Here I will quote from the well-known translation of the French original read by the young princess who was capable of resolving the argument between “Bernardiner und Rabiner”:
“Gibbon was of small stature, extremely fat, and had a most remarkable face. It was impossible to make out any features on this face. Neither the nose, nor the eyes, nor the mouth could be seen at all; two huge, fat cheeks, resembling the devil knows what, engulfed everything … They were so puffed up that they quite departed from all proportion ever so slightly proper even for the biggest cheeks; anyone seeing them must have wondered: why has that place not been put in the right place? I would characterize Gibbon’s face with one word, if it were only possible to speak such a word. Lauzun,8 who was on close terms with Gibbon, once brought him to du Deffand. Mme du Deffand was already blind then and had the habit of feeling with her hands the faces of distinguished people newly introduced to her. In this way she would acquire a rather accurate notion of the features of her new acquaintance. She applied this tactile method to Gibbon, and the result was terrible. The Englishman approached her chair and with especial good-naturedness offered her his astonishing face. Mme du Deffand brought her hands to it and passed her fingers over this ball-shaped face. She tried to find something to stop at, but it was impossible. All at once the blind lady’s face expressed first astonishment, then wrath, and at last, quickly pulling her hands away in disgust, she cried: ‘What a vile joke!’ ”9
XIII
That was the end of the reading, and of the friends’ conversation, and of the anticipated celebration of the New Year, because, when the young princess closed the book and asked, “What was it that Mme du Deffand imagined?” the mother’s look was so terrible that the girl cried out, covered her face with her hands, and rushed headlong to another room, from where her weeping was heard at once, verging on hysterics.
The brother rushed to his sister, and at the same moment the princess hastened there on long strides.
The presence of outsiders was now inappropriate, and therefore the “three friends” and I all quietly cleared off that minute, and the bottle of Veuve Clicquot prepared for seeing in the New Year remained wrapped in a napkin, as yet uncorked.
XIV
The feelings with which we left were painful, but did no credit to our hearts, for, while keeping our faces strenuously serious, we could barely refrain from bursting into laughter, and bent down with exaggerated care to look for our galoshes, which was necessary because the servants had also scattered on occasion of the alarm caused by the young lady’s sudden illness.
The senators got into their carriages, but the diplomat accompanied me on foot. He wished to take some fresh air and, it seems, was interested in knowing my insignificant opinion about what might have presented itself to the young princess’s mental eyes after reading the above passage from the writings of Mme de Genlis.
But I decidedly did not dare to make any suggestions about it.
XV
From the unfortunate day when this incident took place, I saw no more of the princess or her daughter. I could not resolve to go and wish her a Happy New Year, and only sent to inquire after the young princess’s health, but even that with great hesitation, lest it be taken in some other sense. Visits of condoléance seemed totally out of place to me. The situation was a most stupid one: to suddenly stop visiting acquaintances would be rude, but to appear there also seemed inappropriate.
Perhaps I was wrong in my conclusions, but they seemed right to me; and I was not mistaken: the blow that the princess suffered on New Year’s Eve from the “spirit” of Mme de Genlis was very heavy and had serious consequences.
XVI
About a month later I met the diplomat on Nevsky Prospect: he was very affable, and we fell to talking.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” he said.
“We have nowhere to meet,” I replied.
“Yes, we’ve lost the dear house of the esteemed princess: the poor woman had to leave.”
“Leave?” I said. “For where?”
“As if you don’t know.”
“I know nothing.”
“They all left for abroad, and I’m very happy that I was able to find a post there for her son. It was impossible not to do so after what happened then … So terrible! You know, the unfortunate woman burned all her volumes that same night and smashed the little terracotta hand to smithereens, though one finger, or better say a fig, seems to have survived as a souvenir. Generally, it was a most unpleasant incident, but then it serves as an excellent proof of one great truth.”
“Even two or three, in my opinion.”
The diplomat smiled and, looking fixedly at me, asked:
“Which, sir?”
“First, it proves that the books we decide to talk about, we should read beforehand.”
“And second?”
“And second—that it’s not reasonable to keep a young girl in such childish ignorance as the young princess was in before that occurrence; otherwise she would certainly have stopped reading about Gibbon much sooner.”
“And third?”
“Third, that spirits are just as unreliable as living people.”
“And that’s not all: the spirit confirms one of my opinions, that ‘the best of serpents is still a serpent,’ and what’s more, the better the serpent, the more dangerous it is, because it holds its venom in its tail.”
If we had satire in our country, this would be an excellent subject for it.
Unfortunately, having no satirical ability, I can recount it only in the simple form of a story.
* Habits. Trans.
† Drawers or panties. Trans.
‡ I have spoken. Trans.
§ From the bottom of [its] heart. Trans.
The Toupee Artist
A Story Told on a Grave
(To the sacred memory of the blessed day of February 19, 1861)1
Their souls will abide with the blessed.
