Je ne cesse de me féliciter de l'idée que j'ai eu de quitter Paris et de venir passer le printemps ici, quoique cela m'ait mérité de votre part le reproche d'inconstance. Vraiment, je suis heureux, and begin to feel the advantage of having been born with a caul.
Il y a ici société charmante de russes: les Poúshkins, the Karamzíns and the Mestchérskys; and they have all, Heaven knows why, taken to liking me; I feel it, and the month I have spent here I have been so nice and good and cosy, that I am sad at the thought of leaving.
From Clarens he took steamer to Montreux, and from there went on foot, taking with him as companion a ten-year-old lad named Sásha, the son of some Russians whose acquaintance he had made at Clarens. They crossed the Pass of Jamon and, after changing their minds as to the direction they would take, finally made for Château d'Oex, from whence they proceeded by diligence to Thun. From that town Tolstoy went on to Lucerne, which he reached in July 1857.
Again and again in his Diary and letters Tolstoy's vivid delight in Nature shows itself in descriptions of the scenery: 'It is wonderful,' he writes, 'but I was at Clarens for two months, and every time—when in the morning, and especially after dinner towards evening—I opened the shutters on which the shadows were already falling, and glanced at the lake and the distant blue of the mountains reflected in it, the beauty blinded me and acted on me with the force of a surprise.' But together with this keen appreciation, comes now and then a sort of protest that this grandiose Swiss mountain scenery is, after all, not the Nature that most appeals to him—a yearning for the vast steppes and forests of his native land. After ascending the Pass of Jamon and describing the magnificent scenery and the pleasure of the climb, he adds:
It was something beautiful, even unusually beautiful, but I do not love what are called magnificent and remarkable views: they are, as it were, cold.... I love Nature when, though it surrounds me on all sides and extends unendingly, I am part of it. I love it, when on all sides I am surrounded by hot air, and that same air rolls away to unending distance, and those same sappy leaves of grass which I crush as I sit on them, form the green of the boundless meadows; when those same leaves which, fluttering in the wind, run their shadows across my face, form also the dark blue of the distant forests; while the same air one breathes makes the deep, light blue of the immeasurable sky; when you do not exult and rejoice alone in Nature, but when around you myriads of insects buzz and whirl, and beetles, clinging together, creep about, and all around you birds overflow with song.
But this is bare, cold, desolate, grey plateau; and somewhere afar there is something beautiful veiled with mist. But that something is so distant that I do not feel the chief delight of Nature—do not feel myself a part of that endless and beautiful distance: it is foreign to me.
From Lucerne he writes:
[37]Je suis de nouveau tout seul, et je vous avouerai que très souvent la solitude m'est pénible, car les connaissances qu'on fait dans les hôtels et en chemin de fer ne sont pas des ressources; mais cet isolement a du moins le bon côté de me pousser au travail. Je travaille un peu, mais cela va mal, comme d'ordinaire en été.
It was here that the incident occurred described in Lucerne, a sketch published in the September number of the Contemporary that same year, and one which in its fierce castigation of the rich is a precursor of much that he wrote thirty years later. Especially the conduct of the wealthy English tourists roused his ire. The particular incident the story deals with is this:
On 7 July 1857, in Lucerne, in front of the Schweizerhof Hotel, where the richest people stay, an itinerant mendicant-singer sang songs and played his guitar for half-an-hour. About a hundred people listened to him. Three times the singer asked them to give him something, but not one of them did so, and many laughed at him.