FRAGMENTS (1867 TO 1868)

1 Swiss Views

Ten years ago, as I was going through the Haymarket late one cold damp winter evening, I came upon a negro, a lad of seventeen; he was barefooted and without a shirt, and in fact rather undressed for the tropics than dressed for London. Shivering all over, with his teeth chattering, he begged from me. Two days later I met him again, and then again and again. At last I got into conversation with him. He spoke a broken English-Spanish, but it was not hard to understand the meaning of his words.

‘You are young and strong,’ I said to him, ‘why don’t you get work?’

‘No one will give it me.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I know no one here who would give me a character.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘From a ship.’

‘What sort of ship?’

‘A Spanish one; the captain beat me very much, so I went away.’

‘What did you do on board ship?’

‘Everything: brushed the clothes, washed up, did the cabins.’

‘What do you mean to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you will die of cold and hunger, you know, or anyway you will certainly get a bad cold.’

‘What am I to do?’ said the negro in despair, looking at me and shivering all over with cold.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘here goes. It is not the first silly thing I have done in my life.’

‘Come with me. I’ll give you clothes and a corner to sleep in; you shall scrub my rooms, light the fires and stay as long as you like, if you behave quietly and properly. Si no—no.’

The negro jumped with joy.

Within a week he was fatter, and gaily did the work of four. So he spent six months with us; then one evening he made his appearance at my door, stood a little while in silence, and then said to me:—

‘I have come to say good-bye to you.’

‘How’s that?’

‘For now it is enough, I am going.’

‘Has anybody been nasty to you?’

‘No, indeed, I am content with all.’

‘Then where are you going now?’

‘To some ship.’

‘What for?’

‘I am dreadfully sick of it, I can’t stand it, I shall do a mischief if I stay. I want the sea. I will go away and come back again, but for now it is enough.’

I made an effort to keep him; he stayed on for three days, and then announced for the second time it was more than he could stand, that he must go away, that ‘for now it is enough.’

That was in the spring.

In the autumn he turned up again, tropically divested, and again I clothed him; but he soon began playing various nasty tricks, and even threatened to kill me, and I was obliged to turn him away.

These last facts are irrelevant, but the point is that I completely share the negro’s outlook. After staying a long time in the same place and sticking in the same rut, I feel that for a time it is enough, that I must refresh myself with other horizons and other faces ... and at the same time must retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The superficial distractions of the journey do not prevent it.

There are people who prefer to get away inwardly, some with the help of a powerful imagination and faculty of abstracting themselves from their surroundings (a peculiar gift bordering on genius and insanity is necessary for this), some with the help of opium or alcohol. Russians, for instance, will have a drinking-bout for a week or two, and then go back to their duties. I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round.

Perhaps it is because I have a bad time after too much wine.

So I meditated on the 4th of October 1866 in a little room of a wretched hotel on the Lac de Neufchâtel where I felt as much at home as though I had lived in it all my life. The craving for solitude, and still more for tranquillity, develops strangely with years.... It was rather a warm night; I opened my window.... Everything was plunged in deep sleep: the town and the lake and the boat which was moored to the bank and faintly heaving, as I could hear from a slight creaking and see from the swinging of the mast which shifted first to the right then to the left....

To know that no one is expecting you, no one will come in to you, that you can do what you like, die perhaps, and no one will hinder you ... no one will care ... is at once dreadful and good. I am certainly beginning to be unsociable, and sometimes regret that I have not the strength to become a secular hermit.

Only in solitude can a man work to the utmost of his power. The free disposal of one’s time and the absence of inevitable interruptions is a great thing. If a man begins to feel dull and tired, he can take his hat and go himself in search of his fellows and rest with them. He has but to go out into the street; the everlasting stream of faces floats by, unending, changing and unchanged, with its flashing rainbow hues and grey froth, its uproar and din. You look at this river of life as an artist, you look at it as at an exhibition, just because you have nothing to do with it. It is all apart from you, and you need nothing from any one.

Next day I got up early, and by eleven o’clock was so hungry that I went for déjeuner to a big hotel which could not take me the evening before for lack of room. In the dining-room there was an Englishman with his wife, from whom he concealed himself with a sheet of The Times, and a Frenchman of about thirty, one of the new types which have come up of late: stout, flabby, white, fair-haired, and softly fat, he looked as though he were on the point of melting like jelly in a warm room, but his ample overcoat and trousers of springy material fortunately held him together. No doubt he was the son of some prince of the Bourse or aristocrat of the democratic empire. Listlessly, in a spirit of mistrust and investigation, he was proceeding through his lunch. One could see that he had been engaged upon it for a long time already and was tired of it.

This type, which scarcely existed in old days in France, began to appear in the time of Louis-Philippe and has reached its full blossoming during the last fifteen years. It is very repulsive, and that is perhaps a compliment to the French. The life of an epicure of the cuisine and of wines does not so distort an Englishman or a Russian as it does a Frenchman. The Foxes and the Sheridans drank and ate more than enough, but they remained Foxes and Sheridans. The Frenchman is with impunity devoted only to literary gastronomy, consisting in an elaborate knowledge of dainties and in the ordering of dishes. No other nation talks as much about dinner, about sauces and culinary refinements, as the Frenchman, but that is all a form of flourish and rhetoric. Real gluttony and drunkenness destroy a Frenchman, swallow him up ... his nerves are not fit for that. A Frenchman remains sound and uninjured only when he spends his time flirting with every aspect of life; that is his national passion and favourite weakness—in it he is strong.

‘Will you take dessert?’ asked the waiter, who evidently had more respect for the Frenchman than for us. The young gentleman was at the moment engaged in digestion, and therefore, slowly lifting his weary and lustreless eyes to the waiter, he said: ‘I don’t know yet,’ thought a little, and then added: ‘Une poire!’

The Englishman, who had all this time been eating in silence behind the screen of his paper, stirred and said: ‘Et à moa aussi!’

The waiter brought two pears on two plates and handed one to the Englishman; but the latter vigorously and emphatically protested: ‘No, no! aucune chose pour poire!’ He simply wanted something to drink. He got his drink and stood up; I only then observed that he was wearing a child’s jacket, or spencer, of a light brown colour, and tight-fitting light trousers terribly creased above his boots. The lady too got up; she rose higher and higher still, and at last, terrifically tall, took the arm of her squat husband and went out.

I followed them out with an involuntary smile, completely free from malice; they seemed to me to have ten times as much human dignity as my neighbour, who was unbuttoning the third button of his waistcoat as the lady withdrew.

Basle.

The Rhine is a natural frontier, not shutting off anything, but dividing Basle into two parts, which does not prevent both sides from being inexpressibly dull. Everything here is oppressed by a threefold dullness: German, commercial and Swiss. It is no wonder that the only artistic work that originated in Basle took the form of a dance of the dying with Death⁠[47]⁠; none but the dead rejoice here, though the German inhabitants are extremely fond of music—of a very grave and elevated character, however. The town is a place of transit; every one passes through it, but nobody stays here except commissioners and carriers of the higher order.

No one could live in Basle apart from a passion for money. Though, indeed, life is dull in Swiss towns as a rule, and not only in Swiss towns, but in all little towns. ‘Florence is a wonderful town,’ said Bakunin, ‘like a delicious sweetmeat ... you are delighted while you eat it, but in a week you are deadly sick of everything sweet.’ That is perfectly true, and nothing need be said about Swiss towns after that. In old days it was quiet and pleasant on the shores of Lake Leman; but since villas have been built all the way from Vevey and whole families of the Russian nobility, impoverished by the calamities of the 19th of February 1861, have taken up their abode in them, it is no place for such as us.

Lausanne.

I am passing through Lausanne. Every one passes through Lausanne except the aborigines.

