Chapter 1

THE MEMOIRS OF ALEXANDER HERZEN

IV

NOTE

This translation has been made by arrangement from the sole complete

and copyright edition of _My Past and Thoughts_, that published in the

original Russian at Berlin, 1921.

_MY PAST AND THOUGHTS_

THE MEMOIRS OF

ALEXANDER HERZEN

_THE AUTHORISED TRANSLATION

TRANSLATED FROM THE RUSSIAN

BY CONSTANCE GARNETT_

VOLUME IV

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

ALFRED A. KNOPF

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

T. & A. CONSTABLE LTD. EDINBURGH

*

ALL RIGHTS

RESERVED

FIRST PUBLISHED 1925

CONTENTS

_SECTION THREE_

A FAMILY DRAMA

I. THE YEAR 1848 _page 1_

II. THE YEAR 1849 _page 39_

III. THE YEAR 1851 _page 47_

IV. THE YEAR 1852 _page 75_

ADDENDA TO SECTION THREE—EXTRACTS FROM A DIARY _page 110_

SELECTIONS FROM CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO SECTION THREE _page 114_

_SECTION FOUR_

ENGLAND

(1852-1855)

CHAPTER I:—The Fogs of London _page 138_

CHAPTER II:—The Mountain Heights—The Central European

Committee—Mazzini—Ledru-Rollin—Kossuth _page 144_

APPENDIX (TO CHAPTER II) _page 163_

CHAPTER III:—I. The Exiles in London—The Germans and the

French—Parties—Victor Hugo—Felix Pyat—Louis Blanc and Armand

Barbès—II. Felix Pyat—Victor Hugo and Others—Louis Blanc and

the French Refugees _page 167_

CHAPTER IV:—I. POLISH REFUGEES: Aloysius Bernacki—Stanislaw

Worcell—The Polish Agitators between 1854 and 1856—The Death

of Worcell.—II. Pater V. Petcherin _page 206_

THREE TRIALS—I. The Duel—II. Barthélemy—III. Not Guilty _page 250_

CHAPTER V:—Golovin _page 301_

_SECTION THREE_[1]

A FAMILY DRAMA

I

THE YEAR 1848

1

‘To understand so much’ (Natalie wrote to Ogaryov at the end of 1846)

‘and not to have the strength to deal with it—not to have the fortitude

to accept bitter and sweet alike, but to stop short at the first—it is

pitiful! And I understand all that as well as possible, and yet I cannot

arrive at enjoying myself or even being indulgent. I understand what is

good outside myself, I do it justice—but only what is gloomy is reflected

in my soul and torments me. Give me your hand and say with me that

nothing satisfies you, that there is nothing you are content with, and

then teach me to rejoice, to be gay, to enjoy myself—I have everything to

make me happy, if only I could develop the faculty.’ These lines and the

fragment of her diary relating to the same period, and quoted elsewhere,

were written under the influence of our Moscow misunderstandings. Her

gloomy side had come uppermost again; the estrangement of the Granovskys

terrified Natalie; it seemed to her that our whole circle was falling to

pieces and that we were being left alone with Ogaryov.... A girl hardly

more than a child, whom she loved like a younger sister, was drifting

further from us than any. At all costs to break out of this circle became

at that time a passionate _idée fixe_ with Natalie.

We went away.

At first the novelty of Paris, then awakening Italy and revolutionary

France, occupied our whole souls. Personal doubts and hesitations were

eclipsed by history.

So we lived up to the days of June. Even before those terrible days of

bloodshed, the 15th of May had cut down our hopes that had risen once

again....

‘Three full months had not passed since the 24th of February, men were

still wearing the same shoes as when they built the barricades, but

France, already worn out, was asking to be subjugated.’[2] No blood

was spilt on that day; it was a thunderclap from a cloudless sky

foretelling a fearful storm. On that day I seemed to look with a sort

of clairvoyance into the soul of the bourgeois, into the soul of the

workman—and felt horror-stricken. I saw the savage lust of blood on

both sides—concentrated hatred on the side of the workman, and fierce,

rapacious self-preservation on the side of the bourgeois. Two such camps

could not stand side by side, jostling each other every day in the

closest proximity—in the home, in the street, in the workshop, in the

market-place. A terrible bloody conflict, foreboding nothing good, was

close upon us. This was seen by none except the Conservatives who were

working to bring it about; my nearest friends spoke with a smile of my

nervous pessimism. It was easier for them to snatch up a gun and to go to

die on a barricade than to look facts boldly in the face; they did not

want as a rule to understand things, but to triumph over their opponents;

they wanted to establish their own point of view.

I drifted further and further away from every one. There was the menace

of emptiness in that—but all at once the beating of drums, the clatter of

crowds in the streets in the early morning, announced the beginning of

the catastrophe.

Those June days—and the days that followed after them—were awful; they

made the turning-point in my life. I will repeat a few lines I wrote a

month later.

‘Women weep to relieve their hearts, we do not know how to weep. Instead

of tears I want to write—not in order to describe and explain the bloody

events, but simply to talk about them, to give vent to speech, to tears,

to thoughts, to bitterness. How is one to describe, to collect evidence,

to judge!—One’s ears are still ringing with the sound of shots, the

tramp of racing cavalry, the heavy rumblings of cannon-wheels through

the dead streets; individual details flash upon the memory—a wounded

man holding on to the stretcher, with his hand to his side, and a few

drops of blood trickling down it; the omnibuses filled with corpses, the

prisoners with bound hands, the cannon on the Place de la Bastille, the

camp at the Porte St. Denis in the Champs-Élysées, and the gloomy night:

“_Sentinelle, prenez garde à vous!_” How can one describe things when the

brain is inflamed and the blood is on fire?

‘To sit at home with one’s hands folded, unable to go out beyond the

gate, and to hear far and near all around one firing, cannonades,

screams, drums beating, and to know that blood is flowing, men are being

hacked and stabbed and dying at your side—that is enough to kill a man,

to drive him mad. I did not die, but it made me old, and I am recovering

after the days of June as after a terrible illness.

‘And yet the beginning was impressive. On the 23rd, at four o’clock,

before dinner, I was walking along the bank of the Seine towards the

Hôtel de Ville; the shops were shutting, columns of the National Guard

with sinister faces were marching in different directions, the sky was

covered with storm-clouds, a fine rain was falling. I stopped at the Pont

Neuf, a vivid flash of lightning gleamed out of a storm-cloud, claps of

thunder followed one after another, and, in the midst of all that, the

drawn-out measured sound of the alarm-bell rang out from the belfry of

St. Sulpice, and with it the deceived proletariat once more summoned

their brothers to arms. The cathedral and all the buildings on the river

bank were wonderfully lighted up by a few rays of sunshine, gleaming

brightly from under a storm-cloud, the drums sounded from all sides, the

artillery filed along from the Place du Carrousel. I heard the thunder

and the bell ringing, and could not gaze enough at the panorama of Paris,

as though I were taking leave of it; I passionately loved Paris at that

moment; it was the last homage I paid to the great city—after the days of

June it grew hateful to me.

‘On the other side of the river barricades were being thrown up in all

the streets and alleys. I can see now those gloomy figures dragging the

stones, women and children helping them. A young Polytechnic student

climbed one barricade that apparently was finished, unfurled the flag and

began singing the Marseillaise in a mournfully solemn voice, all who were

working joined in, and the chorus of the grand song resounding over the

stones of the barricades made the heart throb.... The alarm bell still

rang out. Meanwhile, there was the thud of artillery over the bridge, and

General Beguot on the bridge scanned through a field-glass the _enemy’s_

position....’

At that moment it was still possible to prevent it all, then it was

still possible to save the republic and the freedom of all Europe, then

it was still possible to have made peace. The dull-witted and tactless

government could not do this, the Assembly would not, the reactionaries

sought revenge, blood, atonement for the 24th of February, and the

enactments of the Nationale gave them the instruments to carry out their

will.

On the evening of the 26th of June, after the victory of the Nationale

over Paris, we heard shots being fired at short regular intervals.... We

glanced at one another, all our faces were livid....

‘They are shooting prisoners,’ we said with one voice, and turned away

from one another. I pressed my forehead against the window-pane. Such

moments provoke ten years of hatred, a lifetime of revenge: _woe to him

who forgives at such moments!_

After the fighting, which lasted four days and four nights, there

followed the calm and stillness of a state of siege; the streets were

still surrounded by cordons, only very rarely here and there one came

upon a carriage; the haughty National Guards, with brutal and stupid

ferocity in their faces, guarded their shops, threatening with bayonets

and butt-ends of rifles. Triumphant crowds of drunken _gardes mobiles_

paraded the streets singing _Mourir pour la Patrie_; lads of sixteen or

seventeen boasted of their brothers’ blood, with which their hands were

stained; shopgirls ran out from behind the counter and threw flowers

to them, to greet the conquerors. Cavaignac took round with him in a

carriage a monster who had killed dozens of Frenchmen. The bourgeoisie

was triumphant. Yet the houses of the Faubourg St. Antoine were still

smoking, the walls battered by bullets were in ruins, the interior of

rooms thrown open displayed wounds in the stones, broken furniture was

still smouldering, bits of shattered looking-glass glittered ... and

where were the owners? The inhabitants? No one even thought of them....

In places they were scattering sand, but still there was blood to be

seen. People were not allowed to approach the Panthéon, which had been

damaged by cannon-balls; there were tents pitched in the boulevards,

horses were nibbling the carefully tended trees of the Champs-Élysées;

hay, cuirassiers, breastplates, and saddles were lying about everywhere

in the Place de la Concorde; soldiers were making soup in the Jardin des

Tuileries, by the fence. Paris had not seen this even in 1814.

A few more days passed—and Paris began to assume its customary aspect.

Crowds of idlers appeared again on the boulevards, smartly-dressed ladies

drove about in carriages and cabriolets _to look_ at the ruins of houses

and the traces of desperate fighting.... It was only the frequent patrols

and gangs of prisoners that reminded one of the terrible days, only then

the past began to grow clear. Byron has a description of a battlefield

at night; its blood-stained details are hidden in the darkness; at

dawn, when the battle has long been over, its traces—a sword-blade and

blood-stained clothes—are seen. It was just such a dawn that rose now in

the soul, it lighted up a scene of fearful desolation. Half of our hopes,

half of our beliefs were slain, ideas of scepticism and despair haunted

the brain and took root in it. One could never have supposed that, after

passing through so many trials, after being schooled by contemporary

scepticism, we had so much left in our souls to be destroyed.

Natalie wrote about this time to Moscow: ‘I look at the children and

weep, I am terrified. I no longer dare to wish them to live, perhaps

there is a fate as awful in store for them too.’

* * * * *

In these words is the echo of all she had been through, in them one seems

to see the omnibuses piled up with dead, and prisoners with bound hands,

followed by oaths, and the poor deaf-and-dumb boy shot a few steps from

our gate because he did not hear: ‘_Passez au large!_’ And how could it

fail to make this impression on the heart of a woman who had unhappily so

profound an understanding of everything sorrowful?... Even joyous natures

grew gloomy and full of bitterness, the heart ached with a sort of angry

pain, and an overwhelming shame made daily life seem out of place.

It was not a fantastic grief for ideals, not a revival of the tears and

romantic religion of her girlhood, which once more flooded Natalie’s

soul, but a real sorrow, too heavy a burden for a woman’s shoulders.

Natalie’s living interest in public affairs did not grow colder; on the

contrary, it turned into a living agony. It was the distress of a sister,

the tears of a mother, on the sorrowful field of the battle that had just

been lost. She was in reality what Rachel falsely played at being with

her Marseillaise.

Weary of fruitless discussions, I snatched up my pen and, with a sort

of inner fury, slew my own old dreams and hopes. The energy that was

breaking and fretting me spent itself in these pages of cursing and

resentment, in which even now, when I read them over, I am conscious of

the fevered blood and indignation that passed beyond all bounds ... it

was an outlet.

She had no such outlet. In the morning there were the children, in the

evening our irritable, vindictive discussions, the post-mortem arguments

of dissectors with doctors who had failed.

She was suffering—and I, in place of healing, offered her the bitter cup

of scepticism and irony. If I had tended her sick soul with half the care

I lavished afterwards on her sick body, I should never have let this

rankling sorrow send out roots in all directions. I helped to feed and

strengthen them without making sure whether she could bear it, could cope

with it.

Our life itself was strangely ordered. We rarely had quiet evenings of

intimate talk and peaceful rest. We had not yet learnt to close our doors

on outsiders. Towards the end of the year, fugitives from all countries,

homeless refugees, began to arrive from all parts. In their dullness and

isolation they sought a friendly roof and a warm welcome.

Here is what she wrote of that:

_November 21, 1848._—‘I am sick of Chinese shadows. I do not know whom I

see and why I see them, I only know that I see too many people—all good

people; I fancy I might take pleasure in their company _sometimes_, but

that it is too often, life is so like the dripping water in springtime,

drip, drip, drip.

‘All the morning I am looking after Sasha, after Tata, and that goes on

all day. I cannot concentrate for one minute. I am so distracted that it

sometimes makes me ill and frightened; the evening comes, the children

are put to bed—well, one might think I should rest.... No, good people

begin strolling in, and that they are good people makes it even harder

to bear; otherwise, I should be quite alone, and, as it is, I am not

alone—and I do not feel their presence, it’s as though the room were

full of smoke, one’s eyes smart, and it is hard to breathe—and they go

away and nothing is left.... To-morrow comes, always the same thing, the

day after comes, always the same thing. To no one else could I say this,

others would think I am complaining, would imagine I am dissatisfied

with my life; you understand me, you know that I would not change with

any one on earth. This is a moment’s indignation, weariness—a breath of

fresh air, and I rise up again as strong as ever. If I am to say all that

passes in my mind, I am sometimes terrified looking at the children ...

what boldness, what audacity, to bring a new creature into life, and to

have nothing, nothing to make its life happy—it is fearful, sometimes I

seem to myself a criminal; it would be easier to take life than to give

it, if it were done with full consciousness. I have never yet met any

one of whom I could say, “If my child were such as he, that is, if his

life were such as his....” My views grow more and more humble. Soon after

Sasha’s birth, I wanted him to be a great man, later on, to be this or

that, now all I want is....’

At this point the letter was cut short by our little girl Tata’s having

typhoid fever; on the 15th of December the words were added: ‘Well, what

I meant to say was that now I don’t care about making anything of the

children; so long as their lives are bright and happy, the rest is of no

consequence....’

_January 24, 1849._—‘How I should sometimes like to run about like a

mouse as others do, and to find that trotting to and fro interesting,

instead of being so idle, so idle in the midst of this bustle, in the

midst of these necessary things, while the work that I should like is

out of the question; how agonising it is always to feel oneself in such

disharmony with those surrounding one—I am not speaking of our most

intimate circle, but if only one could confine oneself to it; one cannot.

‘One longs to get away, far away!... It was all right to feel like that

when we were in Italy.

‘But now! there’s no sense in it! At thirty to have the same yearnings,

the same thirst, and the same dissatisfaction—yes, I said that aloud—and

Tata came up at that word and kissed me so warmly. Dissatisfaction?—I am

too happy, _la vie déborde_.... But

‘“Why is it on the world

One longs to gaze,

Why to fly over it

Does the soul crave?”

‘It is only to you that I talk like this—you will understand me, because

you are just as weak as I am—but with others, whether stronger or weaker,

I should not care to speak like this, I should not care for them to hear

what I am saying. I find something else for them. Then I am frightened by

my indifference, so few things, so few people interest me.... Nature—only

not in the kitchen; history—only not in the law-courts; and then my own

family, then two or three others—that’s all. And yet how kind they all

are—they take so much trouble over my health and Kolya’s deafness.’

_January 27._—‘No, I really have not the strength to go on watching the

death-agonies—they last too long, and life is so short; I am possessed

by egoism, because one does no good by self-sacrifice, at the most

it shows the truth of the proverb, “Even death is agreeable in good

company!” But enough of dying. I should like to live.... I should like

to escape to America.... What we believed in, what we took for reality,

was only a prophecy of the future, and a very premature one. How bitter,

how comfortless it is! I want to cry like a child. What is personal

happiness? ... public life is all around one like the atmosphere, and

that atmosphere is full now of the breath of death and pestilence.’

_February 1._—‘Natasha,[3] if you knew, my dear, how dark, how

comfortless it is outside our personal private circle! Oh, if one could

shut oneself inside it, and forget, forget everything except that narrow

circle.... How insufferable is the ferment, the result of which won’t

come for some centuries! I am too weak to rise above that ferment and

look so far into the future—I shrink into myself and am crushed.’

This letter ends with the words: ‘I should like to have so little

strength as not to feel my own existence; when I do feel it, I feel all

the disharmony of everything that exists....’

The reaction was triumphant; through the pale blue republic could be

seen the features of pretenders to the throne, the National Guards

went hunting after workmen in blouses, the Prefect of Police sent

search-parties through the woods and catacombs, hunting for those who

were in hiding. Men of a less martial type preferred eavesdropping and

sending secret reports.

Until the autumn we were surrounded by our own friends, and gave vent to

our grief and our anger in our own language; the Tutchkovs[4] were living

in the same house, Mariya Fyodorovna Korsh[5] was with us, Annenkov[6]

and Turgenev used to come every day; but all were looking away into the

distance, our little circle was breaking up. After its bath of blood,

Paris had no hold on them; all prepared to go away, from no special

necessity, probably thinking to escape from the spiritual oppression,

from the days of June which had become part of them, and which they took

with them.

Why did not I go too? Much would have been saved, and I should not have

had to offer up such human sacrifices and so much of myself, as an

offering to a cruel and merciless god.

The day of our parting with the Tutchkovs and Mariya Fyodorovna struck a

particularly ominous note in my life, but I let that note of warning pass

unheeded like hundreds of others.

Every man who has gone through a great deal remembers days, hours, a

succession of scarcely noticed points with which a crisis begins, with

which the wind shifts to a different quarter; these signs or warnings do

not come by chance at all, they are sequences, rudimentary germs of what

is ready to burst into life, revelations of what is secretly fermenting

and already existing. We do not notice these psychological signs, but

laugh at them as we do over spilled salt, or a candle being blown out,

because we consider ourselves immeasurably more independent than we

really are, and proudly desire to guide our lives ourselves.

On the eve of our friends’ departure, they gathered at our house together

with three or four other intimate friends. The travellers were to be at

the railway-station at seven o’clock in the morning; it was not worth

while going to bed, we all preferred to spend the last hours together. At

first all were lively with that nervous excitement which is always seen

at moments of separation, but by degrees a cloud of depression seemed to

come over all of us.... Conversation flagged, every one began to feel

dispirited, the wine was left untouched in our glasses, the efforts at

jesting no longer cheered us. Some one, seeing the daybreak, pulled

back the curtain and threw a pale bluish light on all our faces that

suggested the Roman orgies of Couture.[7] All were melancholy. I was so

sad I could hardly breathe. My wife was sitting on a little sofa, while

Tutchkov’s younger daughter, ‘_Consuelo di sua alma_,’[8] as Natalie

used to call her, was kneeling with her face on Natalie’s bosom. She

was passionately fond of my wife, and was unwillingly leaving her to go

into the wilds of the country; her sister stood mournfully beside her.

Consuelo was whispering something through her tears, while two paces

away Mariya Fyodorovna was sitting in gloomy silence; she had learnt

through years to submit to destiny, she knew life, and in her eyes one

could simply read ‘good-bye,’ while through the young girl’s tears there

still gleamed ‘till we meet again.’ Then we went to see them off. It was

piercingly cold in the high, empty, stone station, the doors slammed

incessantly, and the draught blew in all directions. We sat down on a

seat in the corner. Tutchkov went to look after the luggage. Suddenly the

door opened, and two drunken old men burst noisily into the station.

Their clothes were muddy, their faces distorted, everything about them

was suggestive of brutal debauchery. They came in, swearing. One tried

to strike the other, the latter dodged and, swinging his fist with all

his might, hit him in the face. The old drunkard was sent flying. His

head struck the stone floor with the sharp sound of something cracking;

he shrieked and raised his head, while the blood poured in streams over

his grey hair and the stone floor. The police and passengers fell with

fury upon the other old man. Though we had been overwrought and excited

ever since the previous evening, and our nerves were over-strained, we

maintained our self-control, but the fearful echo that resounded through

the hall when the skull struck the floor had almost an hysterical effect

upon all of us. Our household and all our circle were at all times sane

and free from neurotic and hysterical exhibitions, but this was more than

we could bear. I felt myself shuddering all over, and my wife was almost

fainting. And then the bell—time was up! And we were left suddenly at the

barrier—alone.

Nothing could be coarser and more mortifying for parting friends than the

police arrangements at railway-stations in France; they rob those left

behind of the last two or three minutes; the friends are still there, the

engine has not yet whistled, the train has not moved off, but between you

is a fence, a barrier, and the arm of a policeman—while you long to see

them settled, to see the train move off, then to watch it in the distance

turn to a cloud of dust, of smoke, a point, to watch until you can see

nothing....

In silence we reached home. My wife was weeping quietly all the way—she

was sorry to lose her Consuelo; at times, wrapping herself in her shawl,

she asked me, ‘Do you remember that sound?—it is ringing in my ears

still.’

At home I persuaded her to lie down, while I sat down to read the

newspapers; I read, read the _premier Paris_ and the _feuilletons_ and

the short paragraphs, and glanced at my watch—it was not yet twelve; what

a day! I went to see Annenkov; he, too, was going in a few days. We went

for a walk together, the streets were even more dreary than reading; I

was weighed down by misery that was like the gnawing of conscience. ‘Come

to dinner with me,’ I said, and we went home. My wife was really ill, the

evening was disjointed and stupid. ‘And so it is settled,’ I asked as we

parted, ‘that you go at the end of the week?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ll be wretched in Russia.’

‘I can’t help that, I must go. I shall not stay in Petersburg, I shall go

into the country. Why, it’s not so wonderfully nice here now. You may yet

regret staying.’

At that time I could still have returned, I had not yet burnt my ships.

Rebillaud and Carlier had not yet written their secret police reports,

but in my mind the matter was settled. Yet Annenkov’s words jarred

unpleasantly on my overwrought nerves; I thought a moment and answered:

‘No, there is no choice for me, I must stay; and if I regret anything, it

is rather that I did not take the gun when a workman offered it to me at

a barricade on the Place Maubert.’

Many times in moments of weakness and despair, when the cup of bitterness

was too full, when my whole life seemed to me nothing but one prolonged

blunder, when I doubted of myself, of ‘the last thing, all that is left,’

those words came back to my mind, ‘Why did I not take the gun from the

workman and stay at the barricade?’ Struck by a chance bullet, I should

have borne two or three convictions with me to the grave.

* * * * *

And again the time lagged on ... day after day ... grey and wearisome....

People flitted in, made friends for a day, passed by, vanished, were

lost. Towards the winter, exiles from other lands, survivors from other

shipwrecks, began to arrive; full of hope and self-confidence, they took

the reaction that had sprang up all over Europe for a passing squall, a

minor reverse; they expected their turn would come, next day, next week.

I felt that they were wrong, but I was glad of their mistake. I tried

to be inconsistent, struggled with myself, and lived in a state of

nervous irritability. That time has remained in my memory like a day of

stupefaction and delirium.... In my misery I turned hither and thither,

restlessly seeking distraction—in books, in noise, in solitude, at home,

in company, but always there was something lacking, laughter did not

make me merry, wine only made me heavy, music cut me to the heart, and

lively talk almost always ended in gloomy silence. Everything within

was outraged, everything was turned upside down, all was chaos, full of

glaring contradictions; again I was pulling everything to pieces, again

there was nothing. The principles of one’s moral existence, worked out

long ago, were turned again into questions, facts had risen up sullenly

on all sides and refuted them. Doubt trampled under foot the little we

had gained, it was now tearing to shreds, not the vestments of the Church

nor the robes of learned doctors, but the flags of the revolution....

From abstract ideas doubt was turned upon life. There is a deep gulf

between theoretical scepticism and doubt that passes over into conduct;

thought is bold, the tongue is reckless, it readily utters words which

the heart dreads; hopes and convictions still smoulder in the breast

while the mind, racing on ahead, refuses assent. The heart lags behind

because it loves; and while the mind delivers sentence and verdict, it is

still taking leave.

Perhaps in youth, when all is ferment and commotion, when there is so

much in the future, when the loss of some convictions only makes room for

others, perhaps in old age, when all grows indistinct from weariness,

these crises are easier—but _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_,[9] we

paid dearly for them.

What does it all mean—is it a jest? Everything sacred that we loved, for

which we struggled, for which we made sacrifices, has been betrayed by

life, betrayed by history, betrayed for her own ends—she needs madmen as

a ferment, and cares not what becomes of them when they recover; they

have served her turn—let them live out their crippled lives in hospital!

The shame, the mortification! And here at one’s side simple-hearted

friends shrug their shoulders, wonder at one’s poor-spiritedness, at

one’s impatience, look forward to the morrow, and for ever fussing, for

ever busy with the same thing, see nothing, stop before nothing, go on

for ever and are never a step forwarder.... They judge you, comfort you,

scold you—oh wearisome, insufferable infliction! ‘Men of faith, men of

love,’ as they call themselves in contradistinction to us men ‘of doubt

and negation,’ do not know what it is to tear out by the roots the

cherished convictions of a lifetime, they know nothing of the sickness of

truth, they have surrendered no treasure with that loud lamentation of

which the poet speaks:

‘Ich riss sie blutend aus dem wunden Herzen

Und weinte laut und gab sie hin.’

Happy are the lunatics who have no lucid intervals; they know nothing of

the inner conflict, they suffer from external causes, from evil men and

evil chances, but within, all is whole, conscience is at rest, they are

content. And so the gnawing despair of others seems to them caprice,

the self-indulgence of a too well-fed mind, idle irony. They see that

the wounded man laughs at his crutch, and conclude that the operation

meant nothing to him; it does not enter their heads to wonder why he is

prematurely old and whether the stump aches at the change of the weather

and the blowing of the wind.

