indeed, go beyond you—in my unbounded love for any one dear to my heart.’

He was not lying, but all this laid no obligation upon him. He was not lying, but the truth cost him nothing. Why, he did not go to the Baden rising either, meaning to desert his comrades in the hour of conflict, but at the sight of danger he fled. So long as there is no hindrance, no conflict, so long as neither effort nor sacrifice is needed, all may go swimmingly—for whole years, for a whole lifetime ... but if there is any stumbling-block in the path, then there will be trouble, crime, or shame. Why did I not understand that then!

* * * * *

Towards the end of 1848, Herwegh took to spending almost every evening with us. It was dull for him at home. Emma did, indeed, bother him dreadfully. She had come back from the Baden expedition exactly the same as she went. She had no inner misgivings over what had happened. As before, she was in love, satisfied, talkative, as though they had come back from a victory, or at any rate with no wounds in the back. Only one thing worried her—shortage of money and the certain expectation of soon having none at all. The revolution at which he had so unsuccessfully assisted had not freed Germany, nor covered the poet’s brow with laurels, but it had completely ruined the old banker, her father. She was for ever trying to dissipate her husband’s gloomy thoughts; it never entered her head that only these mournful reflections might perhaps be his salvation.

The superficial, volatile Emma had no yearnings for deep spiritual thought, productive apparently of nothing but pain. Hers was one of those natures (like simple tunes in two time) which cut every Gordian knot with their _entweder oder_; to left or to right does not matter to them so long as they can extricate themselves somehow and hurry on again ... whither? That they do not know themselves. She would break into the middle of a talk either with an anecdote or with a practical observation—though its practical bearings were of the lowest order. Convinced that no one among us was gifted with so much practical ability as she, instead of concealing her business abilities through coquetry, she coquettishly displayed them. It must be said, moreover, that she never showed any real practical good sense. Fussing about, discussing prices and cooks, furniture and materials, is something very different from business capacity. Everything in her house was at sixes and sevens, because everything was subordinated to her monomania; she was for ever on the _qui vive_, watching her husband’s face, and she put his caprices before all the real necessities of life, and even before the health and education of the children.

Herwegh naturally struggled to get away from home, and sought with us peace and harmony; he saw in us a sort of ideal family in which he loved everything, worshipped everything, the children as much as us. He dreamed of going with us somewhere far away and thence calmly watching the fifth act of the dark European tragedy. And for all that, except for having the same or very similar understanding of things in general, there was very little resemblance between us. Herwegh somehow brought everything in the world back to himself, he devoted himself for his own ends, sought attention with timidity and vanity, was diffident and at the same time persuaded of his superiority. All this taken together made him coquettish and capricious, sometimes he was intentionally melancholy, attentive or inattentive. He was in perpetual need of some one who would be guide, friend, confidant and slave all at once, precisely as Emma was, who would put up with coldness and upbraiding when his services were not needed, and who would be ready at the first beck to rush back again and do what he was ordered with smiling obedience.

I, too, sought love and friendship, sought sympathy and even applause, and tried to win them, but I have never had a trace of this feminine feline playing at _dépit_ and scenes of explanation, this everlasting thirst for attention and petting. Possibly the unrestrained truthfulness, excessive self-confidence, and healthy simplicity of my behaviour—my _laisser aller_—also arises from vanity, perhaps through them I call down misfortune on my head, but so it is. In laughter and in sorrow, in love and in public interests, I yielded myself sincerely, and could rejoice and grieve with no thought of myself. With strong nerves and muscles, I stood independent and self-reliant, and was ready to give a helping hand to another, though I never asked for help or support as a charity for myself. With such opposite temperaments it could hardly be expected that there should not be sometimes unpleasant encounters between Herwegh and me. But, in the first place, he was much more on his guard with me than with others; in the second, he completely disarmed me by the mournful recognition that he was in fault; he did not justify himself, but in the name of friendship begged indulgence for the weakness which he himself recognised and censured. I played the part of a sort of guardian, defended him from others and gave him lectures which he received submissively. His submissiveness was extremely distasteful to Emma—she was jealously resentful of it.

The year 1849 had come.

II

THE YEAR 1849

DELIRIUM OF THE HEART

Little by little, in 1849, I began to notice various changes in Herwegh. His moody character became more and more moody; he had attacks of insufferable melancholy and weakness. His wife’s father lost his fortune for good and all; the remnants that were saved were needed for other members of the family ... poverty knocked more rudely at the poet’s door.... He could not think of it without shuddering and losing every trace of manliness. Emma struggled her utmost, borrowed right and left, obtained goods on credit and sold her things—and all that he might not notice the true position of affairs. She not only denied herself necessaries, but even had no underclothes made for the children that he might dine at the Provençal Frères and buy himself rubbish. He took money from her, not knowing how she had obtained it, and not wishing to know. I reproached her for this, told her that she was ruining him, and hinted the same to him—he persistently refused to understand, while she lost her temper, and everything went on as before.

Though he was ludicrously afraid of poverty, yet that was not the cause of his depression. In his lamentations about himself one note was continually recurring, and I grew sick of hearing it; in the end, it annoyed me to hear Herwegh’s everlasting repetition of complaints of his own weakness, accompanied with reproaches for my not needing kindness and caresses, while he was fading and perishing without a helping hand, while he was so lonely and unhappy that he longed to die, while, though he had a deep respect for Emma, his sensitive, differently attuned soul shrank from her harsh, rough contact and even from her ‘loud voice.’ Then followed passionate protestations of his affection for me.... Through this feverish and nervous condition I began to discern a feeling that alarmed me for him as much as for myself. It seemed to me that his affection for Natalie was assuming a more passionate character. There was nothing for me to do, I remained silent, and began sorrowfully to foresee that in this way we were rapidly making for great trouble, and that something in our life would be shattered.

... Everything was shattered.

The everlasting talk of despair, the everlasting entreaty for attention, for a warm word, and dependence upon it, and the complaining and complaining—all this had an immense effect on a woman whose hardly-won serenity had just been destroyed, and who was suffering from the profoundly tragic surroundings in which we were living.

‘There is an element left out in you,’ Natalie said to me, ‘and the lack of it goes very well with your character; you don’t understand the yearning for the tender care of a mother, a friend, a sister, which so frets Herwegh. I understand it because I feel it myself. He is a big child, while you are a grown-up man; he can be distressed or made happy by a trifle. A harsh word is almost death to him, he must be spared.... On the other hand, with what infinite gratitude he thanks one for the smallest attention, for warmth, for sympathy!...’

Could it be?... But no, he would himself have told me before speaking to her ... and I kept his secret inviolate and did not hint at it with one word. I regretted that he did not speak to me. A secret may be kept if it is entrusted to no one, but only if it is to no one. If he had spoken of his love he _could not_ have been silent with a man with whom he was living in such spiritual intimacy, and about a secret so closely affecting the latter. So he had not spoken.... I forgot for the time the old novel entitled _Arminius_.

Towards the end of 1849 I went from Zurich to Paris to take steps about my mother’s money, which was detained by the Russian Government. I parted from Herwegh when I left Geneva. On the way I met him in Berne. I found him reading to Simon[15] of Trèves fragments from _Vom andern Ufer_, from the proofs. He rushed at me as though we had not met for months. I was going on the evening of the same day. He did not leave my side for a minute, again and again repeating declarations of the most ardent and passionate affection. Why did he not find the strength then to make a straightforward and open confession?... I was kindly disposed to him then, everything might have happened humanely.

He saw me off to the posting-station, said good-bye and, leaning against the gate by which the posting-chaise drove out, remained there wiping his eyes.... This was almost the last moment when I really loved the man.... It was only after thinking the whole night that I came to one word which I could not get out of my head—‘disaster, disaster!’ ‘What will come of it?’

My mother soon afterwards left Paris. I remained at Emma’s, but was in reality completely alone. This solitude was essential for me; I wanted to be alone, to think what to do. A letter from Natalie, in which she spoke of her sympathy for Herwegh, gave me an opening and I made up my mind to write to her. My letter was sorrowful but calm; I begged her to look quietly and attentively into her own heart and to be open with herself and with me, I reminded her that we were too closely bound together by all the past and by all our life to leave anything unspoken. ‘I got your letter of the 9th’ (Natalie wrote, and this letter has remained, almost all the rest were burnt), ‘and I, too, sit and only wonder: why is this? And I weep and weep. Perhaps it is all my fault, perhaps I don’t deserve to live—but I feel just as I wrote to you on the evening when I was left alone. Blameless towards you and towards the whole world, I have had no feeling of reproach in my soul. I have grown into my love for you as I have into God’s world; if I were not in it, it seems I should be nowhere! To be cast out of that world—anywhere, I must be born again. I am inseparable from it as from nature, come from it and go back into it again. I have never for one instant felt differently. It is a wide, rich world, I know no inner world so rich; perhaps it is too large, perhaps it has too much enlarged my being and its needs—in this fullness there are minutes, and there have been from the very beginning of our life together, in which somewhere deep down in the bottom of my soul, something like a fine hair has fretted my soul imperceptibly, and then everything has been bright again....’ ‘This unsatisfied something, this something left unused and outcast,’ Natalie writes in another letter, craved other sympathy, and found it in Herwegh’s affection.

This was not enough for me, and I wrote to her: ‘Don’t turn away from simply looking into the depths of yourself, don’t try to find explanations. You won’t escape the whirlpool by talking, it will carry you away just the same. There is a new note in your letters unfamiliar to me, not the note of sadness, but another.... Now everything is still in our hands ... let us have the courage to go to the bottom of it. Consider that since we have put the secret which troubled our soul into words, _Herwegh will be a false note in our harmony or I shall. I am ready to go with Sasha to America_, then we shall see how things are ... it will be hard for me, but I shall try to bear it; here it will be harder still, and I cannot bear it!’

To this letter she answered with a cry of horror, the thought of separation from me had never occurred to her. ‘How can you! How can you—and to part from you ... as though that were possible ... no, no, I long to come to you, to come to you at once.... I am going to pack up, and in a few days I shall be in Paris with the children!’

On the day of leaving Zurich she wrote again: ‘As though after storm and shipwreck I come back to you as to my haven, with full faith, with full love. If only the state of your soul were like that in which I am now! I am happier than ever! I love you always the same, but I have learnt to know your love better, and all my accounts with life are settled—I expect nothing, I desire nothing. Misunderstandings!—I am grateful to them, they have made so much clear to me, and they will pass away and disappear like storm-clouds.’

Our meeting in Paris was not joyful, but it was filled with the feeling of deep, genuine recognition that the roots of our life had gone too deep for the storm to tear them up, that it was not easy to part us. In the long conversations of that period, one thing surprised me, and I looked out for it several times, and was every time convinced that I was right. Together with the warm affection she still retained for Herwegh, Natalie seemed to breathe more freely away from him, as though stepping out of the circle of some black magic spell; she was afraid of him, she felt that there were dark forces in his soul, she was frightened by his boundless egoism and she looked for support and protection in me.

Though he knew nothing of my correspondence with Natalie, Herwegh saw that there was something wrong from my letters. As a matter of fact, apart from everything else, I was very much displeased with him. Emma was struggling, weeping, trying to satisfy him and get him money, while he either left her letters unanswered or wrote spiteful things and kept asking for more and more money.

His letters to me which I have kept are more like ecstatic love-letters than a friendly correspondence. He tearfully reproaches me for coldness, he beseeches me not to abandon him, he cannot live without me, without the full cloudless sympathy of the past, he curses our misunderstandings and the interference of the ‘frantic woman’ (_i.e._, Emma), he thirsts to begin a new life, a life far away, a life with us, and again he calls me his father, his brother, his dearest friend. To all this I wrote to him in different variations: ‘Consider whether you are capable of beginning a new life, whether you are able to shake off ... the rottenness, the corrupt civilisation’—and twice I reminded him of Aleko,[16] to whom the old Gypsy says: ‘Leave us, proud man, you want freedom for yourself alone.’ He answered this with tears and reproaches, but did not speak out. His letters of 1850 and our first conversations at Nice make up a terrible indictment ... of what? Of deceit, of treachery, of lying?... No. And that would be nothing new—but of that weak-spirited doubleness of which I have so many times accused the Western European. Going many times over all the details of our mournful drama, I am always brought up short with amazement at how this man never once, never by one word, never by one straightforward impulse of the heart, betrayed himself. How could he, feeling the impossibility of being open with me, try to enter into closer and closer intimacy with me, and touch in his talk on those sacred places of the soul which can only be touched without sacrilege in perfect and mutual openness?

The moment when he guessed my doubt—and not only kept silent, but assured me more and more warmly of his affection, and at the same time worked more and more intensely by his despair on the woman whose heart was shaken—the moment when he began passively deceiving me by his silence while beseeching her (as I afterwards learned) not to deprive him of my affection by an incautious word—that moment was the beginning of crime.

Crime!... Yes ... and all the calamities that follow come as the simple, inevitable consequence of it—they come unchecked by deaths, unchecked by penitence, because they are not the punishment but the consequence.... Consequences come upon a generation through the terrible immutability of what has once been done. Atonement, repentance may reconcile a man to himself and to others, penitence may redeem him, but the consequences of his action go their own terrible way. To escape from them, religion has invented paradise—and its antechamber the monastery.

I was turned out of Paris, and almost at the same time Emma was also. We decided to spend a year or two in Nice—it was then Italy—and Emma went there also. Within a short time, that is, towards winter, my mother was to come to Nice, and with her Herwegh.

Why did I go with Natalie to that town? This question has occurred to me and to others, but it is really a petty one. Apart from the fact that wherever I had gone Herwegh could have come too, was it possible to achieve anything but mortification by geographical and other external measures?

Within a fortnight or three weeks of his arrival, Herwegh assumed the airs of a Werther—in the last stages of despair—and so conspicuously that a Russian doctor, who was passing through Nice, was convinced that he was becoming definitely insane. His wife used to appear with tear-stained eyes—he treated her outrageously. She would come for hours together to weep in Natalie’s room, and both were convinced that to-day or to-morrow he would fling himself into the sea or shoot himself. Natalie’s pale cheeks and anxious expression, and her anxious preoccupation, even when she was with the children, showed me clearly what was passing within her.

Not a word had been said yet, but already through the external calm there was the gleam of something sinister coming nearer and nearer—like two glittering points continually disappearing and appearing again at the edge of the forest that show that a wild beast is there. Everything was moving rapidly to a climax. It was delayed by the birth of Olga.

III

THE YEAR 1851

1

Before the New Year Natalie brought a water-colour she had ordered from the painter Guyot,[17] to show me.

It was a sketch of our verandah, with part of the house and the yard, with the children playing in the yard and Tata’s goat lying there—Natalie herself was in the background, on the verandah. I thought that the sketch was meant for me, but Natalie said that she meant to give it to Herwegh for a New Year’s present.... I was vexed. ‘Do you like it?’ asked Natalie. ‘I like it so much,’ I said, ‘that if Herwegh will allow it, I will order a copy to be made for myself.’

From my pallor and my voice, Natalie saw that these words were both a challenge and the sign of a violent storm within. She glanced at me, there were tears in her eyes. ‘Take it for yourself,’ she said.

‘Nothing would induce me, anything so mean....’

We said no more. We kept the New Year at my mother’s, I was in a state of acute irritability; I sat beside Vogt and, filling his glass and mine over and over again, I kept making biting and sarcastic jokes. Vogt was rolling with laughter. Herwegh looked mournfully from under his brows. At last he understood. After drinking to the New Year, he raised his glass and said that the only thing he hoped was, ‘that the coming year might be no worse than the last, that he desired this with all his heart, but did not expect it. On the contrary, he had a foreboding that all, all would fall into ruins.’

I said nothing.

Next morning I took up my old novel, _Who is to Blame?_ and read over Lubinka’s diary and the last chapters. Could this be a prophecy of my fate, just as Onyegin’s duel foreshadowed Pushkin’s fate?... But an inner voice said to me: ‘You are a queer sort of Krutsifersky—and, indeed, he is a queer sort of Beltov! Where is his noble sincerity, where is my tearful self-sacrifice?’ And in the midst of my conviction of Natalie’s passing infatuation, I was even more convinced that I should fight it out with him, that he would not drive me out of her heart.

What happened was what I expected—Natalie herself invited explanation. After the scene over the sketch, and the New Year’s party at my mother’s, it was impossible to put it off. The conversation was painful. _We were both no longer on the high level on which we had been the year before._ She was confused, afraid of my going away, afraid of his going away, longed to go away herself for a year to Russia and was afraid to go. I saw her wavering and saw that he with his egoism would destroy her ... while she would not have the strength to withstand. I was beginning to hate him for his silence.

Once more I repeated ‘I put my fate in your hands. Once more I beseech you to weigh everything, to think of the value of everything.... I am still ready to accept any decision—I am ready to wait a day, a week, only the decision must be final. I feel,’ I said, ‘that I have reached the limit of my strength—I can still behave decently—but I feel, too, that I shan’t be able to for long.’

‘You are not going away, you are not going away,’ she said, bursting into tears, ‘I could not survive that.’ On her tongue such words were not to be taken lightly. ‘_He must go._’

‘Natalie, don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry to take the final decision because it is final ... wait a little ... think—as much as you like, but give me a definite answer. These ebbs and flows are more than I can stand ... they are making me stupid. I am growing petty, I shall go off my head.... Ask anything you like of me, but it must be once for all....’

