I confess, this is beginning to weary me. I like the custom of some ancient people: the groom secretly abducts his bride. The next day he already presents her to the town gossips as his wife. Among us family happiness is prepared for with printed announcements, gifts known to the whole town, formal letters, visits—in short, by all sorts of temptations…
A Romance at the Caucasian Waters
On one of the first days of April 181– there was great turmoil in the house of Katerina Petrovna Tomskaya. The doors were all thrown open; the reception room and the front hall were cluttered with trunks and suitcases; the drawers of all the chests were pulled out; the servants kept running up and down the stairs, the maids fussed and argued; the mistress of the house, a lady of about forty-five, sat in her bedroom, going over the account books brought by the fat steward, who stood before her, hands behind his back and right leg thrust forward. Katerina Petrovna made it look as if she were intimately acquainted with the secrets of management, but her questions and observations betrayed her seignorial ignorance and occasionally provoked a barely perceptible smile on the majestic face of the steward, who nevertheless, with great indulgence, entered in detail into all the explanations she demanded. Just then a servant announced that Paraskovya Ivanovna Povodova had arrived. Katerina Petrovna was glad of the chance to break off her consultation, asked her in, and dismissed the steward.
“Good gracious, dearie,” the old lady said, coming in, “you’re getting ready to travel! Where on earth are you going?”
“To the Caucasus, my dear Paraskovya Ivanovna.”
“To the Caucasus! So Moscow told the truth for once in its life, and I didn’t believe it. To the Caucasus! It’s so terribly far away. Why do you want to drag yourself God knows where, for God knows what?”
“What can I do? The doctors told me that my Masha needs mineral waters, and hot baths are necessary for my health. I’ve been suffering for a year and a half already; maybe the Caucasus will help me.”
“God grant it. And are you going soon?”
“Some four days from now; at the most, the very most, I may linger for a week; everything’s ready. Yesterday they brought me a new traveling carriage, and what a carriage! A toy, a joy to look at—little drawers everywhere, and what does it not have: a bed, a toilet table, a cellaret, a medicine chest, a kitchen, a set of dishes. Do you want to have a look?”
“Gladly, dearie.”
And the two ladies went out to the porch. The coachmen pulled the traveling coach out of the shed. Katerina Petrovna told them to open the door, got into the carriage, turned over all the cushions, pulled out all the drawers, showed all the secrets, all the conveniences, raised all the shutters, all the mirrors, turned all the bags inside out—in short, for a sick woman she proved very active and agile. Having admired the equipage, the two ladies returned to the drawing room, where they fell to talking again about the forthcoming journey, the return, the plans for the coming winter:
“I hope to be back by October without fail,” said Katerina Petrovna. “I’ll have soirées twice a week, and I hope, my dear, that you will transfer your Boston1 to me.”
Just then a girl of about eighteen, slender, tall, with a pale, beautiful face and fiery dark eyes, quietly came into the room, went up to kiss Katerina Petrovna’s hand, and curtsied to Povodova.
“Did you sleep well, Masha?” asked Katerina Petrovna.
“Very well, mama; I only just got up. You’re surprised at my laziness, Paraskovya Ivanovna? What can I do? For an invalid it’s forgivable.”
“Sleep, dearie, sleep to your heart’s content,” Povodova replied, “and be sure to come back from the Caucasus ruddy-cheeked, healthy, and, God willing—married.”
“What do you mean, married?” Katerina Petrovna objected, laughing. “Who is she going to marry in the Caucasus? Some Circassian prince?…”
“A Circassian! God forbid! They’re like Turks and Bukharans2—heathens. They’ll shave her head and lock her up.”
“Let God just send us health,” Katerina Petrovna said with a sigh, “and suitors won’t stay away. Thank God, Masha’s still young, there’s a dowry. And if a good man falls in love, he’ll take her even without a dowry.”