My logical confession, the history of the disease through which my

wounded thoughts struggled, remains in the series of articles that make

up _From the Other Side_. In them I attacked the last idols I had left.

With irony I revenged myself on them for the pain and the betrayal. I did

not jeer at my neighbours, but at myself, and, carried away again, was

already dreaming of being free, but there, too, I came to grief. Losing

faith in words and banners, in canonised humanity and the one church

of salvation, that is, Western civilisation, I still believed in a few

persons, I believed in myself. Seeing that all was tumbling into ruins, I

tried to save myself, to begin a new life, to get away with two or three

others, to run, to hide from ... superfluous people. And haughtily I

headed my last article: _Omnia mea mecum porto!_

Life, burnt up, losing shape and colour in the abyss of events, in

the vortex of public interests, became self-centred, shrank back into

youthful lyricism, without youth, without faith. With this _faro da me_,

my boat was bound to be wrecked on submerged rocks, and it was wrecked. I

survived, it is true, but lost everything....

2

TYPHOID

In the winter of 1848 my little girl, Tata, was ill. She had been ailing

for a long time, then had a slight attack of fever, and it seemed to have

passed off. Rayer, the well-known doctor, advised that she should be

taken a drive in spite of the wintry weather. It was a fine day, but not

warm. When she was brought home, she was unusually pale; she asked for

something to eat and fell asleep beside us on the sofa before the broth

was brought; several hours passed, she went on sleeping. Adolf Vogt, a

medical student, a brother of the naturalist, happened to be with us.

‘Look at the child,’ he said; ‘why, that’s not natural sleep.’ The

deathly, almost bluish, pallor of the face alarmed me; I put my hand

on the child’s forehead, it was stone-cold. I rushed myself to Rayer,

luckily found him at home and brought him back with me. The little

creature was still asleep. Rayer lifted her up, shook her violently

and made me call her loudly by her name.... She opened her eyes, said

a couple of words and dropped back again into the same heavy deathlike

sleep; her breathing was hardly perceptible. She remained in that

condition, with slight changes, for several days, without food and almost

without drink. Her lips turned black, her nails were dark blue and spots

came out over the body—it was typhoid. Rayer did scarcely anything,

waited, watched the illness and gave us little hope.

The appearance of the child was terrible; I expected the end from hour to

hour. Pale and silent, my wife sat day and night by the little bed, her

eyes covered with that pearly lustre which betrays fatigue, suffering,

exhausted strength and unnaturally strained nerves. Once, between one and

two o’clock at night, I fancied that Tata was not breathing. I looked at

her, concealing my horror. Natalie guessed it. ‘My head is going round,’

she said, ‘give me some water.’ When I handed her the glass, she was

unconscious. Ivan Turgenev, who had come to share our gloomy hours, ran

to the chemist’s for spirits of ammonia. I stood motionless between

two unconscious bodies, gazed at them, but did nothing. Our maid rubbed

Natalie’s hands and moistened her temples; in a few minutes she came to

herself. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘I thought Tata opened her eyes,’ said good,

kind Luise. I looked, she seemed to be waking; I spoke her name in a

whisper; she opened her eyes and smiled with her black, dry and cracked

lips. From that minute she began to recover.

There are poisons which destroy a man more cruelly, more agonisingly

than children’s illnesses. I know them, but there is nothing worse than

the slow poison that works by exhaustion, that saps the strength in the

stillness and humiliates one with the impotence of an idle spectator.

The man who has once carried a little creature in his arms and felt it

growing cold and heavy, turning to stone, who has heard the last moan

with which the frail creature begs for mercy, for help, imploring for

its life, who has seen the pretty little coffin covered with pink satin,

and the little white frock, with lace on it, which contrasts so with the

little yellow face, will think at every childish illness, may there not

be another little coffin on that table!

Misfortune is a bad school! Of course, a man who has gone through a

great deal is better able to bear misfortunes, but that is only because

his soul has been bruised and weakened. A man slowly wears out and

grows more cowardly from the troubles he has endured. He loses that

confidence in the morrow without which nothing can be done: he grows more

indifferent because he is used to terrible thoughts, and in the end he is

selfishly afraid of suffering, that is, he is afraid of feeling again the

succession of acute miseries, the succession of pangs to the heart, of

which the memories never pass away as storm-clouds do from the sky.

The moan of a sick child causes such inward terror in me, sends such a

cold shiver through me, that I have to make great efforts to overcome

this purely nervous effect of memory.

It was on the morning after that same night that I went out for the

first time for a walk; it was cold, the pavements were lightly powdered

with hoar frost, but in spite of the cold and the early hour the

boulevards were crowded with people; shouting streets-boys were selling

_bulletins_—over five million voices laid France bound at the feet of

Louis Napoleon. The bereaved servants’ hall had found a master again at

last! It was just at this time of bitter trial and strain that a person

came into our circle who brought with him another train of misfortunes,

who brought more ruin into our private life than the black days of June

into our public. This person approached us rapidly, forced himself upon

us without giving us time for consideration.... At ordinary times I am

quick to become acquainted and slow to become intimate, but that, I

repeat again, was not an ordinary time. All our nerves were laid bare and

smarting; trivial meetings, insignificant reminders of the past, made one

quiver in every fibre. I remember, for instance, that three days after

the cannonade, I was strolling along the Faubourg St. Antoine; everything

still bore fresh traces of fierce fighting, there were broken walls,

barricades still standing, pale, frightened women looking for something,

and children rummaging in the _débris_....

I sat down before a little café and looked, with an aching heart, at

the terrible scene. A quarter of an hour passed—some one softly laid a

hand on my shoulder—it was Doviat, a young enthusiast who had preached

some sort of Neo-catholicism _à la_ Ruge in Germany, and had, in 1847,

emigrated to America.

He was pale, his face was working, his long hair was in disorder, he was

dressed as though for a journey.

‘My God!’ he said, ‘how we meet again!’

‘When did you come?’

‘To-day. Having heard in New York of the revolution of February and of

all that was being done in Europe, I hurriedly sold everything I could,

took all my money, and rushed for a steamer with a light heart full of

hope. Yesterday, at Havre, I heard of what has just happened, but I could

never have imagined anything as bad as this.’

We looked at each other once more, and our eyes were full of tears.

‘Not a day, not one single day in this accursed city!’ said the excited

Doviat, and he was really like some prophesying Levite.

‘Hence! Away! Farewell, I go to Germany!’

He did go, and fell into a Prussian prison, where he spent six years.

I remember, too, the performance of _Catiline_ which the strong-nerved

Dumas put on the stage at that time in his historic theatre. The forts

were packed to overflowing with prisoners, some were sent by herds to the

Château d’If and deported, their relations wandered like uneasy spirits

from one police office to another, imploring to be told who was killed,

and who had survived, and who had been shot; but Alexandre Dumas was

already producing the days of June in a Roman setting on the stage. I

went to have a look at it. At first it was nothing much; Ledru-Rollin as

Catiline and Cicero as Lamartine, classical sentences with rhetorical

padding. The rising is put down. Lamartine marches across the stage with

his ‘Vixerunt’; the scene changes. The market-place is covered with

corpses, in the distance is a red glow—the dying, in death agonies, are

lying among the dead; the dead are covered with bloody rags—I could

hardly breathe. So lately behind the walls of that playhouse, in the

streets leading up to it, we had seen the thing itself, and the corpses

were not of cardboard, and the streaming blood was not coloured water,

but trickled from live young bodies.

I rushed away almost hysterical, cursing the wildly applauding

bourgeois....

In such agonising days, when a man cannot stay in restaurant or theatre,

at home or in his study, but goes out in a fever, with brain distraught,

inwardly crushed, deeply wounded, and ready to wound any one he meets,

then every word of sympathy, every tear over the same grief, every curse

that springs from the same hatred, has wonderful power. Sore places

quickly grow together when the wounds are alike.

In the early days of my youth I was struck by a French novel, which I

have not met since—it was called _Arminius_. Possibly it has no great

merits, but at the time it had a great influence on me, and it haunted my

mind for years afterwards. I remember its chief incidents to this day.

From the history of the early ages of Christendom we all know something

of the meeting and conflict between two different worlds—one, the ancient

and classical world of culture, corrupt and effete, the other savage as a

wild beast of the forest, but full of slumbering forces and a disorderly

chaos of tendencies—that is, we all know the official public side of

this contact, but not that side which was concerned with details and

the stillness of home life. We know the events as a whole, but have no

record of the lives of the persons who were directly dependent on them,

though it was through those events that lives unchronicled were broken

and ruined, blood was replaced by tears, devastated towns by desolate

families, the field of battle by forgotten tombs.

The author of _Arminius_—I have forgotten his name—tried to reproduce

these two worlds—one coming from the forest into history, the other going

from history to the tomb—as they met at the domestic hearth. Universal

history, when reduced to personal gossip, comes nearer to us, more

within our grasp, more living. I was so interested by _Arminius_ that

I began writing a series of historical scenes in the same style, and

the Chief Police-master, Tsinsky, made a critical analysis of them in

1834. But I need hardly say that when I wrote those it never entered my

head that I should come into a similar conflict, and that my own hearth

would be devastated, crushed at the meeting of two historic worlds.

Whatever may be said, there are points of resemblance in our relation

to Europeans. Our civilisation is skin-deep, our corruption is crude,

our coarse hair bristles under the powder on our heads, and the sunburn

shows through the powder on our cheeks; we have the cunning of savages,

the vice of animals, the evasiveness of slaves, everywhere we are

beginning to have money and money-grubbers, but we are very far behind

the hereditary, intangible subtleties of West European corruption. Among

us intellectual development[10] serves as a purification and a guarantee.

Exceptions are rare. Culture among us, until lately, was a barrier which

much that was infamous and vicious never crossed.

In Western Europe this is not so. And that is how it is that we readily

surrender to a man who touches upon our holy things, who understands

our cherished thoughts, who boldly utters what we are wont to pass over

in silence or to speak of in whispers to a friend. We do not take into

account that half the sayings which set our hearts beating and our bosoms

heaving have become for Europe truisms or phrases; we forget how many

corrupt passions, the artificial passions of old age, are entangled in

the soul of a modern man belonging to that effete civilisation. From his

earliest years he is trying to get in first, rotten through and through

with self-seeking, sick with envy and _amour-propre_, with insatiable

self-indulgence and petty egoism to which every relation, every feeling

is subordinated.... He wants to play a part, to pose on the stage, he

wants at all costs to keep his place, to satisfy his passions. We sons

of the Steppes, receiving one blow and a second, often not seeing whence

they come, stupefied by them, are long before we come to our senses, and

then fling ourselves like wounded bears, tearing up trees and howling and

flinging up the earth—but too late, and our opponent points a finger of

scorn at us. Much hatred yet will be engendered and much blood yet will

flow through this difference in the two stages of growth and education.

There was a time when I sternly and passionately judged the man who

shattered my life. There was a time when I earnestly desired to kill

him. Seven years have passed since then; a true son of the age, I have

worn out all desire of vengeance, and have cooled my passionate view by

prolonged persistent analysis. In those seven years I have learnt both my

own limit and the limits of many, and instead of a knife I have a scalpel

in my hand, and instead of curses and abuse I set to work to tell my

story of psychological pathology.

* * * * *

On coming home one evening, a few days before the 23rd of June 1848, I

found in my room an unknown person who came to meet me with a mournful

and embarrassed air. ‘Why, is it you?’ I said at last, laughing and

holding out my hands to him. ‘Is it possible? I should never have known

you....’ It was Herwegh, shaven, shorn, with no moustache or beard. His

luck had very quickly turned. Two months before, surrounded by admirers,

he and his wife had driven in a comfortable _dormeuse_ from Paris to

the Baden campaign, at the invitation of the German republic. Now he

had come back, fleeing from the field of battle, pursued by showers of

caricatures, ridiculed by his enemies, blamed by his friends.

In a trice everything had changed, everything had fallen to pieces, and

to complete it all, behind the wrecked scenery there was a prospect of

ruin.

When I left Russia, Ogaryov gave me a letter of introduction to Herwegh,

whom he had known in the days of his greatest glory. Ogaryov, always

penetrating in questions of thought and of art, had no judgment of men.

To him all who were not boring or vulgar were excellent people, and

particularly all artists. I found Herwegh an intimate friend of Bakunin’s

and Sazonov’s, and was soon on terms rather of familiarity than of

intimacy with him. In the autumn of 1847 I went away to Italy. On my

return to Paris I did not find him there. I read of his misfortunes in

the newspapers. Almost on the eve of the days of June, he arrived in

Paris, and as it was from me that he first met with a friendly reception

after his Baden blunders, he took to coming more and more often to see

us. There was a good deal at first to prevent my becoming intimate with

the man. He had not that simple open nature, that complete _abandon_

which is so in keeping with everything strong and gifted, and which

in Russians almost invariably accompanies talent. He was reserved and

furtive, afraid of other people, and liked to enjoy himself on the sly;

he had a sort of unmanly effeminacy, a pitiful dependence on trifles,

on comforts, and an unbounded _rücksichtslos_ egoism to the degree of

_naïveté_ and cynicism. For all that I threw only half the blame on him.

Fate had put beside him a woman who by her sophisticated love and her

exaggerated solicitude fanned his egoistic propensities and encouraged

his weaknesses by making them seem something fine in his eyes. Before his

marriage he had been poor—she had brought him wealth, surrounded him with

luxury, had become his nurse, his housekeeper, his attendant, a permanent

necessity of the lowest order. Humbled to the dust in a sort of perpetual

worship, _Huldigung_, before the poet ‘come to fill the place of Goethe

and Heine,’ she at the same time destroyed, stifled his talent—in the

feather-bed of bourgeois luxury. It used to annoy me to see him accept

so readily the position of a _kept_ husband, and I must own it was not

without satisfaction that I saw the financial ruin for which they were

inevitably making, and I looked rather unsympathetically at Emma’s tears

when she had to give up her ‘gilt-edged’ lodging, as we used to call it,

and to sell, one by one, at half price, her ‘amors and cupids’—happily

not serfs, but bronze figures. I will pause here to say a few words about

their previous life and about their marriage itself, which is wonderfully

typical of modern German sentiment....

* * * * *

Germans, and especially German women, have a mass of false passions—that

is, invented, fantastic and affected literary passions. It is a sort of

_Ueberspanntheit_ ... a bookish proneness to enthusiasm, an artificial,

cold exaltation, always ready to be immensely impressed or touched

without sufficient reason.

It is not hypocrisy, but a false truth, a psychological incontinence,

ethical hysterics costing them nothing but inducing many tears, much joy

and grief, many distractions and sensations, _Wonne_. Even an intelligent

woman like Bettina von Arnim was unable to get rid of this German malady

all her life. The forms it takes may change, the subjects with which it

deals may be different, but the psychological treatment of the material,

so to speak, is always the same. Everything is reduced to different

variations, to different _nuances_ of voluptuous pantheism, that is,

of a religiously erotic and theoretically enamoured attitude to nature

and to men, which by no means excludes romantic chastity or theoretical

sensuality, either in the secular devotees of the cosmos or the monastic

brides of Christ, abandoning themselves to the erotic ecstasies of

prayer. They are both struggling to be the spiritual sisters ... of

the real Magdalens. They do this from curiosity and sympathy for

transgressions to which they never bring themselves, and they are always

ready to absolve the sins of others, even when these latter do not ask

for it. The most enthusiastic of them pass through the whole programme

of passions without descending to practice, and they experience all the

sins, as it were by proxy—_per contumaciam_—in the books of others and

their own manuscripts.

One almost universal feature of all ecstatic German ladies is their

idolatrous worship of genius and of all great men; this religion dates

from Weimar, from the days of Wieland, Schiller, and Goethe. But as men

of genius are rare, and Heine lived in Paris, whilst Humboldt was too old

and too realistic, they flung themselves, with a sort of hungry despair,

on any good musician or decent painter. The image of Franz Liszt passed

like an electric shock through the hearts of all the women of Germany,

branding on them the high forehead and long hair combed back from it.

For lack in the end of great men common to all Germany, they accepted

any, so to speak, local genius, who had distinguished himself in any way;

all the women were in love with him, all the girls _schwärmten für ihn_.

They all embroidered braces and slippers for him, and sent him all sorts

of souvenirs in secret, anonymously. In the ’forties there was great

mental excitement in Germany.

It might have been expected that that people, grown grey over books,

might wish, like Faust, to come out into the market-place and look upon

the light of day. We know now that these were fruitless efforts, that the

new Faust from Auerbach’s cellar went back to the _Studienzimmer_. It

seemed otherwise at the time, particularly to the Germans, and so every

manifestation of the revolutionary spirit met with ardent recognition.

It was in the very heyday of this period that Herwegh’s political poems

appeared. I never saw much talent in them; no one but his wife could

compare Herwegh with Heine, but Heine’s malicious scepticism was out of

harmony with the mood of the day. The Germans, between 1840 and 1850, did

not want Goethes or Voltaires, but Béranger’s songs and the Marseillaise,

adapted to the German fashion. Herwegh’s verses ended sometimes _in

crudo_ with a French shout, with the refrain, _Vive la République!_, and

that put people into ecstasies in 1842. In 1852 they were forgotten. They

cannot be read over again. Herwegh—the poet-laureate of democracy—went

from one banquet to another all over Germany, and at last appeared in

Berlin. Every one rushed to invite him, dinners and parties were given in

his honour, every one wanted to see him, even the King had such a desire

to speak to him that the Court doctor, Schenlein, thought it necessary to

present him to the King.

A few yards away from the palace in Berlin lived a banker. His daughter

had for a long time been in love with Herwegh. She had never seen him and

had no definite idea of him, but as she read his verses she felt that it

was her vocation to make him happy and to twine the roses of domestic

bliss in his laurel wreath. When she did actually see him for the

first time at an evening party given by her father, she became finally

convinced that this was _he_, and he did in fact become her _he_.

The enterprising, resolute girl made her attack vigorously. At first the

poet, aged twenty-four, shied at the thought of marriage, and especially

of marriage with a very plain young person, with a loud voice and rather

_Junker_ manners; the portals of a brilliant future stood wide open

before him—what need had he of family peace, or a wife? But the banker’s

daughter, on her side, offered in the _present_ a sack of gold, a tour in

Italy, Paris, Strasbourg pies, and Clos de Vougeot: the poet was poor

as a church mouse; he could not go on living at the Vollens’ for ever—he

hesitated and hesitated—and ... accepted the offer, forgetting to say

thank you to old Vollen, Vogt’s grandfather.

Emma herself used to tell me how minutely and carefully the poet

conducted negotiations about the dowry. He even sent sketches of the

furniture, the curtains, and so on, from Zurich, and would have it all

despatched before the wedding—he insisted upon that.

There was no thought of love; there had to be something to take its

place. Emma understood that and made up her mind to secure her power by

other measures. They spent some time in Zurich, she took her husband to

Italy and then settled with him in Paris. There she assigned her _Schatz_

a study with soft sofas, heavy velvet hangings, expensive rugs and bronze

statuettes, and arranged for him a whole life of empty idleness. This

was new to him and he liked it, but meanwhile his talent died down, and

he produced nothing; she was vexed at this, scolded him for it and at

the same time drew him more and more into bourgeois luxury. Here is an

example of the extremes to which her solicitude would go. On one occasion

in Italy, Herwegh was dissatisfied with the eau de Cologne. At once his

wife wrote to Jean Marie Farina to send the very purest eau de Cologne

to her husband in Rome. Meanwhile, he went away from Rome, leaving

instructions that letters and parcels should be sent on to Naples; in the

same way he left Naples shortly afterwards.... Some months later a box

containing the eau de Cologne reached them in Paris, with an immense bill

to pay for its travelling expenses.

She was in her own way not at all stupid and had far more strength

and energy than he. Her culture was typically German—she had read an

immense amount, but not what is necessary, and had studied all manner of

subjects without reaching a clear grasp of anything. Her complete lack

of feminine grace made an unpleasant impression. From her abrupt voice

to her angular gestures and angular features, from her cold eyes to her

eagerness to drag the conversation down to ambiguous topics, everything

about her was masculine. Openly, before every one, she dangled about

her husband as elderly men dangle about young girls; she looked into

his eyes, glanced at him to draw our attention to him, straightened his

necktie, smoothed his hair and praised him with revolting indiscretion.

Before strangers he was embarrassed by this, but in his own circle paid

no attention to it, as a man absorbed in his work does not notice the

devotion with which his dog licks his boots and fawns upon him. They

sometimes had scenes over this after visitors had gone away; but next

day the adoring Emma would begin the same fond pestering again, and he

would put up with it again for the sake of his comforts and for the sake

of her zealous supervision of everything. The following anecdote will

show better than anything the extremes to which she went in spoiling her

darling. Ivan Turgenev went in to see them one evening after dinner. He

found Herwegh lying on the sofa. Emma was rubbing his foot; she left off

when their visitor entered. ‘Why have you stopped? Go on!’ said the poet

wearily. ‘Are you ill?’ asked Turgenev. ‘No, not at all, but it’s very

pleasant. Well, what’s the news?’ They went on talking while Emma went on

rubbing his feet.

Fully persuaded that every one admired her husband, she chattered about

him incessantly, without observing either that it was very boring to

others, or that she did him no good by her anecdotes of his delicate

nerves and capricious exactingness; to her all that seemed very charming

and quite worth being imprinted for ever and ever in the memory of men;

other people were revolted by it.

‘My Georg is a fearful egoist and quite spoilt (_zu verwöhnt_),’ she used

to say; ‘but who has more right to be spoilt than he? All great poets

have been capricious children all their lives, and they have always been

spoilt. The other day he bought me a superb camellia; when he got it

home he was so loth to part with it that he did not even show it me, but

hid it in his cupboard and kept it there till it was quite withered—_so

kindisch!_’

That is word for word what she told us. By this idolatrous worship Emma

brought her Georg to the edge of an abyss; he fell into it, indeed, and

if he did not perish, covered himself with shame and disgrace.

The news of the February revolution roused Germany. Hearts were set

throbbing, talk and murmuring were heard from one end to another of

the one United German Fatherland divided into thirty parts. The German

workmen in Paris formed themselves into a club, and considered what they

were to do. The Provisional Government encouraged them, not to rise,

but to leave France; their sleep was somewhat troubled as it was by the

French workmen. Of course, it might well happen that after Flocon’s[11]

parting blessing, and Caussidière’s[12] strong language about tyrants and

despots, these poor fellows would be shot or hanged, or thrown for twenty

years into prison; but they did not care about that.

A campaign in Baden was resolved upon; but who was to be their deliverer?

Who was to lead this new _armée du Rhin_, consisting of a few hundred

peaceful workmen and craftsmen? Who, thought Emma, if not the great poet,

with his lyre on his back and his sword in his hand, on the ‘battle

steed’ of which he dreamed in his poems? He would sing after battle and

conquer after singing; he would be chosen dictator, he would be in the

assembly of kings and dictate to them the will of his Germany; in Berlin,

_Unter den Linden_, his statue would be set up, and would be visible from

the old banker’s house, his name would be sung through the ages, and

... in those songs the good, devoted Emma, who had accompanied him as

sword-bearer, page, orderly, and watched over him _in der Schwertfahrt_,

would perhaps not be forgotten. And she ordered herself, in the Rue

Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, a martial riding-habit of the three national

colours—black, red, and gold, and bought herself a black velvet béret

with a cockade of the same three colours.

Through friends, Emma suggested the poet to the workmen; having no one

in view and remembering Herwegh’s poems calling them to rebellion, they

chose him their leader. Emma persuaded him to accept the position.

What led this woman to thrust the man she so loved into this dangerous

position? Where, how, when had he shown that presence of mind, that

faculty of being stimulated by a crisis which gives a man control over

it, that rapidity of reflection, that clearness of vision, and that

spirit of defiance, in fact, without which no surgeon can perform an

operation, no guerilla chief lead his followers? Where was this weakling

to find strength to rouse one side of his nerves to redoubled activity

and to suppress the other into insensibility? She herself had both

determination and self-control, and that makes it the more unpardonable

in her to have forgotten how he started at the slightest sound, turned

pale at the least misadventure, how depressed he was at the slightest

physical pain and how he lost his head at the sight of danger.

What made her lead him into the terrible ordeal, where pretence is

useless, where there is no saving yourself by prose or verse, where the

choice lies between the laurel wreath upon the tomb on one hand, and

flight and the pillory of disgrace on the other? Her expectations were

utterly different—she unconsciously described them in conversations and

letters afterwards.

The republic in Paris had been proclaimed almost without fighting, the

revolution was getting the upper hand in Italy, the news from Berlin and

even from Vienna showed clearly that those thrones were tottering; it was

difficult to imagine that the Duke of Baden or the King of Würtemberg

could stand firm against the onrush of revolutionary ideas. It might

have been expected that at the first shout of freedom the soldiers would

fling away their weapons, and the people would open their arms to the

insurgents, the poet would proclaim the republic, the republic would

proclaim the poet dictator—had not Lamartine been dictator! All that

would be left then would be for the dictator-poet to pass in triumphal

procession through the whole of Germany, with his black, red, and gold

Emma in her béret, to be covered with military and civic glory....

In reality things turned out otherwise. The dull-witted soldier of

Baden or Swabia knows nothing of poets or republics, but he knows his

discipline and his corporal very well indeed and, from his innate

servility, loves them, and blindly obeys his officers. The peasants were

taken unawares, the revolutionaries moved without a serious plan and with

nothing prepared. Even brave men like Hecker[13] and Willich[14] could do

nothing—they too were defeated, but they did not flee from the field of

battle and, luckily for them, had no adoring German woman beside them.