At that point my mother and Kolya drove up to invite us to Mentone; when we went out to take our seats in the carriage, it appeared that there was one place too few. I motioned Herwegh to the seat. Herwegh, by no means distinguished by such delicacy as a rule, would not take it. I looked at him, slammed the carriage door and said to the coachman, ‘Off!’ We were left alone, the two of us, on the seashore in front of the house. I felt as though there were a stone on my heart; he was silent, pale as a sheet, and avoided my eyes. Why did not I begin speaking openly or shove him off the rock into the sea? A sort of nervous impotence prevented me. He said something to me about the sufferings of a poet and life being so horribly organised that a poet brings trouble everywhere. He suffers himself and makes every one near him suffer.... I asked him whether he had read George Sand’s _Horace_. He did not remember. I advised him to read it. He went to Visconti’s for the book.

_I never saw him again._

When, between six and seven, we all assembled for dinner, he was not there. His wife came in—her eyes swollen with tears: she announced that her husband was ill—we all looked at each other—I felt quite capable of sticking into her the knife I had in my hand. He shut himself up in his rooms on the top storey. By this _étalage_ he did for himself—I was free as regards him.

At last all the others had gone, and the children were in bed—_we were left alone_. Natalie sat in the window crying. I walked about the room, the blood throbbing in my temples; I could scarcely breathe.

‘He is going,’ she said at last.

‘I imagine that is not necessary—it is I must go.’

‘For God’s sake....’

‘I am going.’

‘Alexandr, Alexandr, don’t say what you may regret—listen to me—save us all. You alone can do it. He is crushed, he is utterly despondent. You know yourself what you have been to him, his frantic love—his frantic affection and the consciousness that he has caused you grief—and worse ... he wants to go away, to vanish, but you must not complicate things—or he is not a step from suicide.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I am certain of it.’

‘And it is he who says so?’

‘He and Emma. He has cleaned his pistol.’

I burst into a roar of laughter and asked: ‘Is it his Baden one—he’d have to clean it, it must have fallen in the mud. You can tell Emma, though, that I will answer for his life. I’ll insure it for any sum you like.’

‘Mind that you do not regret your laughter,’ said Natalie, shaking her head gloomily.

‘If you like I’ll go and persuade him....’

‘What will it all lead to?’

‘The consequences,’ I said, ‘are hard to foresee and still harder to avert.’

‘My God! My God!—the children, the poor children, what will become of them!’

‘You ought to have thought of them before!’ I said.

And that, of course, was the most cruel thing of all that I said to her. I was too much worked up to understand the meaning of what I said in a humane way. I felt something convulsive in my chest and in my head, and was, perhaps, capable of bloody acts as well as cruel words. She was utterly crushed—a silence followed. Half an hour passed, I wanted to drink my cup of bitterness to the dregs, and put several questions to her—she answered. I felt myself torn to shreds, savage impulses of revenge, of jealousy, of wounded _amour-propre_, made me drunk; no punishment, no gibbet could have had terrors for me, my life was not worth a farthing. That is what makes mad and dreadful deeds possible. I did not say a word—I stood in front of the big table in the drawing-room, with my arms folded—probably my face was utterly distorted.

The silence went on. All at once I glanced at her and was frightened—her face was covered with a deathly pallor, a bluish pallor, her lips were white, her mouth half-opened and twitching—not uttering a word, she gazed at me with vacant, frantic eyes. That look of infinite suffering, of mute agony instantly stilled the turmoil of passion; I felt sorry for her, tears trickled down my cheeks, I was ready to fall at her feet, to entreat her forgiveness.... I sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand, put my head on her shoulder and tried to comfort her in a soft, gentle voice.

My conscience tormented me, I felt I had been an Inquisitor, a torturer.... Was this what was wanted? Was this a friend’s help, was this sympathy? And so with all my culture, with all my humanity, in a fit of fury and jealousy I could torture an unhappy woman, could play the part of a Bluebeard?

A few minutes passed before she said anything, before she could say anything—then suddenly she threw herself on my neck sobbing. I let her sink on the sofa; utterly worn out, she could only say: ‘Don’t be afraid, dear, these are good tears, tears of tenderness; no, no, I will never be parted from you.’

Her agitation and spasmodic sobbing was too much, she closed her eyes, she was fainting; I poured eau de Cologne on her head, moistened her temples; she grew calm, opened her eyes, pressed my hand, and sank into semi-consciousness which lasted more than an hour: I remained on my knees beside her; when she opened her eyes, she met my calm, mournful look, the tears were still rolling down my cheeks—she smiled to me....

This was the crisis. From that minute the stifling fumes that weighed on her began to lift, the poison acted less freely.

‘Alexandr,’ she said, recovering herself a little, ‘finish what you have done, swear to me—I must have it, I can’t live without it—swear that it shall all end without bloodshed—think of the children ... of what will become of them without you and without me.’

‘I promise to do everything possible to prevent a collision, to sacrifice a great deal—but for that I must have one thing, that he should leave to-morrow—go at least to Genoa.’

‘That’s as you like ... and we will begin a new life and let all that is past be past.’

I embraced her warmly.

Next morning Emma came to my room—she was dishevelled, with tear-stained eyes, looking very ugly, in a blouse with a cord round her waist. She approached me with tragic deliberation—at any other time I should have burst out laughing at this German melodrama ... now I was in no mood for laughing. I received her standing and made no attempt to conceal that her visit was unpleasant to me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘I have come from _him_ to you.’

‘Your husband,’ I said, ‘might come himself if he wants anything—or perhaps he has already shot himself?’

She folded her arms across her bosom.

‘And this is you speaking—you, his friend ... I don’t know you! Surely you must understand the tragedy of what is taking place before your eyes ... his tender constitution will not survive separation from her, nor a rupture with you—yes, yes, with you ... he is weeping over the sorrow he has caused you—he begged me to tell you that his life is in your hands, he begs you to kill him....’

‘This is a farce,’ I said, interrupting her speech. ‘Come, who invites people to murder like this, and through his wife too? This persisting in vulgar melodramatic tricks is disgusting to me. I am not a German.’

‘Herr Herzen!’

‘Madame Herwegh, why do you undertake such difficult commissions? You could hardly expect to hear anything pleasant from me.’

‘This is a fatal calamity,’ she said, after a pause; ‘it has struck you and me alike ... but look at the difference between your anger and my devotion....’

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘our parts have not been alike; I beg you not to compare them, for fear you should have to blush.’

‘Never,’ she said defiantly, ‘you do not know what you are saying.’ And then she added: ‘I will take him away, he must not remain in this position—your will shall be done. But you are no longer in my eyes the man I have so much respected and looked upon as Georg’s best friend. No, if you were that man, you would have parted with Natalie, let her go, let him go; I would have remained with you and the children here.’

I laughed aloud. She flushed crimson, and with a voice shaking with anger and indignation, asked me: ‘What does that mean?’

‘Why do you jest about serious matters?’ I said to her; ‘but that’s enough. Here is my ultimatum: go at once to Natalie, yourself alone, talk to her—if she wants to go, let her go—I shall not hinder any one or anything except (excuse me), except your staying here; I can manage the housekeeping myself somehow—but listen.... If she does not want to go, this is the last night I will spend under the same roof as your husband, we shall not both be here another night alive!’

An hour later Emma came back and gloomily announced to me, in a tone as though to say: ‘See the fruits of your wickedness!’

‘Natalie is not going—she has destroyed a great being from _amour-propre_—I will save him——’

‘And so?’

‘And so we are going in a day or two....’

‘A day or two? What do you mean? To-morrow morning! Have you forgotten the alternative?’ (Repeating this, I did not really break my promise to Natalie, I was absolutely certain she would take him away.)

‘I don’t know you—how bitterly I’ve been mistaken in you!’ observed the crazy woman, and she went out again.

Her diplomatic task this time was an easy one—she came back ten minutes later saying that he agreed to everything, both to going away and to a duel, but at the same time he had told her to tell me that he had taken a vow not to lift his pistol to my breast—but was ready to accept death at my hands.

‘You see how he keeps on joking with you—why, even the French king was put to death simply by a public executioner, and not by a friend. And so you will set off to-morrow?’

‘I really don’t know how to manage. We have nothing ready.’

‘Everything can be got ready before night.’

‘We must get a _visa_ for our passports.’

I rang the bell; Rocca, our cook, came in. I told him that Madame Emma begged him to take their passports at once and to get a _visa_ for Genoa.

‘But we have nothing for the journey.’

‘Do you need much to get to Genoa?’

‘Six hundred francs.’

‘Allow me to hand it you.’

‘We owe bills to the shops here.’

‘Approximately?’

‘Five hundred francs.’

‘Don’t worry yourself, and _bon voyage_.’

This tone she could not endure, _amour-propre_ was almost her leading passion.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘why this behaviour to _me_? Me you have no right to hate or to despise.’

‘So him I have?’

‘No,’ she said, choking with tears, ‘no, I only meant to say that I liked you sincerely as a sister, that I don’t like to leave you without shaking hands with you. I respect you, you may be right, but you are a cruel man. If you knew what I have been through!’

‘But why have you been all your life a slave?’ I said to her, giving her my hand; at that minute I was not capable of sympathy. ‘You deserve your fate.’

She went away hiding her face.

At ten o’clock next morning, in a hired coach, upon which various boxes and hampers were loaded, the poet set off—_mit Weib und Kind_—for Genoa. I was standing at the open window; he managed to whisk into the carriage so rapidly that I did not catch sight of him. She held out her hand to the cook and the maid, and took her seat beside him. Anything more ignominious than this bourgeois departure I cannot imagine. Natalie was distressed. We went out alone together into the country; the walk was a dismal one, the blood was still streaming from fresh, raw wounds. On returning home, the first person that met me was Herwegh’s son Horace, a boy of nine, a mischievous and thievish little fellow.

‘Where have you come from?’

‘From Mentone.’

‘What has happened?’

‘Here is a note from Maman for you.’

‘Lieber Herzen,’ she wrote, as if nothing had happened between us, ‘we are stopping for a couple of days at Mentone, the room at the hotel is small—Horace is in Georg’s way—allow us to leave him with you for a few days.’

This lack of tact amazed me. At the same time Emma wrote to Karl Vogt to come that they might consult him—so outsiders were to be mixed up in our affairs! I asked Vogt to take Horace and to say that we had no room.

‘Yet,’ she sent word to me through Vogt, ‘we still have the upper rooms for another three months, and I can make use of them.’ That was perfectly true—only it was I who paid the rent for those rooms. Yes, in this tragedy, as in Shakespeare, the coarse laughter, oaths, and petty cheating of the market-place are side by side with strains that tear the heart, with the moan of ebbing life, of dying faith, of dimming thought.

Emma had a maid-servant, a handsome and very honourable French girl from Provence, called Jeannette; she remained behind for a couple of days, and was to go with their luggage by steamer to Genoa. Next morning Jeannette softly opened my study door and asked me whether she might come in and speak to me alone. This had never happened before; I thought that she was wanting to ask for money, and was prepared to give it her. Blushing up to her ears, the good Provençale gave me, with tears in her eyes, various unpaid bills of Emma’s, and added: ‘Madame told me, but I really cannot do it without asking your leave—you see, she told me to buy a lot of different things in the shops and have them put down on these bills—I couldn’t do it without telling you.’

‘You did quite right to tell me. What did she tell you to buy?’

‘Here is the list.’

On the list were several pieces of linen, several dozen handkerchiefs, and a complete outfit of children’s underclothes.

They say that Caesar could read, write, and dictate at the same moment: this is somewhat the same versatility—to be able to think of thrifty means of obtaining linen and children’s stockings while lives are being ruined, and men are feeling the cold blade of Saturn’s scythe. The Germans are a glorious people!

* * * * *

We were again alone, but this was not the past over again—everything bore the traces of the storm. Faith and doubt, weariness and irritation, the feeling of annoyance and indignation were a torture, but what was most fretting of all was that the thread of life was broken, that precious carelessness which had made life so easy was gone, nothing was left sacred. Since what had been had been, nothing was impossible. Thoughts of the past terrified me for the future. How many times we came in to dinner alone in the evening and, both scarcely touching anything and not uttering a word, got up from the table wiping away a tear, and seeing kind Rocca, with an angry face, shake his head as he carried away the dishes.

Idle days, sleepless nights ... misery—misery. I drank spirits of all sorts, cognac, old Bellet, drank at night alone and drank by day with Engelson—and that in the climate of Nice. The Russian weakness of drowning sorrow in drink is by no means so bad as is said. Heavy sleep is better than heavy sleeplessness, and the headache of the morning after is better than deadly gloom on an empty stomach.

Herwegh sent me a letter. I sent it back without reading it. He took to writing to Natalie, letter after letter. He wrote once more to me—I sent the letter back. I looked on gloomily at this. That time should have been a time of thorough testing, of peace and of freedom from external influences. What sort of peace, what sort of freedom could there be with letters coming from a man who posed as being frantic and threatened not only suicide but the most fearful crimes? Thus, for instance, he wrote that he had moments of frenzy when he longed to cut his children’s throats, to fling their corpses out of the window and to appear before us bathed in their blood. In another, he wrote that he should come to kill himself at my feet, and say: ‘See to what you have brought the man who loved you so!’ Side by side with this, he kept imploring Natalie to reconcile him with me, to take everything on herself, and to suggest that he should come as Sasha’s tutor.

A dozen times he wrote of his loaded pistol; Natalie still believed it all. He only asked her blessing on his death. I persuaded her to write to him that she at last agreed, that she was convinced there was nothing for it but death. He answered that her words came _too late_, that he was now in a different mood and felt he had not strength enough to do it, but that, forsaken by all, he would go away to Egypt. This letter did him great damage in Natalie’s eyes.

After that, Orsini came from Genoa, and he told us, laughing, how the husband and wife had tried to commit suicide.... Learning that Herwegh was in Genoa, Orsini went to see them and met him walking along the sea-front. Learning from him that his wife was at home, Orsini went to see her. She immediately explained to him that she had made up her mind to starve herself to death, that this form of suicide had been selected for him by himself, but that she wished to share his fate, and she besought Orsini not to desert Horace and Ada.

Orsini was petrified with astonishment.

‘We have touched nothing for thirty hours,’ Emma went on; ‘do persuade him to eat something, save the great poet for humanity,’ and she sobbed.

Orsini went out on to the verandah and at once returned with the joyful tidings that Herwegh was standing in the corner eating _salmis_. Emma, overjoyed, rang the bell and ordered a basin of soup. At that moment her husband came in gloomily, without a word of the _salmis_, but the tell-tale basin was standing there. ‘Georg,’ said Emma, ‘I was so delighted, hearing from Orsini that you were eating, that I, too, decided to ask for soup.’

‘I felt so sick, I took a little piece of _salmis_—but that’s of no consequence; death by starvation is most painful, I shall poison myself.’

His wife raised her eyes to the ceiling and glanced at Orsini as though to say: ‘You see, there is no saving him.’ He, too, had some soup.

Orsini is dead, but there are several witnesses of his story living, for instance, Karl Vogt, Mordini, and Charles Edmond. These antics made it very hard for Natalie. She was humiliated through him, I was humiliated through him, and she felt this poignantly.

In the spring Herwegh went away to Zurich and sent his wife to Nice (another outrageous indelicacy). I longed, after all that had happened, to rest. I took advantage of my Swiss naturalisation and went to Paris and Switzerland with Engelson.

Natalie’s letters were calm, her soul seemed to be more at ease.

On the way home I met Sazonov in Geneva. Over a bottle of wine, he asked me, with the most absolute nonchalance, how things were going now between my wife and me.

‘As always.’

‘Well, I know the whole story, and I am asking you from friendly sympathy.’

I looked at him with a shudder of horror; he noticed nothing. What was the meaning of it? I had reckoned on its all being a secret, and here, all at once, a man speaks to me of it over a glass of wine as though it were the most ordinary everyday affair.

‘What have you heard, and from whom?’

‘I have heard the whole story from Herwegh himself—and I tell you openly, I don’t think you are right at all. Why don’t you let your wife go, or else leave her yourself?—upon my soul, it’s such weakness—you could begin a new fresh life....’

‘But what makes you imagine that she wants to go? You can’t believe that I am able to _let_ her go or to prevent her.’

‘You coerce her morally, of course, not physically, by your words, your distress. I am very glad, though, to find you much more serene than I expected—and I don’t care to be open by halves with you. Herwegh left your house, in the first place, because he’s a coward, and is simply terrified of you, and in the second, because your wife promised him to come to Switzerland as soon as you were calmer.’

‘That’s a foul lie!’ I shouted.

‘That’s what he told me, I give you my word of honour on it.’

When I got home to the hotel, I flung myself, sick and shattered, on the bed, without undressing, in a state bordering on madness or death—did I believe it or not? I do not know, but I cannot say that I entirely disbelieved what Sazonov had told me.

And so, I repeated to myself, this is how our poetical life is ending, in deceit, and incidentally in a European scandal ... ha, ha, ha! They pity me, they spare me from compassion, they give me time to rest, like a soldier who is taken half-way through the flogging to the hospital, when his pulse is weak, and zealously tended that he may have the other half when he is stronger. I was insulted, outraged, humiliated.

In that state of mind I wrote at night a letter—my letter must have borne traces of frenzy, despair, and distrust. I repent, I bitterly repent that insult from afar—that wicked letter.

Natalie answered in words of black gloom. ‘I were better dead,’ she said; ‘your faith is shattered, every word now will call back all the past to you. What am I to do, and how can I ever convince you? I weep and weep.’

Herwegh had lied.

Her following letters were briefly mournful; she was sorry for me, she wanted to heal my wounds, and what must she herself have been suffering!... Why did that man turn up to repeat me that lie ... and why was there no other there to stop my letter, written in a fit of criminal fury?

2

TURIN. OCEANO NOX

On the night between the 7th and 8th of July, between one and two in the morning, I was sitting on the step of the Carignano Palace in Turin; the square was completely empty, at a little distance from me a beggar was dozing, and a sentinel was walking slowly up and down, whistling a tune from some opera and jingling with his gun.... It was a hot, soft night, saturated with the scent of the scirocco.

