In another section of the Kitaigorod is the finest part of the city, containing the hotels and residences of the nobles, many of which are truly magnificent. The hotel at which I put up would in Italy be called a palace. As we moved slowly along the street by the Pont des Mareschaux, we discoursed of the terrible inroads at this moment making by the French in the capital of the north, almost every shop having an inviting sign of nouveautés from Paris. Foiled in their attempt with the bayonet, they are now advancing with apparently more feeble but far more insidious and fatal weapons; and the rugged Russian, whom French arms could not conquer, bows to the supremacy of the French modistes and artistes, and quietly wears the livery of the great mistress of fashion.
CHAPTER IV.
The Drosky.—Salle des Nobles.—Russian Gaming.—Gastronomy.—Pedroski.—A Sunday in Moscow.—A Gipsy Belle.—Tea drinking.—The Emperor's Garden.—Retrospective.
Early the next morning I mounted a drosky and rode to a celebrated garden or springs, furnished with every description of mineral water. I have several times spoken of the drosky. This may be called the Russian national vehicle, for it is found all over Russia, and nowhere else that I know of, except at Warsaw, where it was introduced by its Russian conquerors. It is on four wheels, with a long cushioned seat running lengthwise, on which the rider sits astride as on horseback, and so low that he can mount from the street. It is drawn by two horses; one in shafts, with a high arched bow over the neck called the douga, and the other, called "le furieux," in traces alongside, this last being trained to curb his neck and canter while the shaft-horse trots. The seat is long enough for two besides the driver, the riders sitting with their feet on different sides; or sometimes there is a cross-seat behind, on which the riders sit, with their faces to the horses, and the drosky boy, always dressed in a long surtout, with a bell-crowned hat turned up at the sides, sits on the end. But to return to the springs. The waters are prepared under the direction of medical men, who have the chymical analysis of all the principal mineral waters known, and manufacture them to order. As is universally the case in Russia, where there is any attempt at style, the establishment is upon a magnificent scale. The building contains a room perhaps one hundred and fifty feet long, with a clean and highly-polished floor, large looking-glasses, elegant sofas, and mahogany chairs and tables. The windows open upon a balcony extending along the whole front, which is furnished with tables and rustic chairs, and opens upon a large garden ornamented with gravel-walks, trees, and the most rare and valuable plants and flowers, at the time of my visit in full bloom. Every morning, from sunrise till noon, crowds of people, and particularly the nobility and higher classes, frequent this establishment, and that morning there was a larger collection than usual. Russian hospitality is conspicuous at a place like this. A stranger, instead of being avoided, is sought out; and after one or two promenades I was accosted by more than one gentleman, ready to show me every civility. In the long room and on the balconies, scattered about at the different tables, I saw the gourmand who had distended his stomach almost to bursting, and near him the gaunt and bilious dyspeptic, drinking their favourite waters; the dashing officer and the blooming girl, the lover and coquette, and, in short, all the style and fashion of Moscow, their eyes occasionally turning to the long mirrors, and then singly, in pairs and in groups, strolling gently through the gardens, enjoying the music that was poured forth from hidden arbours.
Returning through a street not far from my hotel, I saw a line of carriages, and gentlemen and ladies passing under a light arcade, which formed the entrance to a large building. I joined the throng, and was put back by the doorkeeper because I was not in a dresscoat. I ran to my hotel and changed my frockcoat, but now I had no biglietto of entrance. A few rubles obviated this difficulty and admitted me to the Salle des Nobles, a magnificent apartment surrounded by a colonnade, capable of containing more than three thousand persons, and said to be the finest ballroom in Europe. It belongs to a club of the nobility, and none are admitted as members but nobles. All games of hazard are forbidden; but, nevertheless, all games of hazard are played. Indeed, among the "on dits" which a traveller picks up, gambling is said to be the great vice of Russia. Young men who have not two rubles to rub together will bet thousands; and, when all other resources fail, the dishonourable will cheat, but the delicate-minded will kill themselves. It is not uncommon for a young man to say at the cardtable over night, "I must shoot myself to-morrow;" and he is as good as his word. The Salle was open for a few days, as a sort of fair, for the exhibition of specimens of Russian manufacture; and, besides tables, workboxes, &c., there were some of the finest living specimens of genuine Russian men and women that I had yet seen, though not to be compared, as a Russian officer said, to whom I made the remark, with the exhibition of the same specimens in the waltz and mazourka, when the Salle was lighted up and decorated for a ball.
