§1
ONE winter evening my uncle came to our house at an unusual hour. He looked anxious and walked with a quick step to my father’s study, after signing to me to stay in the drawing-room.
Fortunately, I was not obliged to puzzle my head long over the mystery. The door of the servants’ hall opened a little way, and a red face, half hidden by the wolf-fur of a livery coat, invited me to approach; it was my uncle’s footman, and I hastened to the door.
“Have you not heard?” he asked.
“Heard what?”
“The Tsar is dead. He died at Taganrog.”
I was impressed by the news: I had never before thought of the possibility of his death. I had been brought up in great reverence for Alexander, and I thought with sorrow how I had seen him not long before in Moscow. We were out walking when we met him outside the Tver Gate; he was riding slowly, accompanied by two or three high officers, on his way back from manœuvres. His face was attractive, the features gentle and rounded, and his expression was weary and sad. When he caught us up, I took off my hat; he smiled and bowed to me.
Confused ideas were still simmering in my head; the shops were selling pictures of the new Tsar, Constantine; notices about the oath of allegiance were circulating; and good citizens were making haste to take the oath—when suddenly a report spread that the Crown Prince had abdicated. Immediately afterwards, the same footman, a great lover of political news, with abundant opportunities for collecting it from the servants of senators and lawyers—less lucky than the horses which rested for half the day, he accompanied his master in his rounds from morning till night—informed me that there was a revolution in Petersburg and that cannon were firing in the capital.
On the evening of the next day, Count Komarovsky, a high officer of the police, was at our house, and told us of the band of revolutionaries in the Cathedral Square, the cavalry charge, and the death of Milorádovitch.[[26]]
[26]. When Nicholas became Emperor in place of his brother Constantine, the revolt of the Decembrists took place in Petersburg on December 14, 1825. Five of the conspirators were afterwards hanged, and over a hundred banished to Siberia.
Then followed the arrests—“They have taken so-and-so”; “They have caught so-and-so”; “They have arrested so-and-so in the country.” Parents trembled in fear for their sons; the sky was covered over with black clouds.
During the reign of Alexander, political persecution was rare: it is true that he exiled Púshkin for his verses, and Labzin, the secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts, for proposing that the imperial coachman should be elected a member;[[27]] but there was no systematic persecution. The secret police had not swollen to its later proportions: it was merely an office, presided over by De Sanglin, a freethinking old gentleman and a sayer of good things, in the manner of the French writer, Etienne de Jouy. Under Nicholas, De Sanglin himself came under police supervision and passed for a liberal, though he remained precisely what he had always been; but this fact alone serves to mark the difference between the two reigns.
[27]. The president had proposed to elect Arakchéyev, on the ground of his nearness to the Tsar. Labzin then proposed the election of Ilyá Baikov, the Tsar’s coachman. “He is not only near the Tsar but sits in front of him,” he said.
The tone of society changed visibly; and the rapid demoralisation proved too clearly how little the feeling of personal dignity is developed among the Russian aristocracy. Except the women, no one dared to show sympathy or to plead earnestly in favour of relations and friends, whose hands they had grasped yesterday but who had been arrested before morning dawned. On the contrary, men became zealots for tyranny, some to gain their own ends, while others were even worse, because they had nothing to gain by subservience.
Women alone were not guilty of this shameful denial of their dear ones. By the Cross none but women were standing; and by the blood-stained guillotine there were women too—a Lucile Desmoulins, that Ophelia of the French Revolution, wandering near the fatal axe and waiting her turn, or a George Sand holding out, even on the scaffold, the hand of sympathy and friendship to the young fanatic, Alibaud.[[28]]
[28]. Camille Desmoulins was guillotined, with Danton, April 5, 1794; his wife, Lucile, soon followed him. Alibaud was executed July 11, 1836, for an attempt on the life of Louis Philippe.
The wives of the exiles were deprived of all civil rights; abandoning their wealth and position in society, they faced a whole lifetime of slavery in Eastern Siberia, where the terrible climate was less formidable than the Siberian police. Sisters, who were not permitted to accompany their condemned brothers, absented themselves from Court, and many of them left Russia; almost all of them retained in their hearts a lively feeling of affection for the sufferers. But this was not so among the men: fear devoured this feeling in their hearts, and none of them dared to open their lips about “the unfortunate.”
As I have touched on this subject, I cannot refrain from giving some account of one of these heroic women, whose history is known to very few.