“But all the same it’s better with a dowry, dearie,” Paraskovya Ivanovna said, standing up. “Well, let’s say good-bye, Katerina Petrovna, I won’t see you till September. It’s a long way to drag myself to you, from Basmannaya to the Arbat3—and I won’t invite you, I know you have no time now. Good-bye to you, too, my beauty; don’t forget my advice.”
The ladies took leave of each other, and Paraskovya Ivanovna left.
A Russian Pelham
CHAPTER ONE
My memories begin from the most tender age, and here is a scene that is vividly preserved in my imagination.1
Nanny brings me to a big room, dimly lit by a candle under a shade. On a bed under green curtains lies a woman all in white: my father takes me in his arms. She kisses me and weeps. My father sobs loudly, I get frightened and cry out. Nanny takes me away, saying, “Mama wants to go bye-bye.” I also remember great turmoil, a lot of guests, servants running from room to room. The sun shines through all the windows, and I’m very cheerful. A monk with a golden cross on his chest blesses me; a long red coffin is carried through the door. That is all that my mother’s funeral left in my heart. She was a woman of extraordinary mind and heart, as I learned later from the stories of people who knew how priceless she was.
Here my memories become confused. I cannot give a clear account of myself before I reached my eighth year. But first I must talk about my family.
My father was awarded the rank of sergeant while my grandmother was still pregnant with him. He was educated at home until he was eighteen. His tutor, Monsieur Décor, was a simple and kind old man, who had a very good knowledge of French orthography. It is not known whether my father had any other instructors, but, apart from French orthography, my father had no thorough knowledge of anything. He married against his parents’ will a girl who was several years older than he, retired that same year and went to Moscow. Old Savelyich, his valet, told me that the first years of their marriage were happy. My mother managed to reconcile her husband with his family, in which she came to be loved. But my father’s frivolous and inconstant character did not allow her to enjoy peace and happiness. He entered into a liaison with a woman known in society for her beauty and her amorous adventures. For him she divorced her husband, who yielded her to my father for ten thousand roubles and afterwards used to dine with us quite frequently. My mother knew it all, and kept silent. Inner suffering ruined her health. She took to her bed and never left it again.
My father owned five thousand souls. Consequently, he was one of those gentlemen whom the late Count Sheremetev called petty landowners, wondering in all honesty how they were able to live!2—The thing was that my father lived no worse than Count Sheremetev, though he was exactly twenty times poorer. Muscovites still remember his dinners, his private theater, and his horn music. Two years after my mother’s death, Anna Petrovna Virlatskaya, the cause of that death, moved into his house. She was, as they say, a fine figure of a woman, though no longer in the first bloom of youth. They brought me a boy in a red jacket with cuffs and told me he was my little brother. I gazed at him all eyes. Mishenka scraped to the right, scraped to the left, and wanted to play with my toy gun; I tore it from his hands, Mishenka began to cry, and my father stood me in the corner and gave my little brother my gun.
Such a beginning did not bode well for me. And indeed my sojourn under the paternal roof left nothing pleasant in my memory. My father loved me, of course, but he did not bother himself about me at all and abandoned me to the care of French tutors, who were constantly being hired and fired. My first tutor turned out to be a drunkard; the second, who was no fool and not lacking in knowledge, had such a violent temper that he nearly killed me with a log because I spilled ink on his waistcoat; the third, who spent a whole year with us, was mad, a
nd the household only realized it when he came to complain to Anna Petrovna that Mishenka and I had incited all the bedbugs in the house to give him no peace and that moreover a little devil had taken to nesting in his nightcap. Other Frenchmen could not get along with Anna Petrovna, who gave them no wine at dinner or horses on Sunday; moreover she paid them very irregularly. I was to blame: Anna Petrovna decided that none of my tutors could manage such an insufferable boy. However, it was also true that there was not one of them that I had not turned into a household laughingstock within two weeks of their entering into their duties. I remember with particular satisfaction Monsieur Groget, a respectable fifty-year-old Genevan, whom I persuaded that Anna Petrovna was in love with him. You should have seen his chaste horror, with a certain admixture of sly coquetry, when Anna Petrovna, glancing sidelong at him at the table, would say in a half whisper: “What a glutton!”