When firing began, Emma saw her pale and terrified Georg with tears of

terror in his eyes, ready to fling away his sword and hide anywhere—and

she completed his ruin. She stood in front of him under fire and called

on his comrades to save the poet. The soldiers were victorious. Emma,

covering her husband’s flight, ran the risk of being wounded, killed, or

taken prisoner, that is, sent for twenty years to Spandau or Rastadt,

besides a preliminary flogging.

He hid in a neighbouring village at the very beginning of the battle.

There he rushed to a peasant, beseeching and imploring the latter to hide

him. The peasant hesitated at first, fearing the soldiers, but at last

called him into his yard and, looking round, hid the future dictator in

an empty barrel and covered him with straw, exposing his house to the

risk of pillage and himself to the risk of _Fuchtel_ and imprisonment.

The soldiers appeared—the peasant did not betray him, but sent word to

Emma, who came to fetch him, hid her husband in a cart, changed her

clothes, seated herself on the box and drove him over the frontier. ‘What

was the name of the man who saved you?’ we asked him. ‘I forgot to ask

him,’ Herwegh answered calmly.

His irritated comrades fell upon the luckless poet with fury, paying him

out at the same time for having grown rich and for his lodgings being

covered with ‘gilt carving’ and for his aristocratic effeminacy, and

so on. His wife so utterly failed to see the _portée_ of what she had

done that four months later she published, in her husband’s defence, a

brochure, in which she described her own heroic deeds, oblivious of the

light this threw on him.

Soon charges were made against him, not only of running away, but of

wasting and concealing the party funds. I think that the money was

not appropriated by him, but at the same time I feel sure that it was

aimlessly squandered and on utterly unnecessary fancies of the martial

pair. P. Annenkov was an eye-witness of the purchase of pasties and

turkeys stuffed with truffles, at Chevet’s, and wines and so on being

packed in the leader’s travelling carriage. Money was given by Flocon in

accordance with the instructions of the Provisional Government: there are

very strange variations in the estimate of this sum; the French talked of

thirty thousand francs, Herwegh declared that he had not received even

half that, but that the government had paid his railway fare. To this

charge the returning insurgents added, that when they reached Strasbourg,

hungry, ragged, and without a farthing, after the defeat, they applied

to Herwegh for assistance, and were refused—Emma did not even allow them

to see him—while he was living in an expensive hotel and wearing ‘yellow

morocco slippers.’ Why they regarded that as a sign of luxury, I do not

know, but I heard of those yellow slippers a dozen times.

All this happened as in a dream. At the beginning of March the deliverers

of their country, _in spe_, had been still feasting in Paris; by the

middle of May, defeated, they crossed the French frontier back again.

Herwegh, coming to his senses in Paris, saw his old garden path to glory

choked up—real life had sternly reminded him of his limits. He realised

that his position—the poet of his wife, and the dictator who had fled the

field of battle—was awkward.... He had to begin his life afresh, or go

to the bottom. I fancied—and that was where I made my worst mistake—that

he would outgrow the petty side of his character. I fancied that I could

help him in this more than any one.

And how could I help thinking it when the man said to me every day (and

later on wrote it): ‘I know the pitiful weakness of my character—your

character is clearer and stronger than mine—support me, be an elder

brother, a father to me.... I have no one near or dear to me—I

concentrate on you all my affections—you can make anything of me by love

and friendship—do not be severe, but kind and indulgent. Let me keep

your hand ... and, indeed, I shall not let it go, I cling to you.... In

one thing I am not inferior to you, perhaps, indeed, go beyond you—in my

unbounded love for any one dear to my heart.’

He was not lying, but all this laid no obligation upon him. He was not

lying, but the truth cost him nothing. Why, he did not go to the Baden

rising either, meaning to desert his comrades in the hour of conflict,

but at the sight of danger he fled. So long as there is no hindrance, no

conflict, so long as neither effort nor sacrifice is needed, all may go

swimmingly—for whole years, for a whole lifetime ... but if there is any

stumbling-block in the path, then there will be trouble, crime, or shame.

Why did I not understand that then!

* * * * *

Towards the end of 1848, Herwegh took to spending almost every evening

with us. It was dull for him at home. Emma did, indeed, bother him

dreadfully. She had come back from the Baden expedition exactly the same

as she went. She had no inner misgivings over what had happened. As

before, she was in love, satisfied, talkative, as though they had come

back from a victory, or at any rate with no wounds in the back. Only one

thing worried her—shortage of money and the certain expectation of soon

having none at all. The revolution at which he had so unsuccessfully

assisted had not freed Germany, nor covered the poet’s brow with laurels,

but it had completely ruined the old banker, her father. She was for ever

trying to dissipate her husband’s gloomy thoughts; it never entered her

head that only these mournful reflections might perhaps be his salvation.

The superficial, volatile Emma had no yearnings for deep spiritual

thought, productive apparently of nothing but pain. Hers was one of

those natures (like simple tunes in two time) which cut every Gordian

knot with their _entweder oder_; to left or to right does not matter

to them so long as they can extricate themselves somehow and hurry on

again ... whither? That they do not know themselves. She would break

into the middle of a talk either with an anecdote or with a practical

observation—though its practical bearings were of the lowest order.

Convinced that no one among us was gifted with so much practical ability

as she, instead of concealing her business abilities through coquetry,

she coquettishly displayed them. It must be said, moreover, that she

never showed any real practical good sense. Fussing about, discussing

prices and cooks, furniture and materials, is something very different

from business capacity. Everything in her house was at sixes and sevens,

because everything was subordinated to her monomania; she was for ever

on the _qui vive_, watching her husband’s face, and she put his caprices

before all the real necessities of life, and even before the health and

education of the children.

Herwegh naturally struggled to get away from home, and sought with us

peace and harmony; he saw in us a sort of ideal family in which he loved

everything, worshipped everything, the children as much as us. He dreamed

of going with us somewhere far away and thence calmly watching the fifth

act of the dark European tragedy. And for all that, except for having

the same or very similar understanding of things in general, there was

very little resemblance between us. Herwegh somehow brought everything in

the world back to himself, he devoted himself for his own ends, sought

attention with timidity and vanity, was diffident and at the same time

persuaded of his superiority. All this taken together made him coquettish

and capricious, sometimes he was intentionally melancholy, attentive or

inattentive. He was in perpetual need of some one who would be guide,

friend, confidant and slave all at once, precisely as Emma was, who would

put up with coldness and upbraiding when his services were not needed,

and who would be ready at the first beck to rush back again and do what

he was ordered with smiling obedience.

I, too, sought love and friendship, sought sympathy and even applause,

and tried to win them, but I have never had a trace of this feminine

feline playing at _dépit_ and scenes of explanation, this everlasting

thirst for attention and petting. Possibly the unrestrained truthfulness,

excessive self-confidence, and healthy simplicity of my behaviour—my

_laisser aller_—also arises from vanity, perhaps through them I call down

misfortune on my head, but so it is. In laughter and in sorrow, in love

and in public interests, I yielded myself sincerely, and could rejoice

and grieve with no thought of myself. With strong nerves and muscles,

I stood independent and self-reliant, and was ready to give a helping

hand to another, though I never asked for help or support as a charity

for myself. With such opposite temperaments it could hardly be expected

that there should not be sometimes unpleasant encounters between Herwegh

and me. But, in the first place, he was much more on his guard with

me than with others; in the second, he completely disarmed me by the

mournful recognition that he was in fault; he did not justify himself,

but in the name of friendship begged indulgence for the weakness which he

himself recognised and censured. I played the part of a sort of guardian,

defended him from others and gave him lectures which he received

submissively. His submissiveness was extremely distasteful to Emma—she

was jealously resentful of it.

The year 1849 had come.

II

THE YEAR 1849

DELIRIUM OF THE HEART

Little by little, in 1849, I began to notice various changes in Herwegh.

His moody character became more and more moody; he had attacks of

insufferable melancholy and weakness. His wife’s father lost his fortune

for good and all; the remnants that were saved were needed for other

members of the family ... poverty knocked more rudely at the poet’s

door.... He could not think of it without shuddering and losing every

trace of manliness. Emma struggled her utmost, borrowed right and left,

obtained goods on credit and sold her things—and all that he might

not notice the true position of affairs. She not only denied herself

necessaries, but even had no underclothes made for the children that he

might dine at the Provençal Frères and buy himself rubbish. He took money

from her, not knowing how she had obtained it, and not wishing to know.

I reproached her for this, told her that she was ruining him, and hinted

the same to him—he persistently refused to understand, while she lost her

temper, and everything went on as before.

Though he was ludicrously afraid of poverty, yet that was not the cause

of his depression. In his lamentations about himself one note was

continually recurring, and I grew sick of hearing it; in the end, it

annoyed me to hear Herwegh’s everlasting repetition of complaints of his

own weakness, accompanied with reproaches for my not needing kindness

and caresses, while he was fading and perishing without a helping hand,

while he was so lonely and unhappy that he longed to die, while, though

he had a deep respect for Emma, his sensitive, differently attuned soul

shrank from her harsh, rough contact and even from her ‘loud voice.’

Then followed passionate protestations of his affection for me....

Through this feverish and nervous condition I began to discern a feeling

that alarmed me for him as much as for myself. It seemed to me that his

affection for Natalie was assuming a more passionate character. There was

nothing for me to do, I remained silent, and began sorrowfully to foresee

that in this way we were rapidly making for great trouble, and that

something in our life would be shattered.

... Everything was shattered.

The everlasting talk of despair, the everlasting entreaty for attention,

for a warm word, and dependence upon it, and the complaining and

complaining—all this had an immense effect on a woman whose hardly-won

serenity had just been destroyed, and who was suffering from the

profoundly tragic surroundings in which we were living.

‘There is an element left out in you,’ Natalie said to me, ‘and the

lack of it goes very well with your character; you don’t understand the

yearning for the tender care of a mother, a friend, a sister, which so

frets Herwegh. I understand it because I feel it myself. He is a big

child, while you are a grown-up man; he can be distressed or made happy

by a trifle. A harsh word is almost death to him, he must be spared....

On the other hand, with what infinite gratitude he thanks one for the

smallest attention, for warmth, for sympathy!...’

Could it be?... But no, he would himself have told me before speaking

to her ... and I kept his secret inviolate and did not hint at it with

one word. I regretted that he did not speak to me. A secret may be kept

if it is entrusted to no one, but only if it is to no one. If he had

spoken of his love he _could not_ have been silent with a man with whom

he was living in such spiritual intimacy, and about a secret so closely

affecting the latter. So he had not spoken.... I forgot for the time the

old novel entitled _Arminius_.

Towards the end of 1849 I went from Zurich to Paris to take steps about

my mother’s money, which was detained by the Russian Government. I parted

from Herwegh when I left Geneva. On the way I met him in Berne. I found

him reading to Simon[15] of Trèves fragments from _Vom andern Ufer_,

from the proofs. He rushed at me as though we had not met for months. I

was going on the evening of the same day. He did not leave my side for

a minute, again and again repeating declarations of the most ardent and

passionate affection. Why did he not find the strength then to make a

straightforward and open confession?... I was kindly disposed to him

then, everything might have happened humanely.

He saw me off to the posting-station, said good-bye and, leaning against

the gate by which the posting-chaise drove out, remained there wiping his

eyes.... This was almost the last moment when I really loved the man....

It was only after thinking the whole night that I came to one word which

I could not get out of my head—‘disaster, disaster!’ ‘What will come of

it?’

My mother soon afterwards left Paris. I remained at Emma’s, but was in

reality completely alone. This solitude was essential for me; I wanted to

be alone, to think what to do. A letter from Natalie, in which she spoke

of her sympathy for Herwegh, gave me an opening and I made up my mind

to write to her. My letter was sorrowful but calm; I begged her to look

quietly and attentively into her own heart and to be open with herself

and with me, I reminded her that we were too closely bound together by

all the past and by all our life to leave anything unspoken. ‘I got

your letter of the 9th’ (Natalie wrote, and this letter has remained,

almost all the rest were burnt), ‘and I, too, sit and only wonder: why is

this? And I weep and weep. Perhaps it is all my fault, perhaps I don’t

deserve to live—but I feel just as I wrote to you on the evening when

I was left alone. Blameless towards you and towards the whole world, I

have had no feeling of reproach in my soul. I have grown into my love for

you as I have into God’s world; if I were not in it, it seems I should

be nowhere! To be cast out of that world—anywhere, I must be born again.

I am inseparable from it as from nature, come from it and go back into

it again. I have never for one instant felt differently. It is a wide,

rich world, I know no inner world so rich; perhaps it is too large,

perhaps it has too much enlarged my being and its needs—in this fullness

there are minutes, and there have been from the very beginning of our

life together, in which somewhere deep down in the bottom of my soul,

something like a fine hair has fretted my soul imperceptibly, and then

everything has been bright again....’ ‘This unsatisfied something, this

something left unused and outcast,’ Natalie writes in another letter,

craved other sympathy, and found it in Herwegh’s affection.

This was not enough for me, and I wrote to her: ‘Don’t turn away

from simply looking into the depths of yourself, don’t try to find

explanations. You won’t escape the whirlpool by talking, it will carry

you away just the same. There is a new note in your letters unfamiliar to

me, not the note of sadness, but another.... Now everything is still in

our hands ... let us have the courage to go to the bottom of it. Consider

that since we have put the secret which troubled our soul into words,

_Herwegh will be a false note in our harmony or I shall. I am ready to go

with Sasha to America_, then we shall see how things are ... it will be

hard for me, but I shall try to bear it; here it will be harder still,

and I cannot bear it!’

To this letter she answered with a cry of horror, the thought of

separation from me had never occurred to her. ‘How can you! How can

you—and to part from you ... as though that were possible ... no, no, I

long to come to you, to come to you at once.... I am going to pack up,

and in a few days I shall be in Paris with the children!’

On the day of leaving Zurich she wrote again: ‘As though after storm and

shipwreck I come back to you as to my haven, with full faith, with full

love. If only the state of your soul were like that in which I am now! I

am happier than ever! I love you always the same, but I have learnt to

know your love better, and all my accounts with life are settled—I expect

nothing, I desire nothing. Misunderstandings!—I am grateful to them, they

have made so much clear to me, and they will pass away and disappear like

storm-clouds.’

Our meeting in Paris was not joyful, but it was filled with the feeling

of deep, genuine recognition that the roots of our life had gone too

deep for the storm to tear them up, that it was not easy to part us. In

the long conversations of that period, one thing surprised me, and I

looked out for it several times, and was every time convinced that I was

right. Together with the warm affection she still retained for Herwegh,

Natalie seemed to breathe more freely away from him, as though stepping

out of the circle of some black magic spell; she was afraid of him, she

felt that there were dark forces in his soul, she was frightened by his

boundless egoism and she looked for support and protection in me.

Though he knew nothing of my correspondence with Natalie, Herwegh saw

that there was something wrong from my letters. As a matter of fact,

apart from everything else, I was very much displeased with him. Emma

was struggling, weeping, trying to satisfy him and get him money, while

he either left her letters unanswered or wrote spiteful things and kept

asking for more and more money.

His letters to me which I have kept are more like ecstatic love-letters

than a friendly correspondence. He tearfully reproaches me for coldness,

he beseeches me not to abandon him, he cannot live without me, without

the full cloudless sympathy of the past, he curses our misunderstandings

and the interference of the ‘frantic woman’ (_i.e._, Emma), he thirsts to

begin a new life, a life far away, a life with us, and again he calls me

his father, his brother, his dearest friend. To all this I wrote to him

in different variations: ‘Consider whether you are capable of beginning

a new life, whether you are able to shake off ... the rottenness, the

corrupt civilisation’—and twice I reminded him of Aleko,[16] to whom

the old Gypsy says: ‘Leave us, proud man, you want freedom for yourself

alone.’ He answered this with tears and reproaches, but did not speak

out. His letters of 1850 and our first conversations at Nice make up a

terrible indictment ... of what? Of deceit, of treachery, of lying?...

No. And that would be nothing new—but of that weak-spirited doubleness of

which I have so many times accused the Western European. Going many times

over all the details of our mournful drama, I am always brought up short

with amazement at how this man never once, never by one word, never by

one straightforward impulse of the heart, betrayed himself. How could he,

feeling the impossibility of being open with me, try to enter into closer

and closer intimacy with me, and touch in his talk on those sacred places

of the soul which can only be touched without sacrilege in perfect and

mutual openness?

The moment when he guessed my doubt—and not only kept silent, but assured

me more and more warmly of his affection, and at the same time worked

more and more intensely by his despair on the woman whose heart was

shaken—the moment when he began passively deceiving me by his silence

while beseeching her (as I afterwards learned) not to deprive him of my

affection by an incautious word—that moment was the beginning of crime.

Crime!... Yes ... and all the calamities that follow come as the simple,

inevitable consequence of it—they come unchecked by deaths, unchecked by

penitence, because they are not the punishment but the consequence....

Consequences come upon a generation through the terrible immutability of

what has once been done. Atonement, repentance may reconcile a man to

himself and to others, penitence may redeem him, but the consequences of

his action go their own terrible way. To escape from them, religion has

invented paradise—and its antechamber the monastery.

I was turned out of Paris, and almost at the same time Emma was also. We

decided to spend a year or two in Nice—it was then Italy—and Emma went

there also. Within a short time, that is, towards winter, my mother was

to come to Nice, and with her Herwegh.

Why did I go with Natalie to that town? This question has occurred to me

and to others, but it is really a petty one. Apart from the fact that

wherever I had gone Herwegh could have come too, was it possible to

achieve anything but mortification by geographical and other external

measures?

Within a fortnight or three weeks of his arrival, Herwegh assumed the

airs of a Werther—in the last stages of despair—and so conspicuously that

a Russian doctor, who was passing through Nice, was convinced that he was

becoming definitely insane. His wife used to appear with tear-stained

eyes—he treated her outrageously. She would come for hours together to

weep in Natalie’s room, and both were convinced that to-day or to-morrow

he would fling himself into the sea or shoot himself. Natalie’s pale

cheeks and anxious expression, and her anxious preoccupation, even when

she was with the children, showed me clearly what was passing within her.

Not a word had been said yet, but already through the external calm there

was the gleam of something sinister coming nearer and nearer—like two

glittering points continually disappearing and appearing again at the

edge of the forest that show that a wild beast is there. Everything was

moving rapidly to a climax. It was delayed by the birth of Olga.

III

THE YEAR 1851

1

Before the New Year Natalie brought a water-colour she had ordered from

the painter Guyot,[17] to show me.

It was a sketch of our verandah, with part of the house and the yard,

with the children playing in the yard and Tata’s goat lying there—Natalie

herself was in the background, on the verandah. I thought that the

sketch was meant for me, but Natalie said that she meant to give it to

Herwegh for a New Year’s present.... I was vexed. ‘Do you like it?’ asked

Natalie. ‘I like it so much,’ I said, ‘that if Herwegh will allow it, I

will order a copy to be made for myself.’

From my pallor and my voice, Natalie saw that these words were both a

challenge and the sign of a violent storm within. She glanced at me,

there were tears in her eyes. ‘Take it for yourself,’ she said.

‘Nothing would induce me, anything so mean....’

We said no more. We kept the New Year at my mother’s, I was in a state

of acute irritability; I sat beside Vogt and, filling his glass and mine

over and over again, I kept making biting and sarcastic jokes. Vogt was

rolling with laughter. Herwegh looked mournfully from under his brows. At

last he understood. After drinking to the New Year, he raised his glass

and said that the only thing he hoped was, ‘that the coming year might be

no worse than the last, that he desired this with all his heart, but did

not expect it. On the contrary, he had a foreboding that all, all would

fall into ruins.’

I said nothing.

Next morning I took up my old novel, _Who is to Blame?_ and read over

Lubinka’s diary and the last chapters. Could this be a prophecy of my

fate, just as Onyegin’s duel foreshadowed Pushkin’s fate?... But an inner

voice said to me: ‘You are a queer sort of Krutsifersky—and, indeed, he

is a queer sort of Beltov! Where is his noble sincerity, where is my

tearful self-sacrifice?’ And in the midst of my conviction of Natalie’s

passing infatuation, I was even more convinced that I should fight it out

with him, that he would not drive me out of her heart.

What happened was what I expected—Natalie herself invited explanation.

After the scene over the sketch, and the New Year’s party at my mother’s,

it was impossible to put it off. The conversation was painful. _We were

both no longer on the high level on which we had been the year before._

She was confused, afraid of my going away, afraid of his going away,

longed to go away herself for a year to Russia and was afraid to go. I

saw her wavering and saw that he with his egoism would destroy her ...

while she would not have the strength to withstand. I was beginning to

hate him for his silence.

Once more I repeated ‘I put my fate in your hands. Once more I beseech

you to weigh everything, to think of the value of everything.... I am

still ready to accept any decision—I am ready to wait a day, a week, only

the decision must be final. I feel,’ I said, ‘that I have reached the

limit of my strength—I can still behave decently—but I feel, too, that I

shan’t be able to for long.’

‘You are not going away, you are not going away,’ she said, bursting into

tears, ‘I could not survive that.’ On her tongue such words were not to

be taken lightly. ‘_He must go._’

‘Natalie, don’t be in a hurry—don’t be in a hurry to take the final

decision because it is final ... wait a little ... think—as much as you

like, but give me a definite answer. These ebbs and flows are more than

I can stand ... they are making me stupid. I am growing petty, I shall

go off my head.... Ask anything you like of me, but it must be once for

all....’

At that point my mother and Kolya drove up to invite us to Mentone; when

we went out to take our seats in the carriage, it appeared that there was

one place too few. I motioned Herwegh to the seat. Herwegh, by no means

distinguished by such delicacy as a rule, would not take it. I looked at

him, slammed the carriage door and said to the coachman, ‘Off!’ We were

left alone, the two of us, on the seashore in front of the house. I felt

as though there were a stone on my heart; he was silent, pale as a sheet,

and avoided my eyes. Why did not I begin speaking openly or shove him off

the rock into the sea? A sort of nervous impotence prevented me. He said

something to me about the sufferings of a poet and life being so horribly

organised that a poet brings trouble everywhere. He suffers himself and

makes every one near him suffer.... I asked him whether he had read

George Sand’s _Horace_. He did not remember. I advised him to read it. He

went to Visconti’s for the book.

_I never saw him again._

When, between six and seven, we all assembled for dinner, he was not

there. His wife came in—her eyes swollen with tears: she announced that

her husband was ill—we all looked at each other—I felt quite capable of

sticking into her the knife I had in my hand. He shut himself up in his

rooms on the top storey. By this _étalage_ he did for himself—I was free

as regards him.

At last all the others had gone, and the children were in bed—_we were

left alone_. Natalie sat in the window crying. I walked about the room,

the blood throbbing in my temples; I could scarcely breathe.

‘He is going,’ she said at last.

‘I imagine that is not necessary—it is I must go.’

‘For God’s sake....’

‘I am going.’

‘Alexandr, Alexandr, don’t say what you may regret—listen to me—save us

all. You alone can do it. He is crushed, he is utterly despondent. You

know yourself what you have been to him, his frantic love—his frantic

affection and the consciousness that he has caused you grief—and worse

... he wants to go away, to vanish, but you must not complicate things—or

he is not a step from suicide.’

‘Do you believe that?’

‘I am certain of it.’

‘And it is he who says so?’

‘He and Emma. He has cleaned his pistol.’

I burst into a roar of laughter and asked: ‘Is it his Baden one—he’d have

to clean it, it must have fallen in the mud. You can tell Emma, though,

that I will answer for his life. I’ll insure it for any sum you like.’

‘Mind that you do not regret your laughter,’ said Natalie, shaking her

head gloomily.

‘If you like I’ll go and persuade him....’

‘What will it all lead to?’

‘The consequences,’ I said, ‘are hard to foresee and still harder to

avert.’

‘My God! My God!—the children, the poor children, what will become of

them!’

‘You ought to have thought of them before!’ I said.

And that, of course, was the most cruel thing of all that I said to her.

I was too much worked up to understand the meaning of what I said in

a humane way. I felt something convulsive in my chest and in my head,

and was, perhaps, capable of bloody acts as well as cruel words. She

was utterly crushed—a silence followed. Half an hour passed, I wanted

to drink my cup of bitterness to the dregs, and put several questions

to her—she answered. I felt myself torn to shreds, savage impulses of

revenge, of jealousy, of wounded _amour-propre_, made me drunk; no

punishment, no gibbet could have had terrors for me, my life was not

worth a farthing. That is what makes mad and dreadful deeds possible. I

did not say a word—I stood in front of the big table in the drawing-room,

with my arms folded—probably my face was utterly distorted.

The silence went on. All at once I glanced at her and was frightened—her

face was covered with a deathly pallor, a bluish pallor, her lips were

white, her mouth half-opened and twitching—not uttering a word, she gazed

at me with vacant, frantic eyes. That look of infinite suffering, of

mute agony instantly stilled the turmoil of passion; I felt sorry for

her, tears trickled down my cheeks, I was ready to fall at her feet, to

entreat her forgiveness.... I sat down on the sofa beside her, took her

hand, put my head on her shoulder and tried to comfort her in a soft,

gentle voice.

My conscience tormented me, I felt I had been an Inquisitor, a

torturer.... Was this what was wanted? Was this a friend’s help, was this

sympathy? And so with all my culture, with all my humanity, in a fit of

fury and jealousy I could torture an unhappy woman, could play the part

of a Bluebeard?

A few minutes passed before she said anything, before she could say

anything—then suddenly she threw herself on my neck sobbing. I let her

sink on the sofa; utterly worn out, she could only say: ‘Don’t be afraid,

dear, these are good tears, tears of tenderness; no, no, I will never be

parted from you.’

Her agitation and spasmodic sobbing was too much, she closed her eyes,

she was fainting; I poured eau de Cologne on her head, moistened her

temples; she grew calm, opened her eyes, pressed my hand, and sank into

semi-consciousness which lasted more than an hour: I remained on my knees

beside her; when she opened her eyes, she met my calm, mournful look, the

tears were still rolling down my cheeks—she smiled to me....