Outsiders do not live in Lausanne, in spite of the marvellous scenery round it and of the fact that the English three times discovered it: once after the death of Cromwell, once in the time of Gibbon, and now when they are building houses and villas in it. Tourists stay only in Geneva.

The thought of that town is in my mind inseparable from the thought of the coldest and driest of great men and the coldest and driest of winds—of Calvin and of the bise; I can’t endure either of them. And certainly in every native of Geneva there is something left of the bise and of Calvin, both of which have blown upon him physically and spiritually from the day of his conception and even before, one from the mountains, the other from the prayer-book.

Those two chilling influences, checked and diversified by different currents from Savoy, from Valais, most of all from France, make up the fundamental character of the citizens of Geneva—an excellent character, but not a particularly agreeable one.

However, I am now writing my impressions de voyage while I am living in Geneva. Of that town I will write when I have retreated to an artistic distance....

I reached Freiburg at ten o’clock in the evening and went straight to the Zöhringhof. The same landlord in a black velvet cap who met me in 1851, with the same regular features and condescendingly polite face of a Russian master of the ceremonies, or an English porter, came up to the omnibus and congratulated us on our arrival.

And the dining-room is the same, the same rectangular folding little sofas upholstered in red velvet. Fourteen years have passed over Freiburg like fourteen days! There is the same pride in the cathedral-organ, the same pride in their hanging bridge.

The breath of the new restless spirit, continually shifting and casting down barriers, that was raised by the equinoctial gales of 1848, scarcely touched towns which morally and physically stand apart, such as the Jesuitical Freiburg and the pietistic Neufchâtel. These towns, too, have advanced, though at the pace of a tortoise; they have improved, though they seem to us out of date in their old-fashioned stony garb.... And of course much in the life of old days was not bad; it was more comfortable, more durable; it was better fitted for the small number of the elect, and so it does not do for the vast number of the newly invited, who are far from being spoiled or difficult to please.

Of course, in the present state of technical development, with the discoveries that are being made every day, with the improvement of the resources at our disposal, it is possible to organise modern life on a free and ample scale. But the Western European, as soon as he has a place of his own, is satisfied with little. As a rule, he has been falsely charged, or rather he has charged himself, with the passion for comfort and that love of luxury of which people talk. All that, like everything else in him, is rhetoric and flourish. They have had free institutions without freedom, why not have a brilliant setting for a narrow and clumsy life? There are exceptions. One may find all sorts of things among English aristocrats and French Camélias and the Jewish princes of this world.... All that is personal and temporary; the lords and bankers have no future and the Camélias have no heirs. We are talking about the whole world, about the golden mean, about the chorus and the corps de ballet, which now is on the stage, leaving aside the father of Lord Stanley, who has twenty thousand francs a day, and the father of that child of twelve who flung himself into the Thames the other day to relieve his parents of the task of feeding him.

The old tradesman who has grown rich loves to talk of the comforts of life. For him it is a novelty that he is a gentleman qu’il a ses aises, ‘that he has the means to do this, and that doing that will not ruin him.’ He glories in money and knows its value and how quickly it flies, while his predecessors in fortune believed neither in its value nor that it could be exhausted, and so have been ruined. But they ruined themselves with good taste. The bourgeois has little notion of making full use of his accumulated riches. The habits of the old narrow, niggardly life he has inherited from his forbears remain. He may indeed spend a great deal of money, but he does not spend it on the right things.

A generation which has come from behind the counter has absorbed standards and ambitions of no wide horizon and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally aim at the greatest possible profit, gain and good bargain. The propriétaire instinctively diminishes the size of his rooms and increases their number, not knowing why he makes the windows small and the ceilings low; he takes advantage of every corner to snatch it from his lodger or from his own family. That corner is of no use to him, but in case he may need it, he will take it from somebody. With peculiar satisfaction he builds two uncomfortable kitchens instead of one good one, puts up a garret for his maid in which she can neither work nor move, but succeeds in making it damp. To compensate for this economy of light and space, he paints the front of the house, loads the drawing-room with furniture, and lays out before the house a flower-bed with a fountain in it, which is a source of tribulation to children, nurses, dogs and workmen. What is not spoilt by miserliness is ruined by lack of intelligence. Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, flings its wealth to right and left, but the boatmen do not know how to catch it. All the profit goes to the wholesale dealers and filters in scanty drops to others; the wholesale dealers are changing the face of the earth, while private life trails along beside their steam-engines in its old lumbering waggon with its broken-down nags....

The fire which does not smoke is a dream. A landlord in Geneva said to me soothingly: ‘This fire only smokes in the bise.’ That is only just when one most wants a fire; and he says this as though the bise were something casual or newly invented, as though it had not been blowing since before the birth of Calvin and would not blow after the death of Fazy. In all Europe, not excepting Spain or Italy, one must make one’s will at the approach of winter, as men used to do when they set off on a journey from Paris to Marseilles, and must have a thanksgiving service sung to the Iversky Madonna at mid-April.

Let these people tell me that they are not occupied with such vanities, that they have many other things to do, and I would forgive them their smoky chimneys, and the locks which at once open the door and bleed you, and the stench in the passage, and so on; but I ask, what other work have they, what are their higher interests? They have none.... They only make a display of them to cover the inconceivable emptiness and senselessness of their lives.

In the Middle Ages men lived in the very nastiest way and wasted their efforts on utterly useless edifices which did not add to their comfort. But the Middle Ages did not talk about their passion for comfort; on the contrary, the more comfortless their life, the more nearly it approached their ideal; their luxury took the form of the magnificence of the House of God and of their assembly-hall, and there they were not niggardly, they grudged nothing. The knight in those days built a fortress, not a palace, and did not select for a site the most convenient road, but an inaccessible precipice. Now there is no one to defend oneself against, and nobody believes in saving his soul by adorning the church; the peaceful and orderly citizen has dropped out of the forum and the Rathhaus, out of the opposition and the club; passions and fanaticisms, religions and heroisms, have all given way to material prosperity: and that has not been successfully organised.

For me there is something melancholy, tragic, in all this, as though the world were living anyhow, in expectation of the earth’s giving way under its feet, and were seeking not reconstruction but forgetfulness. I see this not only in the careworn, wrinkled faces, but also in the fear of any serious thinking, in the turning away from any analysis of the position, in the nervous thirst to be busy, to fill up the time with external distractions. The old are ready to play with toys, ‘if only to keep from thinking.’ The fashionable mustard-plaster is an International Exhibition. The remedy and the disease form a sort of intermittent fever centred first in one part and then in another. All are moving, rushing, flying, spending money, striving, staring and growing weary, living even more uncomfortably in order to keep up with progress—in what? Why, just progress. As though in three or four years there can be much progress in anything, as though, when we have railways to travel by, there were any necessity to drag from place to place things like houses, machines, stables, cannon, even perhaps parks and kitchen-gardens.

And when they are sick of exhibitions they will take to war and find distraction in the sheaves of dead—anything to avoid seeing certain black spots on the horizon.

2 Chatter on the Road and Fellow-Countrymen in the Buffet

‘Is there a seat free for Andermatt?’

‘Most likely there will be.’

‘In the cabriolet?’

‘Perhaps; you must come at half-past ten....’

