§1
UNTIL I was ten, I noticed nothing strange or peculiar in my position.[[15]] To me it seemed simple and natural that I was living in my father’s house, where I had to be quiet in the rooms inhabited by him, though in my mother’s part of the house I could shout and make a noise to my heart’s content. The Senator gave me toys and spoilt me; Calot was my faithful slave; Vyéra Artamónovna bathed me, dressed me, and put me to bed; and Mme. Provo took me out for walks and spoke German to me. All went on with perfect regularity; and yet I began to feel puzzled.
[15]. Herzen’s parents were never married with the Russian rites, and he bore throughout life a name which was not his father’s.
My attention was caught by some casual remarks incautiously dropped. Old Mme. Provo and the household in general were devoted to my mother, but feared and disliked my father. The disputes which sometimes took place between my parents were often the subject of discussion between my nurses, and they always took my mother’s side.
It was true that my mother’s life was no bed of roses. An exceedingly kind-hearted woman, but not strong-willed, she was utterly crushed by my father; and, as often happens with weak characters, she was apt to carry on a desperate opposition in matters of no importance. Unfortunately, in these trifles my father was almost always in the right, and so he triumphed in the end.
Mme. Provo would start a conversation in this style: “In her place, I declare I would be off at once and go back to Germany. The dulness of the life is fit to kill one; no enjoyment and nothing but grumbling and unpleasantness.”
“You’re quite right,” said Vyéra Artamónovna; “but she’s tied hand and foot by someone”—and she would point her knitting-needles at me. “She can’t take him with her, and to leave him here alone in a house like ours would be too much even for one not his mother.”
Children in general find out more than people think. They are easily put off, and forget for a time, but they persist in returning to the subject, especially if it is mysterious or alarming; and by their questions they get at the truth with surprising perseverance and ingenuity.
Once my curiosity was aroused, I soon learned all the details of my parents’ marriage—how my mother made up her mind to elope, how she was concealed in the Russian embassy at Cassel by my uncle’s connivance, and then crossed the frontier disguised as a boy; and all this I found out without asking a single question.
The first result of these discoveries was to lessen my attachment to my father, owing to the disputes of which I have spoken already. I had witnessed them before, but had taken them as a matter of course. The whole household, not excluding the Senator, were afraid of my father, and he spared no one his reproofs; and I was so accustomed to this, that I saw nothing strange in these quarrels with my mother. But now I began to take a different view of the matter, and the thought that I was to some extent responsible threw a dark shadow sometimes over my childhood.
A second thought which took root in my mind at that time was this—that I was much less dependent on my father than most children are on their parents; and this independence, though it existed only in my own imagination, gave me pleasure.