This was the crisis. From that minute the stifling fumes that weighed on

her began to lift, the poison acted less freely.

‘Alexandr,’ she said, recovering herself a little, ‘finish what you have

done, swear to me—I must have it, I can’t live without it—swear that it

shall all end without bloodshed—think of the children ... of what will

become of them without you and without me.’

‘I promise to do everything possible to prevent a collision, to sacrifice

a great deal—but for that I must have one thing, that he should leave

to-morrow—go at least to Genoa.’

‘That’s as you like ... and we will begin a new life and let all that is

past be past.’

I embraced her warmly.

Next morning Emma came to my room—she was dishevelled, with tear-stained

eyes, looking very ugly, in a blouse with a cord round her waist. She

approached me with tragic deliberation—at any other time I should have

burst out laughing at this German melodrama ... now I was in no mood for

laughing. I received her standing and made no attempt to conceal that her

visit was unpleasant to me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

‘I have come from _him_ to you.’

‘Your husband,’ I said, ‘might come himself if he wants anything—or

perhaps he has already shot himself?’

She folded her arms across her bosom.

‘And this is you speaking—you, his friend ... I don’t know you! Surely

you must understand the tragedy of what is taking place before your eyes

... his tender constitution will not survive separation from her, nor a

rupture with you—yes, yes, with you ... he is weeping over the sorrow he

has caused you—he begged me to tell you that his life is in your hands,

he begs you to kill him....’

‘This is a farce,’ I said, interrupting her speech. ‘Come, who invites

people to murder like this, and through his wife too? This persisting in

vulgar melodramatic tricks is disgusting to me. I am not a German.’

‘Herr Herzen!’

‘Madame Herwegh, why do you undertake such difficult commissions? You

could hardly expect to hear anything pleasant from me.’

‘This is a fatal calamity,’ she said, after a pause; ‘it has struck you

and me alike ... but look at the difference between your anger and my

devotion....’

‘Madam,’ I said, ‘our parts have not been alike; I beg you not to compare

them, for fear you should have to blush.’

‘Never,’ she said defiantly, ‘you do not know what you are saying.’

And then she added: ‘I will take him away, he must not remain in this

position—your will shall be done. But you are no longer in my eyes the

man I have so much respected and looked upon as Georg’s best friend. No,

if you were that man, you would have parted with Natalie, let her go, let

him go; I would have remained with you and the children here.’

I laughed aloud. She flushed crimson, and with a voice shaking with anger

and indignation, asked me: ‘What does that mean?’

‘Why do you jest about serious matters?’ I said to her; ‘but that’s

enough. Here is my ultimatum: go at once to Natalie, yourself alone,

talk to her—if she wants to go, let her go—I shall not hinder any one or

anything except (excuse me), except your staying here; I can manage the

housekeeping myself somehow—but listen.... If she does not want to go,

this is the last night I will spend under the same roof as your husband,

we shall not both be here another night alive!’

An hour later Emma came back and gloomily announced to me, in a tone as

though to say: ‘See the fruits of your wickedness!’

‘Natalie is not going—she has destroyed a great being from

_amour-propre_—I will save him——’

‘And so?’

‘And so we are going in a day or two....’

‘A day or two? What do you mean? To-morrow morning! Have you forgotten

the alternative?’ (Repeating this, I did not really break my promise to

Natalie, I was absolutely certain she would take him away.)

‘I don’t know you—how bitterly I’ve been mistaken in you!’ observed the

crazy woman, and she went out again.

Her diplomatic task this time was an easy one—she came back ten minutes

later saying that he agreed to everything, both to going away and to a

duel, but at the same time he had told her to tell me that he had taken a

vow not to lift his pistol to my breast—but was ready to accept death at

my hands.

‘You see how he keeps on joking with you—why, even the French king was

put to death simply by a public executioner, and not by a friend. And so

you will set off to-morrow?’

‘I really don’t know how to manage. We have nothing ready.’

‘Everything can be got ready before night.’

‘We must get a _visa_ for our passports.’

I rang the bell; Rocca, our cook, came in. I told him that Madame Emma

begged him to take their passports at once and to get a _visa_ for Genoa.

‘But we have nothing for the journey.’

‘Do you need much to get to Genoa?’

‘Six hundred francs.’

‘Allow me to hand it you.’

‘We owe bills to the shops here.’

‘Approximately?’

‘Five hundred francs.’

‘Don’t worry yourself, and _bon voyage_.’

This tone she could not endure, _amour-propre_ was almost her leading

passion.

‘Why,’ she said, ‘why this behaviour to _me_? Me you have no right to

hate or to despise.’

‘So him I have?’

‘No,’ she said, choking with tears, ‘no, I only meant to say that I liked

you sincerely as a sister, that I don’t like to leave you without shaking

hands with you. I respect you, you may be right, but you are a cruel man.

If you knew what I have been through!’

‘But why have you been all your life a slave?’ I said to her, giving her

my hand; at that minute I was not capable of sympathy. ‘You deserve your

fate.’

She went away hiding her face.

At ten o’clock next morning, in a hired coach, upon which various boxes

and hampers were loaded, the poet set off—_mit Weib und Kind_—for Genoa.

I was standing at the open window; he managed to whisk into the carriage

so rapidly that I did not catch sight of him. She held out her hand

to the cook and the maid, and took her seat beside him. Anything more

ignominious than this bourgeois departure I cannot imagine. Natalie was

distressed. We went out alone together into the country; the walk was

a dismal one, the blood was still streaming from fresh, raw wounds. On

returning home, the first person that met me was Herwegh’s son Horace, a

boy of nine, a mischievous and thievish little fellow.

‘Where have you come from?’

‘From Mentone.’

‘What has happened?’

‘Here is a note from Maman for you.’

‘Lieber Herzen,’ she wrote, as if nothing had happened between us, ‘we

are stopping for a couple of days at Mentone, the room at the hotel is

small—Horace is in Georg’s way—allow us to leave him with you for a few

days.’

This lack of tact amazed me. At the same time Emma wrote to Karl Vogt to

come that they might consult him—so outsiders were to be mixed up in our

affairs! I asked Vogt to take Horace and to say that we had no room.

‘Yet,’ she sent word to me through Vogt, ‘we still have the upper

rooms for another three months, and I can make use of them.’ That was

perfectly true—only it was I who paid the rent for those rooms. Yes, in

this tragedy, as in Shakespeare, the coarse laughter, oaths, and petty

cheating of the market-place are side by side with strains that tear the

heart, with the moan of ebbing life, of dying faith, of dimming thought.

Emma had a maid-servant, a handsome and very honourable French girl from

Provence, called Jeannette; she remained behind for a couple of days, and

was to go with their luggage by steamer to Genoa. Next morning Jeannette

softly opened my study door and asked me whether she might come in and

speak to me alone. This had never happened before; I thought that she

was wanting to ask for money, and was prepared to give it her. Blushing

up to her ears, the good Provençale gave me, with tears in her eyes,

various unpaid bills of Emma’s, and added: ‘Madame told me, but I really

cannot do it without asking your leave—you see, she told me to buy a lot

of different things in the shops and have them put down on these bills—I

couldn’t do it without telling you.’

‘You did quite right to tell me. What did she tell you to buy?’

‘Here is the list.’

On the list were several pieces of linen, several dozen handkerchiefs,

and a complete outfit of children’s underclothes.

They say that Caesar could read, write, and dictate at the same moment:

this is somewhat the same versatility—to be able to think of thrifty

means of obtaining linen and children’s stockings while lives are being

ruined, and men are feeling the cold blade of Saturn’s scythe. The

Germans are a glorious people!

* * * * *

We were again alone, but this was not the past over again—everything bore

the traces of the storm. Faith and doubt, weariness and irritation, the

feeling of annoyance and indignation were a torture, but what was most

fretting of all was that the thread of life was broken, that precious

carelessness which had made life so easy was gone, nothing was left

sacred. Since what had been had been, nothing was impossible. Thoughts

of the past terrified me for the future. How many times we came in to

dinner alone in the evening and, both scarcely touching anything and not

uttering a word, got up from the table wiping away a tear, and seeing

kind Rocca, with an angry face, shake his head as he carried away the

dishes.

Idle days, sleepless nights ... misery—misery. I drank spirits of all

sorts, cognac, old Bellet, drank at night alone and drank by day with

Engelson—and that in the climate of Nice. The Russian weakness of

drowning sorrow in drink is by no means so bad as is said. Heavy sleep is

better than heavy sleeplessness, and the headache of the morning after is

better than deadly gloom on an empty stomach.

Herwegh sent me a letter. I sent it back without reading it. He took to

writing to Natalie, letter after letter. He wrote once more to me—I sent

the letter back. I looked on gloomily at this. That time should have

been a time of thorough testing, of peace and of freedom from external

influences. What sort of peace, what sort of freedom could there be with

letters coming from a man who posed as being frantic and threatened not

only suicide but the most fearful crimes? Thus, for instance, he wrote

that he had moments of frenzy when he longed to cut his children’s

throats, to fling their corpses out of the window and to appear before

us bathed in their blood. In another, he wrote that he should come to

kill himself at my feet, and say: ‘See to what you have brought the man

who loved you so!’ Side by side with this, he kept imploring Natalie to

reconcile him with me, to take everything on herself, and to suggest that

he should come as Sasha’s tutor.

A dozen times he wrote of his loaded pistol; Natalie still believed it

all. He only asked her blessing on his death. I persuaded her to write

to him that she at last agreed, that she was convinced there was nothing

for it but death. He answered that her words came _too late_, that he was

now in a different mood and felt he had not strength enough to do it, but

that, forsaken by all, he would go away to Egypt. This letter did him

great damage in Natalie’s eyes.

After that, Orsini came from Genoa, and he told us, laughing, how the

husband and wife had tried to commit suicide.... Learning that Herwegh

was in Genoa, Orsini went to see them and met him walking along the

sea-front. Learning from him that his wife was at home, Orsini went to

see her. She immediately explained to him that she had made up her mind

to starve herself to death, that this form of suicide had been selected

for him by himself, but that she wished to share his fate, and she

besought Orsini not to desert Horace and Ada.

Orsini was petrified with astonishment.

‘We have touched nothing for thirty hours,’ Emma went on; ‘do persuade

him to eat something, save the great poet for humanity,’ and she sobbed.

Orsini went out on to the verandah and at once returned with the joyful

tidings that Herwegh was standing in the corner eating _salmis_. Emma,

overjoyed, rang the bell and ordered a basin of soup. At that moment

her husband came in gloomily, without a word of the _salmis_, but the

tell-tale basin was standing there. ‘Georg,’ said Emma, ‘I was so

delighted, hearing from Orsini that you were eating, that I, too, decided

to ask for soup.’

‘I felt so sick, I took a little piece of _salmis_—but that’s of no

consequence; death by starvation is most painful, I shall poison myself.’

His wife raised her eyes to the ceiling and glanced at Orsini as though

to say: ‘You see, there is no saving him.’ He, too, had some soup.

Orsini is dead, but there are several witnesses of his story living, for

instance, Karl Vogt, Mordini, and Charles Edmond. These antics made it

very hard for Natalie. She was humiliated through him, I was humiliated

through him, and she felt this poignantly.

In the spring Herwegh went away to Zurich and sent his wife to Nice

(another outrageous indelicacy). I longed, after all that had happened,

to rest. I took advantage of my Swiss naturalisation and went to Paris

and Switzerland with Engelson.

Natalie’s letters were calm, her soul seemed to be more at ease.

On the way home I met Sazonov in Geneva. Over a bottle of wine, he asked

me, with the most absolute nonchalance, how things were going now between

my wife and me.

‘As always.’

‘Well, I know the whole story, and I am asking you from friendly

sympathy.’

I looked at him with a shudder of horror; he noticed nothing. What was

the meaning of it? I had reckoned on its all being a secret, and here,

all at once, a man speaks to me of it over a glass of wine as though it

were the most ordinary everyday affair.

‘What have you heard, and from whom?’

‘I have heard the whole story from Herwegh himself—and I tell you openly,

I don’t think you are right at all. Why don’t you let your wife go, or

else leave her yourself?—upon my soul, it’s such weakness—you could begin

a new fresh life....’

‘But what makes you imagine that she wants to go? You can’t believe that

I am able to _let_ her go or to prevent her.’

‘You coerce her morally, of course, not physically, by your words, your

distress. I am very glad, though, to find you much more serene than I

expected—and I don’t care to be open by halves with you. Herwegh left

your house, in the first place, because he’s a coward, and is simply

terrified of you, and in the second, because your wife promised him to

come to Switzerland as soon as you were calmer.’

‘That’s a foul lie!’ I shouted.

‘That’s what he told me, I give you my word of honour on it.’

When I got home to the hotel, I flung myself, sick and shattered, on the

bed, without undressing, in a state bordering on madness or death—did

I believe it or not? I do not know, but I cannot say that I entirely

disbelieved what Sazonov had told me.

And so, I repeated to myself, this is how our poetical life is ending,

in deceit, and incidentally in a European scandal ... ha, ha, ha! They

pity me, they spare me from compassion, they give me time to rest, like a

soldier who is taken half-way through the flogging to the hospital, when

his pulse is weak, and zealously tended that he may have the other half

when he is stronger. I was insulted, outraged, humiliated.

In that state of mind I wrote at night a letter—my letter must have borne

traces of frenzy, despair, and distrust. I repent, I bitterly repent that

insult from afar—that wicked letter.

Natalie answered in words of black gloom. ‘I were better dead,’ she said;

‘your faith is shattered, every word now will call back all the past to

you. What am I to do, and how can I ever convince you? I weep and weep.’

Herwegh had lied.

Her following letters were briefly mournful; she was sorry for me,

she wanted to heal my wounds, and what must she herself have been

suffering!... Why did that man turn up to repeat me that lie ... and why

was there no other there to stop my letter, written in a fit of criminal

fury?

2

TURIN. OCEANO NOX

On the night between the 7th and 8th of July, between one and two in the

morning, I was sitting on the step of the Carignano Palace in Turin; the

square was completely empty, at a little distance from me a beggar was

dozing, and a sentinel was walking slowly up and down, whistling a tune

from some opera and jingling with his gun.... It was a hot, soft night,

saturated with the scent of the scirocco.

I felt extraordinarily happy, as I had not for ages; I felt again that I

was still young and full of energy, that I had friends and convictions,

that I was as full of love as I had been some thirteen years before.

My heart was beating as I had not felt it for years; it was beating as

on that March day in 1838, when I stood wrapped in my cloak under the

lamp-post waiting for Ketscher in Povarsky Street.

Now, too, I was awaiting a meeting, a meeting with the same woman, and

awaited it perhaps with even more love, though sad and gloomy notes were

mingled with it; but on that night they were hardly audible. After the

frantic crisis of bitterness and despair that had come over me on my way

through Geneva, I felt better. Natalie’s gentle letters, filled with

sadness, tears, pain, and love, had worked my healing. She wrote that

she was coming from Nice to Turin to meet me, that she longed to spend

a few days in Turin. She was right: we needed to look into each other

once more alone, to wash the blood from each other’s wounds, to wipe away

our tears and to find out once for all whether there was still happiness

for us together, and all that in solitude, without the children even,

and in another place too, not in the surroundings where the furniture,

the very walls, might at the wrong moment bring reminder, whisper some

half-forgotten word.

The posting-chaise was to arrive between one and two from the direction

of the Col di Tenda; I was waiting for it at the gloomy Carignano

Palace—it was to turn the corner not far from it.

I had arrived on the morning of the same day from Paris, through Mont

Cenis to the Hotel Feder. I was given a large, lofty, rather handsomely

furnished sitting-room and bedroom. I liked its holiday air, it was in

keeping. I ordered a little supper for us and went to wander about the

town, waiting for the night.

When the chaise drove up to the posting-station, Natalie recognised me.

‘You here!’ she said, nodding to me at the window. I opened the door,

and she threw herself on my neck with such rapturous joy, with such an

expression of love and thankfulness, that words from her letter flashed

like lightning into my mind: ‘I come back like a ship to its own haven,

after storms, shipwrecks, and misfortunes—broken but saved.’

One glance, two or three words, were enough ... all was explained and

understood; I took her little travelling-bag, threw it on a stick over my

back, gave her my arm, and we walked gaily along the empty streets to the

hotel. There every one was asleep except the porter. On the table (laid

for supper) stood two unlighted candles, bread, fruit, and a decanter of

wine. I did not want to wake any one; we lighted the candles and, sitting

down to an empty table, glanced at each other and at once both thought of

our days at Vladimir.

She had on a white muslin dress or blouse, put on for the journey on

account of the blazing heat, and at that first interview, when I came

from exile, she had been in white, too, and her wedding dress had

been white. Though her face wore deep imprints of violent agitations,

anxieties, sufferings, and reflections, its expression recalled her

features at that time.

And we ourselves were the same, only now we gave each other our hands,

not as conceited young creatures, self-confident and proud in our faith

in ourselves, in our faith in each other, and in our fate being somehow

exceptional, but like veterans tempered in the struggle for life, who had

tested not only our strength, but our weakness too, and had only just

come safely from terrible blows and irretrievable mistakes.... Starting

on the road anew, we shared the painful burden of the past together, with

no settling of accounts.

We had to move forward with a humbler step for that burden, but our

aching hearts still kept safe within all that was needed for settled

mature happiness. Through our horror and dull agony we had seen the more

clearly how inseparably years and circumstances, children and life in

foreign lands, had welded us together.

At this meeting all was over, the broken threads grew together more

firmly than ever, as sometimes parts of a broken bone will grow together,

not without leaving a scar. The tears of sorrow, not yet dry in our eyes,

united us by a new bond—the feeling of deep compassion for each other.

I saw her conflict, her agony, I saw how exhausted she was. She saw me

weak, unhappy, humiliated and humiliating others, ready for sacrifice and

ready for crime.

We had paid too dear a price for each other not to know what we were

worth, and what we had cost each other. ‘In Turin,’ I wrote at the

beginning of 1852, ‘was our second wedding; it meant perhaps something

deeper and more significant than the first, it was accompanied with full

consciousness of all the responsibility which we took up anew in regard

to each other, still in sight of terrible events....’

Love by some miracle survived the blow which might have destroyed it.

The last dark clouds passed further and further away, for hours we talked

... as though we had been separated for years; it was not till long after

bright streaks of daylight had filtered through the shutters that we got

up from the empty table....

Three days later we drove home together through the Riviera to Nice.

We caught a glimpse of Genoa, a glimpse of Mentone, where we had so

often been, and in such a different frame of mind, a glimpse of Monaco,

thrusting its velvety grass and velvety sand into the sea; they all

greeted us gaily, like old friends after a separation; and here were the

little vineyards, the rose-bushes, the orange-trees, and the sea lying

stretched before the house, and the children playing on the beach.... Now

they had seen us and rushed to meet us, we were at home.

I am thankful to destiny for those days and for the four months which

followed them. They made a glorious ending to personal life for me. I

thank her, the old heathen, for crowning the doomed victims with the

rich wreath of autumn flowers and strewing their path, if only for the

time, with her poppy of forgetfulness and fragrance!

The differences that parted us had vanished, the barriers had fallen. Was

not this the hand which had lain in mine through my whole life, were not

these the same eyes though sometimes dimmed with tears? ‘Be comforted,

sister, friend, comrade, all is over—and we the same as in our young,

bright, holy years!’

‘After sufferings, you, perhaps, know how great, have come some minutes

full of bliss; all the cherished beliefs of childhood, of youth, have

not only come true, but have passed through terrible ordeals, losing

neither their freshness nor their fragrance, and have blossomed with new

splendour and new power. I have never been so happy as now,’ she wrote to

her friend in Russia.

Of course, there was a sediment left from the past which could not be

touched with impunity, something broken within, some lightly slumbering

fear and pain.

The past is not a proof that can be corrected, but a guillotine knife;

after it has once fallen there is much that cannot grow together again,

and there is always something left that cannot be set right. It remains

as though cast in metal, distinct, unalterable, dark as bronze. Men as

a rule forget only what is not worth remembering, or what they do not

understand. If only a man could forget two or three incidents, such and

such happenings, such a day, such a word, he would be strong and young

and bold, but burdened with them he sinks like a key to the bottom.

One need not be a Macbeth to meet the ghost of Banquo; ghosts are not

criminal judges, nor pangs of conscience, but the happenings that can

never be obliterated from the mind.

But one ought not to forget; that is a weakness, that is a falsity of a

sort; the past has its rights, it is fact, one has to get over it and

not to forget it—and we moved towards that, keeping step.

Sometimes it would happen that a trivial word, uttered by outsiders, or

some object that caught the eye, would pass like a razor over the heart,

and blood would flow, and the pang would be insufferable, but at the same

instant I would meet eyes full of alarm, looking at me with infinite

distress and saying: ‘Yes, you are right, it can’t be helped, but——’ and

I tried to chase away the gathering clouds.

Holy time of reconciliation, I think of it through my tears....

No, not reconciliation, that is not the word. Words are like ready-made

clothes that fit all people of the same height up to a certain point and

are equally unbecoming to every one. We had no need to be reconciled, we

had never quarrelled; we had suffered for each other, but we had never

drifted apart. At the blackest moments a sort of indissoluble unity, of

which neither doubted, and a deep respect for each other remained intact.

We were more like people recovering after a high fever; the delirium had

passed, we knew each other again as we looked with dim and troubled eyes.

The pain we had been through was fresh in the memory, and we were still

conscious of exhaustion, but we knew that all the trouble was over and

that we were safely on shore again.

An idea, that had several times occurred to Natalie before, absorbed

her more and more now. She wanted to write the story of her heart. She

was dissatisfied with the beginning and burnt the pages; only one long

letter and one brief page have remained.... From these one can judge what

has been lost.... Reading them almost terrifies one, one feels that one

is touching a warm and suffering heart, one seems to hear the whisper

of those unvoiced secrets, for ever hidden, and scarcely awakening into

consciousness. In those lines one can trace the anguish of struggle

leading up to new strength of spirit and of pain leading up to thought.

If this work had not been cruelly interrupted, it would have been a

precious document, filling the gap left by the evasive silence of woman

and the haughty patronage of her by man. But the most senseless blow

broke over our heads and shattered everything for ever.

* * * * *

_Dans une mer sans fond, par une nuit sans lune, sous l’aveugle

océan à jamais enfouis._ V. HUGO.

So ended the summer of 1851. We were quite alone. My mother, with Kolya

and Spielmann, had gone to Paris to stay with Marya Kasparovna. We spent

our days quietly with the children. It seemed as though all our troubles

were behind us.

In November we received a letter from my mother to tell us she was

setting off immediately, then another from Marseilles to say that next

day, the 15th of November, they would take the steamer and come to us.

During her absence we had moved into another house, also on the sea, in

the suburb of St. Hélène. In this house, which had a large garden, there

was a room for my mother; we decorated it with flowers, our cook went

with Sasha to get Chinese lanterns, and we hung them about the walls and

trees. Everything was ready. From three o’clock in the afternoon the

children watched from the verandah; at last, between five and six, a dark

coil of smoke could be discerned on the horizon and a few minutes later

the steamer, too, could be seen, a motionless point growing larger and

larger. All was bustle in the house. François ran down to the harbour, I

got into the carriage and drove there.

When I reached the harbour the steamer had already arrived, boats were

waiting for the permission of quarantine authorities for the passengers

to land. One of them came up to the landing-stage. François was standing

in it.

‘How is this?’ I asked, ‘you are back again already?’

He did not answer. I glanced at him and my heart sank; his face was

livid, and he was trembling all over.

‘What is it?’ I asked, ‘are you ill?’

‘No,’ he answered, avoiding my eyes, ‘but our people have not come.’

‘Haven’t come?’

‘Something happened with the steamer, so some of the passengers haven’t

come.’

I hastily got into a boat and told them to push off at once.

On the steamer I was met with a sort of ominous consideration and

complete silence. The captain himself was waiting for me; all this was

so unusual that I felt something awful was coming. The captain told me

that between the island of Hyères and the mainland the steamer on which

my mother was sailing had run into another vessel and sunk to the bottom,

that most of the passengers had been picked up by him and by another

steamer that was passing by. ‘I have only two young girls of your party,’

he said, and he led me to the upper deck—every one stepped aside with

the same gloomy silence. I followed senselessly without even asking

a question. My mother’s niece, who had been staying with her, a tall

slender girl, was lying on deck with wet and dishevelled hair; beside her

was the maid who looked after Kolya. Seeing me, the young girl tried to

sit up, to say something, but could not; she turned away sobbing.

‘What has happened? Where are they?’ I asked, taking the maid’s hand with

a sick dread.

‘We know nothing,’ she answered. ‘The steamer sank, we were pulled out

of the water half dead. An Englishwoman gave us her clothes to change

into.’

The captain looked mournfully at me, shook my hand and said: ‘You must

not despair; go to Hyères, perhaps you will find some of them there.’

Leaving Engelson and François to look after the girls, I drove home in a

sort of stupefaction; everything in my head was confused and shuddering,

I only wished that our house had been a thousand miles away. But soon I

caught a gleam between the trees, and more and more; it was the lanterns

lighted by the children. At our gate stood our servants, Tata, and

Natalie, with Olga in her arms.

‘What, you alone?’ Natalie asked me calmly. ‘Why, you might have brought

Kolya, at least.’

‘They are not there,’ I said, ‘something happened to their steamer. They

had to change on to another, this one did not take them all. Luise is

here.’

‘They are not here!’ cried Natalie, ‘and only now I see you, your eyes

are dim, your face is working. For God’s sake, what has happened?’

‘I am going to look for them in Hyères.’