I look at my watch, it is a quarter to three ... and with a feeling of fury I sit down on a seat in front of the café. Noise, shouting, trunks dragged about, horses led, horses needlessly stamping on the stones, waiters from the restaurants fighting over travellers, ladies rummaging among the portmanteaus.... Clack, clack, our diligence has galloped off; clack, clack, another has galloped after it.... The square grows empty, everything has gone away.... The heat is deadly, the sunlight is hideously bright, the stones grow whiter; a dog lies down in the middle of the square, but suddenly leaps up with indignation and runs into the shade. The fat landlord sits in his shirt-sleeves before the café, continually dropping asleep. A peasant-woman comes along with fish. ‘How much are the fish?’ the landlord asks with an expression of intense anger. The woman tells the price. ‘Carrogna!’ shouts the landlord. ‘Ladro!’ shouts the woman. ‘Go along with you, old she-devil.’ ‘Will you take it, you robber?’ ‘Well, let me have it for tre venti the pound.’ ‘May you die unshriven!’ The landlord takes the fish, the woman takes the money, and their parting is friendly. All their abusive epithets are just an accepted etiquette, like the forms of politeness employed by us.

The dog goes on sleeping, the landlord has taken in the fish and is dozing again, the sun is baking. I can’t sit there any longer. I go into the café, take up a sheet of paper and begin writing, not knowing in the least what I am going to write: a description of the mountains and precipices, of the flowering meadows and bare granite rocks—all that is in the guide ... better talk gossip.... Gossip is the repose of conversation, its dessert, its sauce; only idealists and theoretical people do not like gossip.... But about whom? Why, of course about the subject nearest to our patriotic heart, our charming fellow-countrymen. There are plenty of them everywhere, especially in good hotels.

It is still just as easy to recognise Russians as it always has been. The zoological features noted long ago have not been effaced, though the number of travellers has been so greatly increased. Russians speak in a loud voice where others speak in a low voice, and do not speak at all where others speak loud. They laugh aloud and tell funny stories in a whisper, they quickly make friends with the waiters and slowly with their neighbours. They eat with their knives. The military people look like Germans, but are distinguished from them by the peculiar insolence of the back of their heads and their original bristling hair; the ladies attract attention by their dress in railway trains and steamers, just as Englishwomen do at table d’hôte, and so on.

The lake of Thun has become a tank about which our tourists of the higher sort have settled. The Fremden List might have been copied out of a reference book; ministers and grandees, generals of every branch of the service, even of the secret police, are recorded in it. In the hotel-gardens the great mit Weib und Kind enjoy nature, and in the hotel dining-room her gifts.

‘Did you come by Gemmi or Grimsel?’ an Englishwoman will ask her fellow-countrywoman.

‘Are you staying at the Jungfraublick or at the Victoria?’ a Russian woman will ask her fellow-countrywoman.

‘There is the Jungfrau!’ says an Englishwoman.

‘There is Reytern, the Minister of Finance!’ says a Russian.

‘Intcinq minutes d’arrêt....’

‘Intcinq minutes d’arrêt....’

And every one in the railway carriages hurries into the restaurant and rushes to a table in haste to devour dinner in some twenty minutes, from which the railway authorities will inevitably steal five or six, besides scaring away the appetite with a terrifying bell and shout of ‘En voiture!’

A tall lady in black walked in, together with her husband in light-coloured clothes, and with them two children.... A poorly dressed girl with her arms full of bags and parcels walked in with a shy awkward air. She stood a little, then went into a corner and sat down almost beside me. The sharp eye of the waiter detected her; after flying past her with a plate on which lay a slice of roast beef he pounced like a hawk on the poor girl and asked her what she wished to order. ‘Nothing,’ she answered, and the waiter, summoned by an English clergyman, ran off to him ... but a minute later he flew down upon her again, and waving his napkin asked her: ‘What was it you ordered?’

The girl muttered something, flushed crimson and stood up. It sent a pang to my heart. I longed to offer her something, but I did not dare.

Before I had made up my mind what to do, the lady in black turned her dark eyes about the room, and seeing the girl, beckoned to her with her finger. She went up, the lady pointed her to the soup that the children had not finished, and she, standing among rows of sitting and astonished travellers, confused and helpless, ate two spoonfuls and put down the plate.

‘Essieurs les voyageurs pour Ucinnungen onction, et tontuyx-en voiture!’

All rushed with unnecessary haste to their carriages.

I could not refrain from saying to the waiter (not the hawk, another one): ‘Did you see?’

‘To be sure I did—they are Russians.’

3 Beyond the Alps

The architectural monumental character of the Italian towns together with their neglected condition palls on one at last. In them a modern man feels not at home, but as though in an uncomfortable box at the theatre, with magnificent scenery on the stage.

Life in them has not found its own level, is not simple, and is not convenient. The tone is elevated; in everything there is declamation, and Italian declamation (any one who has heard Dante read aloud knows what it is like). In everything there is the strained intensity which used to be the fashion among Moscow philosophers and German learned artists; everything is looked at from the highest standpoint, vom höhern Standpunkt. This artificial strain excludes all abandon, and is for ever prepared for controversy and exposition in set phrases. Chronic enthusiasm is exhausting and irritating.

Man does not want to be always admiring, always spiritually elevated; he does not want to have the Tugenden always in evidence; he does not want to be touched and carried mentally far back into the past; while Italy will never let him drop below a certain high pitch, but is incessantly reminding him that her street is not simply a street but also a monument, that he may not merely walk through her squares but ought to be studying them.

At the same time everything in Italy, particularly what is beautiful and grand (possibly it is the same everywhere), borders upon insanity and absurdity—or at least is suggestive of childishness.... The Piazza Signoria is the nursery of the Florentine people; granddad Buonarroti and uncle Cellini presented it with marble and bronze playthings, and it has strewn them about at random in the square where blood has so often been shed and its fate has been decided—without the slightest connection with David or Perseus.... There is a town in the water so that pike and perch can wander through the streets ... there is a town built of stone crevices such as would suit centipedes or lizards to creep and run through—between precipices made up of palaces ... and then a primaeval wilderness of marble. What brain dared create the outlines of that stone forest called Milan Cathedral, that mountain of stalactites? What brain had the hardihood to carry out that mad architect’s dream?... And who gave the money for it, the incredible immense sums of money?

People only make sacrifices for what is unnecessary. Their fantastic aims are always the most precious to them, more precious than daily bread, more precious than self-interest. To develop egoism a man must be trained, just as for humane culture. But imagination will carry him away without training, will fill him with enthusiasm without reflection. The ages of faith were the ages of miracles.

A town which is more modern but less historical and decorative is Turin.

‘It simply overwhelms one with its prose.’

Yes, but it is easier to live in, just because it is simply a town, a town that exists not only for its own memories but for everyday life, for the present; its streets are not archaeological museums, and do not remind us at every step: memento mori; but glance at its working population, at their aspect, keen as the Alpine air, and you will see that they are a sturdier stamp of men than the Florentines or the Venetians, and have perhaps even more staying power than the Genoese.

The latter, however, I do not know. It is very difficult to get a view of them, they are always flitting before one’s eyes, bustling and running to and fro in a hurry. There are swarms of people in the lanes leading to the sea, but those who are standing still are not Genoese; they are sailors of every land and ocean—skippers, captains. A bell rings here, a bell rings there: Partenza!—Partenza!—and part of the ant-heap begins scurrying about, some loading, others unloading.

4 Zu Deutsch

It has been raining continuously for three days. I cannot go out and I am not inclined to work.... In the bookshop window there are two volumes of Heine’s Correspondence; here is salvation. I take them and proceed to read them till the sky clears again.

Much water has flowed away since Heine was writing to Moser, Immermann, Varnhagen.

It is a strange thing: since 1848 we have all faltered and stepped back, we have thrown everything overboard and shrunk into ourselves, and yet something has been done and everything has gradually changed. We are nearer to the earth, we stand on a lower, that is a firmer, level, the plough cuts more deeply, our work is not so attractive, it is rougher—perhaps because it really is work. The Don Quixotes of the reaction have burst many of our balloons, the smoky gases have evaporated, the aeronauts have come down, and we no longer float like the spirit of God over the waters with chants and prophetic songs, but catch at the trees, the roofs, and damp Mother Earth.

Where are those days when ‘Young Germany’ in its spiritual heights theoretically set the Fatherland free, and in the spheres of Pure Reason and Art made an end of the world of tradition and superstition? Heine hated the highly enlightened frosty heights upon which Goethe majestically slumbered in his old age, dreaming the clever but not quite coherent phantasies of the second part of Faust. But even Heine never sank below the level of the bookshop, even with him it was still the academic precinct, the literary circle, the journalistic clique with its gossip and its babble, with its bookish Shylocks in the form of Cotta,⁠[48] Hoffmann,⁠[49] and Campe,⁠[50] with its Göttingen high priests of philology and its bishops of jurisprudence in Halle or Bonn. Neither Heine nor his circle knew the people, and the people did not know them. The sorrows and the joys of the lowly plains did not rise up to those heights; to understand the moan of humanity in the bogs of to-day they had to translate it into Latin and to arrive at their thoughts through the Gracchi and the proletariate of Rome.

The graduates of a sublimated world, they sometimes emerged into life, beginning like Faust with the beer-shop and always, like him, with a spirit of scholastic scepticism, which with its reflections hindered them as it did Faust from simply looking and seeing. That is why they immediately hastened back from living sources to the sources of history; there they felt more at home. Their pursuits, it is particularly worth noting, were not only not work, but were not science either, but, so to speak, erudition, and above all, literature.

Heine at times revolted against the scholastic atmosphere and the passion for analysis, he wanted something different, but his letters are typically German letters of that period, on the first page of which stands Bettina the child and on the last Rahel the Jewess. We breathe more freely when we meet in his letters passionate outbursts of Judaism, then Heine is genuinely carried away; but he quickly lost his warmth and turned cold to Judaism, and was angry with it for his own by no means disinterested faithlessness.

The revolution of 1830 and Heine’s moving afterwards to Paris did much for his progress. Der Pan ist gestorben! he says with enthusiasm, and hastens to the city to which I once hastened with the same feverish eagerness—to Paris; he wanted to see the ‘great people’ and ‘grey-headed Lafayette’ riding about on his grey horse. But literature soon gets the upper hand again; his letters are filled in and out with literary gossip, personalities, interspersed with complaints of destiny, of health, of nerves, of depressed spirits, through which an immense revolting vanity is apparent. And then Heine takes a false note. His coldly inflated rhetorical Buonapartism grows as detestable as the squeamish horror of the well-washed Hamburg Jew at the tribunes of the people when he meets them not in books but in real life. He could not stomach the fact that the workmen’s meetings were not staged in the frigidly decorous setting of the study and salon of Varnhagen, ‘the fine-china’ Varnhagen von Ense, as he himself calls him.

His feeling of personal dignity, however, did not go beyond having clean hands and being free from the smell of tobacco. It is hard to blame him for that. That feeling is not a German nor a Jewish one, and unhappily not a Russian one either.

Heine coquettes with the Prussian Government, seeks its favour through the ambassador and through Varnhagen, and then abuses it.⁠[51] He coquetted with the King of Bavaria and pelted him with sarcasms; he more than coquetted with the German Diet, and tried to atone for his abject behaviour with biting taunts.

Does not all this explain why the scholastically revolutionary flare-up in Germany so quickly came to grief in 1848? It too was merely a literary effort, and it vanished like a rocket: its leaders were professors and its generals came from the Faculty of Philology; its rank and file in high boots and bérets were students who deserted the revolutionary cause as soon as it passed from metaphysical audacity and literary recklessness into the market-place. Apart from a few stray workmen, the people did not follow these pale Führer, they simply held aloof from them.

‘How can you put up with all Bismarck’s insults?’ I asked a year before the war of a deputy of the Left from Berlin at the time when the former was practising violent methods, and more successfully than Grabow and Company.

‘We have done everything we could, innerhalb the constitution.’

‘Well, then, you should follow the example of the Government and try ausserhalb.’

‘How do you mean? Make an appeal to the people, stop paying taxes?... That’s a dream.... Not a single man would follow us or would make a move to support us.... And we should only provide a fresh triumph for Bismarck by ourselves proving our weakness.’

‘Well, then, I can only say like your President at every fresh blow: “Shout three times Es lebe der König and go home peaceably!”’

5 This World and the Other

I THE OTHER WORLD

... Villa Adolphina.... Adolphina?... Villa Adolphina, grands et petits appartements, jardin, vue sur la mer....

I go in. Everything is clean and nice; there are trees and flowers in the garden, and English children, fat, soft and rosy, who make you hope from the bottom of your heart that they will never meet with cannibals. An old woman comes out, and after asking what I have come for, begins a conversation by telling me that she is not a servant, but ‘more like a friend,’ that Madame Adolphine has gone to a hospital, or almshouse, of which she is a patroness. Then she takes me to see ‘an exceptionally convenient apartment’ which this season for the first time is unoccupied, and which two Americans and a Russian princess had been only that morning to look at—for which reason the old woman who was ‘more a friend than a servant’ sincerely advised me not to lose time. Thanking her for this sudden sympathy and solicitude on my behalf, I asked her the question: ‘Sie sind eine Deutsche?’

‘Zu Diensten, und der gnädige Herr?’

‘Ein Russe.’

‘Das freut mich zu sehr. Ich wohnte so lange, so lange in Petersburg. I must say I believe there is no other town like it and never will be.’

‘It is very pleasant to hear that. Is it long since you left Petersburg?’

‘Yes, it is not yesterday; why, we have been living here twenty years. I have been a friend of Madame Adolphine from my childhood, and so I never wanted to leave her. She does not care much for housekeeping; everything is at sixes and sevens in her house with no one to look after it. When meine Gönnerin bought this little Paradise she sent for me at once from Braunschweig.’

‘And where did you live in Petersburg?’ I asked.

‘Oh, we lived in the very best part of the town, where the Laute Herrschaften und Generäle live. How many times I have seen the late Tsar driving by in a carriage or a one-horse sledge so ernst.... He was a real potentate, one may say.’

‘Did you live on the Nevsky or in Morsky Street?’

‘Yes; that is, not quite on the Nevsky, but close by, at the Polizei-brücke.’

‘Enough ... enough, I might have known,’ I thought, and I asked the old woman to say that I would come to discuss terms with Madame Adolphine herself. I could never without a peculiar tenderness meet the relics of old days, the half-ruined monuments from the temple of Vesta or some other god, it does not matter.... The old woman who was ‘more like a friend’ escorted me across the garden to the gate.

‘Here is our neighbour, he too lived for years in Petersburg....’ She pointed to a big, smartly decorated house, inscribed this time in English: ‘Large and small Apartments, Furnished or Unfurnished....’ ‘No doubt you remember Floriani? He was the coiffeur de la cour near Millionnaya Street; he was mixed up in a very unpleasant affair ... he was prosecuted and almost sent to Siberia ... you know, for being too indulgent, there were such severe measures.’

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘she will certainly exalt Floriani into being my “comrade in misfortune”!’

‘Yes, yes, now I vaguely remember the story; the Procurator of the Holy Synod and other divines and officers in the Guards had a hand in it....’

‘Here he comes.’

A little dried-up, toothless old man in a small straw hat like a sailor’s or a child’s, with a blue ribbon round the crown, a short, light pea-green overcoat and striped breeches, came out to the gate. He raised his dull, lifeless eyes, and munching with his thin lips, nodded to the old lady.

‘Would you like me to call him?’

‘No, thank you very much.... I am not in that line—you see, I don’t shave my beard.... Good-bye. And tell me, please, am I mistaken or not, has M. Floriani a red ribbon?’

‘Yes, yes, he has subscribed largely to charities!’

‘A very good heart, no doubt.’