I was frisky, lazy, and hot-tempered, but sentimental and ambitious, and one could get anything from me by kindness; unfortunately, everybody meddled in my education, but nobody knew the right way of dealing with me. I laughed at the teachers and pulled tricks; with Anna Petrovna I fought tooth for tooth; with Mishenka I had incessant quarrels and scuffles. With my father things often went as far as stormy exchanges, which ended with tears on both sides. Finally Anna Petrovna persuaded him to send me to one of the German universities…I was then fifteen.
CHAPTER TWO
My university life left me with pleasant memories, which, if you look into them, refer to insignificant, and sometimes unpleasant, events; but youth is a great sorcerer: I would pay dearly to sit again over a mug of beer in a cloud of tobacco smoke, with a cudgel in my hand and a greasy velvet cap on my head. I would pay dearly for my room, eternally filled with people, and God knows what people; for our Latin songs, student duels, and quarrels with the philistines!3
The freedom of university studies was of greater benefit to me than lessons at home, but in general the only things I learned properly were fencing and making punch. I received money from home at irregular intervals. That accustomed me to debts and insouciance. Three years went by, and I received an order from my father in Petersburg to leave the university and enter government service in Russia. A few words about disordered circumstances, extra expenses, a change of life seemed odd to me, but I did not pay much attention to them. On my departure I gave a farewell banquet, at which I swore to be eternally faithful to friendship and to mankind and never to take the job of censor, and the next day, with a headache and heartburn, I set out on my way.
We Were Spending the Evening at the Dacha
We were spending the evening at the dacha of Princess D.
The conversation somehow touched upon Mme de Staël.1 Baron D., in poor French, told very poorly a well-known joke: her question to Bonaparte about whom he considered the foremost woman in the world, and his amusing reply: “The one who has had the most children” (“Celle qui a fait le plus d’enfants”).
“What a fine epigram!” one of the guests observed.
“And it serves her right!” one lady said. “How could she fish so clumsily for a compliment?”
“But it seems to me,” said Sorokhtin, who was dozing in a Gambs armchair,2 “it seems to me that Mme de Staël was no more thinking of madrigals than Napoleon was of epigrams. She asked the question out of simple curiosity, quite understandably; and Napoleon literally expressed his own personal opinion. But you don’t believe in the artlessness of genius.”
The guests began to argue, and Sorokhtin dozed off again.
“Really, though,” said the hostess, “whom do you consider the foremost woman in the world?”
“Careful, now: you’re fishing for a compliment…”
“No, joking aside…”
Here a discussion set in: some named Mme de Staël, others the Maid of Orleans, still others Elizabeth, the queen of England, Mme de Maintenon, Mme Roland, and so on…3
A young man standing by the fireplace (because in Petersburg a fireplace is never superfluous) mixed into the conversation for the first time.
“For me,” he said, “the most astonishing woman is Cleopatra.”
“Cleopatra?” said the guests. “Yes, of course…Why, though?”
“There is a feature in her life which is so engraved in my imagination that I can hardly glance at any woman without thinking at once of Cleopatra.”
“What is this feature?” asked the hostess. “Tell us.”
“I can’t; it’s a tricky thing to tell.”
“Why so? Is it indecent?”
“Yes, like almost everything that vividly portrays the terrible morals of antiquity.”
“Ah, tell us, tell us!”
“Ah, no, don’t tell us,” interrupted Volskaya, a divorced woman, primly lowering her fiery eyes.
“Enough,” cried the hostess with impatience. “Qui est-ce donc que l’on trompe ici?*1 Yesterday we saw Antony, and I have La Physiologie du mariage lying there on the mantelpiece.4 Indecent! Find something else to frighten us with! Stop addling our brains, Alexei Ivanych! You’re not a journalist. Tell us simply what you know about Cleopatra…though…keep it decent, if you can…”
Everybody laughed.
