Thus accommodated, and furnished with 150 francs, which were to suffice for the wants of a long journey, I left Paris on January 9, 1843. After having traversed without hindrance Strasburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, and Vienna, I took the road from the last-named place to Pesth. In the interests of my mission I was to make a month’s stay in the capital of Hungary; and I profited by this delay, for I addressed in the meantime to the English ambassador at Vienna the request that he would renew my passport, my intention being to go to Russia instead of to Constantinople, and to make a stay there of considerable length. An answer was soon returned. At the end of a few days I received from Vienna, in exchange for my old passport, a new one, of a recent date, happily free from any ominous blots of ink, and visé for Russia. On February 28th, I quitted Pesth, meaning to reach Kaminieç in Podolia, the term and goal of my voyage. I found that the small sum which I had brought with me from Paris had, in spite of the most frugal way of living, greatly diminished; and I resolved to make the rest of my journey from Hungary to Podolia on foot. The season was favourable, the scenery magnificent, the passage of the Carpathians so splendid as to make me forget any slight fatigue. It was a strange, sometimes almost a diverting, sensation for me thus to traverse Galicia, and to have to ask my way in execrable German of the few Austrian officials, while the peasants gave utterance to the most minute remarks upon me, all in that Polish speech which I declared I did not understand. The pleasantries of our peasants on the subject of ‘the dumb man’ did not, however, miss fire or fail to amuse me greatly. To these jokes there were often added on their part marks of respect to a stranger come from the ends of the earth. ‘I am sure he comes a long way off,’ they would say to each other; ‘from very far, from where even the crow brings no bones.’ At last, on one fine March morning, 1843, I found myself at the boundary which separates the Austrian and Russian territory, near the village of Bojany. The frontier was marked by two barriers, which were distant the one from the other by a few dozen paces. Upon showing my papers the Austrian barrier was opened for me without any difficulty; but when I arrived at the Russian side, it was in vain that I called and looked round in all directions—no one came. Tired of waiting I passed by, stooping under the beam, and directed my steps to a house at a little distance, which seemed to be the Custom House office. The astonishment there was great when I was seen to arrive thus unaccompanied by a soldier.
‘How did you pass the frontier?’
‘At the barrier, down there.’
‘Who opened it for you?’
‘Nobody. I called in vain, and at last determined to slip underneath it.’
‘What! the guard was not there at his post?’ cried the functionary, as much exasperated he rushed out to give orders, of which his menacing tones only too fully explained the nature. Having returned to his room, he emptied out upon me the remains of his ill humour; but the sight of the English passport had a sudden and pacifying effect on his wrath. While my papers were being examined, and they took down the answers which I made to sundry questions relating to my journey, I heard the distant cries of the poor soldier, who was expiating under the bastinado what had been either his negligence or perhaps indeed only my hastiness. At last I was free to leave the office, with a feeling of satisfaction which was not, however, wholly unalloyed. There was indeed something ominous in this incident attending my entrance into the territory of the Emperor Nicholas. From the first step I had defied Russian vigilance, but I had at the same time, albeit involuntarily, caused the punishment of an unhappy creature, and my heart was pained at it.