In classical times writers were fond of bringing back into this world the shades of the dead, that they might have a chat about this and that. In our realistic age everything is on the earth, and even part of the other world is in this world. The Champs-Élysées extend to the shores and strands of Elysium, and are scattered here and there by warm or sulphurous springs at the foot of mountains or the borders of lakes; they are sold in acres or laid out into vineyards.... Part of a man who has died to the life of excitement and agitation is here passing through the first course of the transmigration of souls and the preparatory class of Purgatory.

Every man who has lived for fifty years has buried a whole world or even two; he has grown used to its disappearance and accustomed to the new scenery of another act: but suddenly the names and faces of times long dead appear more frequently on his way, calling up series of shadows and pictures kept somewhere in readiness in the endless catacombs of the memory, making him smile or sigh, and sometimes almost weep....

Those who like Faust want to see ‘the mothers,’ and even ‘the fathers,’ need no Mephistopheles; it is enough to take a railway ticket and travel to the South. By the time Cannes and Grasse are reached, shades of days long fled stray about, warming themselves in the sun; quietly huddled up, close to the sea, they wait for Charon and their turn.

On the way to this Città, which is not so very dolente, the tall, bent and majestic figure of Lord Brougham stands as keeper of the gate. After a long and honourable life spent in useless toil, he seems, with one grey eyebrow lower than the other, like the living embodiment of part of Dante’s inscription: ‘Voi che ’ntrate,’ with the idea of correcting old-standing historical evils by amateurish means, ‘lasciate ogni speranza.’ Old Brougham, the best of the ancients, the defender of the luckless Queen Caroline, the friend of Robert Owen, the contemporary of Canning and Byron, the last unwritten volume of Macaulay, built his villa between Grasse and Cannes, and he did well to do so. Who, if not he, should be put as a conciliatory signboard at the portal of the temporary purgatory to avoid scaring away the living?

Here we are en plein in the world of the tenors, now silent, that set our bosoms quivering at eighteen—thirty years ago; of the feet which set our hearts and the hearts of the whole parterre melting and thrilling, feet now ending their career in down-trodden, home-knitted slippers, that go flopping after the servant-girl from aimless jealousy or from very justifiable niggardliness.

And all this, with a few intervals, goes on right up to the Adriatic, to the shores of Lake Como, and even to some German watering-places. Here is the Villa Taglioni, there is the Palazzo Rubini, there the Campagne Fanny Elsner and others ... du prétérit-défini et du plus-que-parfait.

Beside the actors retired from the small stage of the theatre, the actors of the greatest stages of the world, whose names have long ago been cut out of the playbills and forgotten, live out their days in peace as followers of Cincinnatus and philosophers against their will. Side by side with artists who have once magnificently played the parts of kings are met kings who have played their parts very poorly. Like the dead in India who take their wives to the other world with them, these kings have carried off two or three devoted ministers who zealously helped to bring about their downfall and have themselves come to grief with them. Among them are crowned heads who were hissed at their début and are still expecting that the public will return to a juster sense of values and call them on again. There are others whom the impresarios of the theatre of history have not permitted even to make their début—the stillborn who have a yesterday but no to-day; their biography ended on their appearance in the world; the Aztecs of a long-abolished law of royal inheritance, they remain the moving monuments of extinguished dynasties.

Then come the generals, famous for the victories they have lost; subtle diplomats, who have wrecked their countries; gamblers who have wrecked their fortunes; and grey-headed, wrinkled old women who in their day wrecked the hearts of these diplomats and gamblers. Political fossils, still taking their pinch of snuff, as once they took it at Pozzo di Borgo’s,⁠[52] Lord Aberdeen’s, and Princess Esterhazy’s, discuss with extinct beauties of the days of Madame Récamier reminiscences of the salon of Princess Lieven, the youth of Lablache, the débuts of Malibran, and wonder that Patti dare sing after them ... and at the same time gentlemen of the green cloth, hobbling and limping, half-crippled with paralysis, half-drowned in dropsy, talk with other old ladies of other salons and other celebrities, of reckless stakes, of Countess Kisselyov, of roulette at Homburg and at Baden, of the late Suhozanet’s⁠[53] play, of the patriarchal days when the hereditary princes of the German Spas were partners with the keepers of the gambling-halls and exchanged the risky mediaeval plundering of travellers for the peaceful practice of the bank and rouge et noir.

And all this world is still breathing, still moving; some lie crippled in a bath-chair or a carriage under a fur rug, others lean on a servant by way of a crutch, or sometimes on a crutch for lack of a servant. The visitors’ lists are like old-fashioned directories or bits of torn newspapers ‘of the days of Navarino and the Conquest of Algiers.’

Besides the smouldering stars of the three first magnitudes there are other comets and luminaries with which thirty years ago idle and greedy curiosity was very busy, thanks to the peculiar bloodthirsty lust which prompts men to watch the trials that lead from the murdered victim to the guillotine, and from heaps of gold to hard labour. Among them there are all manner of criminals acquitted for lack of proof, poisoners, coiners, as well as men who have completed their course of moral regeneration in some central prison or penal colony, ‘contumaces’ and so on.

The shades least often met with in these warm purgatories are those of survivors from the revolutionary storms and unsuccessful rebellions. The gloomy and embittered Montagnards of the Jacobin heights prefer the austere bise, or like stern Spartans hide in the fogs of London....

II THIS WORLD

A. Living Flowers—The Last of the Mohicans

‘Let us go to the Bal de l’Opéra; now is just the right time, half-past one,’ I said, getting up from the table in a little room of the Café Anglais, to a Russian artist who was always coughing and never quite sober. I had a longing for the open air and bustle. And besides, I dreaded a long tête-à-tête with my Claude Lorraine from the Neva.

‘Let us go,’ he said, and poured out another glass of brandy.

This was at the beginning of 1849, at that moment of delusive convalescence between two bouts of sickness when one still sometimes thought that one wanted to play the fool and be merry.

Strolling about the opera-hall, we stopped before a particularly pretty quadrille of powdered débardeurs and pierrots with chalked faces. All the four girls were very young, eighteen or nineteen, charming and graceful, dancing and enjoying themselves with all their hearts, and unconsciously passing from the quadrille to the cancan. We had hardly admired it enough when suddenly the quadrille was disturbed ‘owing to circumstances in no way connected with the dancers,’ as our journalists used to express it in the happy days of the censorship. One of the dancing girls, and alas! the handsomest, so skilfully, or so unskilfully, dropped her shoulder that her shift slipped down, displaying half her bosom and part of her back—a little more than is done by elderly Englishwomen (who have nothing with which they can attract except their shoulders) at the most decorous receptions and in the most conspicuous boxes at Covent Garden. (So that it is absolutely impossible in the second tier to listen to Casta Diva or Sul Salice with befitting modesty.) I had scarcely had time to say to the chilled artist: ‘If only Michael Angelo or Titian were here! Seize your brush or she will pull it up again,’ when an immense black hand, not that of Michael Angelo nor Titian, but of a gardien de Paris, seized her by the collar, tore her away from the quadrille, and dragged her off. The girl would not go, and struggled as children do when they are to be washed in cold water, but order and human justice gained the upper hand and were satisfied. The other girls and their pierrots exchanged glances, found a fresh débardeur, and began again kicking above their heads and darting apart from each other in order to rush together with the more fury, taking scarcely any notice of the rape of Proserpine. ‘Let us go and see what the policeman does to her,’ I said to my companion. I noticed the door through which he had led her.

We went down by a side-staircase. Any one who has seen and remembers a certain dog in bronze looking attentively and with some excitement at a tortoise can easily picture the scene which we came upon. The luckless girl in her light attire was sitting on a stone step in the piercing wind in floods of tears; facing her stood a dry, tall municipal in full uniform with a predatory and earnestly stupid expression, with a comma of hair on his chin and half-grey moustaches.

