When captain in the Guards, he was sent on a mission to London. Paul, who was then Tsar, noticed this when he read the roster, and ordered that he should report himself at once in Petersburg. The attaché sailed by the first ship and appeared on parade.
“Do you want to stay in London?” Paul asked in his hoarse voice.
“If Your Majesty is graciously pleased to allow it,” answered the captain.
“Go back at once!” the hoarse voice replied; and the young officer sailed, without even seeing his family in Moscow.
While he served as ambassador, diplomatic questions were settled by bayonets and cannon-balls; and his diplomatic career came to an end at the Congress of Vienna, that great field-day for all the diplomats of Europe. On his return to Russia, he was created a lord-in-waiting at Moscow—a capital which has no Court. Then he was elected to the Senate, though he knew nothing of law or Russian judicial procedure; he served on the Widows’ and Orphans’ Board, and was a governor of hospitals and other public institutions. All these duties he performed with a zeal that was probably superfluous, a love of his own way that was certainly harmful, and an integrity that passed wholly unnoticed.
He was never to be found at home. He tired out a team of four strong horses every morning, and another in the afternoon. He never missed a meeting of the Senate; twice a week he attended the Widows’ Board; and there were also his hospitals and schools. Besides all this, he was never absent from the theatre when a French play was given, and he was driven to the English Club on three days of every week. He had no time to be bored—always busy with one of his many occupations, perpetually on the way to some engagement, and his life rolled along on easy springs in a world of files and official envelopes.
To the age of seventy, he kept the health of youth. He was always to be seen at every great ball or dinner; he figured at speech-days and meetings of public bodies; whatever their objects might be—agriculture or medicine, fire insurance or natural science—it was all one to him; and, besides all this (perhaps because of this), he kept to old age some measure of humanity and warmth of heart.
§10
It is impossible to conceive a greater contrast to all this than my father. My uncle was perpetually active and perpetually cheerful, an occasional visitor at his own house. But my father hardly ever went out-of-doors, hated all the world of official business, and was always hard to please and out of humour. We had our eight horses too, but our stable was a kind of hospital for cripples; my father kept them partly for the sake of appearance, and partly that the two coachmen and two postilions might have some other occupation, as well as going to fetch newspapers and arranging cock-fights, which last amusement they carried on with much success in the space between the coach-house and the neighbours’ yard.
My father did not remain long in the public service. Brought up by a French tutor in the house of a pious aunt, he entered the Guards as a serjeant at sixteen and retired as a captain when Paul became Tsar. In 1801 he went abroad and wandered about from one foreign country to another till the end of 1811. He returned to Russia with my mother three months before I was born; the year after the burning of Moscow he spent in the Government of Tver, and then settled down permanently in Moscow, where he led by choice a solitary and monotonous life. His brother’s lively temperament was distasteful to him.