CHAPTER 12.
Road from Kiow to Moscow.
About nine hundred versts still separated Kiow from Moscow. My Russian coachmen drove me along like lightning, singing airs, the words of which I was told were compliments and encouragements to their horses, "Go along," they said, "my friends: we know one another: go quick." I have as yet seen nothing at all barbarous in this people; on the contrary their forms have an elegance and softness about them which you find no where else. Never does a Russian coachman pass a female, of whatever age or rank she may be, without saluting her, and the female returns it by an inclination of the head which is always noble and graceful. An old man who could not make himself understood by me, pointed to the earth, and then to the heaven, to signify to me, that the one would shortly be to him the road to the other. I know very well that the shocking barbarities which disfigure the history of Russia may be urged, reasonably, as evidence of a contrary character; but these I should rather lay to the charge of the boyars, the class which was depraved by the despotism which it exercised or submitted to, than to the nation itself. Besides, political dissentions, everywhere and at all times, distort national character, and there is nothing more deplorable than that succession of masters, whom crimes have elevated or overturned; but such is the fatal condition of absolute power on this earth. The civil servants of the government, of an inferior class, all those who look to make their fortune by their suppleness or intrigues, in no degree resemble the inhabitants of the country, and I can readily believe all the ill that has been and may be said of them; but to appreciate properly the character of a warlike nation, we must look to its soldiers, and the class from which its soldiers are taken, the peasantry.
Although I was driven along with great rapidity, it seemed to me that I did not advance a step, the country was so extremely monotonous. Plains of sand, forests of birch tree, and villages at a great distance from each other, composed of wooden houses all built upon the same plan: these were the only objects that my eyes encountered. I felt that sort of nightmare which sometimes seizes one during the night, when you think you are always marching and never advancing. The country appeared to me like the image of infinite space, and to require eternity to traverse it. Every instant you met couriers passing, who went along with incredible swiftness; they were seated on a wooden bench placed across a little cart drawn by two horses, and nothing stopped them for a moment. The jolting of their carriage sometimes made them spring two feet above it, but they fell with astonishing address, and made haste to call out in Russian, forward, with an energy similar to that of the French on a day of battle. The Sclavonian language is singularly echoing; I should almost say there is something metallic about it; you would think you heard a bell striking, when the Russians pronounce certain letters of their alphabet, quite different from those which compose the dialects of the West.
We saw passing some corps de reserve approaching by forced marches to the theatre of war; the Cossacks were repairing, one by one, to the army, without order or uniform, with a long lance in their hand, and a kind of grey dress, whose ample hood they put over their head. I had formed quite another idea of these people; they live behind the Dnieper; there their way of living is independent, in the manner of savages; but during war they allow themselves to be governed despotically. One is accustomed to see, in fine uniforms of brilliant colors, the most formidable armies. The dull colors of the Cossack dress excite another sort of fear; one might say that they are ghosts who pounce upon you.
Half way between Kiow and Moscow, as we were already in the vicinity of the armies, horses became more scarce. I began to be afraid of being detained in my journey, at the very moment when the necessity of speed became most urgent; and when I had to wait for five or six hours in front of a post-house, (as there was seldom an apartment into which I could enter) I thought with trembling of that army which might overtake me at the extremity of Europe, and render my situation at once tragical and ridiculous; for it is thus with the failure of an undertaking of this kind. The circumstances which compelled me to it not being generally known, I might have been asked why I quitted my own house, even although it had been made a prison to me, and there are good enough people who would not have failed to say, with an air of compunction, that it was very unlucky, but I should have done better to stay where I was. If tyranny had only its direct partisans on its side, it could never maintain itself; the astonishing thing, and which proves human misery more than all, is, that the greater part of mediocre people enlist themselves in the service of events: they have not the strength to think deeper than a fact, and when an oppressor has triumphed, and a victim has been destroyed, they hasten to justify, not exactly the tyrant, but the destiny whose instrument he is. Weakness of mind and character is no doubt the cause of this servility: but there is also in man a certain desire of finding destiny, whatever it may be, in the right, as if it was a way of living in peace with it.
I reached at last that part of my road which removed me from the theatre of war, and arrived in the governments of Orel and Toula, which have been so much talked of since, in the bulletins of the two armies. I was received in these solitary abodes, for so the provincial towns in Russia appear, with the most perfect hospitality. Several gentlemen of the neighbourhood came to my inn, to compliment me on my writings, and I confess having been flattered to find that my literary reputation had extended to this distance from my native country. The lady of the governor received me in the Asiatic style, with sherbet and roses; her apartment was elegantly furnished with musical instruments and pictures. In Europe you see every where the contrast of wealth and poverty; but in Russia it may be said that neither one nor the other makes itself remarked.
The people are not poor; the great know how to lead, when it is necessary, the same life as the people: it is the mixture of the hardest privations and of the most refined enjoyments which characterizes the country. These same noblemen, whose residence unites all that the luxury of different parts of the world has most attractive, live, while they are travelling, on much worse food than our French peasantry, and know how to bear, not only during war, but in various circumstances of life, a physical existence of the most disagreeable kind. The severity of the climate, the marshes, the forests, the deserts, of which a great part of the country is composed, place man in a continual struggle with nature. Fruits, and even flowers, only grow in hot-houses; vegetables are not generally cultivated; and there are no vines any where. The habitual mode of life of the French peasants could not be obtained in Russia but at a very great expense. There they have only necessaries by luxury: whence it happens that when luxury is unattainable, even necessaries are renounced. What the English call comforts are hardly to be met with in Russia. You will never find any thing sufficiently perfect to satisfy in all ways the imagination of the great Russian noblemen; but when this poetry of wealth fails them, they drink hydromel, sleep upon a board, and travel day and night in an open carriage, without regretting the luxury to which one would think they had been habituated. It is rather as magnificence that they love fortune, than from the pleasures they derive from it: resembling still in that point the Easterns, who exercise hospitality to strangers, load them with presents, and yet frequently neglect the every day comforts of their own life. This is one of the reasons which explains that noble courage with which the Russians have supported the ruin which has been occasioned them by the burning of Moscow. More accustomed to external pomp than to the care of themselves, they are not mollified by luxury, and the sacrifice of money satisfies their pride as much or more than the magnificence of their expenditure. What characterizes this people, is something gigantic of all kinds: ordinary dimensions are not at all applicable to it. I do not by that mean to say that neither real grandeur nor stability are to be met with in it: but the boldness and the imagination of the Russians know no bounds: with them every thing is colossal rather than well proportioned, audacious rather than reflective, and if they do not hit the mark, it is because they overshoot it.