May his ashes be agitated in his tomb and suffer at the sight of all the blood spilt, for it is not to be denied that his writings are greatly responsible for the Revolutions which have succeeded each other in Russia; but I fear they rejoice at it!
Possessor of a great fortune, he lived in the greatest luxury, though he posed for poverty and simple tastes, having himself photographed writing his works in a poor cottage for propaganda on post cards, or working himself behind a plough in a field.
Even his death was a final pose. To leave his home to go and die in a railway station, so that he should be talked about to the last! flying from his family and his devoted wife who had helped him so much in his work, and had copied, it is said, eight times the whole of War and Peace; which act certainly denotes the greatest devotion!
CHAPTER XIII
AT that time motors were very rarely seen in Russia, the reason for this being, I suppose, that there were so few good roads; and when one did appear in the streets it immediately became an object of the utmost curiosity.
Another striking feature in Petrograd was that there was not a closed cab to be seen, nothing but little open vehicles, which struck me as being an almost barbarous custom considering the extreme cold of the place. I asked my aunt the reason of this; she told me that the authorities had once tried the experiment of “Voitures fermées—mais il s’y passait tant d’horreurs que l’on avait dû y renoncer.”
The tziganes had an enormous success at Petrograd. I went to hear them play one night; their music was quite diabolical and so was the flashing of their eyes. They were the terrors of the mothers, and were responsible for many scandals—and even suicides. They played and sang with so much go and rhythm—it was quite bewildering; the hall was, needless to say, packed to overflowing.
At the time of my arrival in Russia the Dreyfus affair had been and still was the topic of general conversation, people’s opinions over there being very diverse; the Protestant element—in England, too, I know—made him a hero and treated him as a martyr, whereas the Orthodox Church considered him a traitor and a renegade, which latter opinion as a loyal Frenchwoman I naturally shared, the opposite sides taking so much to heart their deductions that it was best to avoid touching on the subject altogether.
The Russian woman is, as a rule, very intelligent and well read, a charmer, even if she has no claims to any particular beauty; she is often the man’s superior; and in spite of being sometimes a successful butterfly, she is at the same time capable of the greatest attachment and of the most profound devotion.
The Russian man, in spite of his fascination—being very often delightful to meet in society—never inspired me with sufficient confidence for permanence, and I was never able quite to overcome this sentiment.