He said:
“I do not want to believe it: such scandals are so often invented and people’s memory spoilt. Moreover, Poggio loved Volkonsky so much that when later (Volkonsky’s wife being already dead) he felt the approach of death himself, he came to Volkonsky to die there.”
Tolstoi went on to say:
“I made Volkonsky’s acquaintance in Florence at Dolgorukov’s, Koko Dolgorukov, the doctor. At that time it was rare for an aristocrat to become a doctor. It was when Nicolas I. limited the number of university students to three hundred, and Dolgorukov could not be admitted to any other faculty. He was a wonderfully capable man: he wrote poems, was a superb musician, painted pictures. He was married to (?). When I visited them for the first time in Florence, this was the scene I found: his wife and the well-known Marquis de Rogan were playing an extraordinary game: they made a mark on the wall and tried, by lifting their feet, to touch the mark; each tried to lift his or her leg higher and higher.
“There was also present the very gifted painter Nikitin. He drew wonderfully in pencil. I remember he had an album and drew Volkonsky’s portrait in it. He also drew mine. I wonder where the album is. If some collector were to get hold of it now!”
Then at dinner Tolstoi told us two anecdotes from his life. The first was how he ate some earth-worms (Tolstoi told it because Alexandra Lvovna and Ilya Lvovich’s children were going fishing). Tolstoi said he was carrying the worms in one hand, and a loaf of black bread in the other. He had finished eating the bread, and, thinking of something else, put the worms in his mouth and began chewing them, and for some time could not think what mess he had put in his mouth.
Tolstoi said:
“I remember the taste of them as if I were eating them now.”
My wife asked him if it was very unpleasant.