She shook her head and added: ‘Not here, not here!’ Then without a word

she pressed her forehead against my shoulder. We walked up the avenue

without saying a word. I led her into the dining-room; as we passed, I

whispered to Rocca: ‘For God’s sake, the lanterns’; he understood me and

rushed to put them out. In the dining-room everything was ready—a bottle

of wine in ice, a nosegay of flowers before my mother’s place, new toys

before Kolya’s.

The terrible news quickly spread about the town, and our house began

to be filled with friends, such as Vogt, Tessier, Hoetsky and Orsini,

and even complete strangers; some wanted to find out what had happened,

others to show their sympathy, others to give all sorts of advice,

mostly foolish. But I will not be ungrateful; the sympathy shown me then

in Nice touched me deeply. In face of these senseless blows of destiny,

men wake up and feel their common bonds.

I decided to go to Hyères that same night. Natalie wanted to go with

me; I persuaded her to remain behind; besides, there had been an abrupt

change in the weather, the mistral was blowing cold as ice, and it was

raining heavily. I had to get a permit to go to France across the Var

bridge; I went to Léon Pilet, the French Consul; he was at the opera; I

went to his box with Hoetsky. Pilet, who had already heard something of

what had happened, said to me: ‘I have no right to give you permission,

but there are circumstances in which it would be a crime to refuse. I

give you on my own responsibility a permit to cross the frontier. Will

you go for it to the Consulate in half an hour’s time?’

At the entrance to the theatre about a dozen of the people who had been

with us were waiting for me. I told them that Léon Pilet would give the

permit.

‘You go home and don’t trouble about anything,’ they said to me on all

sides; ‘the rest shall be done; we will take the permit, we will get the

_visa_ at the office, we will order the post-horses.’

My landlord, who was present, ran to get a carriage; an hotel-keeper

offered his free of charge.

At eleven o’clock in the evening I set off in the pouring rain. It was

an awful night; the squalls of wind were sometimes so violent that the

horses stopped; the sea that had buried them only that day beat and

roared almost unseen in the darkness. We mounted the Esterel, the rain

changed into snow, the horses stumbled and almost fell on the slippery

ice. Several times the driver, exhausted by his efforts, tried to warm

himself; I offered him my flask of brandy and, promising him double

fares, besought him to make haste.

What for? Did I believe in the possibility of finding any of them, of

any one being saved? It was hard to suppose it after all I had heard—but

to find out, to look at the very spot, to find something, some rag, to

see an eye-witness even.... One needed to be convinced that there was no

hope. I needed to be doing something, to be away from home, to come to

myself.

While they were changing horses at Esterel, I got out of the carriage;

my heart ached, and I almost sobbed as I looked round. It was near the

very tavern where we had spent a night in 1847. I remembered the huge

trees which formed a canopy over it; the same view lay stretched before

it, only then it had been lighted up by the rising sun, while now it was

hidden behind grey clouds, unlike Italy, and in places was white with

snow.

I vividly recalled that time with every minute detail; I remembered

how our hostess had regaled us with a hare, the highness of which was

disguised by a terrible quantity of garlic, how bats had flown about the

bedroom, how with the help of our Luise I drove them out with a towel,

and how for the first time we felt the breath of the warm southern air....

At the time I wrote: ‘From Avignon one feels and sees the south. For a

man who has always lived in the north, the first contact with a southern

landscape is filled with solemn joy, one feels younger, one longs to

sing, dance and weep; everything is so brilliant, so light, so gay, so

luxuriant. After Avignon we had to cross the Maritime Alps. We went up

the Esterel by moonlight; when we began to go down again the sun was

rising, the mountain chains stood out from the morning mist, the rays

of the sun threw a dazzling red light upon the snowy peaks; around was

vivid green, flowers, sharply-cut shadows, immense trees and gloomy

rocks, covered here and there with poor and rough vegetation; the air

was intoxicating, extraordinarily limpid, refreshing, and resonant, our

words and the notes of the birds sounded louder than usual, and all at

once at a little curve in the road there was a fringe of brilliance round

the mountains, and there, quivering with the flash of silver, lay the

Mediterranean.’[18]

And now, after four years, I was in the same place again.

We could not reach Hyères before night; I went at once to the Commissaire

of Police; with him and a brigadier of gendarmes I went first to the

Commissaire of the Port. He had all sorts of things that had been saved;

I found nothing among them. Then we went to the hospital. One of the

victims was dying; the others told me they had seen an elderly woman, a

child of five, and with him a young man with a fair bushy beard ... that

they had seen them at the very last minute, and that therefore they, too,

had gone to the bottom like every one else. But here again one asked

oneself how was it these people were alive, though they too, like Luise

and the maid, had no clear idea how they were saved.

The bodies that had been found were lying in the crypt of a nunnery. We

went there from the hospital; the Sisters of Mercy met us and conducted

us, lighting our way with church candles. In the crypt stood a row of

closed boxes, each containing one body. The Commissaire ordered them to

be opened; it appeared that they were nailed up. The brigadier sent a

gendarme for a chisel and told him to break open one lid after the other.

This examination of the bodies was insufferably painful. The Commissaire

had a little book in his hand, and in an official tone he asked at the

opening of each box: ‘Do you testify in our presence that this body is

not known to you?’ I nodded. The Commissaire made a mark with his pencil

and, turning to the gendarme, ordered him to close it again. We passed

on to the next. The gendarme lifted the lid; with a sort of terror I

glanced at the dead and was, as it were, relieved when I met unfamiliar

features, though in reality it was still more horrible to think that all

three were lost without a trace, lying forsaken at the bottom of the sea,

tossed by the waves. A body without a grave, without a tomb, is more

dreadful than any burial, and we had not even our dead.

I found no one. One body impressed me; a beautiful woman of twenty, in

Provençal holiday dress; her bosom was bare (she had had a baby in her

arms, carried away, of course, by the waves) and a stream of milk was

still trickling from her bosom. Her face was utterly unchanged, the brown

sunburn made her look as though living.

The brigadier could not help saying: ‘What a beauty!’ The Commissaire

made no comment; the gendarme, as he covered her, observed to the

brigadier: ‘I knew her, she was a peasant woman living not far from the

town, she was going to Grasse to her husband. Well, he’ll have to wait.’

My mother, my Kolya, and our good Spielmann had vanished without a trace.

Nothing was left of them; among the articles saved there was not a scrap

belonging to them. There could be no doubt of their death. All the saved

were either in Hyères or on the steamer which had brought Luise. The

captain had made up the tale to comfort me. I was told in Hyères of an

elderly man who had lost his whole family, and would not stay in the

hospital, but went off somewhere on foot, with no money, in a state

bordering on madness; and of two English girls who had been sent to the

English Consul—they had lost father, mother, and brother.

It was approaching daybreak; I ordered the horses. Before setting off,

the waiter took me to a part of the shore that jutted out into the

sea, and showed me from there the place of the shipwreck. The sea was

still boiling and tossing, grey and muddy-looking from the storm of

the previous day; in the distance, in one place, there was a peculiar

patch, as though of a thicker, transparent liquid. ‘The steamer was

taking a cargo of oil, you see it is floating, that’s where the accident

happened.’ That floating patch was all.

‘And is it deep there?’

‘It must be one hundred and eighty metres.’

I stood a little; the morning was very cold, particularly by the sea.

The mistral was still blowing, the sky was covered with the clouds of

a Russian autumn. Farewell!... A hundred and eighty metres deep, in a

floating patch of oil.

‘Nul ne sait votre sort, pauvres têtes perdues,

Vous roulerez à travers les sombres étendues,

Heurtant de vos fronts des écueils inconnus....’

I came back with a terrible certainty. Natalie, who had only just

recovered, had not the strength to bear this blow. From the day of the

death of my mother and Kolya, she never recovered her health again. The

horror, the pain remained—it entered into her blood. Sometimes in the

evening or the night, she would say to me, as though imploring my help:

‘Kolya, Kolya is always with me; poor Kolya, how frightened he must have

been, how cold he was! and then the fishes, the crabs!’ She would take

out his little glove, which had been in the maid’s pocket—and a silence

would follow, that silence in which life flows away as though a sluice

had been raised. At the sight of these agonies, which passed into nervous

illness, at the sight of her glittering eyes and increasing thinness, I

for the first time doubted whether I should save her.... The days dragged

by in an anguish of uncertainty, something like the existence men lead

between sentence and execution, when a man at once hopes and knows for

certain that he will not escape the axe.

IV

THE YEAR 1852

1

Again the new year had come; we met it about Natalie’s bedside—at last

her strength had failed, and she had been obliged to lie up.

The Engelsons, Vogt, and a couple of intimate friends were with us. We

were all melancholy. The 2nd of December in Paris weighed like a stone on

our hearts.... Everything—public and private—was rushing to ruin, and was

already so far on its way that there was no stopping nor turning back;

one could but wait, dully, miserably, till the headlong rush ended in

destruction.

The usual healths were drunk. At twelve o’clock we forced a smile; within

was death and horror, we were all ashamed to add any wishes for the new

year. To glance forward was more terrible than to look back.

The symptoms became more definite; pleurisy in the left lung set in.

She spent a terrible fortnight between life and death, but for the time

life conquered. Convalescence followed and with it a last ray of hope

shed its pale radiance over our troubled life.

The powers of her spirit came back first ... there were marvellous

moments—the last chords of a music that was to be hushed for ever.

A few days after the crisis of the illness, I went early in the morning

into my study and fell asleep upon the sofa. I must have slept soundly,

for I did not hear the servant come in. When I woke up I found a letter

on the table. Herwegh’s handwriting. What excuse had he for writing, and

how dared he write to me after all that had passed? I had given him no

pretext whatever. I picked up the letter in order to send it back, but

seeing on the envelope the words, ‘Containing an honourable challenge,’

I opened it. The letter was revolting, infamous. He said that by my

_calumnies_ I had bewildered Natalie, that I had taken advantage of

her weakness and my influence over her, that she had _betrayed him_.

In conclusion, he made charges against her, and said that fate had

decided between me and him: ‘it drowns in the sea your progeny (_votre

progéniture_) and your mother. You wanted to end this in blood, while I

supposed it was possible to end it humanely. Now I am ready and demand

satisfaction.’ I never read this letter again, and only once opened it

afterwards. In 1853, on Natalie’s birthday, the 23rd of October, I burnt

it without reading it.

This letter was the first insult I had ever received in my life. I leaped

up like a wounded beast, with a sort of moan of fury. Why was not that

wretch in Nice ... why was a dying woman lying the other side of the

passage?

After sousing my head two or three times in cold water, I went in to

Engelson (after my mother’s death he had her rooms), and after waiting

till his wife had gone out, I told him that I had received a letter from

Herwegh.

‘So you have actually received it?’ said Engelson.

‘Why, did you know—did you expect it?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I heard about it yesterday.’

‘From whom?’

‘From Karl Vogt.’

I clutched at my head, it seemed to me I was going mad. Our silence had

been so complete that neither my mother nor Marya Kasparovna Reihel had

once spoken to me about what had happened. I was more intimate with

Engelson than with other people—but to him I had only once, as we were

walking in the environs of Paris, spoken of it in a brief answer to a

question he put to me about the cause of my rupture with Herwegh. I had

been overwhelmed in Geneva when I heard from Sazonov of the scoundrel’s

gossip—but how could I have imagined that near me, close at hand, the

other side of the door, every one knew, every one was talking of what I

regarded as a secret buried between few persons ... that they even knew

of letters which I had not yet received.

We went in to Vogt. He told me that two days previously Emma had shown

him a letter from her husband, in which he said he would send me a

_terrible letter_, that he would fling me down ‘from the height’ on which

Natalie set me, ‘that he would cover us with disgrace, if he had to pass

over the dead bodies of children, and bring us all, and himself too, into

the prisoner’s dock of the criminal court.’ Finally, he wrote to his wife

(and she had shown all this to Vogt, to Charles Edmond, and to Orsini),

‘you alone are pure and innocent, you ought to be the avenging angel,’

namely, I suppose, to cut our throats. There were people who said he had

been driven out of his mind by love, by his rupture with me, by the wound

to his _amour-propre_. That is nonsense. The man never took one _step_

that was dangerous or incautious, the madness was only in _words_, he

raged in literature. His vanity was stung, silence was for him harder

to bear than any scandal, the peace that had returned to our life gave

him no rest. A petty bourgeois, like George Sand’s Horace, he talked to

revenge himself upon the woman whom he loved and the man whom he had

called brother and father, and, a bourgeois German, he threatened in

melodramatic phrases, composed in pseudo-Schilleresque style.

At the very time when he was writing this letter to me and a string of

insane letters to his wife, at that very time he was living with, and at

the expense of, a former mistress of Louis Napoleon’s, a dissolute woman,

who was notorious in Zurich. With her he spent his days and nights, at

her expense he lived in luxury, drove about in her carriage and feasted

in big hotels ... no, that is not madness!...

‘What do you intend to do?’ Engelson asked me at last.

‘Go and kill him like a dog. That he is a fearful coward you know and

every one knows—the chances are all in my favour.’

‘But how can you go...?’

‘That’s the whole point. Write to him meanwhile that it is not for him

to demand satisfaction of me, but for me to punish him, and that I will

myself choose the means and the time to do it, that I will not leave a

sick woman for that, and that I spit on his rudeness.’

To that effect I wrote to Sazonov, and asked whether he would help in

the matter. Engelson, Sazonov, and Vogt received my proposition with

eagerness. My letter was a great mistake, and gave him a pretext for

saying afterwards that I had accepted his challenge, and that I had

refused it later on.

To refuse a challenge is a difficult thing and requires much strength of

mind or much weakness.

The feudal duel has a firm standing in modern society, betraying that

it is not altogether so modern as it seems. Rarely does any one venture

to attack this sacred relic set up by aristocratic honour and military

_amour-propre_—and, indeed, it is rare for any one to be in a position so

independent as to be able to insult the bloody idol with impunity and to

accept the charge of cowardice.

To prove the absurdity of the duel is not worth while—in theory no one

justifies it except a few bullies and fencing masters, but in practice

every one gives in to it in order to prove—the devil knows to whom—his

courage.

The worst thing about the duel is that it justifies any blackguard,

either by giving him an honourable death, or by making him an honourable

murderer.

A man is charged with cheating at cards—he insists on a duel, as though

one cannot cheat at cards without being afraid of a pistol. And how

shameful to put the card-sharper on a level with the man who denounces

him!

A duel may sometimes be preferred as the means of escaping the gallows or

the guillotine, although the logic is not clear even then, and I do not

understand why a man under penalty of general contempt is bound not to

fear his antagonist’s sword, though he may be afraid of the knife of the

guillotine.

The death penalty has this advantage, that it is preceded by a trial,

which may condemn a man to death, but cannot deprive him of the right of

showing up his enemy, dead or alive. In a duel everything remains secret

and concealed. It is an institution belonging to that pugnacious period

when blood was still so fresh on men’s hands that the wearing of deadly

weapons was looked on as a sign of nobility and exercise in the art of

killing as an official duty.

So long as the world is governed by military men duels will not be

abolished; but we may boldly demand that the choice should be left to us

when we should bow the head to an idol we do not believe in, and when

show ourselves free men in our full stature and—after battling with

the gods and the powers of this world—dare to challenge the bloody,

mediaeval ordeal.... How many men have passed with proud and triumphant

faces through all the hardships of life, prison, poverty, sacrifice and

toil, the tortures of the Inquisition, and I do not know what, and have

succumbed to the impudent challenge of some trivial scoundrel? There must

be no more such victims. The principle that regulates a man’s actions

should lie within himself in his own reason; if it lies without himself,

he is a slave, however valiant he may be.

I neither accepted nor refused the challenge; the chastisement of Herwegh

was for me a moral necessity, a physical necessity—I tried to think of

some sure means of revenge and one which could not redound to his glory.

But whether by a duel or whether by a knife I attained it, was a matter

of complete indifference to me. He himself suggested the solution. He

wrote to his wife—and she, as she always did, showed the letter to every

one she knew—that in spite of everything I was a head and shoulders above

all the rabble round me, that I was influenced for harm by men like Vogt,

Engelson, Golovin (!), that if he could see me for one minute, all would

be set right—‘he (_i.e._, I) alone can understand me’; and this was

written after his letter to me!

And for this reason the poet concluded, ‘What I should like best of all

is that Herzen would accept a duel without witnesses. I am convinced that

from the first word we should fall into each other’s arms, and all would

be forgotten.’

And so a duel was proposed as a means for a theatrical reconciliation.

If I could at that time have got away for five days or a week, I should

certainly have set off to Zurich and gone to him to carry out his

desire—and he would not have been left alive.

A few days after receiving Herwegh’s letter, Orsini came in to me

one morning at nine o’clock. Orsini, through a sort of physiological

absurdity, was passionately devoted to Emma; what there was in common

between this handsome, ardent young Southerner and the ugly, lymphatic

German woman, I never could imagine. His early arrival surprised me. He

very simply and directly said to me that the news of Herwegh’s letter had

revolted his whole circle, and that many common acquaintances had offered

to form a court of honour. Then he began to defend Emma, saying that she

was not in fault except in her senseless love for her husband and her

slavish submission to him, that he himself had seen how much she had felt

it all. ‘You ought,’ he said, ‘to hold out a hand to her, you ought to

punish the guilty, but you ought also to rehabilitate an innocent woman.’

I gave a resolute and unconditional refusal. Orsini was too clear-sighted

not to see that I should not change my mind, and so did not insist.

Among other things, speaking of a court of honour, he told me that he had

already written about the whole story to Mazzini and asked his opinion.

The court of honour was never held, but I received later on a letter

that amounted to a verdict on Herwegh, signed by names that were dear to

me—and among others the heroic martyr Pisacane, Mordini, Orsini, Bertani,

Medici, Mezzacapo, Cosenz, etc. Was not that horrible again? Parties were

formed, verdicts were passed, Mazzini was written to—and all this without

my knowledge, and all this concerning events at which a week before no

one had dared to hint in my presence. After seeing Orsini out, I took a

sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Mazzini. Here I was confronted with

a sort of Court of Wehm—and a self-invited court. I wrote to him that

Orsini had told me of his letter, and that, fearing that he might not

have presented the cause quite correctly, since he had never heard a word

about it from me, I wanted to tell my story and to ask advice. Mazzini at

once replied. ‘It would have been better,’ he wrote, ‘to bury the whole

thing in silence, but I doubt whether that is possible for you now, and

therefore you had better come boldly forward to the attack and leave us

to form a court.’ That I believed in the possibility of such a court was,

perhaps, my last illusion.

I was mistaken and paid dearly for my mistake.

Together with Mazzini’s letter I received a letter from Haug, to whom

Mazzini, knowing that he was an intimate friend of mine, had shown

Orsini’s letter and mine. After my first meeting with Haug in Paris, he

had served under Garibaldi and distinguished himself in battle near Rome.

There was much that was good in the man and a vast deal that was immature

and absurd. He had slept the unbroken sleep of an Austrian lieutenant

in his barracks, till he was suddenly awakened by the alarm bell of the

Hungarian rising and the Vienna barricades. He snatched up a weapon,

not to slay the insurgent people, but to take his place in its ranks.

The transition had been too violent and left, as it were, traces of

angularity and incompleteness.

A dreamy and rather impetuous man, generous and devoted, proud to the

point of arrogance, a Bursch and a Cadet, a student and a lieutenant, he

had a real affection for me. Haug wrote that he was going to Nice, and

besought me to take no steps without him. ‘You have left your country

and have come to us as a brother; do not imagine that we will permit

any fellow-countryman of ours to go unpunished after adding calumny

to all his previous treachery, and then covering it all up with his

insolent challenge. No, we have a very different conception of our mutual

responsibility. It is enough that a Russian poet[19] has been killed by

the bullet of a western adventurer—a Russian revolutionist shall not be!’

In reply I wrote a long letter to Haug. This was the first time I had

told the story. I told him everything that had happened—and waited for

him to come....

And meanwhile, in the bedroom close by, a great life was feebly

flickering out in a desperate struggle with bodily weakness and terrible

forebodings. I spent day and night beside the sick-bed—she liked me to

give her her medicine and to prepare her orangeade; at night I kept up

the fire, and when she slept quietly I had hopes again of saving her.

But there were moments of insufferable misery. I felt her thin, feverish

hand, I saw her gloomy, anxious eyes fixed upon me with entreaty, with

yearning and the terrible words: ‘The children will be left alone—they

will be orphans—all will be lost, you are only waiting ... for the

children’s sake drop it all, don’t defend yourself from the mud ... let

me, me, defend you—you shall come out clean, if only I can get a little

stronger physically—but no, no, strength will not come. Do not leave the

children!’ And for the hundredth time I repeated my promise.

In one of these conversations Natalie suddenly said to me: ‘Has he

written to you?’[20]

‘Yes.’

‘Show me the letter.’

‘What for?’

‘I want to see what he could write to you....’

I was almost glad that she had spoken of the letter; I passionately

longed to know whether there was a grain of truth in one of the charges

he made against her.... I could never have brought myself to ask, but

now that she had herself spoken of the letter, I could not overcome

my desire, I was horrified at the thought that the doubt would always

remain, and, perhaps, grow stronger when her lips would be closed for

ever....

‘I am not going to show you the letter, but tell me, did you say

something like this...?’

‘How can you imagine such a thing!’

‘He writes it.’

‘It’s almost incredible—he writes that with his own hand...?’

I folded the letter back at the passage and showed her—she glanced at it,

was silent for a little and then said mournfully: ‘How vile!’

From that moment her contempt passed into hatred, and never in one word

or one hint did she forgive him or express pity for him.

A few days after this conversation she wrote him the following letter:

‘Your persecution and your infamous conduct force me once

more to repeat, and in the presence of witnesses, what I have

written to you several times already; yes, my infatuation was

immense and blind, but your character, treacherous, Jewish in

the worst sense, your unbridled egoism, have been displayed

in all their hideous nakedness when you were leaving here

and since, while Alexandr’s goodness and devotion have been

greater every day. My unhappy infatuation has only been a new

pedestal on which to raise my love for him. You have tried to

cover that pedestal with mud, but you can do nothing to break

our union, which is stronger and firmer now than ever it was.

Your charges, your slanders against a woman only fill Alexandr

with contempt for you, you dishonour yourself by this baseness.

What has become of your everlasting protestations of religious

respect for my will, of your love for the children? It is not

long since you swore that you would rather vanish off the face

of the earth than cause Alexandr a moment’s distress. Have

I not always told you that I could not for one day survive

parting with him, that if he left me, even if he died—I would

remain alone to the end of my life...?

‘As for my promise to see you again some day, it is true that I

made it—I was sorry for you then, I wanted our parting to be

humane—you have made it impossible for me to keep that promise.

‘From the time you went away you began torturing me, demanding

first one promise, then another. You meant to vanish for

years, to go away to Egypt, if only you could take with you

the smallest hope. When you saw that that did not answer,

you suggested one absurd thing after another—impossible,

ludicrous—and ended by threatening me with _publicity_,

tried to estrange me completely from Alexandr, tried to make

him kill you, fight you, and finally threatened to commit

terrible crimes. These threats had no more effect on me, you

had repeated them too often. I tell you again what I wrote in

my last letter: “I remain in my home—my home is Alexandr and

my children,” and if I could not remain as mother and wife, I

would remain as nurse and servant. There is no bridge between

me and you. You have made even the past loathsome to me.

‘NATALIE HERZEN.’

‘NICE, _February 18, 1852_.’

A few days later the letter returned from Zurich. Herwegh sent it back

unopened; the letter had been sent registered with three seals, and was

returned with the receipt in the same envelope.

‘If that’s it,’ observed Natalie, ‘it shall be read to him.’

She sent for Haug, Tessier, Engelson, Orsini, and Vogt, and said to them:

‘You know how I long to justify Alexandr, but what can I do, chained to

my bed? I may not get over this illness—let me die in peace, trusting

that you will carry out my last request. That man has sent me back my

letter; I want one of you to read it to him, and in the presence of

witnesses.’

Haug took her hand and said: ‘Your letter shall be read to him, I stake

my life on that!’

That simple vigorous action affected us all—and the sceptical Vogt went

out as much stirred as the fanatical Orsini, who preserved a fervent

respect for Natalie to the end of his days. The last time I saw him

before he went away to Paris—at the end of 1857—he spoke with tenderness

of Natalie, and perhaps with secret reproach. Of us two, Orsini certainly

is not the one who could be accused of moral inconsistency—of dualism of

words and deeds!

Once, late in the evening, or rather night, I had been having a long and

melancholy discussion with Engelson. At last he went to his room, and I

went upstairs. Natalie was sleeping quietly; I stayed a few minutes in

her bedroom and went out into the garden. Engelson’s window was open.

Standing disconsolately at the window he was smoking a cigar. ‘Such is

fate, it seems,’ he said and came towards me. ‘Why aren’t you asleep,

why have you come?’ he asked, and there was a nervous quiver in his

voice. Then he caught hold of my hand and went on. ‘Do you believe in

my boundless love for you, do you believe there is no one in the world

dearer to me than you?—leave Herwegh to me—there is no need of a court,

or of Haug—Haug’s a German—give me the right to avenge you, I am a

Russian.... I’ve thought over a complete plan; I need your confidence,

your blessing.’ He stood with a pale face before me, his arms folded,

in the light of the coming dawn. I was deeply touched and felt ready

to fall on his neck with tears. ‘Do you believe or not that I would

sooner perish, be wiped off the face of the earth, than compromise a

business in which so much is involved that is sacred to me? But without

your confidence my hands are tied. Tell me openly: yes or no? If it’s

no—good-bye and the devil take it all, and the devil take you and me too.

I shall go away to-morrow, and you will not hear of me again.’

‘I believe in your friendship and in your sincerity, but I am afraid

of your imagination and your nerves, and I have no great faith in your

practical ability. You are nearer to me than any of the others here, but

I must own, I fancy that you may do harm and get yourself into trouble.’

‘So you think General Haug has practical talents?’