I felt extraordinarily happy, as I had not for ages; I felt again that I was still young and full of energy, that I had friends and convictions, that I was as full of love as I had been some thirteen years before. My heart was beating as I had not felt it for years; it was beating as on that March day in 1838, when I stood wrapped in my cloak under the lamp-post waiting for Ketscher in Povarsky Street.

Now, too, I was awaiting a meeting, a meeting with the same woman, and awaited it perhaps with even more love, though sad and gloomy notes were mingled with it; but on that night they were hardly audible. After the frantic crisis of bitterness and despair that had come over me on my way through Geneva, I felt better. Natalie’s gentle letters, filled with sadness, tears, pain, and love, had worked my healing. She wrote that she was coming from Nice to Turin to meet me, that she longed to spend a few days in Turin. She was right: we needed to look into each other once more alone, to wash the blood from each other’s wounds, to wipe away our tears and to find out once for all whether there was still happiness for us together, and all that in solitude, without the children even, and in another place too, not in the surroundings where the furniture, the very walls, might at the wrong moment bring reminder, whisper some half-forgotten word.

The posting-chaise was to arrive between one and two from the direction of the Col di Tenda; I was waiting for it at the gloomy Carignano Palace—it was to turn the corner not far from it.

I had arrived on the morning of the same day from Paris, through Mont Cenis to the Hotel Feder. I was given a large, lofty, rather handsomely furnished sitting-room and bedroom. I liked its holiday air, it was in keeping. I ordered a little supper for us and went to wander about the town, waiting for the night.

When the chaise drove up to the posting-station, Natalie recognised me. ‘You here!’ she said, nodding to me at the window. I opened the door, and she threw herself on my neck with such rapturous joy, with such an expression of love and thankfulness, that words from her letter flashed like lightning into my mind: ‘I come back like a ship to its own haven, after storms, shipwrecks, and misfortunes—broken but saved.’

One glance, two or three words, were enough ... all was explained and understood; I took her little travelling-bag, threw it on a stick over my back, gave her my arm, and we walked gaily along the empty streets to the hotel. There every one was asleep except the porter. On the table (laid for supper) stood two unlighted candles, bread, fruit, and a decanter of wine. I did not want to wake any one; we lighted the candles and, sitting down to an empty table, glanced at each other and at once both thought of our days at Vladimir.

She had on a white muslin dress or blouse, put on for the journey on account of the blazing heat, and at that first interview, when I came from exile, she had been in white, too, and her wedding dress had been white. Though her face wore deep imprints of violent agitations, anxieties, sufferings, and reflections, its expression recalled her features at that time.

And we ourselves were the same, only now we gave each other our hands, not as conceited young creatures, self-confident and proud in our faith in ourselves, in our faith in each other, and in our fate being somehow exceptional, but like veterans tempered in the struggle for life, who had tested not only our strength, but our weakness too, and had only just come safely from terrible blows and irretrievable mistakes.... Starting on the road anew, we shared the painful burden of the past together, with no settling of accounts.

We had to move forward with a humbler step for that burden, but our aching hearts still kept safe within all that was needed for settled mature happiness. Through our horror and dull agony we had seen the more clearly how inseparably years and circumstances, children and life in foreign lands, had welded us together.

At this meeting all was over, the broken threads grew together more firmly than ever, as sometimes parts of a broken bone will grow together, not without leaving a scar. The tears of sorrow, not yet dry in our eyes, united us by a new bond—the feeling of deep compassion for each other. I saw her conflict, her agony, I saw how exhausted she was. She saw me weak, unhappy, humiliated and humiliating others, ready for sacrifice and ready for crime.

We had paid too dear a price for each other not to know what we were worth, and what we had cost each other. ‘In Turin,’ I wrote at the beginning of 1852, ‘was our second wedding; it meant perhaps something deeper and more significant than the first, it was accompanied with full consciousness of all the responsibility which we took up anew in regard to each other, still in sight of terrible events....’

Love by some miracle survived the blow which might have destroyed it.

The last dark clouds passed further and further away, for hours we talked ... as though we had been separated for years; it was not till long after bright streaks of daylight had filtered through the shutters that we got up from the empty table....

Three days later we drove home together through the Riviera to Nice. We caught a glimpse of Genoa, a glimpse of Mentone, where we had so often been, and in such a different frame of mind, a glimpse of Monaco, thrusting its velvety grass and velvety sand into the sea; they all greeted us gaily, like old friends after a separation; and here were the little vineyards, the rose-bushes, the orange-trees, and the sea lying stretched before the house, and the children playing on the beach.... Now they had seen us and rushed to meet us, we were at home.

I am thankful to destiny for those days and for the four months which followed them. They made a glorious ending to personal life for me. I thank her, the old heathen, for crowning the doomed victims with the rich wreath of autumn flowers and strewing their path, if only for the time, with her poppy of forgetfulness and fragrance!

The differences that parted us had vanished, the barriers had fallen. Was not this the hand which had lain in mine through my whole life, were not these the same eyes though sometimes dimmed with tears? ‘Be comforted, sister, friend, comrade, all is over—and we the same as in our young, bright, holy years!’

‘After sufferings, you, perhaps, know how great, have come some minutes full of bliss; all the cherished beliefs of childhood, of youth, have not only come true, but have passed through terrible ordeals, losing neither their freshness nor their fragrance, and have blossomed with new splendour and new power. I have never been so happy as now,’ she wrote to her friend in Russia.

Of course, there was a sediment left from the past which could not be touched with impunity, something broken within, some lightly slumbering fear and pain.

The past is not a proof that can be corrected, but a guillotine knife; after it has once fallen there is much that cannot grow together again, and there is always something left that cannot be set right. It remains as though cast in metal, distinct, unalterable, dark as bronze. Men as a rule forget only what is not worth remembering, or what they do not understand. If only a man could forget two or three incidents, such and such happenings, such a day, such a word, he would be strong and young and bold, but burdened with them he sinks like a key to the bottom. One need not be a Macbeth to meet the ghost of Banquo; ghosts are not criminal judges, nor pangs of conscience, but the happenings that can never be obliterated from the mind.

But one ought not to forget; that is a weakness, that is a falsity of a sort; the past has its rights, it is fact, one has to get over it and not to forget it—and we moved towards that, keeping step.

Sometimes it would happen that a trivial word, uttered by outsiders, or some object that caught the eye, would pass like a razor over the heart, and blood would flow, and the pang would be insufferable, but at the same instant I would meet eyes full of alarm, looking at me with infinite distress and saying: ‘Yes, you are right, it can’t be helped, but——’ and I tried to chase away the gathering clouds.

Holy time of reconciliation, I think of it through my tears....

No, not reconciliation, that is not the word. Words are like ready-made clothes that fit all people of the same height up to a certain point and are equally unbecoming to every one. We had no need to be reconciled, we had never quarrelled; we had suffered for each other, but we had never drifted apart. At the blackest moments a sort of indissoluble unity, of which neither doubted, and a deep respect for each other remained intact. We were more like people recovering after a high fever; the delirium had passed, we knew each other again as we looked with dim and troubled eyes. The pain we had been through was fresh in the memory, and we were still conscious of exhaustion, but we knew that all the trouble was over and that we were safely on shore again.

An idea, that had several times occurred to Natalie before, absorbed her more and more now. She wanted to write the story of her heart. She was dissatisfied with the beginning and burnt the pages; only one long letter and one brief page have remained.... From these one can judge what has been lost.... Reading them almost terrifies one, one feels that one is touching a warm and suffering heart, one seems to hear the whisper of those unvoiced secrets, for ever hidden, and scarcely awakening into consciousness. In those lines one can trace the anguish of struggle leading up to new strength of spirit and of pain leading up to thought. If this work had not been cruelly interrupted, it would have been a precious document, filling the gap left by the evasive silence of woman and the haughty patronage of her by man. But the most senseless blow broke over our heads and shattered everything for ever.

* * * * *

_Dans une mer sans fond, par une nuit sans lune, sous l’aveugle océan à jamais enfouis._ V. HUGO.

So ended the summer of 1851. We were quite alone. My mother, with Kolya and Spielmann, had gone to Paris to stay with Marya Kasparovna. We spent our days quietly with the children. It seemed as though all our troubles were behind us.

In November we received a letter from my mother to tell us she was setting off immediately, then another from Marseilles to say that next day, the 15th of November, they would take the steamer and come to us. During her absence we had moved into another house, also on the sea, in the suburb of St. Hélène. In this house, which had a large garden, there was a room for my mother; we decorated it with flowers, our cook went with Sasha to get Chinese lanterns, and we hung them about the walls and trees. Everything was ready. From three o’clock in the afternoon the children watched from the verandah; at last, between five and six, a dark coil of smoke could be discerned on the horizon and a few minutes later the steamer, too, could be seen, a motionless point growing larger and larger. All was bustle in the house. François ran down to the harbour, I got into the carriage and drove there.

When I reached the harbour the steamer had already arrived, boats were waiting for the permission of quarantine authorities for the passengers to land. One of them came up to the landing-stage. François was standing in it.

‘How is this?’ I asked, ‘you are back again already?’

He did not answer. I glanced at him and my heart sank; his face was livid, and he was trembling all over.

‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘are you ill?’

‘No,’ he answered, avoiding my eyes, ‘but our people have not come.’

‘Haven’t come?’

‘Something happened with the steamer, so some of the passengers haven’t come.’

I hastily got into a boat and told them to push off at once.

On the steamer I was met with a sort of ominous consideration and complete silence. The captain himself was waiting for me; all this was so unusual that I felt something awful was coming. The captain told me that between the island of Hyères and the mainland the steamer on which my mother was sailing had run into another vessel and sunk to the bottom, that most of the passengers had been picked up by him and by another steamer that was passing by. ‘I have only two young girls of your party,’ he said, and he led me to the upper deck—every one stepped aside with the same gloomy silence. I followed senselessly without even asking a question. My mother’s niece, who had been staying with her, a tall slender girl, was lying on deck with wet and dishevelled hair; beside her was the maid who looked after Kolya. Seeing me, the young girl tried to sit up, to say something, but could not; she turned away sobbing.

‘What has happened? Where are they?’ I asked, taking the maid’s hand with a sick dread.

‘We know nothing,’ she answered. ‘The steamer sank, we were pulled out of the water half dead. An Englishwoman gave us her clothes to change into.’

The captain looked mournfully at me, shook my hand and said: ‘You must not despair; go to Hyères, perhaps you will find some of them there.’

Leaving Engelson and François to look after the girls, I drove home in a sort of stupefaction; everything in my head was confused and shuddering, I only wished that our house had been a thousand miles away. But soon I caught a gleam between the trees, and more and more; it was the lanterns lighted by the children. At our gate stood our servants, Tata, and Natalie, with Olga in her arms.

‘What, you alone?’ Natalie asked me calmly. ‘Why, you might have brought Kolya, at least.’

‘They are not there,’ I said, ‘something happened to their steamer. They had to change on to another, this one did not take them all. Luise is here.’

‘They are not here!’ cried Natalie, ‘and only now I see you, your eyes are dim, your face is working. For God’s sake, what has happened?’

‘I am going to look for them in Hyères.’

She shook her head and added: ‘Not here, not here!’ Then without a word she pressed her forehead against my shoulder. We walked up the avenue without saying a word. I led her into the dining-room; as we passed, I whispered to Rocca: ‘For God’s sake, the lanterns’; he understood me and rushed to put them out. In the dining-room everything was ready—a bottle of wine in ice, a nosegay of flowers before my mother’s place, new toys before Kolya’s.

The terrible news quickly spread about the town, and our house began to be filled with friends, such as Vogt, Tessier, Hoetsky and Orsini, and even complete strangers; some wanted to find out what had happened, others to show their sympathy, others to give all sorts of advice, mostly foolish. But I will not be ungrateful; the sympathy shown me then in Nice touched me deeply. In face of these senseless blows of destiny, men wake up and feel their common bonds.

I decided to go to Hyères that same night. Natalie wanted to go with me; I persuaded her to remain behind; besides, there had been an abrupt change in the weather, the mistral was blowing cold as ice, and it was raining heavily. I had to get a permit to go to France across the Var bridge; I went to Léon Pilet, the French Consul; he was at the opera; I went to his box with Hoetsky. Pilet, who had already heard something of what had happened, said to me: ‘I have no right to give you permission, but there are circumstances in which it would be a crime to refuse. I give you on my own responsibility a permit to cross the frontier. Will you go for it to the Consulate in half an hour’s time?’

At the entrance to the theatre about a dozen of the people who had been with us were waiting for me. I told them that Léon Pilet would give the permit.

‘You go home and don’t trouble about anything,’ they said to me on all sides; ‘the rest shall be done; we will take the permit, we will get the _visa_ at the office, we will order the post-horses.’

My landlord, who was present, ran to get a carriage; an hotel-keeper offered his free of charge.

At eleven o’clock in the evening I set off in the pouring rain. It was an awful night; the squalls of wind were sometimes so violent that the horses stopped; the sea that had buried them only that day beat and roared almost unseen in the darkness. We mounted the Esterel, the rain changed into snow, the horses stumbled and almost fell on the slippery ice. Several times the driver, exhausted by his efforts, tried to warm himself; I offered him my flask of brandy and, promising him double fares, besought him to make haste.

What for? Did I believe in the possibility of finding any of them, of any one being saved? It was hard to suppose it after all I had heard—but to find out, to look at the very spot, to find something, some rag, to see an eye-witness even.... One needed to be convinced that there was no hope. I needed to be doing something, to be away from home, to come to myself.

While they were changing horses at Esterel, I got out of the carriage; my heart ached, and I almost sobbed as I looked round. It was near the very tavern where we had spent a night in 1847. I remembered the huge trees which formed a canopy over it; the same view lay stretched before it, only then it had been lighted up by the rising sun, while now it was hidden behind grey clouds, unlike Italy, and in places was white with snow.

I vividly recalled that time with every minute detail; I remembered how our hostess had regaled us with a hare, the highness of which was disguised by a terrible quantity of garlic, how bats had flown about the bedroom, how with the help of our Luise I drove them out with a towel, and how for the first time we felt the breath of the warm southern air....

At the time I wrote: ‘From Avignon one feels and sees the south. For a man who has always lived in the north, the first contact with a southern landscape is filled with solemn joy, one feels younger, one longs to sing, dance and weep; everything is so brilliant, so light, so gay, so luxuriant. After Avignon we had to cross the Maritime Alps. We went up the Esterel by moonlight; when we began to go down again the sun was rising, the mountain chains stood out from the morning mist, the rays of the sun threw a dazzling red light upon the snowy peaks; around was vivid green, flowers, sharply-cut shadows, immense trees and gloomy rocks, covered here and there with poor and rough vegetation; the air was intoxicating, extraordinarily limpid, refreshing, and resonant, our words and the notes of the birds sounded louder than usual, and all at once at a little curve in the road there was a fringe of brilliance round the mountains, and there, quivering with the flash of silver, lay the Mediterranean.’[18]

And now, after four years, I was in the same place again.

We could not reach Hyères before night; I went at once to the Commissaire of Police; with him and a brigadier of gendarmes I went first to the Commissaire of the Port. He had all sorts of things that had been saved; I found nothing among them. Then we went to the hospital. One of the victims was dying; the others told me they had seen an elderly woman, a child of five, and with him a young man with a fair bushy beard ... that they had seen them at the very last minute, and that therefore they, too, had gone to the bottom like every one else. But here again one asked oneself how was it these people were alive, though they too, like Luise and the maid, had no clear idea how they were saved.

The bodies that had been found were lying in the crypt of a nunnery. We went there from the hospital; the Sisters of Mercy met us and conducted us, lighting our way with church candles. In the crypt stood a row of closed boxes, each containing one body. The Commissaire ordered them to be opened; it appeared that they were nailed up. The brigadier sent a gendarme for a chisel and told him to break open one lid after the other.

This examination of the bodies was insufferably painful. The Commissaire had a little book in his hand, and in an official tone he asked at the opening of each box: ‘Do you testify in our presence that this body is not known to you?’ I nodded. The Commissaire made a mark with his pencil and, turning to the gendarme, ordered him to close it again. We passed on to the next. The gendarme lifted the lid; with a sort of terror I glanced at the dead and was, as it were, relieved when I met unfamiliar features, though in reality it was still more horrible to think that all three were lost without a trace, lying forsaken at the bottom of the sea, tossed by the waves. A body without a grave, without a tomb, is more dreadful than any burial, and we had not even our dead.

I found no one. One body impressed me; a beautiful woman of twenty, in Provençal holiday dress; her bosom was bare (she had had a baby in her arms, carried away, of course, by the waves) and a stream of milk was still trickling from her bosom. Her face was utterly unchanged, the brown sunburn made her look as though living.

The brigadier could not help saying: ‘What a beauty!’ The Commissaire made no comment; the gendarme, as he covered her, observed to the brigadier: ‘I knew her, she was a peasant woman living not far from the town, she was going to Grasse to her husband. Well, he’ll have to wait.’

My mother, my Kolya, and our good Spielmann had vanished without a trace. Nothing was left of them; among the articles saved there was not a scrap belonging to them. There could be no doubt of their death. All the saved were either in Hyères or on the steamer which had brought Luise. The captain had made up the tale to comfort me. I was told in Hyères of an elderly man who had lost his whole family, and would not stay in the hospital, but went off somewhere on foot, with no money, in a state bordering on madness; and of two English girls who had been sent to the English Consul—they had lost father, mother, and brother.

