HISTORY OF A FOAL.
275
like them, the habits of early life as an excuse,) thus to leave the poor colt and the unhappy child to mourn in concert ; the one by neighing with all his might, the other by crying silently — a difference which gave to the brute a real advantage over the human being. I ought to have interposed my authority to cause this double punishment to cease; but no, I assisted, I contributed to the martyrdom. It was a long one, for the stage was six leagues in length. The boy, obliged to torture the animal that he wished to save, suffered with a resignation that would have touched me, had not my heart been already hardened by my abode in this country. Every time that a peasant appeared on the road, the hope of rescuing his beloved foal again revived in the bosom of the child: he made `íigns from afar off; he shouted when a hundred paces distant from the foot-passenger, but not daring to slacken the unmerciful gallop of our horses, he never succeeded iu making himself understood in time. If ever a peasant, more quick-sighted than the others, endeavoured of himself to turn the foal, the speed of the carriage disconcerted him, and the young animal passed on close to the flank of one of our horses. The case was the same in the villages, and at last the despair of our youthful coachman became so great, that he no longer opened his mouth. The persevering little animal, only eight days old, according to our driver, had the spirit and muscle necessary to perform six leagues at a gallop! *
When this was accomplished, our slave — it is of the boy that I speak—seeing himself at length released
* 2·¡¾· miles English is a French lieue de poste.—Trans. N 6
276HISTORY OF A FOAL.
from the rigorous yoke of discipline, called the whole village to the rescue of the foal. The energy of this spirited little creature was so great, that, notwithstanding the fatigue of such a course, notwithstanding the stiffness of his limbs, ruined before they were formed, he was still very difficult to catch. They could only take him by driving him into a stable after the mare he had mistaken for his dam. When they had placed a halter round him, they shut him up with another mare, that gave him her milk ; but he had not strength left to suck. Some said he would come round by and by, others, that he was foundered and could not live. I begin to understand a little Russian, and heard this sentence pronounced by one of the elders of the village. Our little coachman completely identified himself with the young animal. Foreseeing, no doubt, the treatment that the keeper of the foals would have to suffer, he appeared in as great a consternation as if he was himself to receive the blows with which his comrade would be overwhelmed. Never have I seen the expression of despair more profoundly imprinted on the face of a child ; but not one look, not one gesture of reproach against my cruel courier, escaped him. So great an empire over self, so much restraint of feeling at such an age, inspired me with fear and pity.
Meanwhile the courier, without troubling himself for a moment about the foal, or taking the least notice of the disconsolate child, proceeded gravely to make the necessary arrangements for procuring a fresh relay.
On this road, which is the finest and the most frequented in Russia, the villages where relays may be
EVIL OF THE MORAL ATMOSPHERE.277
obtained are peopled with peasants purposely established there to attend to the posting. Upon the arrival of a carriage, the imperial director sends from house to house to seek for horses and a disengaged coachman. Sometimes the distances are great enough to cause a considerable delay to the traveller. I should prefer more promptness in the changing of horses, and a little less speed in the driving. At the moment of leaving the broken-down foal and the forlorn young postillion, I felt no remorse; it came only upon reflection, and especially upon recording the circumstances in writing : shame then awoke repentance. Thus easily may those who breathe the air of despotism be corrupted. What do I say ? In Russia, despotism is only upon the throne, but tyranny pervades the country.
Education and circumstances considered, it must-be acknowledged that a Russian lord, the most accustomed to submit to, and to exercise arbitrary power, could not have committed, in the seclusion of his province, an act of cruelty more blamable than that of which I yesterday evening rendered myself guilty by my silence.
I, a Frenchman, who believe myself to possess a naturally kind disposition, who have been educated under a civilisation of ancient date, who travel among a people of whose manners I am a severe observer,— lo ! even I, upon the first opportunity for practising a petty act of unnecessary cruelty, yield to the temptation. The Parisian acts like a Tartar ! The evil is in the atmosphere.
