The general, who had never before been in our house, came to propose to our father to marry his wife’s niece, Mademoiselle Elisabeth Karandinó, one of several daughters of an admiral of the Black Sea fleet—a young lady with a classical Greek profile, said to have been very beautiful. Father accepted, and his second wedding, like the first, was solemnized with great pomp.
‘You young people understand nothing of this kind of thing,’ he said in conclusion, after having told me the story more than once, with a very fine humour which I will not attempt to reproduce. ‘But do you know what it meant at that time, the commander of an army corps—above all that one-eyed devil, as we used to call him—coming himself to propose? Of course she had no dowry; only a big trunk filled with ladies’ finery, and that Martha, her one serf, dark as a gypsy, sitting upon it.’
I have no recollection whatever of this event. I only remember a big drawing-room in a richly furnished house, and in that room a young lady, attractive but with a rather too sharp southern look, gambolling with us, and saying, ‘You see what a jolly mamma you will have;’ to which Sásha and I, sulkily looking at her, replied, ‘Our mamma has flown away to the sky.’ We regarded so much liveliness with suspicion.
Winter came, and a new life began for us. Our house was sold and another was bought and furnished completely anew. All that could convey a reminiscence of our mother disappeared—her portraits, her paintings, her embroideries. In vain Madame Búrman implored to be retained in our house, and promised to devote herself to the baby our stepmother was expecting as to her own child: she was sent away. ‘Nothing of the Sulímas in my house,’ she was told. All connection with our uncles and aunts and our grandmother was broken. Uliána was married to Frol, who became a major-domo, while she was made housekeeper; and for our education a richly paid French tutor, M. Poulain, and a miserably paid Russian student, N. P. Smirnóff, were engaged.
Many of the sons of the Moscow nobles were educated at that time by Frenchmen, who represented the débris of Napoleon’s Grande Armée. M. Poulain was one of them. He had just finished the education of the youngest son of the novelist Zagóskin; and his pupil, Serge, enjoyed in the Old Equerries’ Quarter the reputation of being so well brought up that our father did not hesitate to engage M. Poulain for the considerable sum of six hundred roubles a year.
M. Poulain brought with him his setter, Trésor, his coffee-pot Napoléon, and his French text-books, and he began to rule over us and the serf Matvéi who was attached to our service.
His plan of education was very simple. After having woke us up he attended to his coffee, which he used to take in his room. While we were preparing the morning lessons he made his toilet with minute care: he shampooed his grey hair so as to conceal his growing baldness, put on his tail-coat, sprinkled and washed himself with eau-de-cologne, and then escorted us downstairs to say good-morning to our parents. We used to find our father and stepmother at breakfast, and on approaching them we recited in the most ceremonious manner, ‘Bonjour, mon cher papa,’ and ‘Bonjour, ma chère maman,’ and kissed their hands. M. Poulain made a very complicated and elegant obeisance in pronouncing the words, ‘Bonjour, monsieur le prince,’ and ‘Bonjour, madame la princesse,’ after which the procession immediately withdrew and retired upstairs. This ceremony was repeated every morning.
Then our work began. M. Poulain changed his tail-coat for a dressing-gown, covered his head with a leather cap, and dropping into an easy-chair said ‘Recite the lesson.’
We recited it ‘by heart’ from one mark which was made in the book with the nail to the next mark. M. Poulain had brought with him the grammar of Noël and Chapsal, memorable to more than one generation of Russian boys and girls; a book of French dialogues; a history of the world, in one volume; and a universal geography, also in one volume. We had to commit to memory the grammar, the dialogues, the history, and the geography.
The grammar, with its well-known sentences, ‘What is grammar?’ ‘The art of speaking and writing correctly,’ went all right. But the history book, unfortunately, had a preface, which contained an enumeration of all the advantages which can be derived from a knowledge of history. Things went on smoothly enough with the first sentences. We recited: ‘The prince finds in it magnanimous examples for governing his subjects; the military commander learns from it the noble art of warfare.’ But the moment we came to law all went wrong. ‘The jurisconsult meets in it’—but what the learned lawyer meets in history we never came to know. That terrible word ‘jurisconsult’ spoiled all the game. As soon as we reached it we stopped.