§4

I still remember dimly the traces of the great fire, which were visible even in the early twenties—big houses with the roof gone and window-frames burnt out, heaps of fallen masonry, empty spaces fenced off from the street, remnants of stoves and chimneys sticking up out of them.

Stories of the Great Fire, the battle of Borodino, the crossing of the Berezina, and the taking of Paris—these took the place of cradle-song and fairy-tale to me, they were my Iliad and Odyssey. My mother and our servants, my father and my old nurse, were never tired of going back to that terrible time, which was still so recent and had been brought home to them so painfully. Later, our officers began to return from foreign service to Moscow. Men who had served in former days with my father in the Guards and had taken a glorious part in the fierce contest of the immediate past, were often at our house; and to them it was a relief from their toils and dangers to tell them over again. That was indeed the most brilliant epoch in the history of Petersburg: the consciousness of power breathed new life into Russia; business and care were, so to speak, put off till the sober morrow, and all the world was determined to make merry to-day and celebrate the victory.

At this time I heard even more than my old nurse could tell me about the war. I liked especially to listen to the stories of Count Milorádovitch;[[9]] I often lay at his back on the long sofa, while he described and acted scenes of the campaign, and his lively narrative and loud laugh were very attractive to me. More than once I fell asleep in that position.

[9]. Michael Milorádovitch (1770-1825), a famous commander who lost his life in suppressing the Decembrist revolution, December, 1825.

These surroundings naturally developed my patriotic feeling to an extreme degree, and I was resolved to enter the Army. But an exclusive feeling of nationality is never productive of good, and it landed me in the following scrape. One of our guests was Count Quinsonet, a French émigré and a general in the Russian army. An out-and-out royalist, he had been present at the famous dinner where the King’s Body-Guards trampled on the national cockade and Marie Antoinette drank confusion to the Revolution.[[10]] He was now a grey-haired old man, tall and slight, a perfect gentleman and the pink of politeness. A peerage was awaiting him at Paris; he had been there already to congratulate Louis XVIII on his accession, and had returned to Russia to sell his estates. As ill luck would have it, I was present when this politest of generals in the Russian service began to speak about the war.

[10]. This dinner took place at Versailles, on October 1, 1789.

“But you, surely, were fighting against us,” I said very innocently.

“Non, mon petit, non! J’étais dans l’armée russe.”

“What!” said I, “you a Frenchman and fighting on our side! That’s impossible.”

My father gave me a reproving look and tried to talk of something else. But the Frenchman saved the situation nobly: he turned to my father and said, “I like to see such patriotic feeling.” But my father did not like to see it, and scolded me severely when our guest had gone. “You see what comes of rushing into things which you don’t and can’t understand: the Count served our Emperor out of loyalty to his own sovereign.” That was, as my father said, beyond my powers of comprehension.