It was approaching daybreak; I ordered the horses. Before setting off, the waiter took me to a part of the shore that jutted out into the sea, and showed me from there the place of the shipwreck. The sea was still boiling and tossing, grey and muddy-looking from the storm of the previous day; in the distance, in one place, there was a peculiar patch, as though of a thicker, transparent liquid. ‘The steamer was taking a cargo of oil, you see it is floating, that’s where the accident happened.’ That floating patch was all.

‘And is it deep there?’

‘It must be one hundred and eighty metres.’

I stood a little; the morning was very cold, particularly by the sea. The mistral was still blowing, the sky was covered with the clouds of a Russian autumn. Farewell!... A hundred and eighty metres deep, in a floating patch of oil.

‘Nul ne sait votre sort, pauvres têtes perdues, Vous roulerez à travers les sombres étendues, Heurtant de vos fronts des écueils inconnus....’

I came back with a terrible certainty. Natalie, who had only just recovered, had not the strength to bear this blow. From the day of the death of my mother and Kolya, she never recovered her health again. The horror, the pain remained—it entered into her blood. Sometimes in the evening or the night, she would say to me, as though imploring my help: ‘Kolya, Kolya is always with me; poor Kolya, how frightened he must have been, how cold he was! and then the fishes, the crabs!’ She would take out his little glove, which had been in the maid’s pocket—and a silence would follow, that silence in which life flows away as though a sluice had been raised. At the sight of these agonies, which passed into nervous illness, at the sight of her glittering eyes and increasing thinness, I for the first time doubted whether I should save her.... The days dragged by in an anguish of uncertainty, something like the existence men lead between sentence and execution, when a man at once hopes and knows for certain that he will not escape the axe.

IV

THE YEAR 1852

1

Again the new year had come; we met it about Natalie’s bedside—at last her strength had failed, and she had been obliged to lie up.

The Engelsons, Vogt, and a couple of intimate friends were with us. We were all melancholy. The 2nd of December in Paris weighed like a stone on our hearts.... Everything—public and private—was rushing to ruin, and was already so far on its way that there was no stopping nor turning back; one could but wait, dully, miserably, till the headlong rush ended in destruction.

The usual healths were drunk. At twelve o’clock we forced a smile; within was death and horror, we were all ashamed to add any wishes for the new year. To glance forward was more terrible than to look back.

The symptoms became more definite; pleurisy in the left lung set in.

She spent a terrible fortnight between life and death, but for the time life conquered. Convalescence followed and with it a last ray of hope shed its pale radiance over our troubled life.

The powers of her spirit came back first ... there were marvellous moments—the last chords of a music that was to be hushed for ever.

A few days after the crisis of the illness, I went early in the morning into my study and fell asleep upon the sofa. I must have slept soundly, for I did not hear the servant come in. When I woke up I found a letter on the table. Herwegh’s handwriting. What excuse had he for writing, and how dared he write to me after all that had passed? I had given him no pretext whatever. I picked up the letter in order to send it back, but seeing on the envelope the words, ‘Containing an honourable challenge,’ I opened it. The letter was revolting, infamous. He said that by my _calumnies_ I had bewildered Natalie, that I had taken advantage of her weakness and my influence over her, that she had _betrayed him_. In conclusion, he made charges against her, and said that fate had decided between me and him: ‘it drowns in the sea your progeny (_votre progéniture_) and your mother. You wanted to end this in blood, while I supposed it was possible to end it humanely. Now I am ready and demand satisfaction.’ I never read this letter again, and only once opened it afterwards. In 1853, on Natalie’s birthday, the 23rd of October, I burnt it without reading it.

This letter was the first insult I had ever received in my life. I leaped up like a wounded beast, with a sort of moan of fury. Why was not that wretch in Nice ... why was a dying woman lying the other side of the passage?

After sousing my head two or three times in cold water, I went in to Engelson (after my mother’s death he had her rooms), and after waiting till his wife had gone out, I told him that I had received a letter from Herwegh.

‘So you have actually received it?’ said Engelson.

‘Why, did you know—did you expect it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I heard about it yesterday.’

‘From whom?’

‘From Karl Vogt.’

I clutched at my head, it seemed to me I was going mad. Our silence had been so complete that neither my mother nor Marya Kasparovna Reihel had once spoken to me about what had happened. I was more intimate with Engelson than with other people—but to him I had only once, as we were walking in the environs of Paris, spoken of it in a brief answer to a question he put to me about the cause of my rupture with Herwegh. I had been overwhelmed in Geneva when I heard from Sazonov of the scoundrel’s gossip—but how could I have imagined that near me, close at hand, the other side of the door, every one knew, every one was talking of what I regarded as a secret buried between few persons ... that they even knew of letters which I had not yet received.

We went in to Vogt. He told me that two days previously Emma had shown him a letter from her husband, in which he said he would send me a _terrible letter_, that he would fling me down ‘from the height’ on which Natalie set me, ‘that he would cover us with disgrace, if he had to pass over the dead bodies of children, and bring us all, and himself too, into the prisoner’s dock of the criminal court.’ Finally, he wrote to his wife (and she had shown all this to Vogt, to Charles Edmond, and to Orsini), ‘you alone are pure and innocent, you ought to be the avenging angel,’ namely, I suppose, to cut our throats. There were people who said he had been driven out of his mind by love, by his rupture with me, by the wound to his _amour-propre_. That is nonsense. The man never took one _step_ that was dangerous or incautious, the madness was only in _words_, he raged in literature. His vanity was stung, silence was for him harder to bear than any scandal, the peace that had returned to our life gave him no rest. A petty bourgeois, like George Sand’s Horace, he talked to revenge himself upon the woman whom he loved and the man whom he had called brother and father, and, a bourgeois German, he threatened in melodramatic phrases, composed in pseudo-Schilleresque style.

At the very time when he was writing this letter to me and a string of insane letters to his wife, at that very time he was living with, and at the expense of, a former mistress of Louis Napoleon’s, a dissolute woman, who was notorious in Zurich. With her he spent his days and nights, at her expense he lived in luxury, drove about in her carriage and feasted in big hotels ... no, that is not madness!...

‘What do you intend to do?’ Engelson asked me at last.

‘Go and kill him like a dog. That he is a fearful coward you know and every one knows—the chances are all in my favour.’

‘But how can you go...?’

‘That’s the whole point. Write to him meanwhile that it is not for him to demand satisfaction of me, but for me to punish him, and that I will myself choose the means and the time to do it, that I will not leave a sick woman for that, and that I spit on his rudeness.’

To that effect I wrote to Sazonov, and asked whether he would help in the matter. Engelson, Sazonov, and Vogt received my proposition with eagerness. My letter was a great mistake, and gave him a pretext for saying afterwards that I had accepted his challenge, and that I had refused it later on.

To refuse a challenge is a difficult thing and requires much strength of mind or much weakness.

The feudal duel has a firm standing in modern society, betraying that it is not altogether so modern as it seems. Rarely does any one venture to attack this sacred relic set up by aristocratic honour and military _amour-propre_—and, indeed, it is rare for any one to be in a position so independent as to be able to insult the bloody idol with impunity and to accept the charge of cowardice.

To prove the absurdity of the duel is not worth while—in theory no one justifies it except a few bullies and fencing masters, but in practice every one gives in to it in order to prove—the devil knows to whom—his courage.

The worst thing about the duel is that it justifies any blackguard, either by giving him an honourable death, or by making him an honourable murderer.

A man is charged with cheating at cards—he insists on a duel, as though one cannot cheat at cards without being afraid of a pistol. And how shameful to put the card-sharper on a level with the man who denounces him!

A duel may sometimes be preferred as the means of escaping the gallows or the guillotine, although the logic is not clear even then, and I do not understand why a man under penalty of general contempt is bound not to fear his antagonist’s sword, though he may be afraid of the knife of the guillotine.

The death penalty has this advantage, that it is preceded by a trial, which may condemn a man to death, but cannot deprive him of the right of showing up his enemy, dead or alive. In a duel everything remains secret and concealed. It is an institution belonging to that pugnacious period when blood was still so fresh on men’s hands that the wearing of deadly weapons was looked on as a sign of nobility and exercise in the art of killing as an official duty.

So long as the world is governed by military men duels will not be abolished; but we may boldly demand that the choice should be left to us when we should bow the head to an idol we do not believe in, and when show ourselves free men in our full stature and—after battling with the gods and the powers of this world—dare to challenge the bloody, mediaeval ordeal.... How many men have passed with proud and triumphant faces through all the hardships of life, prison, poverty, sacrifice and toil, the tortures of the Inquisition, and I do not know what, and have succumbed to the impudent challenge of some trivial scoundrel? There must be no more such victims. The principle that regulates a man’s actions should lie within himself in his own reason; if it lies without himself, he is a slave, however valiant he may be.

I neither accepted nor refused the challenge; the chastisement of Herwegh was for me a moral necessity, a physical necessity—I tried to think of some sure means of revenge and one which could not redound to his glory. But whether by a duel or whether by a knife I attained it, was a matter of complete indifference to me. He himself suggested the solution. He wrote to his wife—and she, as she always did, showed the letter to every one she knew—that in spite of everything I was a head and shoulders above all the rabble round me, that I was influenced for harm by men like Vogt, Engelson, Golovin (!), that if he could see me for one minute, all would be set right—‘he (_i.e._, I) alone can understand me’; and this was written after his letter to me!

And for this reason the poet concluded, ‘What I should like best of all is that Herzen would accept a duel without witnesses. I am convinced that from the first word we should fall into each other’s arms, and all would be forgotten.’

And so a duel was proposed as a means for a theatrical reconciliation. If I could at that time have got away for five days or a week, I should certainly have set off to Zurich and gone to him to carry out his desire—and he would not have been left alive.

A few days after receiving Herwegh’s letter, Orsini came in to me one morning at nine o’clock. Orsini, through a sort of physiological absurdity, was passionately devoted to Emma; what there was in common between this handsome, ardent young Southerner and the ugly, lymphatic German woman, I never could imagine. His early arrival surprised me. He very simply and directly said to me that the news of Herwegh’s letter had revolted his whole circle, and that many common acquaintances had offered to form a court of honour. Then he began to defend Emma, saying that she was not in fault except in her senseless love for her husband and her slavish submission to him, that he himself had seen how much she had felt it all. ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to hold out a hand to her, you ought to punish the guilty, but you ought also to rehabilitate an innocent woman.’

I gave a resolute and unconditional refusal. Orsini was too clear-sighted not to see that I should not change my mind, and so did not insist.

Among other things, speaking of a court of honour, he told me that he had already written about the whole story to Mazzini and asked his opinion. The court of honour was never held, but I received later on a letter that amounted to a verdict on Herwegh, signed by names that were dear to me—and among others the heroic martyr Pisacane, Mordini, Orsini, Bertani, Medici, Mezzacapo, Cosenz, etc. Was not that horrible again? Parties were formed, verdicts were passed, Mazzini was written to—and all this without my knowledge, and all this concerning events at which a week before no one had dared to hint in my presence. After seeing Orsini out, I took a sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Mazzini. Here I was confronted with a sort of Court of Wehm—and a self-invited court. I wrote to him that Orsini had told me of his letter, and that, fearing that he might not have presented the cause quite correctly, since he had never heard a word about it from me, I wanted to tell my story and to ask advice. Mazzini at once replied. ‘It would have been better,’ he wrote, ‘to bury the whole thing in silence, but I doubt whether that is possible for you now, and therefore you had better come boldly forward to the attack and leave us to form a court.’ That I believed in the possibility of such a court was, perhaps, my last illusion.

I was mistaken and paid dearly for my mistake.

Together with Mazzini’s letter I received a letter from Haug, to whom Mazzini, knowing that he was an intimate friend of mine, had shown Orsini’s letter and mine. After my first meeting with Haug in Paris, he had served under Garibaldi and distinguished himself in battle near Rome. There was much that was good in the man and a vast deal that was immature and absurd. He had slept the unbroken sleep of an Austrian lieutenant in his barracks, till he was suddenly awakened by the alarm bell of the Hungarian rising and the Vienna barricades. He snatched up a weapon, not to slay the insurgent people, but to take his place in its ranks. The transition had been too violent and left, as it were, traces of angularity and incompleteness.

A dreamy and rather impetuous man, generous and devoted, proud to the point of arrogance, a Bursch and a Cadet, a student and a lieutenant, he had a real affection for me. Haug wrote that he was going to Nice, and besought me to take no steps without him. ‘You have left your country and have come to us as a brother; do not imagine that we will permit any fellow-countryman of ours to go unpunished after adding calumny to all his previous treachery, and then covering it all up with his insolent challenge. No, we have a very different conception of our mutual responsibility. It is enough that a Russian poet[19] has been killed by the bullet of a western adventurer—a Russian revolutionist shall not be!’

In reply I wrote a long letter to Haug. This was the first time I had told the story. I told him everything that had happened—and waited for him to come....

And meanwhile, in the bedroom close by, a great life was feebly flickering out in a desperate struggle with bodily weakness and terrible forebodings. I spent day and night beside the sick-bed—she liked me to give her her medicine and to prepare her orangeade; at night I kept up the fire, and when she slept quietly I had hopes again of saving her. But there were moments of insufferable misery. I felt her thin, feverish hand, I saw her gloomy, anxious eyes fixed upon me with entreaty, with yearning and the terrible words: ‘The children will be left alone—they will be orphans—all will be lost, you are only waiting ... for the children’s sake drop it all, don’t defend yourself from the mud ... let me, me, defend you—you shall come out clean, if only I can get a little stronger physically—but no, no, strength will not come. Do not leave the children!’ And for the hundredth time I repeated my promise.

In one of these conversations Natalie suddenly said to me: ‘Has he written to you?’[20]

‘Yes.’

‘Show me the letter.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to see what he could write to you....’

I was almost glad that she had spoken of the letter; I passionately longed to know whether there was a grain of truth in one of the charges he made against her.... I could never have brought myself to ask, but now that she had herself spoken of the letter, I could not overcome my desire, I was horrified at the thought that the doubt would always remain, and, perhaps, grow stronger when her lips would be closed for ever....

‘I am not going to show you the letter, but tell me, did you say something like this...?’

‘How can you imagine such a thing!’

‘He writes it.’

‘It’s almost incredible—he writes that with his own hand...?’

I folded the letter back at the passage and showed her—she glanced at it, was silent for a little and then said mournfully: ‘How vile!’

From that moment her contempt passed into hatred, and never in one word or one hint did she forgive him or express pity for him.

A few days after this conversation she wrote him the following letter:

‘Your persecution and your infamous conduct force me once more to repeat, and in the presence of witnesses, what I have written to you several times already; yes, my infatuation was immense and blind, but your character, treacherous, Jewish in the worst sense, your unbridled egoism, have been displayed in all their hideous nakedness when you were leaving here and since, while Alexandr’s goodness and devotion have been greater every day. My unhappy infatuation has only been a new pedestal on which to raise my love for him. You have tried to cover that pedestal with mud, but you can do nothing to break our union, which is stronger and firmer now than ever it was. Your charges, your slanders against a woman only fill Alexandr with contempt for you, you dishonour yourself by this baseness. What has become of your everlasting protestations of religious respect for my will, of your love for the children? It is not long since you swore that you would rather vanish off the face of the earth than cause Alexandr a moment’s distress. Have I not always told you that I could not for one day survive parting with him, that if he left me, even if he died—I would remain alone to the end of my life...?

‘As for my promise to see you again some day, it is true that I made it—I was sorry for you then, I wanted our parting to be humane—you have made it impossible for me to keep that promise.

‘From the time you went away you began torturing me, demanding first one promise, then another. You meant to vanish for years, to go away to Egypt, if only you could take with you the smallest hope. When you saw that that did not answer, you suggested one absurd thing after another—impossible, ludicrous—and ended by threatening me with _publicity_, tried to estrange me completely from Alexandr, tried to make him kill you, fight you, and finally threatened to commit terrible crimes. These threats had no more effect on me, you had repeated them too often. I tell you again what I wrote in my last letter: “I remain in my home—my home is Alexandr and my children,” and if I could not remain as mother and wife, I would remain as nurse and servant. There is no bridge between me and you. You have made even the past loathsome to me.

‘NATALIE HERZEN.’

‘NICE, _February 18, 1852_.’

A few days later the letter returned from Zurich. Herwegh sent it back unopened; the letter had been sent registered with three seals, and was returned with the receipt in the same envelope.

‘If that’s it,’ observed Natalie, ‘it shall be read to him.’

She sent for Haug, Tessier, Engelson, Orsini, and Vogt, and said to them:

‘You know how I long to justify Alexandr, but what can I do, chained to my bed? I may not get over this illness—let me die in peace, trusting that you will carry out my last request. That man has sent me back my letter; I want one of you to read it to him, and in the presence of witnesses.’

Haug took her hand and said: ‘Your letter shall be read to him, I stake my life on that!’

That simple vigorous action affected us all—and the sceptical Vogt went out as much stirred as the fanatical Orsini, who preserved a fervent respect for Natalie to the end of his days. The last time I saw him before he went away to Paris—at the end of 1857—he spoke with tenderness of Natalie, and perhaps with secret reproach. Of us two, Orsini certainly is not the one who could be accused of moral inconsistency—of dualism of words and deeds!

Once, late in the evening, or rather night, I had been having a long and melancholy discussion with Engelson. At last he went to his room, and I went upstairs. Natalie was sleeping quietly; I stayed a few minutes in her bedroom and went out into the garden. Engelson’s window was open. Standing disconsolately at the window he was smoking a cigar. ‘Such is fate, it seems,’ he said and came towards me. ‘Why aren’t you asleep, why have you come?’ he asked, and there was a nervous quiver in his voice. Then he caught hold of my hand and went on. ‘Do you believe in my boundless love for you, do you believe there is no one in the world dearer to me than you?—leave Herwegh to me—there is no need of a court, or of Haug—Haug’s a German—give me the right to avenge you, I am a Russian.... I’ve thought over a complete plan; I need your confidence, your blessing.’ He stood with a pale face before me, his arms folded, in the light of the coming dawn. I was deeply touched and felt ready to fall on his neck with tears. ‘Do you believe or not that I would sooner perish, be wiped off the face of the earth, than compromise a business in which so much is involved that is sacred to me? But without your confidence my hands are tied. Tell me openly: yes or no? If it’s no—good-bye and the devil take it all, and the devil take you and me too. I shall go away to-morrow, and you will not hear of me again.’