‘I don’t say that, but I believe Haug is a more practical man, just as I

think Orsini is more practical than Haug....’

Engelson would hear no more—he began dancing about on one leg, singing,

and at last recovering himself, said to me: ‘There you are, there you

are, putting your foot in it.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and added

in an undertone: ‘It’s with Orsini that I thought out the whole plan,

with the most practical man on earth. Come, give us your blessing,

father.’

‘But will you give me your word not to attempt anything without telling

me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me your plan, then.’

‘I can’t do that, at any rate I can’t do that now.’

A silence followed. What he meant to do it was not difficult to guess.

‘Good-night,’ I said, ‘let me think a little,’ and I could not help

adding: ‘What possessed you to tell me about it?’

Engelson understood me.

‘My damned weakness, but nobody will ever know that I’ve told you.’

‘But I know,’ said I in answer, and we parted.

Anxiety over Engelson and fear of some catastrophe which would be a

fatal shock to Natalie in her weak state compelled me to prevent his

scheme from being carried out. Orsini shook his head, and looked at it

regretfully ... and so instead of punishing I saved Herwegh, though, of

course, it was not for his sake nor for my own. There was not a trace of

sentimentality or magnanimity about it.

And, indeed, how are magnanimity and sympathy possible with this hero

turned inside out? Emma, alarmed by something, quarrelled with Vogt for

speaking impertinently of her Georg, and besought Charles Edmond to write

to the latter, advising him to stay quietly at Zurich and abandon every

sort of provocation—or it would be the worse for him. I do not know what

Charles Edmond wrote, his task was not an easy one. But Herwegh’s answer

was remarkable. First, he said it was not for the Vogts nor for Charles

Edmond to judge him, then that it was I who had broken the bond between

him and me, and so the whole responsibility fell upon me. After going

into everything and defending himself even in the ambiguous part he had

played, he concluded thus: ‘I don’t even know whether this can be called

treachery. Those cads are still talking about money—to put a stop to that

paltry accusation once for all, I may say openly that Mr. Herzen did

not with his few thousand francs pay too high a price for the moments

of distraction and enjoyment which we spent together in that oppressive

time!’ ‘_C’est grand, c’est sublime_,’ said Charles Edmond, ‘_mais c’est

niederträchtig_.’ To which Hoetsky replied that the stick was the only

answer to such letters, and that he would give it him the next time they

met. Herwegh relapsed into silence.

2

DEATH

With the coming of spring Natalie was better; she would sit up for the

greater part of the day in an easy-chair, was able to do her hair for

the first time during her illness and was soon able to listen without

exhaustion when I read aloud to her.

We were planning, as soon as she should be a little better, to go to

Seville or Cadiz. She was eager to get strong, eager to live, eager to go

to Italy.

After the return of the letter there was complete silence, as though both

husband and wife felt in their conscience that they had reached a limit

rarely reached, had overstepped it, and desisted.

Natalie had not yet gone downstairs and was in no haste to do so: she

meant to go down for the first time on the 25th of March, my birthday.

She was having a white merino blouse made for that day, and I had ordered

an ermine cloak from Paris. Two days before, Natalie herself wrote or

dictated to me the list of the guests she wanted to invite besides the

Engelsons, Orsini, Vogt, Mordini, and Paccelli and his wife.

Two days before my birthday, Olga developed a cold and cough, there was

influenza in the town. Natalie got up twice in the night and went across

her room to the nursery. It was a warm night, but stormy. She woke up in

the morning with an acute attack of influenza—she had an agonising cough

and towards evening fever.

There could be no question of her getting up next day; a feverish night

was followed by terrible prostration and aggravated symptoms. All the

faint reviving hopes to which we clung so desperately were shattered. The

unnatural sound of the cough had a sinister menace.

Natalie would not hear of putting off our visitors. Anxious and

melancholy, at two o’clock we sat down to table without her.

Madame Paccelli brought with her a song her husband had composed for

my birthday. She was a silent, melancholy and very kind-hearted woman.

It seemed as though some sorrow weighed upon her—either the curse

of poverty was too great a burden, or perhaps life had promised her

something more than everlasting music-lessons and the devotion of a

feeble, colourless man, conscious of his inferiority to her.

In our house she met with more homeliness and a warmer welcome than with

her other pupils, and she came to love Natalie with southern fervour.

After lunch she sat a little with the invalid, and came away from her,

pale as a sheet. The guests begged her to sing the song she had brought

with her; she sat down at the piano, struck a few chords, began singing

and all at once, with a frightened look at me, burst into tears, let her

head fall on the instrument and sobbed spasmodically. So ended our fête.

Almost without saying a word, the guests dispersed, with a weight like a

stone on their hearts.

I went upstairs. The same fearful cough continued. It was the prelude to

the funeral.

And there were two of them.

Within two months from my birthday Madame Paccelli was buried too. She

had set off for Mentone or Roccabrunn on a donkey. The donkeys in Italy

are accustomed to ascend the mountains at night without missing their

footing. On this occasion the donkey stumbled in broad daylight—the

hapless woman fell off, rolled on to the sharp rocks and died on the spot

in terrible agonies.... I was in Lugano when I received the news. So she

was no more. _Nur zu_—what grotesque absurdity was to come next...?

After that all is clouded over ... there comes a blank gloomy night

indistinct in my memory, it is useless or impossible to describe it ...

a time of pain, anxiety, sleeplessness, the stupefying consciousness of

terror, of moral impotence and horrible physical strength....

Everything in the house seemed to have collapsed. There was a peculiar

disorder and chaos, a hurry and bustle, the servants were run off their

legs; and together with the approach of death, there came fresh scandal,

fresh nastiness.... Fate did not gild the pill for me, nor did men spare

me either; his shoulders are broad, they seemed to say, let him bear it.

Three days before Natalie’s end, Orsini brought me a note for her from

Emma. She besought Natalie ‘to forgive her for all that had been done

against her and against all of us.’ I told Orsini that it was out of

the question to give the patient the note, but that I fully appreciated

the feeling that had led Emma to write these lines and that I accepted

them. I did more: on one of the last peaceful moments, I said quietly to

Natalie: ‘Emma asks your forgiveness.’ She smiled ironically and did not

answer a word. She knew the woman better than I did.

In the evening I heard a loud conversation in the billiard-room, which

was where our intimate friends usually gathered. I went in and found a

heated conversation going on. Vogt was exclaiming, Orsini was urging

something and was paler than usual. The argument stop at my entrance.

‘What is it?’ I asked, feeling certain that some fresh meanness was in

question.

‘Why,’ Engelson answered, ‘what’s the use of making a secret of it? but

it’s so charming, such a Teutonic gem, that I should be ready to stand on

my head if it had happened at any other time.... The chivalrous Emma has

commissioned Orsini to tell you that, since you forgive her, she suggests

that in proof of it you should give her back the I.O.U. for ten thousand

francs which she gave you when you paid off their creditors. _Stupendisch

theuer, stupendisch theuer._’

Orsini, embarrassed, added: ‘I think she has gone out of her mind.’

I took out her note and, giving it to Orsini, said to him: ‘Tell the

woman that she asks too high a price—that, if I did value her feeling of

repentance, it was not at ten thousand francs!’

Orsini did not take the note.

Through such filth I was dragged beside her deathbed: what was this?

madness or vice, depravity or density?

On the evening of the 29th of April, Marya Kasparovna arrived. Natalie

had been expecting her from day to day. She had several times begged

her to come, fearing that Madame Engelson would take the charge of the

children into her hands. Every hour she looked for her coming, and when

we got a letter from her she sent Haug and Sasha to meet her at the

bridge over the Var. But in spite of this, seeing Marya Kasparovna was

terribly agitating for her. I remember the faint cry, almost a moan, with

which she said ‘Masha,’ and could say nothing more.

The illness had found Natalie half-way through her pregnancy, Bonfils

and Vogt thought that her condition had assisted her recovery from the

pleurisy.

Marya Kasparovna’s arrival brought on the birth, which was easier

than had been expected; the baby was born alive, but her strength was

exhausted. A terrible prostration followed. The baby was born towards

morning. Towards evening she told us to give her the little one and call

the children. The doctor had prescribed absolute quiet. I besought her

not to do this. She looked at me gently.

‘You, too, heed what they say, Alexandr,’ she said; ‘mind that you are

not very sorry later on for robbing me of this moment. I am a little

easier just now. I want to show baby to the children myself.’ I called

the children.

Not having the strength to hold the little one, she laid him beside

her, and with a bright and joyous face said to Sasha and Tata: ‘Here

is another little brother. You must love him.’ The children rushed with

delight to kiss her and the baby. I remembered that a few days before

Natalie had repeated, looking at the children:

‘And may the young life sport and play

About the entrance to the grave.’

Overwhelmed with grief, I looked at this apotheosis of the dying mother.

When the children had gone I besought her to rest and not to speak. She

tried to rest and could not: tears trickled down her cheeks. ‘Remember

your promise.... Ah, how terrible to think that they will be left alone,

quite alone ... and in a foreign land!... But can it be that there is no

hope?’

She fixed on me a glance of entreaty and despair. These transitions

from terrible hopelessness to illusive dreams of recovery tore my heart

inexpressibly those last few days. At the moments when I had least faith,

she would take my hand and say: ‘No, Alexandr, it can’t be so, it’s too

stupid, we have a life before us if only this weakness would pass.’

The rays of hope slipped away, they faded of themselves and were replaced

by unutterably gloomy, quiet despair.

‘When I am not here,’ she would say, ‘everything will be arranged

somehow; now I can’t imagine how you’ll live without me, it seems I am

so necessary to the children, but when one thinks—they will grow up just

the same even without me, and everything will go on as though it had

always been so.’ She added a few words more about the children, about

Sasha’s health, said how glad she was that he had grown stronger in Nice,

and that Vogt, too, agreed that he had. ‘Look after Tata, you must be

very careful with her—she has a deep and reserved character. Ah,’ she

added, ‘if only I could live till my Natalie[21] comes!... Well, are the

children asleep?’ she asked a little later.

‘Yes,’ I said.

There was the sound of a child’s voice in the distance.

‘That is Olenka,’ she said, and smiled (for the last time). ‘See what she

wants.’

Towards night she became terribly restless, without speaking she motioned

that her pillow was uncomfortable. But however I arranged it, she was

still restless, and with distress and even vexation kept changing the

position of her head; then she fell into a heavy sleep.

In the middle of the night she made a movement with her hand as though

she wanted to drink; I gave her a spoonful of orange juice mixed with

sugar and water, but her teeth were firmly clenched; she was unconscious.

I was numb with horror. It was daybreak. I drew back the curtain and,

with a sort of senseless feeling of despair, saw that not only her lips

but even her teeth had turned black.

Why was it, why this awful unconsciousness, why this black colour?

Dr. Bonfils and Karl Vogt had been sitting all night in the drawing-room.

I went and told Vogt what I had seen. He avoided my eyes and went

upstairs without answering. No answer was needed. Her pulse was scarcely

beating.

About midday she came to herself and sent for the children, but did not

utter a word.

She thought that it was dark in the room. It was the second time this had

happened in the daylight. She asked me why there were no candles (two

candles were burning on the table). I lighted another candle, but not

noticing it, she said that it was dark: ‘Oh, my dear, how my head aches!’

she said, and two or three words more.

She took my hand—and already hers was not like a living hand—and covered

her face with it. I said something to her. She answered indistinctly,

consciousness was lost again and never came back....

In that condition she remained till the following morning, from midday or

one o’clock on the 1st of May till seven o’clock on the morning of the

2nd. I longed for one more word ... one word ... or for the end to come!

Those awful, cruel nineteen hours!

At moments she returned to half-consciousness, said distinctly that

she wanted to take off the flannel, the dressing-jacket, asked for a

handkerchief, but nothing more.

Several times I began to speak: it seemed to me that she heard but could

not utter a word, a look of bitter pain seemed to pass over her face.

Twice she pressed my hand, not convulsively but intentionally. At six

o’clock in the morning I asked the doctor how long it would go on. ‘Not

more than an hour.’

I went into the garden to call Sasha. I wanted him to keep his mother’s

last minutes in his memory for ever. As I went upstairs with him, I told

him what a sorrow was in store for us. He had no suspicion of the truth.

Pale and almost fainting, he went into the room with me.

‘Let us kneel here side by side,’ I said to him, pointing to a rug by

the side of the bed. The sweat of death covered her face, her hand

spasmodically caught at her dressing-jacket, as though trying to take

it off. A few moans, a few sounds that reminded me of Vadim’s death

agony—then those, too, ceased.

The doctor took her hand and let it drop, it fell like a stone.

The boy was sobbing. I do not fully remember what happened for the first

moment. I rushed away into the hall, met Charles Edmond, tried to say

something to him, but, instead of words, a sound such as I had never

heard broke from me. I stood before the window and, stupefied, with no

clear understanding, stared at the senselessly moving, sparkling sea.

Then suddenly I remembered the words: ‘Look after Tata.’ I felt alarmed

that the child might be frightened. I had forbidden their speaking to her

before, but could I rely upon it? I had her fetched and, shutting myself

up with her in the study, sat her on my knee and, preparing her little by

little, told her at last that Mother was dead. She trembled all over, her

face flushed in patches, tears came into her eyes.... I led her upstairs.

There already everything was changed. Natalie was lying as though alive

on a bed decked with flowers, beside the baby, who had died the same

night. The room was draped with white and full of flowers. The taste

of the Italians, artistic in everything, knows how to bring something

soothing into the heartrending sorrow of death. The frightened child was

impressed by the beautiful surroundings. ‘Mamma is here,’ she said; but

when I lifted her up and she touched the cold face with her lips, she

broke into hysterical weeping.

I could bear no more, I went out....

An hour and a half later I was sitting alone again by the same window

and again staring blankly at the sea and the sky. The door opened and

Tata came in. She came up to me and, caressing me, said in a frightened

whisper: ‘Daddy, I was good, wasn’t I? I didn’t cry very much.’ I looked

at the motherless child in deep distress. ‘Yes,’ I thought, ‘you will

need to be good. You will know no mother’s petting, no mother’s love,

nothing can take their place. There will be a gap in your heart, you will

not experience the best, purest devotion, the only disinterested devotion

in the world. You will feel it yourself, perhaps, but no one will feel

it for you. What is a father’s love compared with a mother’s anguish of

love?’

Natalie lay all surrounded with flowers. The blinds had been let down.

I sat on the chair, the same chair as usual, beside the bed; all was

stillness except the splash of the sea under the window. It seemed as

though a faint, faint breath were rising from her lips.

Gently grief and distress sank into calm, as though suffering had passed

away without a trace, effaced by the careless serenity of the tomb that

knows not what it stands for. And I watched and watched all night. What

if she really should wake?

She did not wake; it was not sleep, it was death.

And so it was true.

On the floor and down the staircase masses of orange-red geranium had

been flung. That fragrance even now makes me tremble like an electric

shock, and I recall all the details, every minute, and see the room

draped in white, with the veiled looking-glass; beside her, also covered

with flowers, the yellow body of the baby, who had fallen asleep without

awakening; and her cold, terribly cold brow.... I go with rapid steps,

with no thought, no aim, into the garden. Our François is lying on the

grass sobbing like a child. I try to say something to him and have no

voice, I run back there again. A lady I do not know, dressed all in

black, and followed by two children, softly opens the door—she asks leave

to repeat a Catholic prayer—I am ready to pray with her myself. She

kneels down before the bed and the children kneel beside her, she murmurs

a prayer in Latin. The children softly repeat it after her. Then she says

to me: ‘They, too, have no mother, and their father is far away. You were

at the burial of their grandmother.’ They were Garibaldi’s children.

Within twenty-four hours crowds of exiles had gathered in the courtyard

and the garden. They had come to follow her to the grave.

Vogt and I laid her in the coffin, and it was carried out. I walked

firmly after it, holding Sasha by the hand and thinking: this is how men

look at the crowd when they are led out to be hanged. Two Frenchmen (one

of them, I remember, was the Comte de Voguet) in the street pointed with

hatred and derision at the absence of a priest. Tessier rebuked them.

I was panic-stricken, and made a sign to him with my hand; silence was

essential. An immense wreath of small dark-red roses lay on the coffin.

We each picked a rose; it was like a drop of blood on every one.

As we went up the hillside, the moon rose and there was a gleam on the

sea that had had its share in killing her. We buried her on the hillside

that stands out in sight of Esterel on the one hand and Corniche on the

other. There was a garden all round. And so she was still among flowers

as on her bed....

A fortnight later Haug recalled her last wish and his promise, and he and

Tessier prepared to go to Zurich.

It was time for Marya Kasparovna to return to Paris. Every one insisted

that I should let Tata and Olga go with her, and myself go with Sasha to

Genoa.

It made my heart ache to part from them, but I had no confidence in

myself. Perhaps, I thought, it really will be better for them; well,

if it is better for them, so let it be. I only begged her not to take

the children before the 9th of May, I wanted to spend with them the

fourteenth anniversary of my wedding.

The day after that I saw them as far as the bridge over the Var. Haug

went with them as far as Paris. We watched the customs-house authorities,

the gendarmes and police of all sorts worrying the passengers.

Haug lost his stick, a present from me, hunted for it and was vexed.

Tata was crying. The conductor, in a uniform jacket, sat down beside

the driver. The diligence drove off along the Draguignan road, and we,

Tessier, Sasha, and I, went back across the bridge, got into the carriage

and drove to the place where I lived.

A home I had no longer. With the departure of the children the last trace

of family life vanished. Everything assumed a bachelor air. Engelson

and his wife went away two days later. Half of the rooms were shut

up. Tessier and Edmond moved into the house. The feminine element was

excluded. Only Sasha’s age and features reminded one that there had been

something else ... recalled some one absent.

Five days after the funeral Herwegh wrote to his wife: ‘This news has

grieved me deeply. I am full of gloomy thoughts. Send me by the first

post _I Sepolcri_ of Hugo Foscolo.’ And in a following letter: ‘Now has

come the time for reconciliation with Herzen. The cause of our quarrel

exists no longer ... if only I could see him face to face—he is the only

man capable of understanding me!’

Yes, I did understand him.

3

APPENDIX

Haug and Tessier went one morning to the hotel in Zurich where the

Herweghs were staying. They asked whether he was at home, and, on the

waiter’s answering that he was, asked to be taken straight up to him

without being announced. On seeing them, Herwegh, trembling and white as

a sheet, got up and without a word leaned against a chair.

‘He was a terrible sight—the look of horror so distorted his face,’

Tessier told me.

‘We have come to you,’ Haug said to him, ‘to carry out the wishes of

our dead friend. On her deathbed she wrote to you—you sent the letter

back with the seal unbroken, on the pretext that it was written under

compulsion. She herself commissioned Tessier and me to bear witness that

she wrote that letter herself, of her free will, and then to read it

aloud to you.’

‘I don’t want—I won’t....’

‘Sit down and listen,’ said Haug, raising his voice.

They sat down, Haug broke open the letter and took out of it _a note in

Herwegh’s handwriting_.

When the letter, which had purposely been registered, was sent back

again, I gave it into Engelson’s keeping. The latter observed to me that

two of the seals had been tampered with.

‘You may be sure,’ he said to me, ‘that that scoundrel has read the

letter and that is just why he has sent it back.’ He took the letter to

the candle and showed me that there were two sheets of paper instead of

one inside it. ‘Who sealed up the letter?’ ‘I did.’ ‘Was there nothing

but the letter in it?’ ‘Nothing.’

Then Engelson took a similar sheet of notepaper, a similar envelope, put

three seals on it and ran to the chemist’s shop; there he weighed both

the letters—the one that had been sent back weighed half as much again as

the other. He came home prancing about and singing and cried out to me,

‘I was right! I was right!’

Haug took out the note, read the letter aloud, then glanced at the note,

which began with abuse and upbraiding, handed it to Tessier and asked

Herwegh:

‘Is that your handwriting?’

‘Yes, yes, I wrote it.’

‘Then you did open the letter?’

‘I am not bound to account to you for my actions.’

Haug tore his note into bits and, flinging them in his face, said: ‘What

a blackguard you are!’

Herwegh, panic-stricken, snatched at the bell-rope and began pulling it

with all his might.

‘What are you about? are you crazy?’ said Haug and seized him by the arm.

Herwegh, pulling himself away from him, dashed to the door, opened it and

shouted, ‘Murder! Murder!’ (‘_Mord! Mord!_’).

At the violent ringing of the bell and this shout, there was a general

rush up the stairs to his room—waiters and visitors from rooms in the

same passage appeared on the scene.

‘Police! police! murder!’ Herwegh was by now shouting in the corridor.

Haug went up to him and, giving him a sound smack on the cheek, said

to him: ‘There, you scoundrel (_Schuft_), that is for sending for the

police.’

Tessier, meanwhile, went back into the room, wrote down their names

and addresses and handed them to Herwegh without a word. A crowd of

spectators had gathered on the stairs. Haug first apologised to the

hotel-keeper, then went away with Tessier.

Herwegh rushed off to the Commissaire of Police, begging for the

protection of the law against the persons who had been sent to murder

him, and kept asking whether he could not take proceedings against them

for the slap in the face.

The Commissaire of Police, in the presence of the hotel-keeper, inquired

into the details of the case and expressed doubts whether persons who

had come in this way in broad daylight to the hotel, without concealing

their names and addresses, were really hired assassins. As regards legal

proceedings, he imagined that it would be very easy to take them and

thought it almost certain that Haug would be condemned to a small fine

and a brief term of imprisonment.

‘But what is inconvenient in your case,’ he added, ‘is that to secure

the conviction of that gentleman you will have publicly to prove that he

really did give you a slap in the face; it seems to me that it would be

more to your advantage to drop it—God knows what revelations it might

lead to.’

The Commissaire’s logic gained the day.

I was staying at the time at Lugano. Thinking things over, I felt very

uneasy: I was certain that Herwegh would not challenge Haug or Tessier,

but I was not at all certain that Haug would quietly leave Zurich and do

nothing further. A challenge on Haug’s part[22] would be quite out of

keeping with the character I wanted to give to the business. Tessier,

on whose good feeling and intelligence I could thoroughly rely, was

altogether too much of a Frenchman.

Haug was capriciously obstinate and childishly irritable. He was

continually having tiffs or being huffy, first with Hoetsky, then with

Engelson, then with Orsini and the Italians, whom he succeeded in setting

against him in the end—and Orsini, shaking his head a little with his

characteristic smile, used to say very funnily: ‘_Oh il general, il

general Aug!_’

Karl Vogt, with his clear, practical view of everything, was the only

person who had any influence over Haug. He treated him aggressively,

pelted him with gibes, shouted at him—and Haug obeyed him.

‘What secret have you discovered,’ I once asked Vogt, ‘for subduing our

Bengal general?’

‘_Vous l’avez dit_,’ answered Vogt. ‘You have put your finger on the

secret. I subdue him just because he is a general and believes he

is. A general knows what discipline means—he cannot oppose a higher

authority—you forget that I am a Vicar of the Empire.’

Vogt was perfectly right. A few days later Engelson, not thinking what he

was saying and that he was speaking in Haug’s presence, said: ‘Only a

German could be such a blackguard.’

Haug was offended. Engelson assured him that he had not meant it, that

the silly phrase was a slip of the tongue. Haug observed that what

mattered was not his saying it in his presence, but his having such an

opinion of Germans. And he walked out of the room.

Early next morning he went to Vogt, found him in bed, woke him and told

him of the insult paid to Germany, begging him to be his second and to

take a challenge to Engelson.

‘Why, do you think that I have gone out of my mind as well as you?’ Vogt

asked him.

‘I am not in the habit of accepting insults.’

‘He did not insult you. One says all sorts of things—besides, he

apologised.’

‘He insulted Germany—and he shall see that he cannot with impunity insult

a great nation in my presence.’

‘But why are you the exclusive representative of Germany?’ Vogt shouted

at him. ‘Am not I a German? Have not I the right to defend her as much as

you—more than you?’

‘No doubt, and if you take it on yourself, I will give way to you.’

‘Good—but entrusting it to me, I hope you will not interfere. You sit

quiet here, and I will go and find out whether Engelson really has that

opinion, or whether it was just a phrase dropped by chance—and meanwhile,

we will tear up your challenge.’

Half an hour later Vogt came in to me—I knew nothing of what had happened

the day before. Vogt walked in, laughing aloud as usual, and asked me:

‘Is Engelson walking about freely here or not? I have shut our general

up at home. Only fancy, he wanted to fight Engelson on account of the

damned Germans, of whom Engelson spoke rudely; I persuaded him that the

privilege is mine. Half the business is settled; now you must smooth

down Engelson if he is not in a state of delirium.’

Engelson had no suspicion that Haug was so angry—at first he wanted

to have a personal explanation with him and was ready to accept the

challenge, then gave way, and we sent for Haug. The Vicar of the Empire

laid aside his medusae and his _salpi_ for that morning, and stayed on

till Haug and Engelson were engaged in a perfectly friendly discussion

over a bottle of wine and cutlets _à la Milanaise_.

In Lucerne, where I went from Lugano, I found a new problem awaiting me.

On the very day of my arrival, Tessier told me that Haug had written an

article in regard to the slap in the face and had described the whole

affair in it; that he wished to publish this note and that Tessier had

only succeeded in preventing him by urging that he could not publish

such a thing without my consent. Haug, who had no doubt whatever of my

consent, was induced to await my coming.

‘Do everything you can to prevent this unlucky article being published,’

Tessier said to me; ‘it will ruin everything—it will make an everlasting

laughing-stock of you and all of us and the memory so precious to us.’

In the evening Haug gave me his manuscript. Tessier was right. I could

never have risen again from such a blow. Everything was stated with an

ardent enthusiastic affection for me and for Natalie, and it was all

funny, _funny to me_—at that time of tears and despair. The whole article

was written in the style of Don Carlos in prose. The man who was capable

of writing such a thing was bound to have a high opinion of his work and,

of course, could not relinquish it without a struggle. My task was not

an easy one. It had all been written for my sake, from affection, in all

good faith, honesty, and sincerity, and, instead of showing gratitude,

I had to poison for him the idea which had taken such deep root in his

mind and had gained such a hold upon him.

