Dimitri was the only son of Paul Drentell, the renowned banker of St. Petersburg, who had been raised to the nobility as a reward for having negotiated a loan for the Government. Paul had been sordid and avaricious; his vast wealth was wrung from the necessities of the unfortunates Otho were obliged to borrow from him or succumb to financial disaster. Had he been a Jew, his greed, his miserly ways, his usuries, would have been stigmatized as Jewish traits, but being a devout Catholic he was spoken of as "Drentell, the financier."
The nobility of Russia counts many such upstarts among its representatives. It boasts of a peculiar historical development. The hereditary element plays an unimportant part in matters of state. Exposed to the tyranny of the Muscovite autocrats, they hailed with joy the elevation of the Romanoff family to the throne. The condition of the nobles was thenceforth bettered, their political influence increased. Under Peter the Great, however, there came a change. To noble birth, this Czar showed a most humiliating indifference, and the nobles saw with horror the accession to their ranks of the lowest order of men. The condition of the aristocracy, old and new, was not, however, one of unmixed happiness. The nobles were transformed into mere servants of the Czar, and heavily did their bondage weigh upon them. After the death of the great Prince, they experienced varied changes. Catherine converted the surroundings of her court into a ludicrous imitation of the elegant and refined French régime. Parisian fashions and the French language were adopted by the nobility. It was a pleasure-seeking, pomp-loving aristocracy that surrounded the powerful Empress. But her capricious and violent son overturned this order of things and again reduced the nobility to a condition of dependence and even degradation, from which it had not yet recovered in the days of Nicholas I. For these reasons the nobility of Russia is not characterized by the proud bearing and firm demeanor which are the attributes of the aristocracy of Western Europe. A parvenu, who has, by an act of slavish submission, won the Emperor's favor, may be ennobled, and he thenceforth holds his head as high as the greatest. No one of these is regarded as more important than his neighbor. Dumouriez, having casually spoken to Nicholas of one of the considerable personages at court, received the reply:
"You must learn, sir, that the only considerable person here is the one to whom I am speaking, and that only as long as I am speaking to him."[4]
Hence, we rarely find a Russian noble who is proud of his ancestry or of his ancient name. It is wealth and power, momentary distinction and royal favor that make him of worth. When, therefore, Paul Drentell, because of his valuable services in raising a loan which enabled Russia to engage in war with one of her less powerful neighbors, was elevated to the nobility, it caused no surprise, and the banker at once began a life of pomp and extravagance which he thought suited to his new station. His wealth was fabulous, and was for the greater part invested in large estates, comprising confiscated lands, formerly the property of less fortunate nobles, who, deprived of their rank, were now atoning for their sins in the frozen North. His possessions included about twenty thousand male serfs; consequently, more than forty thousand souls.
Dimitri, upon his father's elevation, was sent to the army, where he distinguished himself in nocturnal debauches and adventures such as we have related, and where, thanks to his father's influence, he shortly rose to the rank of lieutenant.
About five years before the beginning of this story, Paul Drentell died and his vast estates, as well as his title of Count, descended to Dimitri, who now found himself one of the richest men in the Empire. He was, moreover, a personal friend of the young Czarewitch, Alexander, in whose regiment he served. To such a man, a notable future was open: great honors as Governor of a province or exile to Siberia as a dangerous power. One of the features of public life in Russia is the comparative ease with which either of these distinctions may be obtained.
Count Drentell was haughty and arrogant, caring for naught but his own personal advantage, consulting only his own tastes and pleasures. He was a stern officer to his soldiers, a cruel taskmaster to the serfs he had inherited, and a bitter foe of the Jews whom he had offended.
Very different was his wife, Louise. A Georgian by birth, her beauty and ingenuousness had won her great popularity at the court of St. Petersburg, to which she had been introduced by the Governor of Tiflis. She was neither tall nor short, possessed a wealth of raven black hair, perfect teeth, lustrous black eyes, a smile that would inspire poets and a voice that was all music and melody. When Count Drentell carried her off in the face of a hundred admirers, he was considered lucky indeed. Dimitri never confessed, even to himself, that he regretted his hasty choice. Louise was as capricious as she was beautiful, as unlettered as she was charming, as superstitious as she was fascinating. All that she did was done on impulse. She loved her husband on impulse, she deserted her child for weeks at a time on impulse, she succored the poor or neglected them on impulse. Her army of servants set her commands at defiance, for they knew them to be the outgrowth of momentary caprice.
Fortunately for the domestic happiness of the couple, the Count was with his command at St. Petersburg during two-thirds of the year, while his wife enjoyed herself as best she might on his magnificent estate at Lubny.
Brought up among the highlands of Tiflis, Louise possessed all of the unreasoning bigotry characteristic of the people inhabiting that region. She was religious to the very depths of superstition, and she chose Lubny for a dwelling-place, less for its resemblance to the sunny hills of her native province than for its proximity to several large Catholic cloisters for both monks and nuns, whence she hoped to receive that religious nourishment which her southern and impetuous nature craved. It was while returning from an expedition to the furthest of these nunneries, in which she frequently immured herself for weeks at a time, that she found Jacob upon the road.