In fact, his personal appearance caused the sensitive lad much concern, but his efforts to improve it were unsuccessful. On one occasion he clipped his eyebrows, and the unsatisfactory results of that operation occasioned him great grief.
He records in his Reminiscences the following incident, which certainly intensified his lifelong antipathy to corporal punishment:
I do not remember for what, but for something quite undeserving of punishment, St. Thomas [the resident French tutor who succeeded Rössel] first locked me into a room, and secondly threatened to flog me. I thereupon experienced a dreadful feeling of anger indignation and disgust, not only towards St. Thomas himself, but towards the violence with which I was threatened.
When quite a small boy he conceived an attachment for the nine-year-old daughter of his father's friend, Islényef, and being jealous of her for daring to talk to others, he angrily pushed her off a balcony, with the result that she limped for a long time afterwards. A quarter of a century later, when he married this lady's daughter, his mother-in-law used laughingly to remind him of the incident, and say, 'Evidently you pushed me off the balcony in my childhood that you might marry my daughter afterwards!'
His sister relates that once when they were driving in a troika (i.e. three horses abreast) to Yásnaya, Leo got down during a break in the journey and went forward on foot. When the carriage started again and began to overtake him he took to running, and when the horses went faster he also increased his speed, racing as hard as he could. He was not overtaken till he had gone about two miles and was completely tired out. He was lifted back into the carriage gasping for breath, perspiring and quite exhausted. Any one not endowed with the remarkable physical vigour that, in spite of frequent attacks of ill-health, has characterised Tolstoy through life, would probably have done themselves serious injury had they taxed their vital resources as recklessly as he often did.
All accounts agree in representing him as an original and odd little fellow, unwilling to do things like other people. He would for instance enter a drawing-room and, carefully placing his feet together and bending his head, would make his bow backwards, saluting each of the company in turn.
Two incidents are recorded relating to the love of riding which has remained a characteristic of his through life.
When his brothers were sent to a riding-school, Leo (in spite of his father's assurances and those of the riding-master that he was too small to begin and would tumble off) also obtained permission to learn to ride. At his first lesson he duly tumbled off, but begged to be replaced in the saddle; and he did not fall off again, but became an expert horseman. In one of the short stories he wrote many years later for the use of school-children, he tells how he once wished to ride the old horse Raven after his brothers had each had a turn on it; and how Raven being too tired to move from the stables, he beat it till he broke his switch on its sides. He then demanded a stouter switch from the serf in charge, but the man replied:
'Ah, master, you have no pity! Why do you beat him? He is twenty years old, and is tired out; he can hardly breathe. Why, for a horse, he is as old as Timoféyitch I thought of Timoféyitch, and hearkened to the man. I got off the horse's back; and when I noticed how its steaming sides were working, and how heavily it breathed through its nostrils, swishing its thin tail, I understood how hard it was for it. Till then I had thought that it was as happy as I was myself. And I felt so sorry for Raven that I began to kiss his sweaty neck and to beg his pardon for having beaten him.