‘I believe in your friendship and in your sincerity, but I am afraid of your imagination and your nerves, and I have no great faith in your practical ability. You are nearer to me than any of the others here, but I must own, I fancy that you may do harm and get yourself into trouble.’

‘So you think General Haug has practical talents?’

‘I don’t say that, but I believe Haug is a more practical man, just as I think Orsini is more practical than Haug....’

Engelson would hear no more—he began dancing about on one leg, singing, and at last recovering himself, said to me: ‘There you are, there you are, putting your foot in it.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and added in an undertone: ‘It’s with Orsini that I thought out the whole plan, with the most practical man on earth. Come, give us your blessing, father.’

‘But will you give me your word not to attempt anything without telling me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me your plan, then.’

‘I can’t do that, at any rate I can’t do that now.’

A silence followed. What he meant to do it was not difficult to guess.

‘Good-night,’ I said, ‘let me think a little,’ and I could not help adding: ‘What possessed you to tell me about it?’

Engelson understood me.

‘My damned weakness, but nobody will ever know that I’ve told you.’

‘But I know,’ said I in answer, and we parted.

Anxiety over Engelson and fear of some catastrophe which would be a fatal shock to Natalie in her weak state compelled me to prevent his scheme from being carried out. Orsini shook his head, and looked at it regretfully ... and so instead of punishing I saved Herwegh, though, of course, it was not for his sake nor for my own. There was not a trace of sentimentality or magnanimity about it.

And, indeed, how are magnanimity and sympathy possible with this hero turned inside out? Emma, alarmed by something, quarrelled with Vogt for speaking impertinently of her Georg, and besought Charles Edmond to write to the latter, advising him to stay quietly at Zurich and abandon every sort of provocation—or it would be the worse for him. I do not know what Charles Edmond wrote, his task was not an easy one. But Herwegh’s answer was remarkable. First, he said it was not for the Vogts nor for Charles Edmond to judge him, then that it was I who had broken the bond between him and me, and so the whole responsibility fell upon me. After going into everything and defending himself even in the ambiguous part he had played, he concluded thus: ‘I don’t even know whether this can be called treachery. Those cads are still talking about money—to put a stop to that paltry accusation once for all, I may say openly that Mr. Herzen did not with his few thousand francs pay too high a price for the moments of distraction and enjoyment which we spent together in that oppressive time!’ ‘_C’est grand, c’est sublime_,’ said Charles Edmond, ‘_mais c’est niederträchtig_.’ To which Hoetsky replied that the stick was the only answer to such letters, and that he would give it him the next time they met. Herwegh relapsed into silence.

2

DEATH

With the coming of spring Natalie was better; she would sit up for the greater part of the day in an easy-chair, was able to do her hair for the first time during her illness and was soon able to listen without exhaustion when I read aloud to her.

We were planning, as soon as she should be a little better, to go to Seville or Cadiz. She was eager to get strong, eager to live, eager to go to Italy.

After the return of the letter there was complete silence, as though both husband and wife felt in their conscience that they had reached a limit rarely reached, had overstepped it, and desisted.

Natalie had not yet gone downstairs and was in no haste to do so: she meant to go down for the first time on the 25th of March, my birthday. She was having a white merino blouse made for that day, and I had ordered an ermine cloak from Paris. Two days before, Natalie herself wrote or dictated to me the list of the guests she wanted to invite besides the Engelsons, Orsini, Vogt, Mordini, and Paccelli and his wife.

Two days before my birthday, Olga developed a cold and cough, there was influenza in the town. Natalie got up twice in the night and went across her room to the nursery. It was a warm night, but stormy. She woke up in the morning with an acute attack of influenza—she had an agonising cough and towards evening fever.

There could be no question of her getting up next day; a feverish night was followed by terrible prostration and aggravated symptoms. All the faint reviving hopes to which we clung so desperately were shattered. The unnatural sound of the cough had a sinister menace.

Natalie would not hear of putting off our visitors. Anxious and melancholy, at two o’clock we sat down to table without her.

Madame Paccelli brought with her a song her husband had composed for my birthday. She was a silent, melancholy and very kind-hearted woman. It seemed as though some sorrow weighed upon her—either the curse of poverty was too great a burden, or perhaps life had promised her something more than everlasting music-lessons and the devotion of a feeble, colourless man, conscious of his inferiority to her.

In our house she met with more homeliness and a warmer welcome than with her other pupils, and she came to love Natalie with southern fervour.

After lunch she sat a little with the invalid, and came away from her, pale as a sheet. The guests begged her to sing the song she had brought with her; she sat down at the piano, struck a few chords, began singing and all at once, with a frightened look at me, burst into tears, let her head fall on the instrument and sobbed spasmodically. So ended our fête.

Almost without saying a word, the guests dispersed, with a weight like a stone on their hearts.

I went upstairs. The same fearful cough continued. It was the prelude to the funeral.

And there were two of them.

Within two months from my birthday Madame Paccelli was buried too. She had set off for Mentone or Roccabrunn on a donkey. The donkeys in Italy are accustomed to ascend the mountains at night without missing their footing. On this occasion the donkey stumbled in broad daylight—the hapless woman fell off, rolled on to the sharp rocks and died on the spot in terrible agonies.... I was in Lugano when I received the news. So she was no more. _Nur zu_—what grotesque absurdity was to come next...?

After that all is clouded over ... there comes a blank gloomy night indistinct in my memory, it is useless or impossible to describe it ... a time of pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, the stupefying consciousness of terror, of moral impotence and horrible physical strength....

Everything in the house seemed to have collapsed. There was a peculiar disorder and chaos, a hurry and bustle, the servants were run off their legs; and together with the approach of death, there came fresh scandal, fresh nastiness.... Fate did not gild the pill for me, nor did men spare me either; his shoulders are broad, they seemed to say, let him bear it.

Three days before Natalie’s end, Orsini brought me a note for her from Emma. She besought Natalie ‘to forgive her for all that had been done against her and against all of us.’ I told Orsini that it was out of the question to give the patient the note, but that I fully appreciated the feeling that had led Emma to write these lines and that I accepted them. I did more: on one of the last peaceful moments, I said quietly to Natalie: ‘Emma asks your forgiveness.’ She smiled ironically and did not answer a word. She knew the woman better than I did.

In the evening I heard a loud conversation in the billiard-room, which was where our intimate friends usually gathered. I went in and found a heated conversation going on. Vogt was exclaiming, Orsini was urging something and was paler than usual. The argument stop at my entrance.

‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling certain that some fresh meanness was in question.

‘Why,’ Engelson answered, ‘what’s the use of making a secret of it? but it’s so charming, such a Teutonic gem, that I should be ready to stand on my head if it had happened at any other time.... The chivalrous Emma has commissioned Orsini to tell you that, since you forgive her, she suggests that in proof of it you should give her back the I.O.U. for ten thousand francs which she gave you when you paid off their creditors. _Stupendisch theuer, stupendisch theuer._’

Orsini, embarrassed, added: ‘I think she has gone out of her mind.’

I took out her note and, giving it to Orsini, said to him: ‘Tell the woman that she asks too high a price—that, if I did value her feeling of repentance, it was not at ten thousand francs!’

Orsini did not take the note.

Through such filth I was dragged beside her deathbed: what was this? madness or vice, depravity or density?

On the evening of the 29th of April, Marya Kasparovna arrived. Natalie had been expecting her from day to day. She had several times begged her to come, fearing that Madame Engelson would take the charge of the children into her hands. Every hour she looked for her coming, and when we got a letter from her she sent Haug and Sasha to meet her at the bridge over the Var. But in spite of this, seeing Marya Kasparovna was terribly agitating for her. I remember the faint cry, almost a moan, with which she said ‘Masha,’ and could say nothing more.

The illness had found Natalie half-way through her pregnancy, Bonfils and Vogt thought that her condition had assisted her recovery from the pleurisy.

Marya Kasparovna’s arrival brought on the birth, which was easier than had been expected; the baby was born alive, but her strength was exhausted. A terrible prostration followed. The baby was born towards morning. Towards evening she told us to give her the little one and call the children. The doctor had prescribed absolute quiet. I besought her not to do this. She looked at me gently.

‘You, too, heed what they say, Alexandr,’ she said; ‘mind that you are not very sorry later on for robbing me of this moment. I am a little easier just now. I want to show baby to the children myself.’ I called the children.

Not having the strength to hold the little one, she laid him beside her, and with a bright and joyous face said to Sasha and Tata: ‘Here is another little brother. You must love him.’ The children rushed with delight to kiss her and the baby. I remembered that a few days before Natalie had repeated, looking at the children:

‘And may the young life sport and play About the entrance to the grave.’

Overwhelmed with grief, I looked at this apotheosis of the dying mother. When the children had gone I besought her to rest and not to speak. She tried to rest and could not: tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘Remember your promise.... Ah, how terrible to think that they will be left alone, quite alone ... and in a foreign land!... But can it be that there is no hope?’

She fixed on me a glance of entreaty and despair. These transitions from terrible hopelessness to illusive dreams of recovery tore my heart inexpressibly those last few days. At the moments when I had least faith, she would take my hand and say: ‘No, Alexandr, it can’t be so, it’s too stupid, we have a life before us if only this weakness would pass.’

The rays of hope slipped away, they faded of themselves and were replaced by unutterably gloomy, quiet despair.

‘When I am not here,’ she would say, ‘everything will be arranged somehow; now I can’t imagine how you’ll live without me, it seems I am so necessary to the children, but when one thinks—they will grow up just the same even without me, and everything will go on as though it had always been so.’ She added a few words more about the children, about Sasha’s health, said how glad she was that he had grown stronger in Nice, and that Vogt, too, agreed that he had. ‘Look after Tata, you must be very careful with her—she has a deep and reserved character. Ah,’ she added, ‘if only I could live till my Natalie[21] comes!... Well, are the children asleep?’ she asked a little later.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There was the sound of a child’s voice in the distance.

‘That is Olenka,’ she said, and smiled (for the last time). ‘See what she wants.’

Towards night she became terribly restless, without speaking she motioned that her pillow was uncomfortable. But however I arranged it, she was still restless, and with distress and even vexation kept changing the position of her head; then she fell into a heavy sleep.

In the middle of the night she made a movement with her hand as though she wanted to drink; I gave her a spoonful of orange juice mixed with sugar and water, but her teeth were firmly clenched; she was unconscious. I was numb with horror. It was daybreak. I drew back the curtain and, with a sort of senseless feeling of despair, saw that not only her lips but even her teeth had turned black.

Why was it, why this awful unconsciousness, why this black colour?

Dr. Bonfils and Karl Vogt had been sitting all night in the drawing-room. I went and told Vogt what I had seen. He avoided my eyes and went upstairs without answering. No answer was needed. Her pulse was scarcely beating.

About midday she came to herself and sent for the children, but did not utter a word.

She thought that it was dark in the room. It was the second time this had happened in the daylight. She asked me why there were no candles (two candles were burning on the table). I lighted another candle, but not noticing it, she said that it was dark: ‘Oh, my dear, how my head aches!’ she said, and two or three words more.

She took my hand—and already hers was not like a living hand—and covered her face with it. I said something to her. She answered indistinctly, consciousness was lost again and never came back....

In that condition she remained till the following morning, from midday or one o’clock on the 1st of May till seven o’clock on the morning of the 2nd. I longed for one more word ... one word ... or for the end to come! Those awful, cruel nineteen hours!

At moments she returned to half-consciousness, said distinctly that she wanted to take off the flannel, the dressing-jacket, asked for a handkerchief, but nothing more.

Several times I began to speak: it seemed to me that she heard but could not utter a word, a look of bitter pain seemed to pass over her face. Twice she pressed my hand, not convulsively but intentionally. At six o’clock in the morning I asked the doctor how long it would go on. ‘Not more than an hour.’

I went into the garden to call Sasha. I wanted him to keep his mother’s last minutes in his memory for ever. As I went upstairs with him, I told him what a sorrow was in store for us. He had no suspicion of the truth.

Pale and almost fainting, he went into the room with me.

‘Let us kneel here side by side,’ I said to him, pointing to a rug by the side of the bed. The sweat of death covered her face, her hand spasmodically caught at her dressing-jacket, as though trying to take it off. A few moans, a few sounds that reminded me of Vadim’s death agony—then those, too, ceased.

The doctor took her hand and let it drop, it fell like a stone.

The boy was sobbing. I do not fully remember what happened for the first moment. I rushed away into the hall, met Charles Edmond, tried to say something to him, but, instead of words, a sound such as I had never heard broke from me. I stood before the window and, stupefied, with no clear understanding, stared at the senselessly moving, sparkling sea.

Then suddenly I remembered the words: ‘Look after Tata.’ I felt alarmed that the child might be frightened. I had forbidden their speaking to her before, but could I rely upon it? I had her fetched and, shutting myself up with her in the study, sat her on my knee and, preparing her little by little, told her at last that Mother was dead. She trembled all over, her face flushed in patches, tears came into her eyes.... I led her upstairs. There already everything was changed. Natalie was lying as though alive on a bed decked with flowers, beside the baby, who had died the same night. The room was draped with white and full of flowers. The taste of the Italians, artistic in everything, knows how to bring something soothing into the heartrending sorrow of death. The frightened child was impressed by the beautiful surroundings. ‘Mamma is here,’ she said; but when I lifted her up and she touched the cold face with her lips, she broke into hysterical weeping.

I could bear no more, I went out....

An hour and a half later I was sitting alone again by the same window and again staring blankly at the sea and the sky. The door opened and Tata came in. She came up to me and, caressing me, said in a frightened whisper: ‘Daddy, I was good, wasn’t I? I didn’t cry very much.’ I looked at the motherless child in deep distress. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘you will need to be good. You will know no mother’s petting, no mother’s love, nothing can take their place. There will be a gap in your heart, you will not experience the best, purest devotion, the only disinterested devotion in the world. You will feel it yourself, perhaps, but no one will feel it for you. What is a father’s love compared with a mother’s anguish of love?’

Natalie lay all surrounded with flowers. The blinds had been let down. I sat on the chair, the same chair as usual, beside the bed; all was stillness except the splash of the sea under the window. It seemed as though a faint, faint breath were rising from her lips.

Gently grief and distress sank into calm, as though suffering had passed away without a trace, effaced by the careless serenity of the tomb that knows not what it stands for. And I watched and watched all night. What if she really should wake?

She did not wake; it was not sleep, it was death.

And so it was true.

On the floor and down the staircase masses of orange-red geranium had been flung. That fragrance even now makes me tremble like an electric shock, and I recall all the details, every minute, and see the room draped in white, with the veiled looking-glass; beside her, also covered with flowers, the yellow body of the baby, who had fallen asleep without awakening; and her cold, terribly cold brow.... I go with rapid steps, with no thought, no aim, into the garden. Our François is lying on the grass sobbing like a child. I try to say something to him and have no voice, I run back there again. A lady I do not know, dressed all in black, and followed by two children, softly opens the door—she asks leave to repeat a Catholic prayer—I am ready to pray with her myself. She kneels down before the bed and the children kneel beside her, she murmurs a prayer in Latin. The children softly repeat it after her. Then she says to me: ‘They, too, have no mother, and their father is far away. You were at the burial of their grandmother.’ They were Garibaldi’s children.

Within twenty-four hours crowds of exiles had gathered in the courtyard and the garden. They had come to follow her to the grave.

Vogt and I laid her in the coffin, and it was carried out. I walked firmly after it, holding Sasha by the hand and thinking: this is how men look at the crowd when they are led out to be hanged. Two Frenchmen (one of them, I remember, was the Comte de Voguet) in the street pointed with hatred and derision at the absence of a priest. Tessier rebuked them. I was panic-stricken, and made a sign to him with my hand; silence was essential. An immense wreath of small dark-red roses lay on the coffin. We each picked a rose; it was like a drop of blood on every one.

As we went up the hillside, the moon rose and there was a gleam on the sea that had had its share in killing her. We buried her on the hillside that stands out in sight of Esterel on the one hand and Corniche on the other. There was a garden all round. And so she was still among flowers as on her bed....

A fortnight later Haug recalled her last wish and his promise, and he and Tessier prepared to go to Zurich.

It was time for Marya Kasparovna to return to Paris. Every one insisted that I should let Tata and Olga go with her, and myself go with Sasha to Genoa.

It made my heart ache to part from them, but I had no confidence in myself. Perhaps, I thought, it really will be better for them; well, if it is better for them, so let it be. I only begged her not to take the children before the 9th of May, I wanted to spend with them the fourteenth anniversary of my wedding.

The day after that I saw them as far as the bridge over the Var. Haug went with them as far as Paris. We watched the customs-house authorities, the gendarmes and police of all sorts worrying the passengers.

Haug lost his stick, a present from me, hunted for it and was vexed. Tata was crying. The conductor, in a uniform jacket, sat down beside the driver. The diligence drove off along the Draguignan road, and we, Tessier, Sasha, and I, went back across the bridge, got into the carriage and drove to the place where I lived.

A home I had no longer. With the departure of the children the last trace of family life vanished. Everything assumed a bachelor air. Engelson and his wife went away two days later. Half of the rooms were shut up. Tessier and Edmond moved into the house. The feminine element was excluded. Only Sasha’s age and features reminded one that there had been something else ... recalled some one absent.