“By God,” said the young man, “I feel timid: I’ve become as bashful as our censorship. Well, so be it…You should know that among Latin historians there was a certain Aurelius Victor, whom you’ve probably never heard of.”
“Aurelius Victor?” interrupted Vershnev, who once studied with the Jesuits. “Aurelius Victor was a fourth-century writer. His works have been ascribed to Cornelius Nepos and even to Suetonius.5 He wrote the book De Viris Illustribus—about the famous men of the city of Rome, I know…”
“Exactly,” Alexei Ivanych went on. “His little book is quite worthless, but in it is found the story of Cleopatra that struck me so much. And, remarkably enough, in that passage the dry and dull Aurelius Victor equals Tacitus in power of expression: ‘Haec tantae libidinis fuit ut saepe prostiterit; tanta pulchritudinis ut multi noctem illius morte emerint…’ ”*2
“Wonderful!” exclaimed Vershnev. “It reminds me of Sallust—remember? ‘Tantae…’ ”6
“What is this, gentlemen?” asked the hostess. “Now you’re so good as to talk in Latin! How pleasant for us! Tell me, what is the meaning of your Latin phrase?”
“The point is that Cleopatra sold her beauty and that many bought a night with her at the price of their lives…”
“How terrible!” said the ladies. “What do you find astonishing about it?”
“You ask what? It seems to me that Cleopatra was no banal coquette and did not value herself cheaply. I suggested to * * * that he make a poem out of it; he did begin one, but dropped it.”
“And he did well.”
“What did he want to draw from it? What was the main idea here—do you remember?”
“He begins with the description of a banquet in the gardens of the Egyptian queen.”
Dark, sultry night envelops the African sky; Alexandria has fallen asleep; its squares are quiet, its houses dark. The distant Pharos burns solitarily in its vast harbor, like a lamp at the head of a sleeping beauty’s bed.
Bright and noisy are the halls of the Ptolemies’ palace: Cleopatra is receiving her friends; the table is surrounded by ivory couches; three hundred youths serve the guests, three hundred maidens bring them amphorae filled with Greek wines; three hundred black eunuchs silently oversee them.
The porphyry colonnade open to the south and to the north awaits the wafting of Eurus; but the air is still; the flaming tongues of lamps burn motionlessly; the smoke of incense rises straight up in a motionless stream; the sea, like a mirror, lies motionless at the pink steps of the semicircular porch. The gilded claws and granite tails of the guardian sphinxes are reflected in it…only the sounds of cithara and flute stir the lights, the air, and the sea.
Suddenly the queen fell to thinking and sadly hung her wondrous head; the bright banquet was dark
ened by her sadness, as the sun is darkened by a cloud.
What makes her sad?
Why does sorrow weigh her down?
What lacks ancient Egypt’s crown?
In her resplendent capital,
Protected by a crowd of thralls,
Peacefully her power she wields.
The earthly gods to her do yield,
Filled with wonders are her halls.
Let Africa’s scorching noon befall,
Let the cool shade of night descend,
At every hour on her attend
Luxury and art to gratify
Her drowsy senses, and to her fly
From all lands, over all the seas,
Offerings of rich finery,
Which she keeps changing in delight:
Now she shines with rubies bright,
Now chooses, like the women of Tyre,
A purple chiton for attire,
Now on the flood of hoary Nile,
Shaded by a splendid sail,
On her golden-decked trireme
She floats like Cypris in a dream.
Hourly before her eyes
Banquet after banquet flies,
And who in his soul can guess aright
All the mysteries of her nights?…
In vain! Her heart in languor moans,
She longs for pleasures yet unknown –
Exhausted, surfeited is she,
Ill with insensibility…
Cleopatra awakens from her pensiveness.
The feast dies down as in a daze,
But she again her head does raise,
Fire is in her haughty eyes,
And with a sudden smile she cries:
“You find my love a blissful force?
Novels, Tales, Journeys Page 51