I returned to my hotel, where I found my old friend the marquis waiting, according to appointment, to dine with me. He would have accompanied me everywhere, but I saw that he suffered from the exertion, and would not allow it. Meeting with me had struck a chord that had not been touched for years, and he was never tired of talking of his friends in America. Every morning he breakfasted in my room, and we dined together every day. We went to the restaurant where I had supped with my friend of the theatre. The saloon was crowded, and at a table next us sat a seigneur, who was dining upon a delicacy that will surprise the reader, viz., one of his own female slaves, a very pretty girl, whom he had hired to the keeper of the restaurant for her maintenance and a dinner a volonté per annum for himself. This was the second time he had dined on her account, and she was then waiting upon him; a pretty, modest, delicate-looking girl, and the old noble seemed never to know when he had enough of her. We left him gloating over still untasted dishes, and apparently mourning that human ability could hold out no longer. In going out my old friend, in homely but pithy phrase, said the only difference between a Russian seigneur and a Russian serf is, that the one wears his shirt inside his trousers and the other outside; but my friend spoke with the prejudices of a soldier of France aggravated by more than twenty years of exile. So far as my observation extended, the higher classes are rather extraordinary for talent and acquirements. Their government is unfortunate for the development and exercise of abilities. They have none of the learned profession; merchandise is disgraceful, and the army is the only field. With an ardent love of country and an ambition to distinguish himself, every nobleman becomes a soldier, and there is hardly an old or middle-aged individual of this class who was not in arms to repel the invasion of Napoleon, and hardly a young man who did not serve lately in a less noble cause, the campaign in Poland. The consequence of service in the army seems to have been generally a passion for display and expensive living, which sent them back to their estates, after their terms of service expired, over head and ears in debt. Unable to come often to the cities, and obliged to live at their chateaux, deprived of all society, surrounded only by slaves, and feeling the want of the excitement incident to a military life, many of them become great gourmands, or rather, as my French friend said, gluttons. They do not eat, said he, they swallow; and the manner in which, with the true spirit of a Frenchman who still remembered the cuisine of the Palais Royal, he commented upon their eating entremets, hors d'œuvres, rotis, and desserts all pellmell, would have formed a proper episode to Major Hamilton's chapter upon Americans eating eggs out of wineglasses. The old marquis, although he retained all his French prejudices against the Russians, and always asserted, as the Russians themselves admit, that, but for the early setting in of winter, Napoleon would have conquered Russia, allowed them the virtue of unbounded hospitality, and enumerated several principal families at whose tables he could at any time take a seat without any express invitation, and with whom he was always sure of being a welcome guest; and he mentioned the case of a compatriot who for years had a place regularly reserved for him at the table of a seigneur, which he took whenever he pleased without any questions being asked, until, having stayed away longer than usual, the seigneur sent to inquire for him, and learned that he was dead.
But to return. Toward evening I parted with the marquis, mounted a drosky, and rode to the country theatre at Pedroski. Pedroski is a place dear to the heart of every Russian, having been the favourite residence of Peter the Great, to whom Russia owes its existence among civilized nations. It is about three versts from the barrier, on the St. Petersburgh road. The St. Petersburgh Gate is a very imposing piece of architecture. Six spirited horses rest lightly upon the top, like the brazen horses at St. Mark's in Venice. A wide road, divided into avenues for carriages and pedestrians, gravelled and lined with trees, leads from the gate. The chateau is an old and singular, but interesting building of red brick, with a green dome and white cornices, and enclosed by a circular wall flanked with turrets. In the plain in front two regiments of Cossack cavalry were going through their exercises. The grounds around the chateau are very extensive, handsomely laid out for carriages and promenades, public and retired, to suit every taste. The principal promenade is about a mile in length, through a forest of majestic old trees. On each side is a handsome footpath of continual shade; and sometimes almost completely hidden by the luxuriant foliage are beautiful little summer-houses, abundantly supplied with all kinds of refreshments.
The theatre is at a little distance from the extreme end of the great promenade, a plain and unpretending building; and this and the grand operahouse are the only theatres I have seen built like ours, merely with continued rows of seats, and not partitioned off into private boxes. The opera was some little Russian piece, and was followed by the grand ballet, the Revolt of the Seraglio. He who goes to Russia expecting to see a people just emerging from a state of barbarism, will often be astonished to find himself suddenly in a scene of Parisian elegance and refinement; and in no place will he feel this wonder more than in an operahouse at Moscow. The house was rather full, and contained more of the Russian nobility than I had yet seen at any one time. They were well dressed, adorned with stars and ribands, and, as a class of men, the "biggest in the round" I ever saw. Orders and titles of nobility, by-the-way, are given with a liberality which makes them of no value; and all over Russia princes are as plenty as pickpockets in London.
The seigneurs of Russia have jumped over all intermediate grades of civilization, and plunged at once into the luxuries of metropolitan life. The ballet was, of course, inferior to that of Paris or London, but it is speaking in no mean praise of it to say that at this country theatre it might be made a subject of comparison. The dancers were the prettiest, the most interesting, and, what I was particularly struck with, the most modest looking I ever saw on the stage. It was melancholy to look at those beautiful girls, who, amid the glare and glitter of the stage, and in the graceful movements of the dance, were perfectly captivating and entrancing, and who, in the shades of domestic life, might fill the measure of man's happiness on earth, and know them to be slaves. The whole troop belongs to the emperor. They are selected when young with reference to their beauty and talents, and are brought up with great care and expense for the stage. With light fairy figures, seeming rather spirits than corporeal substances, and trained to inspire admiration and love, they can never give way to these feelings themselves, for their affections and marriages are regulated entirely by the manager's convenience. What though they are taken from the very poorest class of life, leaving their parents, their brothers and sisters, the tenants of miserable cabins, oppressed and vilified, and cold and hungry, while they are rolling in luxuries. A chain does not gall the less because it is gilded. Raised from the lot to which they were born, taught ideas they would never have known, they but feel more sensibly the weight of their bonds; and the veriest sylph, whose graceful movements have brought down the loudest thunders of applause, and whose little heart flutters with the admiration she has excited, would probably give all her shortlived triumph for the privilege of bestowing that little flutterer where it would be loved and cherished. There was one among them whom I long remembered. I followed her with my eyes till the curtain fell and left a blank around me. I saw her go out, and afterward she passed me in one of a long train of dark blue carriages belonging to the direction, in which they are carried about like merchandise from theatre to theatre, but, like many other bright visions that broke upon me for a moment, I never saw her again.