He was standing in a dignified attitude with folded arms, looking intently for the end of these tears and urging: ‘Allons, allons.’

To complete the effect, the girl, whimpering, was saying through her tears: ‘... Et ... et on dit ... on dit que ... que ... nous sommes en République ... et ... on ne peut danser comme l’on veut!...’

All this was so absurd, and in reality so pathetic, that I resolved to go to the rescue of the captive and to the restoration in her eyes of the republican form of government.

‘Mon brave,’ I said with calculated and insinuating courtesy to the policeman, ‘what will you do with mademoiselle?’

‘I shall put her au violon till to-morrow,’ he answered grimly. The wails were redoubled. ‘To teach her to take off her shift,’ added the guardian of order and of public morality.

‘It was an accident, brigadier, you should pardon her.’

‘I can’t. La consigne....’

‘After all, at a fête....’

‘But what is it to do with you? Êtes-vous son réciproque?’

‘It is the first time I have seen her in my life, parole d’honneur. I don’t know her name, ask her yourself. We are foreigners, and are surprised to see you in Paris so stern with a weak girl, avec un être frêle. We always thought the police here were so kind.... How is it that they are allowed to dance the cancan, for if they are allowed, monsieur le brigadier, sometimes without meaning it a foot will be kicked too high or a blouse will slip too low.’

‘That may be so,’ the municipal observed, impressed by my eloquence, and still more stung by my observation that foreigners have such a flattering opinion of the Parisian police.

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘look what you are doing. You are giving her a cold—how can you bring the child, half-naked, out of the heated room and sit her down in the biting wind?’

‘It is her own fault, she won’t come. But there, I’ll tell you what: if you will give me your word of honour that she shan’t go back into the dancing-room to-night, I’ll let her off.’

‘Bravo! Though, indeed, I expected no less of you, monsieur le brigadier, I thank you with all my heart.’

I had now to enter into negotiations with the rescued victim. ‘Excuse me for interfering on your behalf without having the pleasure of being personally acquainted with you.’ She held out a warm, moist little hand to me and looked at me with still moister and warmer eyes. ‘You heard what was said? I can’t answer for you if you won’t give me your word, or better still if you won’t come away at once. It is not a great sacrifice really; I expect it is half-past three by now.’

‘I am ready. I’ll go and get my cloak.’

‘No,’ said the implacable guardian of order, ‘not a step from here.’

‘Where is your cloak and hat?’ ‘In loge so-and-so, row so-and-so.’ The artist was rushing off, but he stopped to ask: ‘But will they give them to me?’

‘Only tell them what has happened and that you come from “Little Leontine.” ... Here’s a ball!’ she added with the expression with which people say in a graveyard: ‘Sleep in peace.’

‘Would you like me to take a fiacre?’

‘I am not alone.’

‘With whom then?’

‘With a friend.’

The artist returned, his cold worse than ever, with a hat and cloak, and a young shopman or commis-voyageur.

‘Very much obliged,’ he said to me, touching his hat, then to her: ‘Always making scandals!’ He seized her by the arm almost as roughly as the policeman had by the collar, and vanished into the big vestibule of the Opéra.... Poor girl ... she will catch it ... and what taste ... she ... and he!

I felt positively vexed. I suggested to the artist a drink. He did not refuse.

A month passed. Six of us, the Vienna agitator Tauzenau, General Haug, Müller, S., and another, agreed to go once more to a ball. Neither Haug nor Müller had ever been to one. We stood together in a group. All at once a masked figure pressed forward through the crowd straight up to me, almost threw herself on my neck, and said to me: ‘I had not time to thank you then.’

‘Ah, Mademoiselle Leontine ... delighted to meet you. I can see before me now your tear-stained face, your pouting lips—you were awfully charming—that does not mean that you are not charming now.’ The sly little rogue looked at me, smiling, knowing quite well that that was true.

‘Didn’t you catch cold then?’

‘Not a bit.’

‘In memory of your captivity, you ought, if you would be very, very kind....’

‘Well what? Soyez bref.’

‘You might have supper with us.’

‘With pleasure, ma parole, only not now.’

‘Where shall I find you then?’

‘Don’t trouble. I’ll come and find you myself at four o’clock; but I say, I am not alone here....’

‘With your friend again...?’ and a shiver ran down my back.

She burst out laughing. ‘Not a very dangerous one,’ and she led up to me a fair-haired, blue-eyed girl of seventeen. ‘This is my friend.’

I invited her too.

At four o’clock Leontine ran up, gave me her hand, and we set off to the Café Riche. Though that is not far from the Opera House, yet Haug had time on the way to fall in love with the Madonna of Andrea del Sarto, that is, the fair girl. And at the first course, after long and curious sentences concerning the Tintoretto charm of her hair and eyes, Haug began discoursing on the aesthetic sin of dancing the cancan with the face of a madonna and the expression of an angel of purity. ‘Armes, holdes Kind!’ he added, addressing us all.

‘Why is it your friend talks such boring fatras?’ Leontine whispered in my ear, ‘and why does he go to fancy-dress balls at all—he’d better go to the Madeleine?’

‘He is a German, they all suffer from that complaint,’ I whispered to her.

‘Mais c’est qu’il est ennuyeux, votre ami avec son mal de sermon. Mon petit saint, finiras-tu donc bientôt?’

And while waiting for the sermon to end, Leontine, tired out, flung herself on the sofa. Facing her was a big looking-glass; she kept looking in it, and at last could not refrain from pointing to herself and saying to me: ‘Why, with my hair so untidy and in this crumpled dress and this position, I really don’t look bad.’

When she had said it, she suddenly dropped her eyes and blushed—blushed openly up to her ears. To cover her confusion she began humming the well-known song which Heine has distorted in his translation, and which is terrible in its artless simplicity:—

A strange creature, elusive, full of life; the ‘Lacerta’ of Goethe’s Elegies, a child in a sort of unconscious delirium. Like a lizard, she could not sit still for a single instant, and she could not keep silent either. When she had nothing to say, she was singing, making grimaces before the looking-glass, and all with the unconstraint of a child and the grace of a woman. Her frivolité was naïve. Carried away by chance, she was still whirling round, still floating.... The shock which would have stopped her on the edge or finally thrust her over the precipice had not yet come. She had gone a good bit of the road but could still turn back. Her clear intelligence and innate grace were still strong enough to save her.

Her type, her circle, her surroundings, exist no longer. She was ‘la petite femme’ of the student of old days, the grisette who passed from the Latin Quartier to this side of the Seine without sinking to the level of the street-walker nor rising to the secure social position of the Camélia. That type has passed away, just as conversations by the fireside, reading aloud at a round table, chatting over tea have gone. There are other forms, other notes, other people, other words.... This too has its own scale, its own crescendo. The mischievous, rather abandoned element of the ’thirties—du lest, de l’espièglerie—passed into chic; there was cayenne pepper in it, but it still retained a careless exuberant grace, it still retained wit and cleverness. As things began to be done on a larger scale, commerce cast off everything superfluous, and sacrificed everything spiritual to the shop-front, the étalage. The type of Leontine, the lively Parisian gamine, mobile, clever, spoilt, sparkling, free, and on occasion proud, is not wanted, and chic has passed into chienne. What the Lovelace of the boulevards wants is the woman-chienne, and above all, one who has her master. It is more economical and disinterested: with another man running the show, he can get his sport by simply paying the extras. ‘Parbleu,’ an old man whose best years had been at the beginning of Louis-Philippe’s reign said to me, ‘je ne me retrouve plus—où est le fion,⁠[54] le chic, où est l’esprit?... Tout cela est beau, well-bred, mais ... c’est de la charcuterie ... c’est du Rubens.’