In France, where they respect life, even that of the brute creation, if my postillion had not thought
278MORAL RESPONSIBILITY.
of rescuing the colt, I should have obliged him to stop. I should myself have appealed to the peasants for aid, and shoidd not have proceeded on my journey until I had seen the animal in safety. Here, I have aided in destroying him by an unmerciful silence. Who would be proud of his virtues, when forced to acknowledge that they depend upon circumstances more than upon self?
A great Russian lord who, in his fits of passion, does not beat to death any of his peasants, merits praise : he is in such case humane ; whilst I, a Frenchman, may be cruel for having simply suffered a foal to gallop on the road !
I have passed the night in meditating upon the great problem of relative virtues and vices, and I have concluded that a very important branch of political morals has not yet been sufficiently elucidated ; an inquiry, namely, as to the share of merit or of responsibility which each individual has the right to claim or to disclaim, in his own actions, and the share which belongs to the society where he is born. If society be exalted by the great things performed by some of its members, it ought also to regard itself as implicated in the crimes of others. In this respect ancient society was more advanced than modern. The scapegoat of the Jews shows us to what point that people feared the responsibility of crime. With them, the penalty of death was not only punishment of the guilty, it was a public expiation, a protestation of the community against all participation in the crime, and in the motive that inspired it. This view serves to show us how social man has been able to arrogate the right of legally disposing of the life of his fellow-
A WAKING DREAM.
279
creature : eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life ; in short the law of retaliation was politic. A society that wishes to subsist must cast from its bosom the criminal. When Jesus Christ came to substitute his law of love in the place of the stern justice of Moses, he well knew that it would abridge the duration of the kingdoms of the earth, but he opened to men the
kingdom of heavenWithout eternity and
immortality, Christianity would cost to earth more than it restores. This was my waking dream throughout the night.
A train of vague ideas, phantoms of the mind, half active, half torpid, wandered slowly through my brain : the gallop of the horses that bore me along seemed more rapid than the flights of my burdened thoughts; the body appeared to have wings, the mind had become lead. I left it, as it were, behind me, as I passed over the ground more quickly than imagination could traverse space. The steppes, the marshes with their spiry pines and stunted birches, the villages, the towns, flew across my eyes like fantastic figures, before I was able to account to myself how I had been brought before this moving scene, where the soul could not keep pace with the
body, so singularly was sensation quickened !
This overturning of nature, these mental deceptions of which the cause was physical, this optical illusion applied to the mechanism of ideas, this displacing of life, these voluntary dreams, were prolonged by the monotonous songs of the men who drove my horses, — lugubrious notes, like some of the chants of our churches, or rather like the nasal accents of the old Jews in the German synagogues. They say these
280FIRST VIEW OP THE VOLGA.
peasants are very musical; we shall see by and by. I have heard nothing yet that merits the tr
ouble of being listened to. The chanted communings of the coachman with his horses, during the night, are very doleful: tliis murmur without rhythm, this declamatory reverie in which man confides his sorrows to the brute, the only kind of friend by whom he is not despised, filled me with a melancholy more deep than pleasing.
At one place, the road shelved suddenly upon a bridge of boats, which lay much below its level by reason of the droughts that had dried up the river thus crossed. This river, still broad, although shrunk in its bed by the summer heats, bears a celebrated name — it is the Volga. Upon the border of the famous stream appeared, gilded by the moon, a city, whose long white walls gleamed in the night, which is only a twilight favourable to the conjuring up of images. The road formed a bend round this newly whitewashed eity, where I found the everlasting Roman pediments and colonnades of plaster, of which the Russians are so fond, because they think them proofs of their knowledge of the arts. The city, of which I went the round, appeared immense. It was Twer, a name that brought to my recollection the interminable civil contests which make up the history of Russia until the invasion of the Tartars. I could hear brethren insulting their brethren ; the cry of war resounded ; I saw the massacre; the Volga flowed with blood ; from the deep solitudes of Asia, the Calmue hurried on to drink it, and to shed more. But what have I to do with this blood thirsty crowd ? It is to have a new
DEWS OF THE NORTH.