I could make no compromise. After hours of reflection, I made up my mind

to write him a long letter; I thanked him for his affection, but besought

him not to publish the article. ‘If it really is necessary to publish

anything about this dreadful business, that melancholy right belongs to

me alone.’

I sealed up this letter and sent it to Haug at seven o’clock in the

morning. Haug answered me: ‘I don’t agree with you; I have set up

a monument to you and to her, I have raised you to an unassailable

pinnacle, and if any one dared to hint a word against you I would make

him hold his tongue. But you have the right to decide in your own affair

and, of course, if you want to write it I give way to you.’

He was morose and abrupt in his manner all day. In the evening the awful

thought occurred to me: ‘If I die he will set up that monument,’ and so,

as I said good-bye, I embraced him, saying: ‘Haug, don’t be angry with

me; really, no one can be a better judge than I in such a thing.’

‘But I am not angry, I am only hurt.’

‘Well, if you are not angry, leave me your manuscript, make me a present

of it.’

‘With the greatest pleasure.’

It is interesting that from that time Haug retained a literary grudge

against me, and later on, in London, on my observing that he wrote in

too elaborate and figurative a style to Garibaldi and Murchison, Haug

answered smiling: ‘I know that you are a polemical writer, you have the

style of cold reason—but feeling and poetry have a different language.’

And once more I thanked my stars that I had not only taken his manuscript

from him, but on my departure for England had burnt it.

The news of the slap in the face had spread far and wide, and suddenly

an article appeared in a Zurich paper signed by Herwegh. He said that

the ‘celebrated’ slap in the face had never been given, but that on the

contrary he had pushed Haug away so that his back had rubbed against the

wall—which apart from everything else was hardly credible to people who

knew the muscular and alert Haug and the frail and awkward leader of the

Baden expedition. He said further that it was all part of an intrigue

with far-reaching ramifications contrived by Baron Herzen on Russian

gold, and that the men who had visited him were in my pay.

Haug and Tessier at once published in the same newspaper a grave,

concise, restrained, and dignified account of the incident.

I added to their explanation that I had never had any one in my pay

except my servants and Herwegh, who had lived for the two previous years

at my expense and was the only person of my acquaintance in Europe who

owed me a considerable sum of money. This weapon, so alien to me, I used

in defence of my slandered friends.

To this Herwegh retorted in the same paper that ‘he had never needed

to borrow money from me, and did not owe me a farthing.’ (His wife had

always borrowed for him.)

At the same time a doctor wrote to me from Zurich that Herwegh had

commissioned him to challenge me.

I answered through Haug that now, as before, I looked upon Herwegh as a

man not entitled to satisfaction. That his punishment had begun, and that

I should continue to go my own way. One cannot help observing that of the

only two persons (apart from Emma) who took Herwegh’s side—this doctor

and Richard Wagner, the musician of the future—neither had any respect

for Herwegh personally. The doctor who sent the challenge added: ‘As for

the rights and wrongs of the case, I know nothing about it and wish to

have nothing to do with it.’ And in Zurich he had said to his friends:

‘I am afraid that he will not go through with it, but wants to get up a

scene of some sort, only I will not let him trifle with me and make a

fool of me. I have told him I shall take a second loaded pistol in my

pocket. That is for him!’

As for Richard Wagner, he complained to me by letter that Haug had been

too rough and ready, and said that he could not pass a severe judgment

on a man ‘whom he loves and pities, that he needs considerate treatment,

and that he may still be redeemed from his trivial effeminate life, his

eccentric dissoluteness, may rally his forces and show himself in a

different aspect.’

Loathsome as it was to make a scandal about money, together with all the

other horrors, yet I saw that by that I should deal him a blow which all

the bourgeois world, that is, the whole public opinion of Switzerland and

Germany, would understand and take to heart.

The I.O.U. for ten thousand francs, which Madame Herwegh had given me and

had afterwards tried to redeem for a few words of belated penitence, was

in my hands. I gave it to a notary.

With the newspaper in one hand, and the I.O.U. in the other, the notary

went to Herwegh demanding an explanation.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘that is not my signature.’

Then the notary showed him his wife’s letter, in which she wrote that she

was borrowing the money for him and with his knowledge.

‘I know nothing about it and never authorised her to do so; but you must

address yourself to my wife in Nice. I have nothing to do with it.’

‘So you really do not remember authorising your wife...?’

‘I don’t remember it.’

‘That is a great pity; it puts quite a different complexion on this

simple money claim, and your creditor may prosecute your wife for

obtaining money under false pretences....’

On this occasion the poet showed no alarm, but valiantly replied that

that was not his business. The notary laid his answer before Emma. I did

not pursue the matter. They never paid the money, of course.

‘Now,’ said Haug, ‘now to London.... We could not leave that blackguard

like that.’ A few days later we were looking out at the London fog from

the fourth storey of Morley’s Hotel.

With my move to London in the autumn of 1852 the most painful part of my

life ends—and with it I break off my story.

(_Finished in 1858._)

* * * * *

To-day is the 2nd of May 1863 ... the eleventh anniversary. Where are

those who stood at the graveside? Not one of them is here ... some are

gone for ever, others are very far away—and not only geographically.

Orsini’s head has rolled bleeding from the scaffold.

The body of Engelson—who died an enemy—lies at rest in a Channel island.

Tessier du Mothe, the chemist-naturalist, has remained the same gentle

and good-natured fellow, but is calling up spirits and turning tables.

Charles Edmond, the friend of Prince Napoleon, is librarian in the Palais

du Luxembourg.

Karl Vogt has remained more unchanged, more true to himself than any.

Haug I saw a year ago. He quarrelled with me over some trifle in 1854,

left London without saying good-bye and broke off all relations. I learnt

by chance that he was in London. I sent word to him ‘that the tenth

anniversary of her burial had come, that it was shameful to keep up

ill-feeling on no serious grounds, that we were bound together by sacred

memories, and that if he had forgotten I still remembered with what

readiness he had held out the hand of friendship to me.’

Knowing his character, I took the first step and went to him. He was

touched and glad to see me, but for all that the meeting was more

melancholy than any parting.

At first we talked of persons and of incidents and recalled details

of the past. Then a pause followed. It was obvious to us that we had

nothing to say to each other, that we had become complete strangers. I

made an effort to keep up the conversation. Haug did his utmost; various

incidents of his trip in Asia Minor served our turn. They, too, were

exhausted at last, and it was difficult again.

‘Oh dear,’ I said suddenly, taking out my watch, ‘it’s five o’clock and I

have an engagement. I must leave you.’ It was a fib. I had no engagement

at all. Haug, too, seemed to feel as though a weight had rolled off his

back.

‘Is it really five o’clock? I am going to dine to-day at Clapham.’

‘It will take you an hour to get there, I will not keep you. Good-bye.’

And going out into the street, I was on the point of bursting into

“laughter”?—no, tears.

Two days later he came to lunch with me. It was the same thing again. He

was meaning to leave London the next day—so he said; he remained a good

deal longer, but we had had enough and we did not try to see each other

again.

ADDENDA TO SECTION THREE

_Extracts from a Diary_

_Feb. 2, 1863._—The moments are rare when it occurs to me to put down

anything in this book—some fresh pain, trouble, anxiety. This book might

be called—if it were not _zu Deutsch_—a book of lamentations.

The Polish rebellion, the fate of the Russian officers, illness,

dissensions, misunderstandings all about one—separation, and the old

phrase comes back into my mind again, ‘What an endless capacity for

suffering is given man and what a tiny capacity for enjoyment!’

Moreover, happiness, harmony—all that flies away, scarcely leaves a

trace, merely touches the present moment—while grief, sickness, the

expectation of trouble, all that drags on and on, cuts more deeply, like

a plough, and leaves deep furrows.

* * * * *

_Sept. 24, 1863, Genoa, Hotel Feder. Cari luoghi io vi ritrovi._—I have

come to Italy by the same route by which I came in 1847. Then I went down

from Esterel to Cannes and to Nice on a most exquisite autumn day. I

went there again in 1851, on the way to Hyères, twenty-four hours after

the awful news of the loss of my mother, my son, and Spielmann. And that

is already twelve years ago. I longed to look once more at these parts,

yet was afraid to be again in the same surroundings. Nature, that ages

slowly, remains the same, but man changes. The first time that I came

here, I was looking for a full life with a rich setting.

The Alps were before us, there were no clouds above us and, light-hearted

and full of courage, I pushed on ahead.

The second time I came stunned with grief. Before me was the wrecked

ship, behind me my wrecked life. Now I am going to my children, expecting

nothing for myself personally, except leisure for thought, free from

anxiety, with harmony and peace about me, the _noli me tangere_ of

weariness and age.

Between Toulon and Nice we left the railway and drove to Hyères.

Everything has been wiped away in twelve years. I could not even find the

hotel at which I stayed then. The Napoleonic mania for reconstruction has

passed over this too.... Then there was no body, no rag, now no house, no

place....

Loss more complete there could not be. _Fu ... e non è!_

We made a triumphal entry into Nice. The railway was not yet finished;

we sat on the roof of the diligence, the evening darkened, and the moon

rose, it had been a day like summer! Towards morning the mistral blew

with passing spurts of rain, and we heard the dreary murmur of the sea.

That sound always upsets me, and it was never more hateful than at that

moment when, after twelve years, I came back for the first time to visit

her grave.

But what a lovely place! Her body is not lowered into the darkness

underground, but lifted up into the mountain ... in the distance stretch

the Alps, below there is the sea.... One broken string has ruined all the

melody ... but such a string—with it the knot that held all together is

severed and the web is unravelled.

I was vexed with myself in the graveyard, the earth was cold, the stones

were cold ... only then I saw the painful effect of the absence of a

tombstone. Without a form, a sign, a written word, a material symbol, in

fact, one loses hold.

The cornice of Italy! Again I passed along it. It saw me last when, with

hopes renewed, we were going home from Turin in 1851. And those beautiful

_cari luoghi_ called back the past more vividly than the graveyard, her

bright image floated against the background of the dark blue sea and

the mountains—and with it I fell asleep, and for a brief space all the

dreadful happenings of the past were blotted out.

In Nice I visited both our houses. There was no one living in either of

them, and I could wander through the rooms. Inside almost everything

remained as of old ... the shutters were closed, there was thick grey

dust and the air was close. It seemed as though we had left it a few days

before. I looked at these dumb witnesses of dreadful things and thought:

Why had I summoned them as witnesses of the past? And I longed to escape

from them, to get away, though I feared no testimony, no accusation—I

feared my memories.

In the room where she died I opened the shutters. The familiar view of

the sea, the shore, and the church ... she sketched it several times....

The bedstead was standing in the same place—the mattresses had been taken

off it and piled up beside it on the floor—the funeral might have been

yesterday. The cook who lived with us came, and the gardener of Sue’s

house, and I met the maid who was with us then. I saw simple-hearted

genuine delight on their faces. The two misfortunes that had befallen

us while they were with me had made a close bond between us. In their

affection for me there was an element of sympathy, of pity. The faces

were the same, only a little older.

Yes, it all happened here!

* * * * *

_Steamer Aunis, Sept. 27, 1863, Civita Vecchia._—We stopped before the

wall of a fortress.... Everything is sullen and ugly except the sky....

French soldiers saunter up and down—a lad absolutely naked swims up

to the steamer and sitting in a little boat reminds me of the boy in

Flandrin’s[23] picture. I cannot land on the Papal shore—I remain on

deck. Towards night we sail into Naples; I go to my children, as to the

great winter holiday. It will not be long before my 31st of December. May

she who is absent be there in them, and may the flowers of their young

life surround me once more. And again to work, again to the road which

every day grows stonier, but which we tread together[24] as we did when

we set off in 1833—thirty years ago! Amen.

* * * * *

_Zurich, Nov. 27, 1868._—Two years ... another two years ... and the same

chaos ... Zurich ... here began the tragedy that ended in the funeral of

the 2nd of May. Here were written the first letters full of doubt, of

terror, of concealed hope. Here he lived for years.

I looked at this town, as Ulysses looked at the rocks on which he left

his blood and fragments of torn flesh. And strange to say, I like meeting

these blood-stained rocks. I recall that time of unbroken pain—the

few minutes of intense passion and the serene figure of a child—his

untroubled eyes in the midst of grief and confusion, and I look with love

at the garden, at the avenue along which I used to walk with him.

Why did no one guess how much love was left in me, how much, how much,

was lavished upon me? Even _she_ forgot it for the time, and only fully

understood it afterwards. And Natalie, what an infinite pity that she

never understood that side!

Only the strong acknowledges his fault, only the strong is humble, only

the strong forgives—and indeed only the strong laughs, though often his

laughter is equal to tears.

SELECTIONS FROM CORRESPONDENCE RELATING TO SECTION THREE

_A Letter to Richard Wagner_[25]

DEAR SIR,—Allow me to thank you for your letter of June 30.

It is another proof of the universal condemnation of the

person in question, which will overwhelm him in the end.

I appreciate with all my heart your magnanimous desire to

champion the man. And I can give you no better proof of my

deep respect for you than by expressing my own opinion with

perfect frankness. I do not in the least share your hopes:

there is a degree of degradation from which a man can never

rise, for he must have destroyed everything human in himself

before he could sink to such depths. Believe me, I thoroughly

understand that passion is a law to itself, and that no one can

be held responsible for the fatal consequences of the tragic

conflicts it involves. Unfortunately, the misdeeds of this man

are of quite a different character—mean, utterly plebeian,

vulgar, cynical, and cowardly. To inspire respect passion must

be coupled with power, with irresistible force—then and only

then it escapes censure. It must be what it really is, _i.e._

tempestuous, overwhelming. It burns and sweeps all before it,

it kills but does not poison drop by drop—does not scheme

for a year to deceive a friend and for another year to take

vengeance on the woman by slander. Passion will face death,

but will not face being ignominiously kicked out of the house.

I have come to know you through your fine work on the _chef

d’œuvre_ of the future. You have well grasped the bond uniting

all the arts, which ought to be combined in a harmonious

concrete whole. I appeal to your aesthetic sense. How can you

justify an existence devoid of every religious feeling, how

can you dream of a future of serenity and self-restraint for

a creature destitute of all manliness, of all chivalrous and

generous feeling, a man without a trace of a conscience? A

man, no—a hetaira of the male sex, who has sold his youth for

francs to an unsexed woman, a worthy accomplice of all his

infamies—a creature who for the sake of comfort has betrayed

his convictions, whose part in the German revolution was a

flight from the field of battle, without accounting for the

money entrusted to him—such a creature has no future. Every

day he was warmly pressing his friend’s hand, calling him in

his letters his one support, his one defence, longing for

the moment to pour out his soul to him, for ever talking

enthusiastically of friendship, and at the same time betraying

his friend! That creature has not passed through a tragedy—he

has simply behaved like a blackguard.

A man who brought his wife into his friend’s house in order

to sully it—with the sole object of keeping his family at the

friend’s expense, at his expense paying his debts—is not a

Werther but a Robert Macaire.[26]

In any case, the second part of the story surpasses the first.

I am not speaking of the slanders he has circulated—secretly,

but in such a way that they are known in Russia—nor of the

coarse brutality of leaving his ex-wife in Nice to spy upon

me, to insult me, to drive me out of the town. A year after he

has allowed himself to be turned out of the house, he sends me

a mean challenge. Knowing little of the etiquette of affairs

of honour, he sends me a challenge by post, without mentioning

even his seconds. Then he returns my wife’s letter as though

unopened, _after tampering with the seal_. The disgusting

challenge, in which, among other things, he gibes at the

unhappy death of my son, does not explain in what way I have

wronged him. There was no possibility of understanding for what

insult he desired satisfaction. It was not a _cartel_, but an

equivalent of a slap in the face. Unhappily, I was then by the

bedside of a dying woman, a woman of the loftiest soul, saintly

in her regrets, who had come to understand the sort of man she

had to deal with—such was the woman whose end was hastened by

the filthy attacks of this depraved man.

A duel between him and me? Never! What would it prove? We

are not equals. I am his judge. I might be his executioner,

but not his opponent. A duel is no expiation, no punishment;

a duel is rehabilitation of honour, but I want to establish

his dishonour. As a socialist and a revolutionary, I have

appealed to the only authority I recognise. I had the spirit,

the courage to submit the affair to the judgment of my friends

the democrats. I showed the letters, I told the facts. My

appeal roused a general outburst of condemnation. Herwegh’s

moral death has been decreed. Despised by all decent men,

excommunicated from the body of democrats, he will be forced

to hide his ignominious existence in some remote corner of the

world. For he will find no peace in France, Italy, Switzerland.

I swear, and my friends swear it also—every day brings us fresh

proofs—that all representatives of the militant revolution

stand by us.—Receive, etc.

A. HERZEN.

_Letter from Haug to Herzen_[27]

MY UNHAPPY ALEXANDR!—Do nothing to avenge your outraged honour

till you have seen me. I shall be in Nice in a few days. I have

only just seen your letter to Mazzini of February the 6th. What

fatal consequences have followed the fact that my last letter,

written in December, did not reach you!

My heart is as desolate as a graveyard. Nothing but crosses and

tombstones. The best of humanity are turning to dust before

my eyes, happiness has vanished for ever, I see with a curse

the holiest hopes of human love at its highest defiled by the

grotesque images of abject scoundrels.

My poor, unhappy Iskander, I suffer as you do, more bitterly

than you do, for I have the highest esteem for Madame Herzen.

You don’t know that one evening Mazzini sent me the brief

sentence: ‘_on vous aura écrit que Herzen a perdu sa femme_.’

This was at the very moment when France was dying. One thing on

the top of another. An angel at the deathbed of a nation. Only

later I heard that the calamity had overtaken your mother. Poor

woman!

For a year you kept silent. By your silence and by the laconic

way in which you returned my letter to Madame Herzen, you

gave rise to a prolonged hideous uncertainty. It has been a

burning poison. You don’t know to what a point my soul, perhaps

from excess of enthusiasm, has grown into your life. When,

late one night, near La Madeleine, you told me that Natalie

was your bliss, your heaven, I came to love that heaven,

with which, perhaps, I was in love before. Natalie was for

me the incarnation of the spirit of the East, you were its

representative. You yourself said to me once, Alexandr, ‘Haug,

you are a pure-hearted man.’ Yes, I am. And I am faithful to my

feeling. You are my religion. I have never consciously profaned

it.

Your distress comes as an agony into my life. I will heal it.

The dream of our age, the solidarity of nations, would become

... [_word illegible_] if those who dream of it would carry

it out in action instead of talking of it. You are right in

refusing to fight. Already one of the greatest sons of the

East has been struck by a scoundrel’s bullet. And where was the

expiation, where was the justice of destiny? Solidarity ought

to have another side. Darkness is dispelled, but the light is

too glaring. There must be the true light which will make the

blind see. The truth of a better future ... [_word illegible_].

My greetings to the angel of your life, Natalie. She is a saint

of humanity. She must be a saint, for every one loves her. And

Mazzini says, ‘_la femme c’est l’ange perdu_.’ Good-bye.

_Herzen’s answer to Haug_

DEAR HAUG,—Your letter of March the 10th gave me great

pleasure. I have been so unhappy of late, I feel so shattered,

so insulted in all that was holiest and most precious to me,

and there are moments when my strength fails me, I am overcome

by utter despair, I feel impotent, humiliated.... Your letter

found me at such a moment, it revived me again—I thank you.

Yes, I accept your brotherly sympathy, I press your

outstretched hand, not that you should fight my battles, but

only support me in this painful struggle that I may end it as I

should wish.

But before bringing you into the thick of this sad and

distressing business, I must make you acquainted with a few

facts. I will tell you them. It is very painful to me, but

it is unavoidable. When I have told my story, judge and act

according to the dictates of your heart.

You reminded me in your letter of a conversation we had walking

by the Madeleine at night. Ah, how grateful I am to you for

that! That conversation does not only lighten my burden, but

serves me as a kind of proof and testimony, in any case, as

regards you. Yes, I opened my heart and soul to you that night.

That rarely happens with me, I never talk of my feelings, I am,

as it were, ashamed—my feelings are for myself alone. And so I

told you then that only one woman has played a part in my life,

and that that part was an immense one, that I have loved only

one woman, and that love was living unchanged in my heart. A

deep affection bound us together as children and survived all

the ups and downs of a stormy life; I will add now that that

love gives me the strength to bear the tortures of my present

position. Yes, our love has worked a miracle—a far greater one

than that of lasting fourteen years—it has survived the shock

that might have destroyed it. We have never been so united

as since this misfortune has befallen us. It has welded us

more closely together. The humiliations I am suffering on her

account, the fact that I have taken half the blame upon myself,

have been fresh foundations for our love.

We are no longer the same people, and that is why nothing has

changed between us.

Hand in hand, we proudly entered upon life; we thought that we

should pass with head erect before admiring multitudes. What

was there to fear after twelve years of union, of love?... A

filthy encounter, a pestilential breath which we could not

withstand has humbled us. Now we are moving away from life in a

lowlier spirit, crushed by an awful memory, we are approaching

the grave, weary and downcast, but hand in hand as before.

Neither of us is innocent, nor guilty; one who has the strength

to forgive shares the responsibility for the past. If any man

despises us, let him hold aloof, let him forget us. Our union,

so humanly holy, has been desecrated by that creature. But

you, you who love us so much, must pause, you must ponder more

deeply what I am saying to you and discern the true image of

our indissoluble union under the dirt and disgrace with which

it has been covered.

I pass to the facts. When we met that creature for the second

time he was very unhappy. Reviled by friends of his own

party—he was accused of cowardice in connection with the Baden

expedition, and even of dishonesty—he was no better off in

his private life: tied for the sake of money to a woman whom

he did not love, but who made him feel his indebtedness to

her, depraved and spoiled by a passionate thirst for trivial

enjoyments, he was not capable of undertaking anything new. He

was alone, there were people who thought highly of his talents,

but there was not one who respected him personally. I held out

a hand to him. At the bottom of that embittered soul I descried

earnest thought, poetical talent which dazzled me. He became

passionately attached to me, he never left my side. No other

man has said so much of his affection for me, he was jealous

over me, tried to keep my friends from me, called me his

brother, his twin soul, his one friend and support; he wrote

to me that if I were to take it into my head to cast him off,

he would cling to me because he could not exist without me. He

reproached me for coldness and shed tears, recalling our first

meeting.

I will show you his letters, which I have fortunately kept.

This passionate, ardent affection for me and boundless love

for my children was what first drew him and Natalie together.

She abandoned herself to her liking for him without a second

thought, and he had plenty of time to draw his nets closer and

closer round a woman who fell into the snare more naïvely than

one who would have struggled against it. There was nothing to

restrain that utterly depraved creature; he found nothing in

his heart to make him feel all the baseness and vileness of

such an outrage. Neither regard for the children, nor respect

for the house that had given him a shelter, nor respect for

himself—why, you know he still persisted in his declarations of

love to me.

Do you know what it means to have doubts and not to dare to

put them into words, to suspect and not to have the courage to

confess it? I am not going to give you the inner history of

that awful time, we will talk of that in the future. To-day I

will only say that that struggle has aged me, I wasted in it

what was left of life and energy. No, I said to myself, this is

impossible: how could they conceal the truth from me, from me,

their true and faithful friend, how could they put me in the

degrading position of a spectator, how could I have deserved

such contempt? On the other side I saw that every explanation

was avoided. In Paris, in December, I began to express my

suspicions more boldly. I was alone in Paris. Natalie was left

in Zurich, where the creature was staying at my mother’s. In

her letters Natalie protested, spoke of the indissoluble ties

that held us together, and finally came herself to Paris.

While I was in Paris I had the opportunity of studying that

creature’s character more closely. There had always been

something in him that revolted me, the selfish injustice, the

harsh coarseness of his behaviour to others, especially to his

wife, whom he exploited, demanding money. My letters to him

from Paris were full of amazement at his behaviour; with my

habitual frankness I blamed him without reserve. His letters

became more and more tender, he talked of nothing but our

leading a pure and serious life together, which should serve as

an example and foundation for the future, far from the crowd

and full of harmony. I answered him: ‘You will bring with you

into that life the corroding egoistic element that will poison

it,’ and quoted the lines of Pushkin:

‘Leave us, proud man!

...

Freedom you want, but only for yourself;

Your very voice strikes terror to our hearts.

Fearful and kindly are we gypsy folk,

You are bold and evil—go away from us!’

When I was turned out of Paris in July 1850, I went to Nice.

This was a great blunder, I ought to have gone to London. All

this time the creature was living at my mother’s in Zurich. At

the end of August she brought him to Nice. Two days before his

arrival, Madame Herwegh, foreseeing misunderstandings, borrowed

ten thousand francs from me for two years. They were without

means. I offered them a storey in the house which I had taken,

accepting, from motives of delicacy, a nominal rent, ostensibly

to cover the cost of it. And so the whole family, women and

children, established themselves at my expense. He knew all

this, allowing his wife to act as she thought best, and now she

has the effrontery to reproach me with having reminded her of

this when she was leaving.

At Nice I grasped the full extent of the catastrophe. Natalie

was struggling between two feelings. She was trying to forget

herself, she was afraid to face the truth. I was shattered,

wounded, profoundly unhappy. And looking at this abject,

pitiful creature, who avoided any explanation, who oppressed

his wife, who was beginning to envy me my fortune, I often

repeated the words which Hamlet said to his mother.

But an inner voice told me that this was not so. I saw it with

my own eyes but I did not believe it. That saved me, saved

Natalie, saved the children. It was time to put an end to it

all, in any case to the falsity of the position. The idea of

playing the part of judge and injured husband never entered my

head.

