“The taste of earth; but I don’t advise you to taste it.”
Some one sneezed and Tolstoi told another story.
“I used to sneeze very loudly; once at night I woke and felt I was going to sneeze immediately, and as Sophie Andreevna was going to have a baby, I was afraid to frighten her by sneezing. Half asleep I cried out: ‘Sonia, I am going to sneeze!’ Sophie Andreevna of course woke up and was frightened, and I instantly fell asleep without having sneezed.”
Tolstoi also talked about Belogolovy’s Reminiscences.[9] He seemed to Tolstoi a narrow-minded man. Speaking of the terrible impression made by his description of the diseases and deaths of Nekrasov, Turgenev, and Saltikov, Tolstoi said:
“How they dreaded death! And then there were those horrible disgusting details of their illnesses, particularly Nekrasov’s.”
Last winter my wife and I stayed at Yasnaya Polyana, and, when we had to leave, Tolstoi was sitting in his room with P. A. Boulanger. We came into the room to say good-bye, and probably they were talking of Boulanger’s family affairs.
We entered just as Tolstoi was saying:
“ ... if people only said more often: ‘Do you remember?’ People should make it a rule that if one person says or does something wrong in the heat of a quarrel, or when one is angry, the other should say: ‘Do you remember?’”
Tolstoi noticed my wife and me and said: