1870
As he grew older Tolstoy's love of outdoor exercise tended more towards activity serving a useful productive purpose, and one finds a hint of this in the following letter to Fet, dated 11th May 1870:
I received your letter, dear friend, when returning perspiring home from work, with axe and spade, and when therefore I was a thousand miles from things artistic in general, and from our business in particular. On opening the letter I first read the poem and felt a sensation in my nose. On coming home to my wife I tried to read it to her, but could not do so for tears of emotion. The poem is one of those rare ones in which not a word could be added or subtracted or altered: it is a live thing, and admirable....
I have just served for a week as juryman, and found it very interesting and instructive.
The next letter refers to the fact that Tolstoy did his best literary work in winter, when he often spent almost the whole day, and sometimes part of the night, at it; that was the time when his 'sap flowed':
2 Oct. 1870.
It is long since we met, and in my winter condition, which I am now entering, I am specially glad to see you. I have been shooting; but the sap is beginning to flow, and I am collecting it as it drips. Whether it be good or bad sap, it is pleasant to let it flow in these long wonderful autumn evenings.... A grief has befallen me; the mare is ill. The veterinary says her wind has been broken, but I cannot have broken it.
The Franco-Prussian war, which commenced at this time, interested Tolstoy keenly. He had come into contact with the French, in the Crimea, before the Napoleonic autocracy had long held sway; and he had visited France in 1857 and 1860, before the effect of that putrescent influence had become fully apparent. Neither the idea of German national unity, nor Bismarck's and Moltke's ideal of efficient organisation and discipline, were things that much appealed to Tolstoy. So it happened that not only were all his sympathies on the side of the French, but he also felt assured of their triumph. His friend Prince Ouroúsof used to write letters to Katkóf's Moscow Gazette demonstrating by analogies with games of chess, that the French were continually drawing the German armies into more and more desperate positions in which they must soon be quite destroyed. When, on the contrary, the French were utterly defeated, it came to him as a complete surprise; which all tends to illustrate the fact that men of great intellectual power, living isolated on their country estates, may at times go very considerably wrong in their estimate of the trend of some of the forces that influence the world.
On 12 February 1871 a daughter was born, who was christened Mary. In later life she, of all his children, was the one most deeply influenced by her father's teaching. The Countess, who, as already mentioned, made a point of nursing her own children, owing to the neglect of an attendant, became unable to do so in this instance before the child was many weeks old, and a wet-nurse was engaged; but as soon as the mother saw her child at a stranger's breast she burst into a flood of jealous tears, dismissed the nurse on the spot, and ordered the child to be fed with a bottle. Tolstoy, when he heard what had happened, declared that his wife had only shown the jealous affection natural to a true mother.