281
journey to recount to my friends ; as though the picture of a country where nature has done nothing, and where art has only produced some rough sketches or copies, could interest, after the description of Spain — of that land where a people the most original, the most lively, the most independent in character, even the most free, in practice if not in theory*, straggle secretly against the most gloomy of governments ; where they dance and pray together, in the intervals of throat-cutting and church pillaging. Such is the picture that my friends must forget, in order that I may describe to them a plain of some thousand leagues wide, and a society which has nothing original that it does not endeavour to
Оо
conceal. . . . The task is a hard one.
Even Moscow will not recompense me for the trouble I am taking to see it. Shall I give up the idea of Moscow ? order the coachman to turn, and depart in all haste for Paris ? To this had my reveries broiight me when the day dawned. My calèche had remained open, and in my protracted doze I had not perceived the baneñú influence of the dews of the north; my clothes were saturated; my hair in a state as if dripping with perspiration; all the leather about my carriage was steeped in noxious moisture; my eyes pained me, a veil seemed to obscure my sight;
I remembered the Princewho became blind in
twenty-four hours after a bivouac in Poland, under the same latitude, in a moist prairie. †
* Within twenty leagues of Madrid, the Castilian shepherd, during the times of absolute monarchy, had no idea but that there was a free government in Spain.
† A similar fate very nearly happened to me ; the disorder
282DEPARTURE FOR MOSCOW.
My servant has just entered to announce that my carriage is mended ; I am therefore again about to take the road : and unless some new accident detain me, and destine me to make my entrance into Moscow in a cart, or on foot, my next chapter will be written in the holy city of the Russians, where they give me hopes of arriving in a few hours.
I must, however, first set about concealing my papers, for each chapter, even those that will appear the most inoffensive to the friends who receive them in the form of letters, would be sufficient to send me to Siberia. I take care to shut myself up when writing; and if my feldjäger or one of the coachmen knock at the door, I put up my papers before opening it, and appear to be reading. I am going to slip this sheet between the crown and the lining of my hat. These precautions are, I hope, superfluous, but I think it necessary to take them ; they at any rate suffice to give an idea of the Russian government.
in my eyes, which commenced when I wrote this sheet, increased during my sojourn in Moscow, and long after ; in short, on my return from the fair of Nijni, it degenerated into an ophthalmia, the effects of which I still feel.
FIRST VIEW OF MOSCOW.283
CHAP. XXIV.
FIRST VIEW OF MOSCOWSYMBOLIC ARCHITECTURE OF GREEK
CHURCHES.CASTLE OF PETROWSKI. ENTRANCE TO MOSCOW.
ASPECT OF THE KREMLIN.CHURCH OF SAINT BASIL.THE
FRENCH AT MOSCOW. ANECDOTE RELATIVE TO THE FRENCH IN
RUSSIA. —BATTLE OF MOSKOWA. THE KREMLIN A CITY.
ORIGIN OF THE WORD CZAR.AN ENGLISH HOTEL IN RUSSIA.
THE CITY BY MOONLIGHT. POPULATION OF MOSCOW. THE
OBJECT OF CONSCIENCE. GARDENS UNDER THE WALLS OF THE
KREMLIN.DESCRIPTION OF THE FORTRESS.IVAN III. NA
POLEON AND THE KREMLIN.MODERN GRANDILOQUENCE.
Does the reader never remember having perceived, when approaching by land some sea-port town in the Bay of Biscay or the British Channel, the masts of a fleet rising behind downs, just elevated enough to conceal the town, the piers, the flat shore, and the sea itself beyond ? Above the natural rampart nothing-can be discovered but a forest of poles bearing sails of a dazzling white, yards, many-coloured flags, and floating streamers. A fleet, apparently on land — such is the apparition with which my eye has been sometimes surprised in Holland, and once in England, after having penetrated into the interior of the country between Gravesend and the mouth of the Thames. Exactly similar is the effect that has been produced upon me by the first view of Moscow : a multitude of spires gleamed alone above the dust of the road, the undulations of the soil, and the misty line that nearly always clothes the distance, under the summer sun of these parts.