Five days after the funeral Herwegh wrote to his wife: ‘This news has grieved me deeply. I am full of gloomy thoughts. Send me by the first post _I Sepolcri_ of Hugo Foscolo.’ And in a following letter: ‘Now has come the time for reconciliation with Herzen. The cause of our quarrel exists no longer ... if only I could see him face to face—he is the only man capable of understanding me!’

Yes, I did understand him.

3

APPENDIX

Haug and Tessier went one morning to the hotel in Zurich where the Herweghs were staying. They asked whether he was at home, and, on the waiter’s answering that he was, asked to be taken straight up to him without being announced. On seeing them, Herwegh, trembling and white as a sheet, got up and without a word leaned against a chair.

‘He was a terrible sight—the look of horror so distorted his face,’ Tessier told me.

‘We have come to you,’ Haug said to him, ‘to carry out the wishes of our dead friend. On her deathbed she wrote to you—you sent the letter back with the seal unbroken, on the pretext that it was written under compulsion. She herself commissioned Tessier and me to bear witness that she wrote that letter herself, of her free will, and then to read it aloud to you.’

‘I don’t want—I won’t....’

‘Sit down and listen,’ said Haug, raising his voice.

They sat down, Haug broke open the letter and took out of it _a note in Herwegh’s handwriting_.

When the letter, which had purposely been registered, was sent back again, I gave it into Engelson’s keeping. The latter observed to me that two of the seals had been tampered with.

‘You may be sure,’ he said to me, ‘that that scoundrel has read the letter and that is just why he has sent it back.’ He took the letter to the candle and showed me that there were two sheets of paper instead of one inside it. ‘Who sealed up the letter?’ ‘I did.’ ‘Was there nothing but the letter in it?’ ‘Nothing.’

Then Engelson took a similar sheet of notepaper, a similar envelope, put three seals on it and ran to the chemist’s shop; there he weighed both the letters—the one that had been sent back weighed half as much again as the other. He came home prancing about and singing and cried out to me, ‘I was right! I was right!’

Haug took out the note, read the letter aloud, then glanced at the note, which began with abuse and upbraiding, handed it to Tessier and asked Herwegh:

‘Is that your handwriting?’

‘Yes, yes, I wrote it.’

‘Then you did open the letter?’

‘I am not bound to account to you for my actions.’

Haug tore his note into bits and, flinging them in his face, said: ‘What a blackguard you are!’

Herwegh, panic-stricken, snatched at the bell-rope and began pulling it with all his might.

‘What are you about? are you crazy?’ said Haug and seized him by the arm. Herwegh, pulling himself away from him, dashed to the door, opened it and shouted, ‘Murder! Murder!’ (‘_Mord! Mord!_’).

At the violent ringing of the bell and this shout, there was a general rush up the stairs to his room—waiters and visitors from rooms in the same passage appeared on the scene.

‘Police! police! murder!’ Herwegh was by now shouting in the corridor.

Haug went up to him and, giving him a sound smack on the cheek, said to him: ‘There, you scoundrel (_Schuft_), that is for sending for the police.’

Tessier, meanwhile, went back into the room, wrote down their names and addresses and handed them to Herwegh without a word. A crowd of spectators had gathered on the stairs. Haug first apologised to the hotel-keeper, then went away with Tessier.

Herwegh rushed off to the Commissaire of Police, begging for the protection of the law against the persons who had been sent to murder him, and kept asking whether he could not take proceedings against them for the slap in the face.

The Commissaire of Police, in the presence of the hotel-keeper, inquired into the details of the case and expressed doubts whether persons who had come in this way in broad daylight to the hotel, without concealing their names and addresses, were really hired assassins. As regards legal proceedings, he imagined that it would be very easy to take them and thought it almost certain that Haug would be condemned to a small fine and a brief term of imprisonment.

‘But what is inconvenient in your case,’ he added, ‘is that to secure the conviction of that gentleman you will have publicly to prove that he really did give you a slap in the face; it seems to me that it would be more to your advantage to drop it—God knows what revelations it might lead to.’

The Commissaire’s logic gained the day.

I was staying at the time at Lugano. Thinking things over, I felt very uneasy: I was certain that Herwegh would not challenge Haug or Tessier, but I was not at all certain that Haug would quietly leave Zurich and do nothing further. A challenge on Haug’s part[22] would be quite out of keeping with the character I wanted to give to the business. Tessier, on whose good feeling and intelligence I could thoroughly rely, was altogether too much of a Frenchman.

Haug was capriciously obstinate and childishly irritable. He was continually having tiffs or being huffy, first with Hoetsky, then with Engelson, then with Orsini and the Italians, whom he succeeded in setting against him in the end—and Orsini, shaking his head a little with his characteristic smile, used to say very funnily: ‘_Oh il general, il general Aug!_’

Karl Vogt, with his clear, practical view of everything, was the only person who had any influence over Haug. He treated him aggressively, pelted him with gibes, shouted at him—and Haug obeyed him.

‘What secret have you discovered,’ I once asked Vogt, ‘for subduing our Bengal general?’

‘_Vous l’avez dit_,’ answered Vogt. ‘You have put your finger on the secret. I subdue him just because he is a general and believes he is. A general knows what discipline means—he cannot oppose a higher authority—you forget that I am a Vicar of the Empire.’

Vogt was perfectly right. A few days later Engelson, not thinking what he was saying and that he was speaking in Haug’s presence, said: ‘Only a German could be such a blackguard.’

Haug was offended. Engelson assured him that he had not meant it, that the silly phrase was a slip of the tongue. Haug observed that what mattered was not his saying it in his presence, but his having such an opinion of Germans. And he walked out of the room.

Early next morning he went to Vogt, found him in bed, woke him and told him of the insult paid to Germany, begging him to be his second and to take a challenge to Engelson.

‘Why, do you think that I have gone out of my mind as well as you?’ Vogt asked him.

‘I am not in the habit of accepting insults.’

‘He did not insult you. One says all sorts of things—besides, he apologised.’

‘He insulted Germany—and he shall see that he cannot with impunity insult a great nation in my presence.’

‘But why are you the exclusive representative of Germany?’ Vogt shouted at him. ‘Am not I a German? Have not I the right to defend her as much as you—more than you?’

‘No doubt, and if you take it on yourself, I will give way to you.’

‘Good—but entrusting it to me, I hope you will not interfere. You sit quiet here, and I will go and find out whether Engelson really has that opinion, or whether it was just a phrase dropped by chance—and meanwhile, we will tear up your challenge.’

Half an hour later Vogt came in to me—I knew nothing of what had happened the day before. Vogt walked in, laughing aloud as usual, and asked me: ‘Is Engelson walking about freely here or not? I have shut our general up at home. Only fancy, he wanted to fight Engelson on account of the damned Germans, of whom Engelson spoke rudely; I persuaded him that the privilege is mine. Half the business is settled; now you must smooth down Engelson if he is not in a state of delirium.’

Engelson had no suspicion that Haug was so angry—at first he wanted to have a personal explanation with him and was ready to accept the challenge, then gave way, and we sent for Haug. The Vicar of the Empire laid aside his medusae and his _salpi_ for that morning, and stayed on till Haug and Engelson were engaged in a perfectly friendly discussion over a bottle of wine and cutlets _à la Milanaise_.

In Lucerne, where I went from Lugano, I found a new problem awaiting me. On the very day of my arrival, Tessier told me that Haug had written an article in regard to the slap in the face and had described the whole affair in it; that he wished to publish this note and that Tessier had only succeeded in preventing him by urging that he could not publish such a thing without my consent. Haug, who had no doubt whatever of my consent, was induced to await my coming.

‘Do everything you can to prevent this unlucky article being published,’ Tessier said to me; ‘it will ruin everything—it will make an everlasting laughing-stock of you and all of us and the memory so precious to us.’

In the evening Haug gave me his manuscript. Tessier was right. I could never have risen again from such a blow. Everything was stated with an ardent enthusiastic affection for me and for Natalie, and it was all funny, _funny to me_—at that time of tears and despair. The whole article was written in the style of Don Carlos in prose. The man who was capable of writing such a thing was bound to have a high opinion of his work and, of course, could not relinquish it without a struggle. My task was not an easy one. It had all been written for my sake, from affection, in all good faith, honesty, and sincerity, and, instead of showing gratitude, I had to poison for him the idea which had taken such deep root in his mind and had gained such a hold upon him.

I could make no compromise. After hours of reflection, I made up my mind to write him a long letter; I thanked him for his affection, but besought him not to publish the article. ‘If it really is necessary to publish anything about this dreadful business, that melancholy right belongs to me alone.’

I sealed up this letter and sent it to Haug at seven o’clock in the morning. Haug answered me: ‘I don’t agree with you; I have set up a monument to you and to her, I have raised you to an unassailable pinnacle, and if any one dared to hint a word against you I would make him hold his tongue. But you have the right to decide in your own affair and, of course, if you want to write it I give way to you.’

He was morose and abrupt in his manner all day. In the evening the awful thought occurred to me: ‘If I die he will set up that monument,’ and so, as I said good-bye, I embraced him, saying: ‘Haug, don’t be angry with me; really, no one can be a better judge than I in such a thing.’

‘But I am not angry, I am only hurt.’

‘Well, if you are not angry, leave me your manuscript, make me a present of it.’

‘With the greatest pleasure.’

It is interesting that from that time Haug retained a literary grudge against me, and later on, in London, on my observing that he wrote in too elaborate and figurative a style to Garibaldi and Murchison, Haug answered smiling: ‘I know that you are a polemical writer, you have the style of cold reason—but feeling and poetry have a different language.’

And once more I thanked my stars that I had not only taken his manuscript from him, but on my departure for England had burnt it.

The news of the slap in the face had spread far and wide, and suddenly an article appeared in a Zurich paper signed by Herwegh. He said that the ‘celebrated’ slap in the face had never been given, but that on the contrary he had pushed Haug away so that his back had rubbed against the wall—which apart from everything else was hardly credible to people who knew the muscular and alert Haug and the frail and awkward leader of the Baden expedition. He said further that it was all part of an intrigue with far-reaching ramifications contrived by Baron Herzen on Russian gold, and that the men who had visited him were in my pay.

Haug and Tessier at once published in the same newspaper a grave, concise, restrained, and dignified account of the incident.

I added to their explanation that I had never had any one in my pay except my servants and Herwegh, who had lived for the two previous years at my expense and was the only person of my acquaintance in Europe who owed me a considerable sum of money. This weapon, so alien to me, I used in defence of my slandered friends.

To this Herwegh retorted in the same paper that ‘he had never needed to borrow money from me, and did not owe me a farthing.’ (His wife had always borrowed for him.)

At the same time a doctor wrote to me from Zurich that Herwegh had commissioned him to challenge me.

I answered through Haug that now, as before, I looked upon Herwegh as a man not entitled to satisfaction. That his punishment had begun, and that I should continue to go my own way. One cannot help observing that of the only two persons (apart from Emma) who took Herwegh’s side—this doctor and Richard Wagner, the musician of the future—neither had any respect for Herwegh personally. The doctor who sent the challenge added: ‘As for the rights and wrongs of the case, I know nothing about it and wish to have nothing to do with it.’ And in Zurich he had said to his friends: ‘I am afraid that he will not go through with it, but wants to get up a scene of some sort, only I will not let him trifle with me and make a fool of me. I have told him I shall take a second loaded pistol in my pocket. That is for him!’

As for Richard Wagner, he complained to me by letter that Haug had been too rough and ready, and said that he could not pass a severe judgment on a man ‘whom he loves and pities, that he needs considerate treatment, and that he may still be redeemed from his trivial effeminate life, his eccentric dissoluteness, may rally his forces and show himself in a different aspect.’

Loathsome as it was to make a scandal about money, together with all the other horrors, yet I saw that by that I should deal him a blow which all the bourgeois world, that is, the whole public opinion of Switzerland and Germany, would understand and take to heart.

The I.O.U. for ten thousand francs, which Madame Herwegh had given me and had afterwards tried to redeem for a few words of belated penitence, was in my hands. I gave it to a notary.

With the newspaper in one hand, and the I.O.U. in the other, the notary went to Herwegh demanding an explanation.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘that is not my signature.’

Then the notary showed him his wife’s letter, in which she wrote that she was borrowing the money for him and with his knowledge.

‘I know nothing about it and never authorised her to do so; but you must address yourself to my wife in Nice. I have nothing to do with it.’

‘So you really do not remember authorising your wife...?’

‘I don’t remember it.’

‘That is a great pity; it puts quite a different complexion on this simple money claim, and your creditor may prosecute your wife for obtaining money under false pretences....’

On this occasion the poet showed no alarm, but valiantly replied that that was not his business. The notary laid his answer before Emma. I did not pursue the matter. They never paid the money, of course.

‘Now,’ said Haug, ‘now to London.... We could not leave that blackguard like that.’ A few days later we were looking out at the London fog from the fourth storey of Morley’s Hotel.

With my move to London in the autumn of 1852 the most painful part of my life ends—and with it I break off my story.

(_Finished in 1858._)

* * * * *

To-day is the 2nd of May 1863 ... the eleventh anniversary. Where are those who stood at the graveside? Not one of them is here ... some are gone for ever, others are very far away—and not only geographically.

Orsini’s head has rolled bleeding from the scaffold.

The body of Engelson—who died an enemy—lies at rest in a Channel island.

Tessier du Mothe, the chemist-naturalist, has remained the same gentle and good-natured fellow, but is calling up spirits and turning tables.

Charles Edmond, the friend of Prince Napoleon, is librarian in the Palais du Luxembourg.

Karl Vogt has remained more unchanged, more true to himself than any.

Haug I saw a year ago. He quarrelled with me over some trifle in 1854, left London without saying good-bye and broke off all relations. I learnt by chance that he was in London. I sent word to him ‘that the tenth anniversary of her burial had come, that it was shameful to keep up ill-feeling on no serious grounds, that we were bound together by sacred memories, and that if he had forgotten I still remembered with what readiness he had held out the hand of friendship to me.’

Knowing his character, I took the first step and went to him. He was touched and glad to see me, but for all that the meeting was more melancholy than any parting.

At first we talked of persons and of incidents and recalled details of the past. Then a pause followed. It was obvious to us that we had nothing to say to each other, that we had become complete strangers. I made an effort to keep up the conversation. Haug did his utmost; various incidents of his trip in Asia Minor served our turn. They, too, were exhausted at last, and it was difficult again.

‘Oh dear,’ I said suddenly, taking out my watch, ‘it’s five o’clock and I have an engagement. I must leave you.’ It was a fib. I had no engagement at all. Haug, too, seemed to feel as though a weight had rolled off his back.

‘Is it really five o’clock? I am going to dine to-day at Clapham.’

‘It will take you an hour to get there, I will not keep you. Good-bye.’

And going out into the street, I was on the point of bursting into “laughter”?—no, tears.

Two days later he came to lunch with me. It was the same thing again. He was meaning to leave London the next day—so he said; he remained a good deal longer, but we had had enough and we did not try to see each other again.

ADDENDA TO SECTION THREE

_Extracts from a Diary_

_Feb. 2, 1863._—The moments are rare when it occurs to me to put down anything in this book—some fresh pain, trouble, anxiety. This book might be called—if it were not _zu Deutsch_—a book of lamentations.

The Polish rebellion, the fate of the Russian officers, illness, dissensions, misunderstandings all about one—separation, and the old phrase comes back into my mind again, ‘What an endless capacity for suffering is given man and what a tiny capacity for enjoyment!’

Moreover, happiness, harmony—all that flies away, scarcely leaves a trace, merely touches the present moment—while grief, sickness, the expectation of trouble, all that drags on and on, cuts more deeply, like a plough, and leaves deep furrows.

* * * * *

_Sept. 24, 1863, Genoa, Hotel Feder. Cari luoghi io vi ritrovi._—I have come to Italy by the same route by which I came in 1847. Then I went down from Esterel to Cannes and to Nice on a most exquisite autumn day. I went there again in 1851, on the way to Hyères, twenty-four hours after the awful news of the loss of my mother, my son, and Spielmann. And that is already twelve years ago. I longed to look once more at these parts, yet was afraid to be again in the same surroundings. Nature, that ages slowly, remains the same, but man changes. The first time that I came here, I was looking for a full life with a rich setting.

The Alps were before us, there were no clouds above us and, light-hearted and full of courage, I pushed on ahead.

The second time I came stunned with grief. Before me was the wrecked ship, behind me my wrecked life. Now I am going to my children, expecting nothing for myself personally, except leisure for thought, free from anxiety, with harmony and peace about me, the _noli me tangere_ of weariness and age.

Between Toulon and Nice we left the railway and drove to Hyères. Everything has been wiped away in twelve years. I could not even find the hotel at which I stayed then. The Napoleonic mania for reconstruction has passed over this too.... Then there was no body, no rag, now no house, no place....

Loss more complete there could not be. _Fu ... e non è!_

We made a triumphal entry into Nice. The railway was not yet finished; we sat on the roof of the diligence, the evening darkened, and the moon rose, it had been a day like summer! Towards morning the mistral blew with passing spurts of rain, and we heard the dreary murmur of the sea.

That sound always upsets me, and it was never more hateful than at that moment when, after twelve years, I came back for the first time to visit her grave.

But what a lovely place! Her body is not lowered into the darkness underground, but lifted up into the mountain ... in the distance stretch the Alps, below there is the sea.... One broken string has ruined all the melody ... but such a string—with it the knot that held all together is severed and the web is unravelled.

I was vexed with myself in the graveyard, the earth was cold, the stones were cold ... only then I saw the painful effect of the absence of a tombstone. Without a form, a sign, a written word, a material symbol, in fact, one loses hold.

