In the street, on Easter Sunday, I noticed all the moujiks, country people, and the populace salute one another in the most solemn manner and embracing each other, while uttering the words “Christ is Risen.”
There is in Russia a custom which I think quite charming; it consists in the ladies shaking hands with their hostess, while the men and children kiss her hand after luncheon and dinner. A lady does not require much encouragement to kiss the forehead of a gentleman who happens to be on friendly terms with her.
The Catholic churches at Petrograd are always fearfully overcrowded, but soon I gave up going to them, as once at St Catherine’s, on the Newsky Prospect, I was literally carried off my feet by the crowd swaying backwards and forwards; and there were very few benches. So in future I preferred going to the Chapel of the Corps des Pages, a college reserved entirely for the young men of the best families destined for a military career, where there was also a Catholic chapel, in which I had been offered a seat, by my Ambassadress, on the benches reserved for the corps diplomatique, which was very comfortable.
But, before this, I went there once and settled myself in one of the benches belonging to the general public. I knelt devoutly for an instant, but on resuming my seat I realized that I was doing so on some one’s knees and not on the hard plank of wood that I expected to find. I turned round to explore the horizon, and what did I find? A stout Polish woman had slipped in behind me while I was at my orisons, and had altogether possessed herself of my seat. I can still see her fat, round face, her heavy, massive figure. One could not dream of using force to dispossess her, and her big victorious eyes gazed at me above their spectacles and the old prayer book, with its pages yellowed by age and its enormous print.
I felt like choking with fury at the sight of all my poor plans for comfort destroyed, and I gave vent to a formidable “Dourak,” the only abusive expression in my repertory; a great insult in Russian, and not a very appropriate one, as it means “Imbecile” or even more, and she had not been in the least “imbecile.” I ought at any rate to have said “Doura,” which is the feminine, but my knowledge of the Russian language was not yet so advanced. It seemed to me that the intruder looked horrified, but sank more than ever into her seat with the air of saying, “J’y suis: j’y reste.” It only remained for me to yield her the ground. It was a real defeat.
One of the most interesting ceremonies of Holy Week in this chapel was the procession on Maundy Thursday of the Blessed Sacrament being carried to the tomb, when the four Catholic Ambassadors—France, Italy, Spain and Austria—in full-dress uniform, hold the dais, followed by the Catholic personnel of the various Embassies, also in full dress.
The Austrian Ambassador was the late Count Aerenthal, who has since played such an important political rôle in Austria, and specially during the last few years of his life; it was he who united Bosnia and Herzegovina to the Austrian Crown.
The Italian Ambassador was Count Tornielli, a small man with a good-looking, amiable face; the French Ambassador was Monsieur M. Bompard, who played a rôle on this occasion that he would not have dared to play in France!
I often met Prince Hohenlohe, at that time Military Attaché to the German Embassy in Petrograd, and a cousin of the Kaiser’s, as well as the chief of His Majesty’s spy bureau in Switzerland. It has since been proved that he was a very dangerous one, and had received enormous sums at Paris—where he had also subsequently become Military Attaché—which he distributed to numerous “Bolos”; as for so many people “L’argent n’a pas d’odeur”! He was also present that day, wearing a green plume in the style of a feather brush in his officer’s shako.
The works of Leon Tolstoy enchanted me; but for all that I did not like the man who had traced those talented lines. A humbug of the first water, a great Socialist for every one but himself—like most people of his class—Tolstoy had managed to instil his false doctrines into the minds of the students, those thousands of “fish out of water” who are a thorn in the side of Russia, doctrines which caused them to take so energetic a part in the first Revolution also.