FUNERAL CHANT
I
Many among us think that the only “artists” are painters and sculptors, and then only those who have been granted this title by the Academy, and they refuse to consider others artists. Sazikov and Ovchinnikov are for many no more than “silversmiths.” It is not so for other peoples: Heine mentions a tailor who “was an artist” and “had ideas,” and Worth made ladies’ dresses that are now called “works of art.”2 Of one of them it was written recently that it “concentrates an abyss of fantasy in a basque waist.”
In America the artistic sphere is understood still more broadly: the famous American writer Bret Harte tells of the extraordinary fame of an “artist” there who “worked on the dead.”3 He endowed the faces of the deceased with various “comforting expressions,” which testified to the more or less happy state of their flown-off souls.
There were several degrees in this art—I remember three: “(1) serenity, (2) lofty contemplation, and (3) the bliss of immediate converse with God.” The artist’s fame corresponded to the high perfection of his work, that is, it was enormous, but, regrettably, the artist fell victim to the coarse crowd, which did not respect the freedom of artistic creativity. He was stoned to death for giving “the expression of blissful converse with God” to the face of a certain fraudulent banker, who had died after robbing the whole town. The swindler’s lucky heirs were moved by the wish to express their gratitude to their departed relation, but the artistic executor paid for it with his life …
We also had a master of this extraordinarily artistic sort here in Russia.
II
My younger brother’s nanny was a tall, dry, but very shapely old woman whose name was Lyubov Onisimovna. She was a former actress from the onetime theater of Count Kamensky in Orel,4 and it was in Orel that all I shall tell about further on took place.
My brother is seven years younger than I; consequently, when he was two years old and was being carried in Lyubov Onisimovna’s arms, I was already over nine and could easily unde
rstand the stories I was told.
Lyubov Onisimovna was not yet very old then, but her hair was snow white; the features of her face were fine and tender, and her tall figure was perfectly straight and astonishingly shapely, like a young girl’s.
My mother and my aunt, looking at her, said of her more than once that she had undoubtedly been a beauty in her time.
She was infinitely honest, meek, and sentimental; loved the tragic in life and … occasionally got drunk.
She used to take us for walks to the cemetery of the Trinity church, would always sit down on the same simple grave with an old cross, and often told me one thing or another.
It was there that I heard from her the story of the “toupee artist.”
III
He had been our nanny’s fellow in the theater; the difference was that she “performed on stage and danced dances,” while he was a “toupee artist”—that is, a hairdresser and makeup man, who “painted and dressed the hair” of all the count’s serf actresses. But he was not a simple, banal workman with a comb behind his ear and a tin of rouge mixed with grease in his hand; he was a man with ideas—in short, an artist.
In the words of Lyubov Onisimovna, nobody was able “to do impression on a face” so well as he.
I am unable to specify under precisely which of the counts Kamensky these two artistic natures blossomed. There are three known counts Kamensky, and the old-timers of Orel called them all “unheard-of tyrants.” Field Marshal Mikhail Fedotovich was murdered by his serfs in 1809 on account of his cruelty, and he had two sons: Nikolai, who died in 1811; and Sergei, who died in 1835.
A child in the forties, I still remember a huge, gray wooden building, with false windows painted crudely in soot and ochre, and surrounded by a long, half-dilapidated fence. This was the theater at the cursed country seat of Count Kamensky. It stood in a place where it could be very well seen from the cemetery of the Trinity church, and therefore when it happened that Lyubov Onisimovna wanted to tell something, she almost always began with the words:
“Look there, my dear … See how terrible it is?”
“Terrible, nanny.”
“Well, and what I’ll tell you now is still more terrible.”
Here is one of her stories about the toupee master Arkady, a sensitive and brave young man, who was very close to her heart.
IV
Arkady “did the hair and makeup” only for actresses. For men there was another hairdresser, and Arkady, if he occasionally went to “the men’s half,” did so only in cases when the count himself gave orders to “paint somebody up in a very noble way.” The main particularity of this artist’s touch with makeup was that he had certain notions, owing to which he could endow faces with the most subtle and diverse expressions.
“It happened that they would call him,” said Lyubov Onisimovna, “and say: ‘There should be such and such an impression on the face.’ Arkady would step back, tell the actor or actress to stand or sit before him, cross his arms on his chest, and think. And meanwhile he himself was the handsomest of the handsome, because he was of average height, but you couldn’t say how well built, a fine and proud little nose, and his eyes—angelic, kind, and a thick lock hung down beautifully over his eyes, so that he used to look as if from behind a misty cloud.”
In short, the toupee artist was handsome and “pleased everybody.”
“The count himself” also liked him and “distinguished him from everybody else, had him charmingly dressed, but kept him in the greatest strictness.” Not for anything did he want Arkady to cut, shave, and comb anyone but him, and for that he always kept him by his dressing room, and, except for the theater, Arkady could not go anywhere.
