[40]. Jacques Necker (1732-1804), Minister of Finance under Louis XVI; the husband of Gibbon’s first love, and the father of Mme. de Staël.
But alas! the honest man came back and reported that the forest had disappeared; all that remained was a fringe of trees, which made it impossible to detect the truth from the high road or from the manor-house. After the division between the brothers, my uncle had paid five visits to the place, but had seen nothing!
§7
That our way of life may be thoroughly understood, I shall describe a whole day from the beginning. They were all alike, and this very monotony was the most killing part of it all. Our life went on like an English clock with the regulator put back—with a slow and steady movement and a loud tick for each second.
At ten in the morning, the valet who sat in the room next the bedroom, informed Vyéra Artamónovna, formerly my nurse, that the master was getting up; and she went off to prepare coffee, which my father drank alone in his study. The house now assumed a different aspect: the servants began to clean the rooms or at least to make a pretence of doing something. The servants’ hall, empty till then, began to fill up; and even Macbeth, the big Newfoundland dog, sat down before the stove and stared unwinkingly at the fire.
Over his coffee my father read the Moscow Gazette and the Journal de St. Petersburg. It may be worth mentioning that the newspapers were warmed to save his hands from contact with the damp sheets, and that he read the political news in the French version, finding it clearer than the Russian. For some time he took in the Hamburg Gazette, but could not pardon the Germans for using German print; he often pointed out to me the difference between French and German type, and said that the curly tails of the Gothic letters tried his eyes. Then he ordered the Journal de Francfort for a time, but finally contented himself with the native product.
When he had read the newspaper, he noticed for the first time the presence of Sonnenberg in the room. When Niko reached the age of fifteen, Sonnenberg professed to start a shop; but having nothing to sell and no customers, he gave it up, when he had spent such savings as he had in this useful form of commerce; yet he still called himself “a commercial agent.” He was then much over forty, and at that pleasant age he lived like the fowls of the air or a boy of fourteen; he never knew to-day where he would sleep or how he would secure a dinner to-morrow. He enjoyed my father’s favour to a certain extent: what that amounted to, we shall see presently.
§8
In 1840 my father bought the house next to ours, a larger and better house, with a garden, which had belonged to Countess Rostopchín, wife of the famous governor of Moscow. We moved into it. Then he bought a third house, for no reason except that it was adjacent. Two of these houses stood empty; they were never let because tenants would give trouble and might cause fires—both houses were insured, by the way—and they were never repaired, so that both were in a fair way to fall down. Sonnenberg was permitted to lodge in one of these houses, but on conditions: (1) he must never open the yard-gates after 10 p.m. (as the gates were never shut, this was an easy condition); (2) he was to provide fire-wood at his own expense (he did in fact buy it of our coachman); and (3) he was to serve my father as a kind of private secretary, coming in the morning to ask for orders, dining with us, and returning in the evening, when there was no company, to entertain his employer with conversation and the news.
The duties of his place may seem simple enough; but my father contrived to make it so bitter that even Sonnenberg could not stand it continuously, though he was familiar with all the privations that can befall a man with no money and no sense, with a feeble body, a pock-marked face, and German nationality. Every two years or so, the secretary declared that his patience was at an end. He packed up his traps, got together by purchase or barter some odds and ends of disputable value and doubtful quality, and started off for the Caucasus. Misfortune dogged him relentlessly. Either his horse—he drove his own horse as far as Tiflis and Redut-Kale—came down with him in dangerous places inhabited by Don Cossacks; or half his wares were stolen; or his two-wheeled cart broke down and his French scent-bottles wasted their sweetness on the broken wheel at the foot of Mount Elbruz; he was always losing something, and when he had nothing else to lose, he lost his passport. Nearly a year would pass, and then Sonnenberg, older, more unkempt, and poorer than before, with fewer teeth and less hair than ever, would turn up humbly at our house, with a stock of Persian powder against fleas and bugs, faded silk for dressing-gowns, and rusty Circassian daggers; and down he settled once more in the empty house, to buy his own fire-wood and run errands by way of rent.