I knew a certain Gentleman of the Chamber who lived at the Monastery of La Laure so as to be close to his wife, who had died eight years before and whose remains lay in the cemetery there, going twice every day to pray by the grave—and he was by no means an old man!
Russia being, above all things, a country of contrasts, a country of great extremes, one should not be astonished by any apparent diversity. There, as in the rest of the world, divorce is badly viewed by the serious Protestant community, and, naturally, by the Catholics, but, as the Greek Church authorizes it, one must not judge its votaries too harshly!
The Greek Church is the State religion. If one of the parents is Orthodox, all the children born of that union must belong to that religion, which renders a marriage between an Orthodox and a Catholic practically impossible, since this latter religion also now exacts Catholicism for all the children if one of the parents is Catholic.
It was not so at the time when my grandmother was born, she and her sisters were Catholics like their mother, the brothers Protestant like their father.
In Russia, there is no middle-class as in the West. Society is, in other words, the nobility; and then comes what is known there as the “Merchants,” who are absolutely ignored and very much despised by the former, although they are often very rich.
In Russia there were two kinds of caviare, the kind for the zakouski and that of the newspapers.
The first is delicious. The zakouski is an assortment of hors-d’œuvres arranged like a buffet on a table in a corner of the room in which the lunch or dinner is served. It is partaken of standing up, off a small plate, and amounts, in fact, to a real meal as a preparation to give one an appetite instead of satisfying it.
There is generally fresh caviare and also preserved caviare, and delicious pickled herrings with quantities of other good little dishes, which the men wash down with vodka.
I was extremely fond of this caviare, but did not feel the same affection for that of the newspapers, especially during the Revolution. One of them reached us showing nothing after its title but five lines, and the five last ones! This variety of caviare is a thick black substance; if one tries to scratch it off, it spreads more and more and seems to become more and more opaque.
The liberty of the Press certainly did not exist then.