The cornice of Italy! Again I passed along it. It saw me last when, with hopes renewed, we were going home from Turin in 1851. And those beautiful _cari luoghi_ called back the past more vividly than the graveyard, her bright image floated against the background of the dark blue sea and the mountains—and with it I fell asleep, and for a brief space all the dreadful happenings of the past were blotted out.

In Nice I visited both our houses. There was no one living in either of them, and I could wander through the rooms. Inside almost everything remained as of old ... the shutters were closed, there was thick grey dust and the air was close. It seemed as though we had left it a few days before. I looked at these dumb witnesses of dreadful things and thought: Why had I summoned them as witnesses of the past? And I longed to escape from them, to get away, though I feared no testimony, no accusation—I feared my memories.

In the room where she died I opened the shutters. The familiar view of the sea, the shore, and the church ... she sketched it several times.... The bedstead was standing in the same place—the mattresses had been taken off it and piled up beside it on the floor—the funeral might have been yesterday. The cook who lived with us came, and the gardener of Sue’s house, and I met the maid who was with us then. I saw simple-hearted genuine delight on their faces. The two misfortunes that had befallen us while they were with me had made a close bond between us. In their affection for me there was an element of sympathy, of pity. The faces were the same, only a little older.

Yes, it all happened here!

* * * * *

_Steamer Aunis, Sept. 27, 1863, Civita Vecchia._—We stopped before the wall of a fortress.... Everything is sullen and ugly except the sky.... French soldiers saunter up and down—a lad absolutely naked swims up to the steamer and sitting in a little boat reminds me of the boy in Flandrin’s[23] picture. I cannot land on the Papal shore—I remain on deck. Towards night we sail into Naples; I go to my children, as to the great winter holiday. It will not be long before my 31st of December. May she who is absent be there in them, and may the flowers of their young life surround me once more. And again to work, again to the road which every day grows stonier, but which we tread together[24] as we did when we set off in 1833—thirty years ago! Amen.

* * * * *

_Zurich, Nov. 27, 1868._—Two years ... another two years ... and the same chaos ... Zurich ... here began the tragedy that ended in the funeral of the 2nd of May. Here were written the first letters full of doubt, of terror, of concealed hope. Here he lived for years.

I looked at this town, as Ulysses looked at the rocks on which he left his blood and fragments of torn flesh. And strange to say, I like meeting these blood-stained rocks. I recall that time of unbroken pain—the few minutes of intense passion and the serene figure of a child—his untroubled eyes in the midst of grief and confusion, and I look with love at the garden, at the avenue along which I used to walk with him.

Why did no one guess how much love was left in me, how much, how much, was lavished upon me? Even _she_ forgot it for the time, and only fully understood it afterwards. And Natalie, what an infinite pity that she never understood that side!

Only the strong acknowledges his fault, only the strong is humble, only the strong forgives—and indeed only the strong laughs, though often his laughter is equal to tears.

SELECTIONS FROM CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO SECTION THREE

_A Letter to Richard Wagner_[25]

DEAR SIR,—Allow me to thank you for your letter of June 30. It is another proof of the universal condemnation of the person in question, which will overwhelm him in the end. I appreciate with all my heart your magnanimous desire to champion the man. And I can give you no better proof of my deep respect for you than by expressing my own opinion with perfect frankness. I do not in the least share your hopes: there is a degree of degradation from which a man can never rise, for he must have destroyed everything human in himself before he could sink to such depths. Believe me, I thoroughly understand that passion is a law to itself, and that no one can be held responsible for the fatal consequences of the tragic conflicts it involves. Unfortunately, the misdeeds of this man are of quite a different character—mean, utterly plebeian, vulgar, cynical, and cowardly. To inspire respect passion must be coupled with power, with irresistible force—then and only then it escapes censure. It must be what it really is, _i.e._ tempestuous, overwhelming. It burns and sweeps all before it, it kills but does not poison drop by drop—does not scheme for a year to deceive a friend and for another year to take vengeance on the woman by slander. Passion will face death, but will not face being ignominiously kicked out of the house. I have come to know you through your fine work on the _chef d’œuvre_ of the future. You have well grasped the bond uniting all the arts, which ought to be combined in a harmonious concrete whole. I appeal to your aesthetic sense. How can you justify an existence devoid of every religious feeling, how can you dream of a future of serenity and self-restraint for a creature destitute of all manliness, of all chivalrous and generous feeling, a man without a trace of a conscience? A man, no—a hetaira of the male sex, who has sold his youth for francs to an unsexed woman, a worthy accomplice of all his infamies—a creature who for the sake of comfort has betrayed his convictions, whose part in the German revolution was a flight from the field of battle, without accounting for the money entrusted to him—such a creature has no future. Every day he was warmly pressing his friend’s hand, calling him in his letters his one support, his one defence, longing for the moment to pour out his soul to him, for ever talking enthusiastically of friendship, and at the same time betraying his friend! That creature has not passed through a tragedy—he has simply behaved like a blackguard.

A man who brought his wife into his friend’s house in order to sully it—with the sole object of keeping his family at the friend’s expense, at his expense paying his debts—is not a Werther but a Robert Macaire.[26]

In any case, the second part of the story surpasses the first. I am not speaking of the slanders he has circulated—secretly, but in such a way that they are known in Russia—nor of the coarse brutality of leaving his ex-wife in Nice to spy upon me, to insult me, to drive me out of the town. A year after he has allowed himself to be turned out of the house, he sends me a mean challenge. Knowing little of the etiquette of affairs of honour, he sends me a challenge by post, without mentioning even his seconds. Then he returns my wife’s letter as though unopened, _after tampering with the seal_. The disgusting challenge, in which, among other things, he gibes at the unhappy death of my son, does not explain in what way I have wronged him. There was no possibility of understanding for what insult he desired satisfaction. It was not a _cartel_, but an equivalent of a slap in the face. Unhappily, I was then by the bedside of a dying woman, a woman of the loftiest soul, saintly in her regrets, who had come to understand the sort of man she had to deal with—such was the woman whose end was hastened by the filthy attacks of this depraved man.

A duel between him and me? Never! What would it prove? We are not equals. I am his judge. I might be his executioner, but not his opponent. A duel is no expiation, no punishment; a duel is rehabilitation of honour, but I want to establish his dishonour. As a socialist and a revolutionary, I have appealed to the only authority I recognise. I had the spirit, the courage to submit the affair to the judgment of my friends the democrats. I showed the letters, I told the facts. My appeal roused a general outburst of condemnation. Herwegh’s moral death has been decreed. Despised by all decent men, excommunicated from the body of democrats, he will be forced to hide his ignominious existence in some remote corner of the world. For he will find no peace in France, Italy, Switzerland.

I swear, and my friends swear it also—every day brings us fresh proofs—that all representatives of the militant revolution stand by us.—Receive, etc.

A. HERZEN.

_Letter from Haug to Herzen_[27]

MY UNHAPPY ALEXANDR!—Do nothing to avenge your outraged honour till you have seen me. I shall be in Nice in a few days. I have only just seen your letter to Mazzini of February the 6th. What fatal consequences have followed the fact that my last letter, written in December, did not reach you!

My heart is as desolate as a graveyard. Nothing but crosses and tombstones. The best of humanity are turning to dust before my eyes, happiness has vanished for ever, I see with a curse the holiest hopes of human love at its highest defiled by the grotesque images of abject scoundrels.

My poor, unhappy Iskander, I suffer as you do, more bitterly than you do, for I have the highest esteem for Madame Herzen.

You don’t know that one evening Mazzini sent me the brief sentence: ‘_on vous aura écrit que Herzen a perdu sa femme_.’ This was at the very moment when France was dying. One thing on the top of another. An angel at the deathbed of a nation. Only later I heard that the calamity had overtaken your mother. Poor woman!

For a year you kept silent. By your silence and by the laconic way in which you returned my letter to Madame Herzen, you gave rise to a prolonged hideous uncertainty. It has been a burning poison. You don’t know to what a point my soul, perhaps from excess of enthusiasm, has grown into your life. When, late one night, near La Madeleine, you told me that Natalie was your bliss, your heaven, I came to love that heaven, with which, perhaps, I was in love before. Natalie was for me the incarnation of the spirit of the East, you were its representative. You yourself said to me once, Alexandr, ‘Haug, you are a pure-hearted man.’ Yes, I am. And I am faithful to my feeling. You are my religion. I have never consciously profaned it.

Your distress comes as an agony into my life. I will heal it. The dream of our age, the solidarity of nations, would become ... [_word illegible_] if those who dream of it would carry it out in action instead of talking of it. You are right in refusing to fight. Already one of the greatest sons of the East has been struck by a scoundrel’s bullet. And where was the expiation, where was the justice of destiny? Solidarity ought to have another side. Darkness is dispelled, but the light is too glaring. There must be the true light which will make the blind see. The truth of a better future ... [_word illegible_]. My greetings to the angel of your life, Natalie. She is a saint of humanity. She must be a saint, for every one loves her. And Mazzini says, ‘_la femme c’est l’ange perdu_.’ Good-bye.

_Herzen’s answer to Haug_

DEAR HAUG,—Your letter of March the 10th gave me great pleasure. I have been so unhappy of late, I feel so shattered, so insulted in all that was holiest and most precious to me, and there are moments when my strength fails me, I am overcome by utter despair, I feel impotent, humiliated.... Your letter found me at such a moment, it revived me again—I thank you.

Yes, I accept your brotherly sympathy, I press your outstretched hand, not that you should fight my battles, but only support me in this painful struggle that I may end it as I should wish.

But before bringing you into the thick of this sad and distressing business, I must make you acquainted with a few facts. I will tell you them. It is very painful to me, but it is unavoidable. When I have told my story, judge and act according to the dictates of your heart.

You reminded me in your letter of a conversation we had walking by the Madeleine at night. Ah, how grateful I am to you for that! That conversation does not only lighten my burden, but serves me as a kind of proof and testimony, in any case, as regards you. Yes, I opened my heart and soul to you that night. That rarely happens with me, I never talk of my feelings, I am, as it were, ashamed—my feelings are for myself alone. And so I told you then that only one woman has played a part in my life, and that that part was an immense one, that I have loved only one woman, and that love was living unchanged in my heart. A deep affection bound us together as children and survived all the ups and downs of a stormy life; I will add now that that love gives me the strength to bear the tortures of my present position. Yes, our love has worked a miracle—a far greater one than that of lasting fourteen years—it has survived the shock that might have destroyed it. We have never been so united as since this misfortune has befallen us. It has welded us more closely together. The humiliations I am suffering on her account, the fact that I have taken half the blame upon myself, have been fresh foundations for our love.

We are no longer the same people, and that is why nothing has changed between us.

Hand in hand, we proudly entered upon life; we thought that we should pass with head erect before admiring multitudes. What was there to fear after twelve years of union, of love?... A filthy encounter, a pestilential breath which we could not withstand has humbled us. Now we are moving away from life in a lowlier spirit, crushed by an awful memory, we are approaching the grave, weary and downcast, but hand in hand as before. Neither of us is innocent, nor guilty; one who has the strength to forgive shares the responsibility for the past. If any man despises us, let him hold aloof, let him forget us. Our union, so humanly holy, has been desecrated by that creature. But you, you who love us so much, must pause, you must ponder more deeply what I am saying to you and discern the true image of our indissoluble union under the dirt and disgrace with which it has been covered.

I pass to the facts. When we met that creature for the second time he was very unhappy. Reviled by friends of his own party—he was accused of cowardice in connection with the Baden expedition, and even of dishonesty—he was no better off in his private life: tied for the sake of money to a woman whom he did not love, but who made him feel his indebtedness to her, depraved and spoiled by a passionate thirst for trivial enjoyments, he was not capable of undertaking anything new. He was alone, there were people who thought highly of his talents, but there was not one who respected him personally. I held out a hand to him. At the bottom of that embittered soul I descried earnest thought, poetical talent which dazzled me. He became passionately attached to me, he never left my side. No other man has said so much of his affection for me, he was jealous over me, tried to keep my friends from me, called me his brother, his twin soul, his one friend and support; he wrote to me that if I were to take it into my head to cast him off, he would cling to me because he could not exist without me. He reproached me for coldness and shed tears, recalling our first meeting.

I will show you his letters, which I have fortunately kept.

This passionate, ardent affection for me and boundless love for my children was what first drew him and Natalie together. She abandoned herself to her liking for him without a second thought, and he had plenty of time to draw his nets closer and closer round a woman who fell into the snare more naïvely than one who would have struggled against it. There was nothing to restrain that utterly depraved creature; he found nothing in his heart to make him feel all the baseness and vileness of such an outrage. Neither regard for the children, nor respect for the house that had given him a shelter, nor respect for himself—why, you know he still persisted in his declarations of love to me.

Do you know what it means to have doubts and not to dare to put them into words, to suspect and not to have the courage to confess it? I am not going to give you the inner history of that awful time, we will talk of that in the future. To-day I will only say that that struggle has aged me, I wasted in it what was left of life and energy. No, I said to myself, this is impossible: how could they conceal the truth from me, from me, their true and faithful friend, how could they put me in the degrading position of a spectator, how could I have deserved such contempt? On the other side I saw that every explanation was avoided. In Paris, in December, I began to express my suspicions more boldly. I was alone in Paris. Natalie was left in Zurich, where the creature was staying at my mother’s. In her letters Natalie protested, spoke of the indissoluble ties that held us together, and finally came herself to Paris.

While I was in Paris I had the opportunity of studying that creature’s character more closely. There had always been something in him that revolted me, the selfish injustice, the harsh coarseness of his behaviour to others, especially to his wife, whom he exploited, demanding money. My letters to him from Paris were full of amazement at his behaviour; with my habitual frankness I blamed him without reserve. His letters became more and more tender, he talked of nothing but our leading a pure and serious life together, which should serve as an example and foundation for the future, far from the crowd and full of harmony. I answered him: ‘You will bring with you into that life the corroding egoistic element that will poison it,’ and quoted the lines of Pushkin:

‘Leave us, proud man! ... Freedom you want, but only for yourself; Your very voice strikes terror to our hearts. Fearful and kindly are we gypsy folk, You are bold and evil—go away from us!’

When I was turned out of Paris in July 1850, I went to Nice.

This was a great blunder, I ought to have gone to London. All this time the creature was living at my mother’s in Zurich. At the end of August she brought him to Nice. Two days before his arrival, Madame Herwegh, foreseeing misunderstandings, borrowed ten thousand francs from me for two years. They were without means. I offered them a storey in the house which I had taken, accepting, from motives of delicacy, a nominal rent, ostensibly to cover the cost of it. And so the whole family, women and children, established themselves at my expense. He knew all this, allowing his wife to act as she thought best, and now she has the effrontery to reproach me with having reminded her of this when she was leaving.

At Nice I grasped the full extent of the catastrophe. Natalie was struggling between two feelings. She was trying to forget herself, she was afraid to face the truth. I was shattered, wounded, profoundly unhappy. And looking at this abject, pitiful creature, who avoided any explanation, who oppressed his wife, who was beginning to envy me my fortune, I often repeated the words which Hamlet said to his mother.

But an inner voice told me that this was not so. I saw it with my own eyes but I did not believe it. That saved me, saved Natalie, saved the children. It was time to put an end to it all, in any case to the falsity of the position. The idea of playing the part of judge and injured husband never entered my head.

Never in my life have I stooped to a degrading inconsistency between my principles and my actions. I demanded the truth; that I was entitled to.

After two or three feverish conversations Natalie told me all. (You will see later on the abominable use to which the creature put this word ‘all.’)

No one without my iron health could have lived through the agonies I endured listening to her, and the four or five sleepless nights that followed our first conversation.

On one of those nights we were sitting together on the sofa; there was death in my heart; thoughts of suicide for the first time floated before my mind; I wanted to drink the cup to the bitter dregs. I put one or two questions to her. She answered. A silence followed. I was annihilated, I was overwhelmed by a rush of rage, shame and anguish, and, I confess it to you, I had an impulse to kill Natalie. With a feeling of gladness I dwelt on the thought....

The silence continued. At last I raised my eyes and looked at her. Her face was awful, terribly pale, bluish; her lips were blanched, her features were working; she said nothing but looked fixedly at me with dim, questioning eyes. Her appearance affected me so much, that forgetting everything I took her hand, and letting my head fall on her shoulder, began comforting her in a voice full of tenderness which came from my heart. This was the real crisis for Natalie. She flung herself sobbing on my neck; I laid her on the sofa; she was almost unconscious, and only had the strength to say: ‘Don’t be afraid, these are good tears, it’s my admiration for you, it’s my tenderness. No, no,’ she kept saying, ‘I will never leave you, if only you can put up with me and forget what has happened.’ Her soul, spellbound by a morbid passion, awakened and revived with the energy and force of former days. She came back ‘like a ship returning to its haven after a storm, half-wrecked but triumphant at its escape’ (her own words in a letter to me).

In her infatuation she had not seen whither she was drifting. She was going to meet death, while he was still seeking ‘a brilliant future’ in the words of Madame Herwegh, who, I swear on my honour, was already drawing up a plan for the division of my property.

After that scene I knew that Natalie would remain, but that she was still under the influence of the creature’s threats, under the influence of the past. I had to take action. I suggested that I should leave Nice the following day and let them settle things as they thought best. Natalie would not hear of my going. Then I insisted that the creature should leave the house. As Natalie was terribly afraid of a duel or some bloody encounter, she asked me in token of my reconciliation and forgiveness to promise her that I would not do anything to provoke it. I promised, but on condition that he left the house. This is what the creature calls ‘using pressure’ and ‘taking a base advantage of my position.’ Of course I used influence, but only by devotion, by love.