That reminds me how in the ’fifties dear good Talandier, with the vexation of a man in love with his France, explained to me with a musical illustration its downfall. ‘When,’ he said to me, ‘we were great, in the early days after the revolution of February, nothing was heard but the Marseillaise—in the cafés, in the street-processions, always the Marseillaise. Every theatre had its Marseillaise, here with cannon, there with Rachel. When things grew duller and quieter, the monotonous sounds of Mourir pour la Patrie took its place. That was no harm yet, but we sank lower.... Un sous-lieutenant accablé de besogne ... drin, drin, din, din, din ... the whole city, the capital of the world, the whole of France was singing that silly thing. That is not the end; after that, we began playing and singing Partant pour la Syrie at the top and Qu’aime donc Margot ... Margot at the bottom: that is, senselessness and indecency. One can sink no lower.’

One can! Talandier did not foresee either Je suis la femme à barbe or The Sapper; he stopped short at chic and never reached the chienne stage. Hurried carnal corruption superseded all embellishments. The body conquered the spirit, and, as I said ten years ago, Margot, la fille de marbre, crowded out Béranger’s Lisette and all the Leontines in the world. The latter had their humanity, their poetry, their ideas of honour. They loved uproar and spectacles better than wine and supper, and they loved their supper more for the sake of the surroundings, the candles, the sweets, the flowers. They could not exist without dancing and balls, without laughter and chatter. In the most luxurious harem they would have been stifled, would have pined away in a year. Their finest representative was Déjazet—both on the great stage of the world and the little one of the Théâtre des Variétés. She was the living embodiment of a song of Béranger, a saying of Voltaire, and was young at forty—Déjazet, who changed her adorers like a guard of honour, capriciously flung away gold by the handful, and gave herself to the first-comer to get a friend out of trouble.

Nowadays it is all simplified, curtailed. One gets there sooner, as old-fashioned country gentlemen used to say who preferred vodka to wine. The woman of fion intrigued and interested, the woman of chic stung and amused, and both, apart from money, took up time. The chienne pounces straight away upon her victim, bites with her beauty, and pulls him by the coat sans phrase; in this there is no preface, in this the epilogue comes at the beginning. Thanks to a paternal Government and the medical faculty, even the two dangers of the past are gone; police and medicine have made great advances of late years.

And what will come after the chienne? Hugo’s pieuvre has completely failed, perhaps because it is too much like a pleutre. And yet we cannot stop at the chienne.

However, let us leave prophesying. The designs of providence are unfathomable.

What interests me is something else.

Which of the two prophecies of Cassandra will come true for Leontine? Is her once graceful little head resting on a lace-trimmed pillow in her own hotel, or has it been laid on the rough hospital-bolster to fall asleep for ever, or awaken to poverty and sorrow? Though maybe neither the one fate nor the other is hers, and she is busy getting her daughter married or saving money to buy a recruit to replace her son in the army. She is no longer young now, and must be long past the ’thirties.

B. Garden Flowers

In our Russian Europe everything done in European Europe has been repeated on a smaller scale as to quantity and on a greater or distorted scale as to quality.

We have had our Orthodox ultra-catholics, our titled liberal-bourgeois, our imperial Royalists, our democrat-officials, our Preobrazhensky Buonapartist horseguards and lifeguards. It is no wonder that among the ladies too we have not escaped our chic and chienne types: with this difference, that our demi-monde was a whole world and a little over.

Our Traviatas and Camélias, for the most part titular, that is honorary ones, grow on quite a different soil and flourish in different spheres from their Parisian prototypes. They must be sought, not in the valley but on the heights; they do not rise up like mist, but drop like dew from above. The Princess Camélia or the Traviata with an estate in the province of Tambov or Voronezh is a purely Russian phenomenon, and I think there is a good deal to be said for it.

As for our non-European Russia, its morals have been to a great extent saved by serfdom, which is now so much maligned. Love was a melancholy thing in the village; it called its sweetheart ‘my heart’s yearning,’ as though feeling that it was stolen from the master, who might at any time miss his property and take it back. The village furnished the master’s house with wood, hay, sheep, and its daughters, as part of its duties. It was a consecrated duty, the Crown service which could not be refused without a crime against morality and religion, which would provoke the landowner’s rod and the knout of the whole empire. Here it was no question of chic, but sometimes of the axe, more often of the river, in which a Palashka or Lushka perished unnoticed.

What has happened since the Emancipation we hardly know, and therefore we cling the more to our ladies. They certainly do in masterly style and with extraordinary rapidity and adroitness assimilate abroad all the ways, all the habitus of the lorettes. It is only on careful scrutiny that it can be discerned that something is lacking. And what is lacking is the very simplest thing—being a lorette. It is just like Peter the Great working with hammer and mallet at Saardam, fancying he was doing real work. From cleverness and idleness, from superfluity and boredom, our ladies play at the trade, as their husbands play with a carpenter’s lathe.

This absence of necessity, this character of artificiality, changes the whole thing. On the Russian side there is the feeling of a superb mise-en-scène; on the French, of reality and inevitability. Hence the vast differences. One is often genuinely sorry for the Traviata tout de bon, for the dame aux perles hardly ever; over the first one sometimes wants to weep, at the other always to laugh. A woman who has inherited two or three thousand souls of peasants, at first perpetually but now only temporarily ruined, can do a great deal—intrigue at the gambling Spas, dress eccentrically, loll in a carriage, whistle and make a row, get up scenes in restaurants, make men blush, change her lovers, go with them to parties fines and to all sorts of ‘calisthenic exercises and conversations,’ drink champagne, smoke Havana cigars, and stake pots of gold on the rouge et noir.... She can be a Messalina and a Catherine—but, as we have said already, she cannot be a lorette, although lorettes are not, like poets, born, but made. Every lorette has her story, her initiation induced by circumstances. As a rule, the poor girl drifts, not knowing whither, and is brought low by coarse deception, coarse ill-treatment. From outraged love, from outraged shame, she develops dépit, resentment, a sort of thirst of vengeance and at the same time a craving for excitement, for gaiety, for dress—with poverty all about her and money only to be gained in one way, and so vogue la galère. The deceived child with no training steps into the fray; her triumphs spoil her, spur her on (of those who have had no triumphs we know nothing, they are lost and never heard of); she remembers her Marengo and her Arcole; the habit of domination and of luxury is absorbed into her blood; she owes everything to herself alone. Beginning with nothing but her body, she too acquires ‘souls,’ and she too ruins the rich men who are temporarily devoted to her, as our great ladies ruin their poor peasants.

But in that also lies the whole impassable gulf between the lorette by profession and the amateur Camélia. That gulf and that opposition are vividly expressed in the fact that the lorette, supping in some stuffy room of the Maison d’Or, dreams of her future drawing-room, while the Russian lady, sitting in her sumptuous drawing-room, dreams of the restaurant.

The serious side of the question is to determine what has given rise in our ladies to this craving for dissipation and debauchery, this need to brag of their emancipation, to trample insolently, capriciously, on public opinion, and to fling off every veil and mask, while the chaste and patriarchal mothers and grandmothers of our lionesses blushed till they were forty at an indiscreet word, and with stealthy modesty contented themselves with a lover like the one in Turgenev’s The Bread of Others, or, lacking him, a coachman or a butler.

Note that our aristocratic Camélias go no further back than the beginning of the ’forties.

And all the modern movement, all the stirring of thought, the groping, the dissatisfaction, the discontent, date from the same period.

