I resume my dear laments, and I must tell you that the highway from Petersburg to Tilsit is only practicable at two sections: from Petersburg to Narva, and from Riga to Taurogen; so that for more than half way the road is detestable when it rains, and it had rained a great deal, alas! Imagine the jolts we made! but the vehicles are excellent; they resisted them. All that is Russian has a very tough life. A roadway is laid down across the sands of Livonia with gorse; out though the road has the gorse characteristics, it has, none the less, a disquieting aspect and a boggy style. It is a miracle to get over the road in three days and a half; and that gives a great idea of Russian stubbornness. We had eight horses, and sometimes ten, in certain places. Where the chaussée [paved road] is made it is magnificent. Ah! I shall have pleasure in going over it again! but then it will not be over gorse but flowers that I shall be jolted. Literally, one eats nothing by the way, for there is nothing to eat; but the way-stations are very handsome, and there is always excellent Russian tea. I am therefore able to honour my grief by thinness, due to the diet of the journey; if I suffered, my mental condition was such that I did not become conscious of it; the grief of quitting you quelled hunger, just as the pleasure of meeting you had already quelled sea-sickness. You are above all.
I am here at the Hôtel de Russie, which is passably good and not too dear. From Berlin I shall go to Leipzig and Frankfort-on-the-Main, by the Prussian Schnell-post; and from Frankfort to France by steamboat, or railroad all the way; which is, I think, more economical than any other way of travelling.
I have found two road companions, two sculptors, one of whom, as I told you, speaks an almost incomprehensible French, and I have just made the rounds of Berlin with him. These young men have been full of attentions to me all the way, especially from Riga, where I parted from my first companion, the Frenchman. The artist-nature is everywhere the same. These two young fellows got me out of all difficulties at inns, and I have just invited them to dinner (a rapin dinner, be it understood). It is the least I can do for such obliging lads to thank them for their good care before we part.
This sulky Berlin is not comparable to sumptuous Petersburg. In the first place, one might cut a score of mean little towns like the capital of the Brandebourg out of the great city of the vast European empire, and there would still remain enough space built upon to crush the score of extracted little Berlins without injury to its vast extent. But, at first sight, Berlin seems the more populated; for I have perceived several individuals in the streets, which is not often the case in Petersburg. However, the houses here, without being handsome, seem well built; one can see that they are not wanting in comfort inside. The public buildings, rather ugly of aspect, are of handsome freestone; and the space around them is so managed as to set them off. Very likely it is to this artfulness that Berlin owes its air of being more populous than Petersburg; I should have said more animated if it concerned any other people; but the Prussian, with his brutish heaviness, is never anything but ponderous; less beer and bad tobacco, and more French or Italian wit is needed to produce the stir of the other great capitals of Europe, or else the grand industrial and commercial ideas which have caused the great development of London; but Berlin and its inhabitants will never be otherwise than an ugly little town inhabited by ugly fat people.
However, it must be admitted, to whoso returns from Russia, Germany has an indefinable air which can only be explained by the magic word LIBERTY, manifested by free manners and customs, or, I should say, by freedom in manners and customs. The principal public buildings of Berlin are grouped about the hotel where I am, so that I could see them all in an hour. Fatigue is seizing me; I aspire to dinner: the first I have eaten since the splendours of Russia.
Till to-morrow, dear countess.
[1] To Madame Hanska, at St. Petersburg. Balzac has just left her after a visit of two months.—TR.
October 15.
Our dinner was composed of soup, venison, mayonnaise of fish, macaroni with cheese, a little dessert, a half-bottle of madeira, and a bottle of bordeaux. Ecco, signora! At eight o'clock I dismissed my guests and went to bed, the first bed that resembled a bed since I left Dunkerque. Before going to sleep I thought of you and of what you might be doing at eight o'clock of a Saturday evening. I imagined you were at the theatre; I saw the Michel theatre; but I did not have the cruel pleasure, as in Schnell-post or in Karéta potchtôvaïa, to think till midnight, for at midnight I was sound asleep, and in the morning I slept till eight o'clock. You have so often subdued the most imperious things in nature that you will pardon poor nature for taking its revenge for once. Exclusively tender souls have a worship for memories, and your memory, you cannot doubt it, is always in my heart and in my thought. I give myself the fête of thinking of it during that short half-dreaming moment when we feel ourselves betwixt slumber and sleep; and all the sweet impressions of the two months I have spent with you return to enchant my soul with their radiant images, so full of harmony. You see that the Virgin of Poland is the same as the Notre-Dame of France, and that if my journey is saddened by a separation such as I have now borne three times, all is otherwise well with me.