284
ARCHITECTURE OF
The uneven, thinly-inhabited, and only half-cultivated plain, resembles downs dotted with a few stunted firs. It was out of the midst of this solitude that I saw, as it were suddenly spring up, thousands of pointed steeples, star-spangled belfries, airy turrets, strangely-shaped towers, palaces, and old convents, the bodies of which all remained entirely concealed.
This first view of the capital of the Slavonians, rising brightly in the cold solitudes of the Christian East, produces an impression that cannot easily be forgotten.
Before the eye, spreads a landscape, wild and gloomy, but grand as the ocean; and to animate the dreary void, there rises a poetical city, whose architecture is without either a designating name or a known model.
To understand the peculiarity of the picture, it iî` necessary to remind the reader of the orthodox plan of every Greek church. The summit of these sacred edifices is always composed of several towers, which vary in form and height, but the number of which is five at the least — a sacramental number, that is often greatly exceeded. The middle steeple is the most lofty ; the four others respectfully surround this principal tower. Their form varies : the summits of some resemble pointed caps placed upon a head ; the great towers of certain churches, painted and gilded externally, may be severally compared to a bishop's mitre, a tiara adorned with gems, a Chinese pavilion, a minaret, and a clergyman's hat. They often consist of a simple cupola, in the shape of a bowl, and terminating in a point. All these more or less whimsical figures are crowned with large, open-worked
GREEK CHURCHES.
285
copper crosses, gilt, and the comphcated designs of which look like work of filagree. The number and disposition of the steeples have always a symbolical religious meaning: they signify the ranks in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. They image the patriarch, surrounded by his priests, his deacons, and sub-deacons, lifting between heaven and earth his radiant head. A fanciful variety characterises this more or less richly adorned roof-work; but the primitive intention, the theological idea, is always scrupulously respected.
Bright chains of gilded or plated metal unite the crosses of the inferior steeples to the principal tower: and this metallic net, spread over an entire city,
produces an effect that it would be impossible to convey, even in a picture. The holy legion of steeples, without having any precise resemblance to the human form, represents a grotesque assemblage of personages gathered together on the summits of the churches and chapels, — a phalanx of phantoms hovering over the eity.
The exteriors of the mystic domes of the Russian churches are worked in a most elaborate manner. They remind the stranger of a cuirass of Damascus steel; and the sight of so many scaly, enamelled, spangled, striped, and chequered roofs, shining in the sun with various but always brilliant colours, strikes him with the most lively astonishment. The desert, with its dull sea-green tint, is, as it were, illuminated by this magical net-work of carbuncles. The play of light, in the aerial city, produces a species of phantasmagoria, in broad clay, which reminds one of the reflected brilliance of lamps in the shop of a lapidary. These changing hues impart to Moscow an aspect altogether
286CASTLE OF PETROWSKI.
different from that of the other great European cities. The sky, when viewed from the middle of such a city, is a golden glory, similar to those seen in old paintings. Schnitzlcr states, that, in 1730, Weber counted at Moscow 1500 churches. Coxe, in 1778, fixes the number at 484. As for myself, I am content with endeavouring to describe the aspect of things. I admire without counting, — I must, therefore, refer the lovers of catalogues to books made up entirely of numerals.
I have said enough, I hope, to impart to the reader a portion of the surprise which the first view of Moscow produced in me. To add to that surprise he must recollect, what he will have often read, that this city is a country within itself, and that fields, lakes, and woods, enclosed within its limits, place a considerable distance between the different edifices that adorn it. The objects being so scattered, greatly increases the effect. The whole plain is covered with a silver giuze. Three or four hundred churches, thus spread, present to the eye an immense semicircle, so that when approaching the city, towards sunset on a stormy evening, it would be easy to fancy you saw a rainbow of fire impending above the churches of Moscow : this is the halo of the holy city. But at about three quarters of a league from the gate, the illusion vanishes. Here, the very real and heavy brick palace of Petrowski arrests the attention. It was built by Catherine after an odd modern design : the ornaments with which it is profusely covered stand in white against the red walls. These decorations, which are formed, I think, of plaster, are in a style of extravagant Gothic. The building is as
Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia Page 55
