§10
It is impossible to conceive a greater contrast to all this than my father. My uncle was perpetually active and perpetually cheerful, an occasional visitor at his own house. But my father hardly ever went out-of-doors, hated all the world of official business, and was always hard to please and out of humour. We had our eight horses too, but our stable was a kind of hospital for cripples; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearance, and partly that the two coachmen and two postilions might have some other occupation, as well as going to fetch newspapers and arranging cock-fights, which last amusement they carried on with much success in the space between the coach-house and the neighbours’ yard.
My father did not remain long in the public service. Brought up by a French tutor in the house of a pious aunt, he entered the Guards as a serjeant at sixteen and retired as a captain when Paul became Tsar. In 1801 he went abroad and wandered about from one foreign country to another till the end of 1811. He returned to Russia with my mother three months before I was born; the year after the burning of Moscow he spent in the Government of Tver, and then settled down permanently in Moscow, where he led by choice a solitary and monotonous life. His brother’s lively temperament was distasteful to him.
After the Senator had left it, the whole house assumed a more and more gloomy aspect. The walls, the furniture, the servants—every thing and person had a furtive and dissatisfied appearance; and of course my father himself was more dissatisfied than anyone else. The artificial stillness, the hushed voices and noiseless steps of the servants, were no sign of devotion, but of repression and fear. Nothing was ever moved in the rooms: the same books lay on the same tables, with the same markers in them, for five or six years together. In my father’s bedroom and study the furniture was never shifted and the windows never opened, not once in a twelvemonth. When he went to the country, he regularly took the key of his rooms in his pocket, lest the servants should take it into their heads to scour the floors or to clean the walls in his absence.