Prevention and persuasion are very different things. At this moment, for instance, I am influencing you. I must tell you too that all this time the creature remained in hiding in his room on the first storey and did not come down to the dining-room or the drawing-room. But he sent me his wife, who came with the most monstrous proposition, made in a naïvely disgusting form, to which no woman but a Berlin German would demean herself. She proposed that I should let Natalie go with the creature while she would remain with me. I repeated for the last time that I was ready to go if Natalie wished it; she ran off to Natalie at once. She knows her answer and can tell it you, I know the result. At first the creature refused to go, then went through a farce of suicide, then told me through his wife, that he was ready for a duel to the death, but nothing would induce him to fire at ‘the friend’ whom he was conscious of having wronged.

But soon his timid, lymphatic temperament got the upper hand and, in a very bourgeois style, with his luggage, governess and children, he went on to Mentone and then to Geneva.

There was something so humiliating and ludicrous in this male Hagar with his Berlin Ishmael, cast out from the house which had sheltered them, that I took no further action. I was absorbed by a very different question. I wanted to reach a clear understanding of the true state of Natalie’s heart. The step she had just brought herself to was the inevitable compensation for the insult I had suffered. Passion might gain the ascendant. What motives were guiding her now? Was it renunciation, self-sacrifice, devotion without love? And if so, would she have the strength to hold out and, finally, had I the right to accept such a sacrifice? After the first weeks during which our conversations were often passionate and gloomy, I grasped that it was a perfectly natural return to the love which had been her guiding thread throughout her life, she was coming back to her normal condition, her momentary passion had been a casual incident; as soon as she had thrown off the yoke of a capricious, exacting creature who worked upon her only by threats, she felt more free, more youthful in soul.

The creature’s mean behaviour destroyed the last vestiges of her unhappy attachment. In his first letter to Natalie he begged her not to justify herself by throwing the blame on him, to take it all on herself. Then followed threats of scandal, murder and amazing suggestions such as that she should rehabilitate him in my opinion and take him as a tutor to my children. Natalie felt that she must not drive him to despair and asked my sanction to write to him at times. I told her that I looked at it very differently, but she might act as she thought best. The correspondence, which all passed through my hands, led to all the horrors that followed. Natalie gave him a promise to meet him a year later on condition that he should not misuse the privilege of writing to her—that only increased his epistolary incontinence. Natalie took back her promise and at last, in August or November, broke off all correspondence with him. She despised him, was ashamed of him.

Only one thing was wanted to complete the meanness of his behaviour—that was to make it public; and he spread abroad the whole story. He did his share and his wife did hers. But they did not merely publish it abroad, they added slander. No one ventured to mention the man’s name in my hearing; I held my peace, respecting the obligation of silence which has no sacredness for the plebeian soul.

All of a sudden, in July, I learned in Geneva from Sazonov that the creature had told him the whole story. This unexpected intelligence distressed me and I returned to Turin, depressed and gloomy. Natalie, seeing from my letters how unhappy I was, came from Nice to meet me and reached Turin the same day as I did. This sign of affection touched me. There, for the last time, we talked it all over. We came to understand each other better than ever. Yes, we were the same, with one terrible memory, one deep scar added. Those days in Turin brought back to me our glorious youth; they reminded me of our life together at Vladimir. Yes, it was a second wedding, a wedding of more significance, perhaps, than the first. It was accompanied by deep consciousness, full understanding of all the responsibility we were taking up anew, and for this we were indebted to the past which had almost ruined us and covered us with disgrace. I leave it to Natalie to give you the inner account of our reconciliation and the full harmony of our home life, which lasted until the terrible blow that fell upon us. On November 16th my mother, my second son and his tutor—one of my friends—perished in the Mediterranean. This blow shattered Natalie’s health. Exhaustion and weakness passed into acute illness. She was attacked by pleurisy: on the 2nd or 3rd of January, she was so much worse that the doctors doubted whether she would recover. And the wretch seized this moment to send me a mean challenge. Through his wife, whom he made live in Nice, he knew everything that was happening to us. I should not have opened his letter, except that he wrote on the envelope ‘an honourable challenge.’

Inside, instead of a challenge, I found a dirty letter, revolting in its cynicism, full of charges against Natalie and the basest disclosures. He covered the vileness of this by saying, ‘You have been told all,’ as though I would ever have cared to demean myself or Natalie by the repetition of all the revolting details. I spoke of this letter to my friend Engelson (he was the first person after Sazonov to whom I spoke of this business). What was my amazement when I saw that he too was fully informed of all that had taken place. Monsieur and Madame H. had initiated all their acquaintances into the sad details of our breach with them, forgetting that he had played the part of a traitor and she of a go-between. I was amazed and scandalised. What duel could suppress these slanders! Natalie and I, by keeping it all absolutely secret, had given them full opportunity for circulating their vile calumnies. Next day it was public property that I had received a challenge. The creature had told his wife, and a few days later Madame Reihel informed my wife from Paris that she had just heard it from Madame Kolatchek.

After the intervention of the Baden heroine it would have been too absurd to play a melodramatic part in this mournful drama. A duel would be unthinkable, it would have set nothing right, it would have been a trap, he was the only man who could have been rehabilitated by a duel. As for me, I did not think about my honour, I wanted to chastise the wretch, to revenge myself on him; the defence of my honour was of very little interest to me. I may say frankly that my past, beginning with five years of exile on the borders of Siberia and ending with our banishment from Paris, gave me, if not certain rights, at any rate a confidence in myself. If my honour could depend upon a traitor whose past was as well known as my own, I should prefer to lose it.

To refuse a duel is not an easy thing to do. Remember, I am writing to you two months after the challenge. I passed through a regular mental illness before I succeeded in recovering my sense of honour by a firm, resolute decision to rise superior to this man, who is devoid of every feeling of dignity and generosity, to rise superior to time-honoured conventions, and obstinately to refuse this miscreant the honour of fighting. I was conscious that I was taking my stand against a monstrous and merciless force. This unjust, haughty, inhuman force is all-powerful where honour is concerned, it dominates even the most independent natures, they submit to its decrees and abandon their own convictions simply to show that they have the courage to face a pistol. I take my stand against despotism, because I feel myself pure, guiltless, because I feel myself strong enough to appeal to my friends and to lay it all before them. My refusal had another, more serious significance: I wanted my action to be a definite and solemn recognition of the freedom of woman. I wanted to leave it to woman to defend her own honour in complete independence. Only the weak-minded, the immature and the feeble need to be defended, and in this case the woman is strong, and if she acts alone she is stronger still. This man, revenging himself upon her for not persisting in wrongdoing, for not becoming his slave, thought to crush her with his cynicism. He will be himself crushed by the grandeur of her repentance.... Not a month ago that woman spoke, and public opinion, amazed, went over to her side. Before that, I alone was pitied and the slanderous charges, rapidly circulated during the previous twelve months by the efforts of Madame H., were continually repeated, but now Natalie stands confronting them all, lovely in her energy and determination.

That was the beginning of my triumph.

I am finishing, dear Haug. The details, the letters of my friends, the creature’s insolent and stupid behaviour, his refusal, for instance, to receive my answer through my second, his asking for a secret duel, his return of a certain letter—all that you will learn from my friends, who have surrounded me with so much warmth and devotion and given me the strength to bear my humiliating position.

What they will tell you will not differ in any material point from my story; all you will learn from them is the depths of degradation to which a plebeian, mean, coarse and abject soul can sink. For what does all this parade of eloquence amount to, what is the object of all these letters, all these words? Why did not he simply come, pistol in hand, why did he run away from the house, why did he not try (he wrote twenty times about it) to kill Natalie or me, why in the last resort did he not kill himself? He had neither the energy nor the daring for that. It is easier to spread calumnies, to bully his wife—and that is what he does. One must put an end to it and punish the wretch. For that, I need the help and the advice of my friends, and above all the conviction that should I, by the irony of fate, perish in the conflict, my friends will set an awe-inspiring example of justice and solidarity,—Your devoted

A. HERZEN.

_Letter of Herzen to his Wife_

GENEVA, A CAFÉ, _June 28, 1851_.

Judge for yourself what I am feeling, and the state I am in.

He has told Sazonov all about it.... Details that took my breath away. He told him that ‘he was sorry for me, but that what was done could not be undone, that you had begged him to keep silent, that in a few months’ time, _when I was calmer_, you would leave me....’

Dear! I will not add a word. Sazonov said he had heard you were ill and asked what it was. I was numb with horror while he talked. I insist upon an answer from you to this last point. It is all beyond the wildest dreams. Sazonov knows absolutely all about it.... I insist on having the truth.... Answer me at once; I shall weigh every word. My heart is breaking.... And you call this consistent development.

To-morrow I am going to Freiburg. I have never sunk so low as this before. Address your answer to this to Turin, _poste restante_.

Can it be really you that they are talking about? My God, my God, what I have suffered for my love.... What more is there?... Answer, answer to Turin!

_Letters of Natalie Herzen to her Husband_

_July 3, 1851._—My dear, my dear, if only I had wings, how I would fly to you! It is more than I can bear.... I can’t tell you how I have felt since your last letter, and I don’t know how to say anything. All I know, dear, is that I love you with all the power of loving there is in me, that nothing but death can tear me from you. These latter days have shown it to me more clearly than ever. And—I, too, will be open—I will say more. My love for you makes me afraid: it is too beautiful, it is timid, dear, it has too vivid a memory of the anguish of not being understood, not valued, not wanted, not loved in the same way.... Well, so be it! My fate is settled once for all; to live and to die for you.... The children ... they too are you. You can make of it what you like.

I embrace you, Alexandr! Be well and calm.

_July 4._—Alexandr, my Alexandr, let us suffer together! Darling, how hard it is! How sorry I am for you, for you, dear! and what can I do? If only I could hold you in my arms ... and to die with you if you don’t care to live or don’t believe me, if I can do nothing for you.... I think now that education is all nonsense: the children have good natures and that will save them.... Life is hard, dear, insufferable, when I know that you are so unhappy. Yesterday I could not bear to have people about me, so I drove in the evening to the Engelsons and spent a long time on the way.... It was awful coming back to the house without you. No, I can’t stay like this, I shall come to you in Turin on the 7th or before, so as to be there on the 8th: inquire for me at the Hotel Feder. My chest and all my bones feel as though they were broken, but my brain won’t stop working.... It is awful to think that there are two more days before the 7th and two days on the journey.... If I am not in Turin on the 8th, it will be because something has kept me here—don’t wait for me, but come here; I am writing that I may be there, perhaps, for fear we may miss each other.

I have just spoken to Rocca. I sent him to book a seat in the post-chaise that goes on Sunday afternoon at half-past four; so that by Tuesday morning we may meet in the hotel....

My heart throbs and throbs and stands still, I can hardly breathe.... Oh, if I could comfort you, dear, set your heart at rest!...

I embrace you, I embrace you.

_July 7._—Yesterday I received the letter in which you write that you will not reach Turin before the 10th; I have put off going till to-morrow; two extra days without the children and without you would be awful.

I don’t know what to say to your reproaches, dear, after all that I have said already. It seems to me after them that it is of no use for me to go ... on your account.... Tata is inconsolable since she has heard that I am going. ‘Father is big and can come alone, or take me, take me with you.’ I say, ‘The mountains are high and dangerous for children to go over them’—‘I would rather die with you than be left without you’—and all that was said so quietly, in secret from the rest. What sufferings life has in store for such a nature!... It’s silly but it breaks my heart to listen to her, yet I can’t help it, this time I must be selfish; not on your account, I shall come for my own sake; I must see you and hear you, my dear, my heart is so heavy. Tata may have much happiness before her in her life, but for me the sun is going down and time is ebbing.

And so till we meet, Alexandr.... Why am I going? Your last letter was so cold....

_Letter of Herzen to his Son_

_June 28 (1851)._

Greetings, Sasha! Do you often think of me, my little dear? Do think of me: it will make me gladder and happier. I may come sooner than I expected—perhaps about the tenth. I would give a great deal to be with you all now, to look at you and Tata asleep.

Good-bye, dear.

I shall be in Freiburg on the 30th of June, and shall stay there five days; if I leave by the 6th I shall be in Turin by the 8th.

Tell me how you met the Colonel.[28]

_Letter from Herzen to M. K. Reihel_

GENEVA, _June 29 (1851), morning_.

This evening I am going to Freiburg, and so I shall be there to-morrow; I shall stay there not more than four or five days; so that when you get this letter, you can send on other letters _poste restante_, Turin.

When I stepped on Swiss soil I felt that I was really free; unless the whole country were occupied by a foreign army there is no danger here; moreover, a Swiss subject cannot actually be expelled from Piedmont—so that everything is right on that score. As to other things, what am I to say to you? I have grown older. That I have told you before, that you have seen for yourself; at times I seem to fall back into the old rut, but there is no limpidity, the water is dull, troubled, muddy, and it is not at all amusing. But you, Marya Kasparovna, were very kind in the way you met me and saw me off. Give me your hand, we are old friends; mind that prolonged absence and other interests do not cool your helpful affection for us (don’t be angry—human nature is weak and changeable, nothing in it is quite secure). Perhaps life will bring us together again—anything may happen, for everything comes by chance.

Most likely you have already sent off an answer to Bernacki.

Good-bye; give my love to Reihel. Was Maurice pleased with the toys?[29]

The colonel has set off gloomily from Lyons: he suffers much, for he loves much; he is consumed by an inward fire and no palm baths will put it out.

Once more good-bye. Give my greetings to Bernacki.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

_June 29-30, 1851._

I embrace the children. I will write to them from Freiburg, but I have no time now. I have to go off somewhere. I went to bed late and overslept myself to-day.

My love to mother and every one.

Why have the books that were returned been paid for? Golovin was to have asked for them from Turin.

_Letter from Herzen to his Son_

FREIBURG, _July 2 (1851)_.

DEAR SASHA,—Yesterday I went with the local treasurer to Morat, and from there with the prefect to the village which has adopted us: Burg or in the French Châtel. A little village; the inhabitants came to meet us, and the elder made me a speech in broken German, which I answered as best I could; then they brought me an immense glass of wine and the schoolmaster made a speech. The elder apologised for not having made preparations for my reception, and especially for no guns having been fired. They are all kind, simple people, they were very much pleased with me, and invited me to come with all my family next year. Good-bye, dear; I kiss Tata, Kolya, Olenka.

Kiss Granny’s hand for me.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

GENEVA, _July 5 (1851), Saturday_.

I arrived here an hour ago—here I am already nearer to you, darling; I don’t know how things will go in Piedmont; I think of leaving the day after to-morrow at eleven o’clock in the evening, or if I can’t get a seat, on the 8th; so by the 10th I shall be in Turin and by the 13th I may be at home; but that is not certain yet.

There has been a tremendous holiday here; I was really touched by the grandeur of the reception of the federal banner and of the deputation from Argau. Yes, say what you like, it is a republic.

I cannot write: frightfully tired; at one o’clock in the night I got into the diligence and travelled without stopping till I arrived here at four in the afternoon. But fatigue is good for me, only my hand won’t write, and my thoughts won’t hang together.

I have found out everything about education in Vevey—if necessary we might be there. Moreover we have never once thought of the Italian Switzerland, _i.e._ Ticino; they say Lugano is a very charming town, and until there is a European war life there is possible.

Good-bye, dear; I feel rather better, but all that depends on a dream, on memory, on nothing.

I kiss the children.

Chambéry is all nonsense.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

_July 1851._

Here is something more for the colonel. Sazonov’s uncle has sent him the decision of the Senate and the Tsar concerning him. The Senate has sentenced him to penal servitude for disobedience to the Imperial command, but the Imperial Council has mitigated the sentence, and the Tsar has confirmed that ... _Risum teneatis_, ‘To condemn him, Sazonov, to perpetual exile from the borders of the Empire’—there’s a punishment for an emigrant! His uncle has sent him 6000 francs and he is going to London.

The Germans who saw Bakunin at Prague said that the latter part of the time he was _chained_ to the wall!

_A Postscript to his Son_

TURIN, _July 10, 1851_.

Mother has written you so much that she has crowded me into the margin. But soon we shall be talking, dear; I think we may set off in three days’ time.

_Letter from Natalie Herzen to her daughter Natalie_

TURIN, _July 13, 1851_.

Tatotchka, my darling, my birdie, my little star, my little flower, my joy! I am hastening to you. Soon I shall see you and how happy we shall be together! I’ll tell you how I travelled over mountains and valleys. And meanwhile, till I come, my little one, be well and merry and good. Kiss Olya as I kiss you. Hug Puponka.

YOUR MOTHER.

_Herzen’s Postscript to the above Letter_

Here we are travelling and travelling; the carriage creaks, the horses snort, the whip clacks, we go on and on, and soon we shall arrive. François will run and open the gate, Rocca will fry and bake. And Tata—she will run and scream and throw herself—flop!—on her daddy’s neck.

Look after Hoetsky,[30] and see that he does not get into mischief. Make a low bow for me to Alexandra Christianovna and press her hand warmly.

_Letter from Herzen to his Son_

TURIN, _July 13, 1851_.

Perhaps, dear Sasha, we may be in time to arrive on Tuesday, and on Wednesday you may almost certainly expect us by the diligence coming from Geneva, I believe it stops at the Hotel York. Did you get the telegraph? Show Kolya how to play with it—it is a very ingenious toy, and I think it will greatly amuse him.

I read with great pleasure in Engelson’s letter that he is satisfied with your conduct. But you are in your thirteenth year, and if we were poor people you would have to be earning your own living and helping your family. You can see for yourself that the children of the poor are much more sensible and steady, especially in everything practical: they are less timid and more cautious. What they gain through necessity we must acquire by will.

_P.S._—Your letters of the 11th have just come.

_SECTION FOUR_

ENGLAND

(1852-1855)