One day Tania, my little Tania, was snatched from my arms. Vassili took her from me, nor did I ever see her again.
I had gone out, I remember, sad and alone, into the wintry park. By my side trotted Bear, my father's faithful setter, who every now and then thrust his moist and affectionate nose into my hand. In my thoughts I was trying to face what the future might have in store for me.
“When my little Tioka grows up,” I said to myself, “I know, alas! that I shall lose him. He will want to live with his father: he will look forward to entering upon life under happy and propitious auspices. Yes, Tioka will leave me, I know. But my little girl will stay with me. Tania will be my very own. She will grow up, fair and gentle, by my side; I shall forget my sorrows in her clinging love; I shall live my life over again in hers. I shall be renewed, in strength and purity, in my daughter's stainless youth.”
As I thus reflected I saw my mother running to meet me, her gray head bare in the icy wind; she was weeping bitterly. Tania was gone! Vassili had taken her away!
Notwithstanding all my tears and prayers it was never vouchsafed to me to see my little girl again.
But when the day came in which they sought to tear my son from me as well, I fought like a maddened creature, vowing that no human power should take him from me while I lived. I fled with him from Otrada—I fled I knew not and cared not whither, clasping in my arms my tender fair-haired prey, watching over him in terror, guarding him with fervent prayers. I fled, hunted onward by the restlessness that was in my own blood, pursued by the bats of madness in my brain.
Thus began my aimless wanderings that were to lead me so far astray.
Alone with little Tioka and the humble Elise Perrier, I took to the highways of the world.
How helpless and terrified we were, all three of us! It was like living in a melancholy fairy tale; it was like the story of the babes lost in the wood. Sometimes, in the midst of a street in some great unknown city, little Tioka would stop and say: “Mother, let us find some one who knows us, and ask them where we are to go and what we are to do.”
“No, no! Nobody must know us, Tioka.”