Another day we went for an excursion to the monastery of Notre Dame de la Garde, where the church is decorated with little cardboard boats that the sailors’ wives offer, with their prayers, to the Madonna, when their husbands are at sea.
We removed at last to the Villa Maria, where we felt the cold very much. The rooms were badly heated, and the draughts in the corridor were strong enough to work a windmill, and they gave me a horrid cold. In the night the noise of the passing trains and the roar of the sea hindered our sleep. We hastened our departure and started for Paris, where we intended to spend a few days before returning to Russia. Towards night three young Corsicans entered our compartment, and we were doomed to pass a sleepless night, for we couldn’t stretch our legs, and felt very uncomfortable. Our fellow-travellers were the very image of Napoleon Bonaparte, and resembled each other like three peas.
CHAPTER XLVI
PARIS
Mary Vietinghoff, my old Stuttgart friend, who had married a Frenchman, Count Soligoux de Fougères, was in Paris for the moment. She used to be a dear girl, and so fond of me! We had not met for nearly ten years, but the friendship which had subsisted between us in the days of our girlhood had suffered no diminuation through absence. How good it was to see her again. Mary smothered me with kisses and made me feel how her heart throbbed with joy at out meeting. She invited us to dine on the following day. There was a French minister among the guests, who began a political discussion with Sergy, which lasted during the whole repast. I must confess that political affairs rather bore me, and was very glad when Mary took me up to her room, leaving the gentlemen to sip their coffee. We sat and chatted happily together. We had not forgotten the old days, and had a thousand confidences to exchange. Mary told me that she had quitted the fold of our Church, and had turned Roman Catholic. She was afraid that my religious views would be hurt, and that her renouncement of our faith would stand as a barrier to our former friendship, but I assured her of my everlasting love. Mary’s husband does not like our country, as it appears, and when his little daughter, called Baby, is capricious, he threatens her saying that if she continued to be naughty he would send her to Russia. How nasty of him!
Last winter a French Colonel, Baron Rothvillers, passing through Moscow, paid us a visit, and invited us to come and see him in Paris and make the acquaintance of his wife, which we now did with pleasure. Baroness Rothvillers is a fine horsewoman and her stables are renowned in Paris. She invited me to drive with her in the Bois de Boulogne. I sat on the high driving-seat and trotted her handsome pair of browns round the Park. The horses were pulling and became somewhat restive, but I kept them well in hand, surveyed by the groom, immovable as a wooden image, with rigidly folded arms, seated on the back seat.
Though sorry to leave Paris, I was glad when the North Express carried us back to Russia.
CHAPTER XLVII
MOSCOW
On returning to Moscow we found among our numerous correspondence a number of the Parisian paper L’Evenement, sent to us by the Rothvillers, with my biography and expressions of regret that the sojourn of the blonde young lady who had made a brief appearance in the “Bois,” handling so surely a pair of restive horses, was of so short duration. It appears that when I entered a café to drink a cup of chocolate, during my drive in the Park with the Baroness Rothvillers, a reporter of the Evenement had asked our groom the address of the hotel where I had put up, and learnt from our hotel-keeper, who had known me a good many years, all sorts of things concerning my life. It is thus that my biography appeared in the French paper.