He was not even allowed to go to church for confession or communion, because the count himself did not believe in God, and could not bear the clergy, and once at Easter he set his wolfhounds on the priests from the Boris and Gleb cathedral as they carried the cross.*
The count, in Lyubov Onisimovna’s words, was so terribly ugly from his habitual angrying that he resembled all beasts at once. But Arkady was able to endow even that beastlikeness, at least for a time, with such an impression, that when the count sat in his box in the evening, he even seemed grander than many.
Yet what the count’s nature lacked most, to his great vexation, was precisely grandeur and a “military impression.”
Thus, so that nobody else could make use of the services of such an inimitable artist as Arkady, he sat “all his life without leave and never in his born days saw money in his hands.” And he was then already over twenty-five, and Lyubov Onisimovna was going on nineteen. They were acquainted, of course, and there took place between them what happens at that age, that is, they fell in love with each other. But they could not speak of their love otherwise than in front of other people, in distant hints during makeup sessions.
To see each other alone was completely impossible and even unthinkable …
“We actresses,” Lyubov Onisimovna used to say, “were kept in the same way that wet nurses are kept in noble families; we were looked after by older women who had children, and if, God forbid, anything happened with one of us, those women’s children were all subjected to a terrible tyrannizing.”
The rule of chastity could be violated only by “himself”—the one who had established it.
V
Lyubov Onisimovna was at that time not only in the flower of her virginal beauty, but also in the most interesting moment in the development of her versatile talent: she “sang in potpourri choruses,” danced “the lead part in The Chinese Farm Girl,” and, feeling a calling for the tragic, “knew all the roles from looking.”
Precisely what years these were, I don’t know, but it so happened that the sovereign (whether Alexander Pavlovich or Nikolai Pavlovich, I can’t say),5 was passing through Orel and spent the night there, and in the evening was expected to be at Count Kamensky’s theater.
The count invited all the nobility to his theater (there was no paying for seats), and the performance put on was the very best. Lyubov Onisimovna was supposed to sing in a “potpourri” and dance in The Chinese Farm Girl, and then suddenly, during the last rehearsal, a flat fell and hurt the foot of the actress who was to perform “the duchesse de Bourblan” in the play.
I have never come across a role with that name anywhere, but Lyubov Onisimovna pronounced it in precisely that way.
The carpenters who dropped the flat were sent to the stable to be punished, and the injured actress was carried to her closet, but there was no one to play the role of the duchesse de Bourblan.
“Here,” Lyubov Onisimovna told me, “I volunteered, because I liked very much how the duchesse de Bourblan begged forgiveness at her father’s feet and died with her hair let down. And I myself had such wonderfully long, light brown hair, and Arkady used to do it up—a lovely sight.”
The count was very glad that the girl had unexpectedly volunteered and, on receiving assurances from the director that “Lyuba won’t spoil the role,” said:
“If she does, your back will answer for it, and take her these camarine6 earrings from me.”
“Camarine earrings” were both a flattering and a repulsive gift. They were a first token of the special honor of being raised for a brief moment to the position of the master’s odalisque. Soon after that, and sometimes straightaway, Arkady would be given the order to make the doomed girl up after the theater “with the innocent look of St. Cecilia,” and this symbolized innocence, all in white, in a coronet and with a lily in her hand, would be delivered to the count’s quarters.
“That,” said my nanny, “you can’t understand at your age, but it was the most terrible thing, especially for me, because I was dreaming of Arkady. I began to weep. I threw the earrings on the table and wept, and of how I was going to perform that evening I couldn’t even think.”
VI
And in those same fatal hours another matter—also fatal and trying—stole up on Arkady as well.
&n
bsp; The count’s brother came from his country estate to present himself to the sovereign. He was still worse looking and had long been living in the country and never put on his uniform or shaved himself, because “his whole face was overgrown and bumpy.” Now, on this special occasion, he had to wear a uniform and put himself all in order and “in a military impression,” as form required.
And it required a great deal.
“Now nobody even understands how strict it was then,” my nanny said. “Form was observed in everything then, and there was a standard for important gentlemen as much in their faces as in their hairstyle, and for some it was terribly unbecoming, and it could happen that, if a man’s hair was done according to fashion, with a brushed-up forelock and side-whiskers, the face came out looking exactly like a muzhik’s balalaika without strings. Important gentlemen were terribly afraid of that. In these matters, skill in shaving and doing hair counted for a lot—how to clear a path on the face between the side-whiskers and mustache, and how to dispose the curls, and how to brush up—these same small things resulted in a face having a totally different fantasy. It was easier for civilians,” in my nanny’s words, “because no attentive regard was paid to them—they were only required to have a meek look; but from the military more was required—that they express meekness before their superiors, but before all others flaunt their boundless courage.”
It was this that Arkady was able to impart to the count’s ugly and insignificant face by means of his astonishing art.
VII
The count’s country brother was still uglier than the city one, and on top of that had “got so overgrowned” and “coarse in the face” from country life that he even felt it himself, and there was no one to tend to him, because he was very stingy in all things and had let his barber go to Moscow in exchange for quitrent, and besides, this second count’s face was all in big bumps, so that it was impossible to shave him without cutting it all over.
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories Page 50