On March 22nd, I reached Kaminieç, at midday. I had my portmanteau in one hand, while with the other I opened the door of an inn that had been pointed out to me, and I found myself suddenly in the middle of a large assembly of people, and in a room where they were playing billiards. I had purposely kept my hat on my head, and by this sign, so contrary to our national habits, I was immediately recognised to be a stranger or a Frenchman, for the two words are among us considered to be synonymous. The sensation, which was evident in the room, was very curious. ‘A Frenchman, a Frenchman,’ they murmured on all sides, speaking with interest and even with sympathy, but with a manifest fear of compromising themselves by an imprudent of even a friendly word. Two men only ventured to come forward frankly and converse with me—the one was a Pole from Cracow, only passing through Kaminieç, and therefore less obliged to be circumspect; the other was a Russian officer, who left the billiard-table when he heard me utter a few sentences in French, and who immediately showed the greatest readiness to make my acquaintance. ‘You are, then, come to stay here for some time? Oh! pray remain, I beseech you. It is a fine country! beautiful women, too! But it is at Warsaw especially that one finds charming women. Ah! Warsaw! I have been garrisoned there: it is a famous place, and there really are pretty faces!’ And the young man seemed not to be able to stop in pouring forth praises which could not but be disagreeable to me. Strange that this Poland, of which he trod the soil, and of which he had visited all the principal towns, should have given him nothing to see or to appreciate but the beauty of our women! Not one word to say of the government, of the fate of the inhabitants, of the misery of the people! His only subject of preoccupation, of praise, and of conversation, was the female population of Poland. One thing only turned him from this favourite topic. I happened to say something incidentally of Paris; then he began to ask questions about the Parisian womankind, and seemed at once pleased and excited at my replies. On the whole he was not a bad fellow, this officer Rogatchev; and he wound up by sharing with me the national dish of pierogi, laughing all the time at the strong foreign accent with which I pronounced the word: but he did me the justice to say soon after, that in the matter of pierogi my good appetite had made ample amends for my bad pronunciation.
While we walked up and down the room and talked in a loud voice on trifling subjects, the other occupants of it, all Poles and young people, kept themselves apart and whispered together, directing towards me from time to time oblique and curious glances. What a striking contrast there was between their attitude of reserve and the full-blown confidence of the happy Rogatchev! While keeping up my conversation with the Russian officer, I endeavored to catch the words which were passing among my countryman. ‘From France?’ ‘Does he know anything of our people?’ ‘Do the French care about us?’ ‘Perhaps something new is about to happen.’ My emotion was great, but I had to redouble the animation with which I was describing to my new acquaintance the beauty and the glories of Paris.
While so discoursing I did not omit to inform M. Rogatchev as well as the other persons present that I had come to Kaminieç to push my fortune as a teacher of languages, and that I desired nothing better than to settle in the town, though, if my interests required it, I might penetrate even to the interior of Russia. This declaration I repeated next morning at the station of police, for I was anxious to lose no time in establishing my position. The permission to remain was accorded to me without hesitation. As regarded my intention of giving lessons in private houses, I was warned that some formalities must in the first place be attended to, and that I must formally ask and obtain the consent of the military governor, of the director of the Lyceum, &c. It was not long before I obtained the necessary authorisation, and thanks to the recommendations of my officer and of other persons whose acquaintance I made on the first day,—thanks, above all, to those obliging cares of which a stranger is always the object in our country, orders for lessons came to me from all sides, and from the very first. I preferred, I must say, the houses of the different Russian officials; it was the surest way to avoid suspicion for myself, and to prevent compromising my countrymen. The offers made to me by the Abaza family were really precious, and it may be supposed that I did not neglect such connections as these; for Colonel Abaza, President of the Chamber of Finance, was a Russian functionary at once highly placed and very influential. I did not, however, refuse to attend on Polish families; but I selected those which any discovery would have the least affected, such as the houses of widows and elderly gentlemen—those, in short, where there were no young people. After a few weeks I had made good my position, and my relations were well understood. I went into all circles, and all over the town I was well known as the M. Catharo whom they persisted in calling a Frenchman.
Thus it was that, after having been an emigrant for twelve years, I found myself again in my native land, not very far either from my own family (which dwelt in the Ukraine), and in the quality of a Maltese, a British subject, teaching foreign languages, and not understanding a word of either the Russian or the Polish tongues. This last circumstance was one which often put my caution and my sang froid both to some severe trials, trials which my professorial office only aggravated. How many times was I not tempted at some difficult idiom or expression to explain myself to my pupils in a speech quite as familiar to me as it was to themselves! One of my first pupils was a certain Dmitrenko, a clerk in the Chamber of Finance, a cheerful being, who was bitten all of a sudden with a fancy for learning French, of which he did not know a single word. At the end of the pantomime which was necessary to make us mutually understand each other during the lesson, he wound up by proposing to give me some notions about Russian, with which I was perfectly conversant; but he never managed to make me read fluently, and he could not conceal his astonishment at this want of intelligence in one of those Frenchmen whose wits he had heard so much vaunted.