§4
I began to visit him from time to time. His was a singular existence. He had a large house on the Tver Boulevard, where he lived in one very small room and used another as a laboratory. His old mother occupied another small room at the end of the passage; and the rest of the house was unused, and left exactly as it was when his father migrated to Petersburg. Tarnished chandeliers, valuable furniture, rarities of all kinds, grandfather’s clocks supposed to have been bought by Peter the Great in Amsterdam, armchairs supposed to have belonged to Stanislas Leshchinski,[[43]] empty frames, and pictures turned to the wall—all these, in complete disorder, filled three large drawing-rooms which were neither heated nor lighted. In the outer hall the servants were generally playing the banjo and smoking—in the very room where formerly they hardly dared to breathe or say their prayers. One of them lit a candle and escorted me through the long museum; and he never failed to advise me to keep on my overcoat, because it was very cold in the drawing-rooms. Thick layers of dust covered all the projections of the furniture, and the contents of the rooms were reflected in the carved mirrors and seemed to move with the candle; straw, left over from packing, lay comfortably here and there, together with scraps of paper and bits of string.
[43]. King of Poland and father-in-law of Louis XV.
After passing through these rooms, you came at last to a curtained door which led into the study. The heat in this room was terrific; and here The Chemist was always to be found, wearing a stained dressing-gown trimmed with squirrel-fur, sitting behind a rampart of books, and surrounded by bottles, retorts, crucibles, and other apparatus. A few years earlier, this room had been the scene of shocking vice and cruelty; now it smelt of chlorine and was ruled by the microscope; and in this very room I was born! When my father returned from foreign parts, he had not yet quarrelled with his brother, and spent some months under his roof. Here too my wife was born in the year 1817. After two years The Chemist sold the house, and I spent many evenings there, arguing about Pan-Slavism and losing my temper with Homyakóv,[[44]] though nothing could make him lose his. The chief rooms were altered then, but the outside steps, front hall, and staircase were unchanged; and the little study was left as before.
[44]. Alexyéi Homyakóv (1804-1860), poet, theologian, and a leader of the Slavophile party.
The Chemist’s household arrangements, simple at all times, were even simpler when his mother went to the country in summer and took the cook with her. At four in the afternoon, his valet brought a coffee-pot, made some strong broth in it, and placed it by the fire of the chemical furnace, where all sorts of poisons were brewing; then he fetched half a chicken and a loaf from an eating-house; and that was his master’s dinner. When it was eaten, the valet washed the coffee-pot and restored it to its proper functions. The man came again in the evening: he removed from the sofa a heap of books and a tiger-skin which The Chemist had inherited from his father; and when he had spread out a sheet and fetched pillows and a coverlet, the study, which had served as kitchen and drawing-room, was converted just as easily into a bedroom.