Therein lies revealed the human, the historical aspect of our aristocratic ladies’ debauchery. It is a half-conscious protest of a sort against the old-fashioned family that weighed upon them like lead, against the brutal debauchery of the men. The oppressed woman, the woman deserted at home, had leisure for reading, and as soon as she felt that the family maxims were incongruous with George Sand, and had heard too many enthusiastic descriptions of Blanches and Célestines, her patience broke down, and she took the bit between her teeth. Her protest was savage, but her position too was savage.

Her opposition was not clearly formulated, but was vague and instinctive; she felt outraged, she was conscious of being humiliated, of being oppressed, but had no conception of independent freedom apart from debauchery and dissipation. She protested by her behaviour: her revolt was full of self-indulgence and bad manners, of caprice, of sloppiness, of coquetry, sometimes of injustice; she was unbridled without becoming free. She retained a secret fear and diffidence, but longed to show her resentment and to try that other life. Against the narrow self-will of the oppressors she set the narrow self-will of patience strained till it snapped, with no firm guiding idea but the conceited bravado of youth. Like a rocket she flared up, went off into sparks and fell with a splash, but not very deep. There you have the history of our titled Camélias, our Traviatas in pearls.

Of course, in this case too we may recall the bilious Rastoptchin, who on his deathbed said of the tragedy of the Fourteenth of December: ‘Everything is inside out with us: in France la roture tried to climb into the nobility—well, that one can understand; our nobility tried to become canaille, and that’s silly!’

But it is just that side of it which to us does not seem silly at all. It follows very consistently from two primary facts: the alien character of the culture which is for us not inevitable, and the fundamental note of another social order to which consciously or unconsciously we are striving.

However, that forms part of our catechism, and I am afraid of being drawn into repetition.

In the history of our development our Traviatas will not disappear without a trace; they have their value and significance, and form the bold and reckless legion of the advance guard, the volunteers and singers, who, whistling and striking their tambourines, dancing and showing off, go first to face the fire, screening the more serious phalanx who have no lack of thought nor daring nor of sharpened weapons.

III THE FLOWERS OF MINERVA

This phalanx is the revolution in person, austere at seventeen ... the fire of her eyes subdued by spectacles that the light of the mind may shine more brightly; sans-crinolines advancing to replace sans-culottes.

The girl-student and the young-lady-bursche have nothing in common with the Traviata ladies. The Bacchantes have grown grey or bald, have grown old and retired, while the students have taken their place before they are out of their teens. The Camélias and the Traviatas of the salons belonged to the Nicholas period. They were like the parade-generals of the same period, the dandy martinets whose victories were won over their own soldiers, who knew every detail of military toilette, all the glitter of the parade, and never soiled their uniforms with the blood of an enemy. The courtesan-generals, jauntily ‘street-walking’ on the Nevsky, were crushed at once by the Crimean War; while ‘the intoxicating glamour of the ball,’ the love-making of the boudoir, and the noisy orgies of the generals’ ladies, were abruptly replaced by the academic hall and the dissecting-room, where the cropped student in spectacles studied the mysteries of nature. Then all the camélias and magnolias had to be forgotten, it had to be forgotten that there were two sexes. Before the truths of science, im Reiche der Wahrheit, distinctions of sex are effaced.

Our Camélias stood for the Gironde, that is why there is such a flavour of Faublas about them.

Our student-girls are the Jacobins, Saint-Just in a riding-habit—everything sharp-cut, pure, ruthless. Our Camélia wore a masque, a loup from warm Venice.

Our students wear a mask too, but it is a mask of Neva ice. The first may stick on, but the second will certainly melt away; that, however, is in the future.

This is a real, conscious protest, a protest and dividing line. Ce n’est pas une émeute, c’est une révolution. Dissipation, luxury, persiflage and dress are shoved aside. Love, passion, are in the far background. Aphrodite with her naked archer sulks and withdraws, Pallas Athene takes her place with her spear and her owl. The Camélias were impelled by vague emotion, indignation, unsatisfied voluptuous desire ... and they went on till they reached satiety. In this case they are impelled by an idea in which they believe, by the declaration of ‘the rights of woman,’ and they are fulfilling a duty laid upon them by their faith. Some abandon themselves on principle, others are unfaithful from a sense of duty. Sometimes these students go too far, but they always remain children—disobedient, conceited, but children. The gravity of their radicalism shows that it is a matter of the head, not of the heart. They are passionate in relation to what is universal, and show no more ‘pathos’ (as they used to call it in old days) in individual encounters than any Leontine. Perhaps less. The Leontines played, they played with fire, and very often, ablaze from head to foot, saved themselves in the Seine; seduced by life before they had developed any prudence, it was sometimes hard for them to conquer their hearts. Our students begin with criticism, with analysis; a great deal may happen to them too, but there will be no surprises, no downfalls; they fall with a parachute of theory in their hands. They fling themselves into the stream with a handbook on swimming, and intentionally swim against the current. Whether they will swim long à livre ouvert I do not know, but they will certainly take their place in history, and will deserve to do so.

The most short-sighted people in the world have guessed as much.

Our old gentlemen, senators and ministers, the fathers and grandfathers of their country, looked with a smile of indulgence and even encouragement at the aristocratic Camélias (so long as they were not their sons’ wives).... But they did not like the students ... so utterly different from the ‘charming rogues’ with whom they had at one time liked to warm in words their old hearts.

For a long time the old gentlemen were angry with the austere Nihilist girls and sought an opportunity of dealing with them as they deserved.

And then, as though of design, Karakozov fired his pistol-shot.... ‘There it is, your Majesty,’ they began to whisper, ‘that is what dressing not according to set rule ... these spectacles and shock-heads, come to.’ ‘What? not according to set rule?’ says the Tsar. ‘We must take sterner measures.’ ‘Slackness, slackness, your Majesty! We have only been waiting for your gracious permission to save the sacred person of your Majesty.’

It was no jesting matter; all set to work in earnest. The Privy Council, the Senate, the Synod, the ministers, the bishops, the military commanders, the police-captains and gendarmes of all sorts, took counsel together, talked and deliberated, and decided in the first place to turn students of the female sex out of the universities altogether. Meanwhile, one of the bishops, fearing deception, recalled how in the time of the false Catholic Church a Pope Anna had been elected to the papacy, and offered his monks as inspectors ... since there is no bodily shame before the eyes of the dead. The living did not accept his suggestion: the generals for their part supposed that such expert’s duties could only be entrusted to an official of the highest rank placed beyond temptation by his rank and his monarch’s confidence; the military department wanted to offer the post to Adlerberg the Elder; while the civilians preferred Butkov. But this did not take place—it is said because the Grand Dukes were anxious to secure the job.

Then the Privy Council, the Synod and the Senate ordered that within twenty-four hours the girls were to grow their cropped hair, to remove their spectacles, and to be forced to have good sight and to wear crinolines. And in spite of the fact that in the Book of Heavenly Wisdom there is nothing said about ‘distension of skirts’ or widening of petticoats, while the plaiting of hair is positively forbidden in it, the clergy assented. For the first time the Tsar’s life seemed secure till he reached the Elysian Fields. It was not their fault that in Paris also there were Champs-Élysées, and with an accent on them too.

These extreme measures were of enormous benefit, and this I say without the slightest irony, but to whom? To our Nihilist girls.

The one thing that they lacked was to fling off their uniform, their formalism, and to develop in that broad freedom to which they have the fullest claim. It is terribly hard for one used to a uniform to cast it off of himself. The garment grows to the wearer. A high priest in a dress-coat would give over blessing and intoning.

Our girl-students and Burschen would have been a long time getting rid of their spectacles and emblems. They were stripped of them at the expense of the Government, which added to them the aureole of a toilette martyrdom.

After that, all they have to do is to swim au large.

P.S.—Some are already coming back with the brilliant diploma of Doctor of Medicine, and all glory to them!

Nice, Summer 1867.