SECTION THREE⁠[1] A FAMILY DRAMA

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

‘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:

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.