Never in my life have I stooped to a degrading inconsistency

between my principles and my actions. I demanded the truth;

that I was entitled to.

After two or three feverish conversations Natalie told me all.

(You will see later on the abominable use to which the creature

put this word ‘all.’)

No one without my iron health could have lived through the

agonies I endured listening to her, and the four or five

sleepless nights that followed our first conversation.

On one of those nights we were sitting together on the sofa;

there was death in my heart; thoughts of suicide for the first

time floated before my mind; I wanted to drink the cup to the

bitter dregs. I put one or two questions to her. She answered.

A silence followed. I was annihilated, I was overwhelmed by a

rush of rage, shame and anguish, and, I confess it to you, I

had an impulse to kill Natalie. With a feeling of gladness I

dwelt on the thought....

The silence continued. At last I raised my eyes and looked

at her. Her face was awful, terribly pale, bluish; her lips

were blanched, her features were working; she said nothing

but looked fixedly at me with dim, questioning eyes. Her

appearance affected me so much, that forgetting everything I

took her hand, and letting my head fall on her shoulder, began

comforting her in a voice full of tenderness which came from

my heart. This was the real crisis for Natalie. She flung

herself sobbing on my neck; I laid her on the sofa; she was

almost unconscious, and only had the strength to say: ‘Don’t

be afraid, these are good tears, it’s my admiration for you,

it’s my tenderness. No, no,’ she kept saying, ‘I will never

leave you, if only you can put up with me and forget what has

happened.’ Her soul, spellbound by a morbid passion, awakened

and revived with the energy and force of former days. She

came back ‘like a ship returning to its haven after a storm,

half-wrecked but triumphant at its escape’ (her own words in a

letter to me).

In her infatuation she had not seen whither she was drifting.

She was going to meet death, while he was still seeking ‘a

brilliant future’ in the words of Madame Herwegh, who, I swear

on my honour, was already drawing up a plan for the division of

my property.

After that scene I knew that Natalie would remain, but that

she was still under the influence of the creature’s threats,

under the influence of the past. I had to take action. I

suggested that I should leave Nice the following day and let

them settle things as they thought best. Natalie would not hear

of my going. Then I insisted that the creature should leave

the house. As Natalie was terribly afraid of a duel or some

bloody encounter, she asked me in token of my reconciliation

and forgiveness to promise her that I would not do anything

to provoke it. I promised, but on condition that he left the

house. This is what the creature calls ‘using pressure’ and

‘taking a base advantage of my position.’ Of course I used

influence, but only by devotion, by love.

Prevention and persuasion are very different things. At this

moment, for instance, I am influencing you. I must tell you too

that all this time the creature remained in hiding in his room

on the first storey and did not come down to the dining-room or

the drawing-room. But he sent me his wife, who came with the

most monstrous proposition, made in a naïvely disgusting form,

to which no woman but a Berlin German would demean herself. She

proposed that I should let Natalie go with the creature while

she would remain with me. I repeated for the last time that I

was ready to go if Natalie wished it; she ran off to Natalie

at once. She knows her answer and can tell it you, I know the

result. At first the creature refused to go, then went through

a farce of suicide, then told me through his wife, that he was

ready for a duel to the death, but nothing would induce him to

fire at ‘the friend’ whom he was conscious of having wronged.

But soon his timid, lymphatic temperament got the upper hand

and, in a very bourgeois style, with his luggage, governess and

children, he went on to Mentone and then to Geneva.

There was something so humiliating and ludicrous in this

male Hagar with his Berlin Ishmael, cast out from the house

which had sheltered them, that I took no further action. I

was absorbed by a very different question. I wanted to reach

a clear understanding of the true state of Natalie’s heart.

The step she had just brought herself to was the inevitable

compensation for the insult I had suffered. Passion might

gain the ascendant. What motives were guiding her now? Was it

renunciation, self-sacrifice, devotion without love? And if so,

would she have the strength to hold out and, finally, had I the

right to accept such a sacrifice? After the first weeks during

which our conversations were often passionate and gloomy, I

grasped that it was a perfectly natural return to the love

which had been her guiding thread throughout her life, she was

coming back to her normal condition, her momentary passion had

been a casual incident; as soon as she had thrown off the yoke

of a capricious, exacting creature who worked upon her only by

threats, she felt more free, more youthful in soul.

The creature’s mean behaviour destroyed the last vestiges

of her unhappy attachment. In his first letter to Natalie

he begged her not to justify herself by throwing the blame

on him, to take it all on herself. Then followed threats of

scandal, murder and amazing suggestions such as that she should

rehabilitate him in my opinion and take him as a tutor to my

children. Natalie felt that she must not drive him to despair

and asked my sanction to write to him at times. I told her

that I looked at it very differently, but she might act as she

thought best. The correspondence, which all passed through my

hands, led to all the horrors that followed. Natalie gave him

a promise to meet him a year later on condition that he should

not misuse the privilege of writing to her—that only increased

his epistolary incontinence. Natalie took back her promise and

at last, in August or November, broke off all correspondence

with him. She despised him, was ashamed of him.

Only one thing was wanted to complete the meanness of his

behaviour—that was to make it public; and he spread abroad

the whole story. He did his share and his wife did hers. But

they did not merely publish it abroad, they added slander. No

one ventured to mention the man’s name in my hearing; I held

my peace, respecting the obligation of silence which has no

sacredness for the plebeian soul.

All of a sudden, in July, I learned in Geneva from Sazonov that

the creature had told him the whole story. This unexpected

intelligence distressed me and I returned to Turin, depressed

and gloomy. Natalie, seeing from my letters how unhappy I

was, came from Nice to meet me and reached Turin the same

day as I did. This sign of affection touched me. There, for

the last time, we talked it all over. We came to understand

each other better than ever. Yes, we were the same, with one

terrible memory, one deep scar added. Those days in Turin

brought back to me our glorious youth; they reminded me of our

life together at Vladimir. Yes, it was a second wedding, a

wedding of more significance, perhaps, than the first. It was

accompanied by deep consciousness, full understanding of all

the responsibility we were taking up anew, and for this we were

indebted to the past which had almost ruined us and covered

us with disgrace. I leave it to Natalie to give you the inner

account of our reconciliation and the full harmony of our home

life, which lasted until the terrible blow that fell upon us.

On November 16th my mother, my second son and his tutor—one of

my friends—perished in the Mediterranean. This blow shattered

Natalie’s health. Exhaustion and weakness passed into acute

illness. She was attacked by pleurisy: on the 2nd or 3rd of

January, she was so much worse that the doctors doubted whether

she would recover. And the wretch seized this moment to send me

a mean challenge. Through his wife, whom he made live in Nice,

he knew everything that was happening to us. I should not have

opened his letter, except that he wrote on the envelope ‘an

honourable challenge.’

Inside, instead of a challenge, I found a dirty letter,

revolting in its cynicism, full of charges against Natalie and

the basest disclosures. He covered the vileness of this by

saying, ‘You have been told all,’ as though I would ever have

cared to demean myself or Natalie by the repetition of all the

revolting details. I spoke of this letter to my friend Engelson

(he was the first person after Sazonov to whom I spoke of this

business). What was my amazement when I saw that he too was

fully informed of all that had taken place. Monsieur and Madame

H. had initiated all their acquaintances into the sad details

of our breach with them, forgetting that he had played the

part of a traitor and she of a go-between. I was amazed and

scandalised. What duel could suppress these slanders! Natalie

and I, by keeping it all absolutely secret, had given them full

opportunity for circulating their vile calumnies. Next day

it was public property that I had received a challenge. The

creature had told his wife, and a few days later Madame Reihel

informed my wife from Paris that she had just heard it from

Madame Kolatchek.

After the intervention of the Baden heroine it would have been

too absurd to play a melodramatic part in this mournful drama.

A duel would be unthinkable, it would have set nothing right,

it would have been a trap, he was the only man who could have

been rehabilitated by a duel. As for me, I did not think about

my honour, I wanted to chastise the wretch, to revenge myself

on him; the defence of my honour was of very little interest

to me. I may say frankly that my past, beginning with five

years of exile on the borders of Siberia and ending with our

banishment from Paris, gave me, if not certain rights, at any

rate a confidence in myself. If my honour could depend upon a

traitor whose past was as well known as my own, I should prefer

to lose it.

To refuse a duel is not an easy thing to do. Remember, I am

writing to you two months after the challenge. I passed through

a regular mental illness before I succeeded in recovering my

sense of honour by a firm, resolute decision to rise superior

to this man, who is devoid of every feeling of dignity and

generosity, to rise superior to time-honoured conventions, and

obstinately to refuse this miscreant the honour of fighting. I

was conscious that I was taking my stand against a monstrous

and merciless force. This unjust, haughty, inhuman force is

all-powerful where honour is concerned, it dominates even

the most independent natures, they submit to its decrees and

abandon their own convictions simply to show that they have the

courage to face a pistol. I take my stand against despotism,

because I feel myself pure, guiltless, because I feel myself

strong enough to appeal to my friends and to lay it all before

them. My refusal had another, more serious significance: I

wanted my action to be a definite and solemn recognition

of the freedom of woman. I wanted to leave it to woman to

defend her own honour in complete independence. Only the

weak-minded, the immature and the feeble need to be defended,

and in this case the woman is strong, and if she acts alone

she is stronger still. This man, revenging himself upon her

for not persisting in wrongdoing, for not becoming his slave,

thought to crush her with his cynicism. He will be himself

crushed by the grandeur of her repentance.... Not a month ago

that woman spoke, and public opinion, amazed, went over to

her side. Before that, I alone was pitied and the slanderous

charges, rapidly circulated during the previous twelve months

by the efforts of Madame H., were continually repeated, but now

Natalie stands confronting them all, lovely in her energy and

determination.

That was the beginning of my triumph.

I am finishing, dear Haug. The details, the letters of my

friends, the creature’s insolent and stupid behaviour, his

refusal, for instance, to receive my answer through my

second, his asking for a secret duel, his return of a certain

letter—all that you will learn from my friends, who have

surrounded me with so much warmth and devotion and given me the

strength to bear my humiliating position.

What they will tell you will not differ in any material point

from my story; all you will learn from them is the depths of

degradation to which a plebeian, mean, coarse and abject soul

can sink. For what does all this parade of eloquence amount

to, what is the object of all these letters, all these words?

Why did not he simply come, pistol in hand, why did he run

away from the house, why did he not try (he wrote twenty times

about it) to kill Natalie or me, why in the last resort did he

not kill himself? He had neither the energy nor the daring for

that. It is easier to spread calumnies, to bully his wife—and

that is what he does. One must put an end to it and punish

the wretch. For that, I need the help and the advice of my

friends, and above all the conviction that should I, by the

irony of fate, perish in the conflict, my friends will set an

awe-inspiring example of justice and solidarity,—Your devoted

A. HERZEN.

_Letter of Herzen to his Wife_

GENEVA, A CAFÉ, _June 28, 1851_.

Judge for yourself what I am feeling, and the state I am in.

He has told Sazonov all about it.... Details that took my

breath away. He told him that ‘he was sorry for me, but that

what was done could not be undone, that you had begged him to

keep silent, that in a few months’ time, _when I was calmer_,

you would leave me....’

Dear! I will not add a word. Sazonov said he had heard you were

ill and asked what it was. I was numb with horror while he

talked. I insist upon an answer from you to this last point.

It is all beyond the wildest dreams. Sazonov knows absolutely

all about it.... I insist on having the truth.... Answer me at

once; I shall weigh every word. My heart is breaking.... And

you call this consistent development.

To-morrow I am going to Freiburg. I have never sunk so low

as this before. Address your answer to this to Turin, _poste

restante_.

Can it be really you that they are talking about? My God,

my God, what I have suffered for my love.... What more is

there?... Answer, answer to Turin!

_Letters of Natalie Herzen to her Husband_

_July 3, 1851._—My dear, my dear, if only I had wings, how I

would fly to you! It is more than I can bear.... I can’t tell

you how I have felt since your last letter, and I don’t know

how to say anything. All I know, dear, is that I love you with

all the power of loving there is in me, that nothing but death

can tear me from you. These latter days have shown it to me

more clearly than ever. And—I, too, will be open—I will say

more. My love for you makes me afraid: it is too beautiful, it

is timid, dear, it has too vivid a memory of the anguish of not

being understood, not valued, not wanted, not loved in the same

way.... Well, so be it! My fate is settled once for all; to

live and to die for you.... The children ... they too are you.

You can make of it what you like.

I embrace you, Alexandr! Be well and calm.

_July 4._—Alexandr, my Alexandr, let us suffer together!

Darling, how hard it is! How sorry I am for you, for you, dear!

and what can I do? If only I could hold you in my arms ... and

to die with you if you don’t care to live or don’t believe me,

if I can do nothing for you.... I think now that education is

all nonsense: the children have good natures and that will

save them.... Life is hard, dear, insufferable, when I know

that you are so unhappy. Yesterday I could not bear to have

people about me, so I drove in the evening to the Engelsons

and spent a long time on the way.... It was awful coming back

to the house without you. No, I can’t stay like this, I shall

come to you in Turin on the 7th or before, so as to be there on

the 8th: inquire for me at the Hotel Feder. My chest and all

my bones feel as though they were broken, but my brain won’t

stop working.... It is awful to think that there are two more

days before the 7th and two days on the journey.... If I am not

in Turin on the 8th, it will be because something has kept me

here—don’t wait for me, but come here; I am writing that I may

be there, perhaps, for fear we may miss each other.

I have just spoken to Rocca. I sent him to book a seat in the

post-chaise that goes on Sunday afternoon at half-past four;

so that by Tuesday morning we may meet in the hotel....

My heart throbs and throbs and stands still, I can hardly

breathe.... Oh, if I could comfort you, dear, set your heart at

rest!...

I embrace you, I embrace you.

_July 7._—Yesterday I received the letter in which you write

that you will not reach Turin before the 10th; I have put off

going till to-morrow; two extra days without the children and

without you would be awful.

I don’t know what to say to your reproaches, dear, after all

that I have said already. It seems to me after them that it

is of no use for me to go ... on your account.... Tata is

inconsolable since she has heard that I am going. ‘Father

is big and can come alone, or take me, take me with you.’ I

say, ‘The mountains are high and dangerous for children to go

over them’—‘I would rather die with you than be left without

you’—and all that was said so quietly, in secret from the rest.

What sufferings life has in store for such a nature!... It’s

silly but it breaks my heart to listen to her, yet I can’t help

it, this time I must be selfish; not on your account, I shall

come for my own sake; I must see you and hear you, my dear, my

heart is so heavy. Tata may have much happiness before her in

her life, but for me the sun is going down and time is ebbing.

And so till we meet, Alexandr.... Why am I going? Your last

letter was so cold....

_Letter of Herzen to his Son_

_June 28 (1851)._

Greetings, Sasha! Do you often think of me, my little dear? Do

think of me: it will make me gladder and happier. I may come

sooner than I expected—perhaps about the tenth. I would give

a great deal to be with you all now, to look at you and Tata

asleep.

Good-bye, dear.

I shall be in Freiburg on the 30th of June, and shall stay

there five days; if I leave by the 6th I shall be in Turin by

the 8th.

Tell me how you met the Colonel.[28]

_Letter from Herzen to M. K. Reihel_

GENEVA, _June 29 (1851), morning_.

This evening I am going to Freiburg, and so I shall be there

to-morrow; I shall stay there not more than four or five days;

so that when you get this letter, you can send on other letters

_poste restante_, Turin.

When I stepped on Swiss soil I felt that I was really free;

unless the whole country were occupied by a foreign army there

is no danger here; moreover, a Swiss subject cannot actually

be expelled from Piedmont—so that everything is right on that

score. As to other things, what am I to say to you? I have

grown older. That I have told you before, that you have seen

for yourself; at times I seem to fall back into the old rut,

but there is no limpidity, the water is dull, troubled, muddy,

and it is not at all amusing. But you, Marya Kasparovna, were

very kind in the way you met me and saw me off. Give me your

hand, we are old friends; mind that prolonged absence and

other interests do not cool your helpful affection for us

(don’t be angry—human nature is weak and changeable, nothing

in it is quite secure). Perhaps life will bring us together

again—anything may happen, for everything comes by chance.

Most likely you have already sent off an answer to Bernacki.

Good-bye; give my love to Reihel. Was Maurice pleased with the

toys?[29]

The colonel has set off gloomily from Lyons: he suffers much,

for he loves much; he is consumed by an inward fire and no palm

baths will put it out.

Once more good-bye. Give my greetings to Bernacki.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

_June 29-30, 1851._

I embrace the children. I will write to them from Freiburg, but

I have no time now. I have to go off somewhere. I went to bed

late and overslept myself to-day.

My love to mother and every one.

Why have the books that were returned been paid for? Golovin

was to have asked for them from Turin.

_Letter from Herzen to his Son_

FREIBURG, _July 2 (1851)_.

DEAR SASHA,—Yesterday I went with the local treasurer to Morat,

and from there with the prefect to the village which has

adopted us: Burg or in the French Châtel. A little village; the

inhabitants came to meet us, and the elder made me a speech

in broken German, which I answered as best I could; then they

brought me an immense glass of wine and the schoolmaster made a

speech. The elder apologised for not having made preparations

for my reception, and especially for no guns having been fired.

They are all kind, simple people, they were very much pleased

with me, and invited me to come with all my family next year.

Good-bye, dear; I kiss Tata, Kolya, Olenka.

Kiss Granny’s hand for me.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

GENEVA, _July 5 (1851), Saturday_.

I arrived here an hour ago—here I am already nearer to you,

darling; I don’t know how things will go in Piedmont; I think

of leaving the day after to-morrow at eleven o’clock in the

evening, or if I can’t get a seat, on the 8th; so by the 10th I

shall be in Turin and by the 13th I may be at home; but that is

not certain yet.

There has been a tremendous holiday here; I was really touched

by the grandeur of the reception of the federal banner and of

the deputation from Argau. Yes, say what you like, it is a

republic.

I cannot write: frightfully tired; at one o’clock in the night

I got into the diligence and travelled without stopping till

I arrived here at four in the afternoon. But fatigue is good

for me, only my hand won’t write, and my thoughts won’t hang

together.

I have found out everything about education in Vevey—if

necessary we might be there. Moreover we have never once

thought of the Italian Switzerland, _i.e._ Ticino; they say

Lugano is a very charming town, and until there is a European

war life there is possible.

Good-bye, dear; I feel rather better, but all that depends on a

dream, on memory, on nothing.

I kiss the children.

Chambéry is all nonsense.

_Letter from Herzen to his Wife_

_July 1851._

Here is something more for the colonel. Sazonov’s uncle has

sent him the decision of the Senate and the Tsar concerning

him. The Senate has sentenced him to penal servitude for

disobedience to the Imperial command, but the Imperial Council

has mitigated the sentence, and the Tsar has confirmed that ...

_Risum teneatis_, ‘To condemn him, Sazonov, to perpetual exile

from the borders of the Empire’—there’s a punishment for an

emigrant! His uncle has sent him 6000 francs and he is going to

London.

The Germans who saw Bakunin at Prague said that the latter part

of the time he was _chained_ to the wall!

_A Postscript to his Son_

TURIN, _July 10, 1851_.

Mother has written you so much that she has crowded me into the

margin. But soon we shall be talking, dear; I think we may set

off in three days’ time.

_Letter from Natalie Herzen to her daughter Natalie_

TURIN, _July 13, 1851_.

Tatotchka, my darling, my birdie, my little star, my little

flower, my joy! I am hastening to you. Soon I shall see you and

how happy we shall be together! I’ll tell you how I travelled

over mountains and valleys. And meanwhile, till I come, my

little one, be well and merry and good. Kiss Olya as I kiss

you. Hug Puponka.

YOUR MOTHER.

_Herzen’s Postscript to the above Letter_

Here we are travelling and travelling; the carriage creaks,

the horses snort, the whip clacks, we go on and on, and soon

we shall arrive. François will run and open the gate, Rocca

will fry and bake. And Tata—she will run and scream and throw

herself—flop!—on her daddy’s neck.

Look after Hoetsky,[30] and see that he does not get into

mischief. Make a low bow for me to Alexandra Christianovna and

press her hand warmly.

_Letter from Herzen to his Son_

TURIN, _July 13, 1851_.

Perhaps, dear Sasha, we may be in time to arrive on Tuesday,

and on Wednesday you may almost certainly expect us by the

diligence coming from Geneva, I believe it stops at the Hotel

York. Did you get the telegraph? Show Kolya how to play with

it—it is a very ingenious toy, and I think it will greatly

amuse him.

I read with great pleasure in Engelson’s letter that he is

satisfied with your conduct. But you are in your thirteenth

year, and if we were poor people you would have to be earning

your own living and helping your family. You can see for

yourself that the children of the poor are much more sensible

and steady, especially in everything practical: they are less

timid and more cautious. What they gain through necessity we

must acquire by will.

_P.S._—Your letters of the 11th have just come.

_SECTION FOUR_

ENGLAND

(1852-1855)

Chapter 1

THE FOGS OF LONDON

When at daybreak on the 25th of August 1852 I passed along a wet plank on

to the shore of England and looked at its dirty white cliffs, I was very

far indeed from imagining that years would pass before I should leave

those chalk cliffs.

Entirely under the influence of the ideas with which I was leaving Italy,

stunned and sick, bewildered by a series of blows which had followed one

on the other with such brutal rapidity, I could not see clearly what I

was doing. It seemed as though I had needed to be brought again and again

into concrete contact with familiar truths in order that I might grasp

again what I had known before or ought to have known.

I had been false to my own logic and forgotten how different the man

of to-day is in opinions and in actions, how noisily he begins and how

humbly he carries out his programme, how good are his desires and how

feeble his muscles.

Two months had been filled with unnecessary meetings, fruitless seeking,

painful and quite useless conversations, and I was still expecting

something ... expecting something. But my realistic nature could not

remain for long in that world of phantoms. I began little by little to

grasp that the edifice I was raising had no foundation, that it would

inevitably crumble into ruins.

I was humiliated, my pride was outraged, I was angry with myself. My

conscience tormented me for the sacrilegious desecration of my grief,

for the year wasted in petty agitation, and I was conscious of a terrible

inexpressible weariness.... How I needed then a friend who, without

judging and condemning, could have received my confession and have shared

my unhappiness! but the wilderness about me grew more and more desolate,

there was no one near to me, not one ... and perhaps that was for the

best.

I had not meant to stay more than a month in London, but little by little

I began to understand that I had absolutely nowhere to go and no reason

to go anywhere. Nowhere could I have found the same hermit-like seclusion

as in London.

Having made up my mind to remain there, I began by taking a house in one

of the remotest parts of the town, beyond Regent’s Park, near Primrose

Hill.

The little girls remained in Paris, only Sasha was with me. As the

fashion is here, the house was divided into three storeys. The whole

middle storey consisted of an immense, cold, uncomfortable drawing-room.

I changed it into my study. The owner of the house was a sculptor and

had piled up the whole room with all sorts of statuettes and models; a

bust of Lola Montes[31] was always before my eyes, together with Queen

Victoria.

When on the second or third day after moving there, having unpacked and

settled in, I went into that room in the morning, sat down in a big

armchair and spent some two hours in complete stillness, disturbed by

no one, I felt myself somehow free, for the first time after years and

years.

My heart was not the lighter for this freedom, but yet I looked gladly

out of window at the gloomy trees in the park, dimly showing through the

smoky fog, and was thankful to them for the peace.

For whole mornings together I used now to sit utterly alone, often doing

nothing, not even reading; Sasha would sometimes run in, but he did not

interfere with my solitude.

Haug, who lived with me, never without extreme necessity came in before

dinner, and we dined between six and seven. In this leisure I went,

fact by fact, over the whole past, myself and the words and letters of

others. I found mistakes to the right, mistakes to the left, vacillation,

weakness, uncertainty in action and over-readiness to be influenced by

others. And in the course of this analysis, by degrees, a revolution took

place within me ... there were bitter moments and more than once tears

rolled down my cheeks; but there were other moments, not of gladness

but of courage: I was conscious of power in myself. I no longer relied

on any one else, but my confidence in myself grew stronger, I grew more

independent of every one.

The emptiness around me strengthened me, gave me time to collect myself,

I grew apart from others, that is, I did not seek real intimacy with

them; I avoided no one, but I no longer cared for people—I saw that I

had no ties that rested on really deep feelings. I was a stranger among

strangers; I had more sympathy for some than for others, but was in no

close intimacy with any. It had been so in the past, too, but I had

not noticed it, being continually absorbed by my own thoughts; now the

masquerade was over, the dominoes had been removed, the garlands were

taken from the heads, the masks from the faces, and I saw features very

different from those I had imagined. What was I to do? I could help

showing that I liked many people less, that is, knew them better, but I

could not help feeling it; and, as I have said, these discoveries did not

rob me of my courage, but rather strengthened it.

London life was very favourable for such a change. There is no town

in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people

and training one into solitude than London. The manner of life, the

distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which the

individual is lost, all this together with the absence of Continental

diversions conduces to the same effect. One who knows how to live alone

has nothing to fear from the dulness of London. The life here, like the

atmosphere here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a

prop outside himself, for one who seeks cordiality, sympathy, attention;

the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task

it is to get rid of the sulphuric acid in the smoky fog. The masses

are saved by the struggle for daily bread, the commercial classes by

their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the fuss and hurry of

business; but nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among

their fellows, of intellectual sloth and emotional idleness, are bored to

death and fall into despair.

Wandering lonely about London, through its stony lanes and through its

stifling passages, sometimes not seeing a step before me for the thick,

opaline fog, and running against flying shadows—I lived through a great

deal.

In the evening when my son had gone to bed, I usually went out for a

walk; I scarcely ever went to see any one; I read the newspapers and

stared in taverns at the alien race, and stood on the bridges across the

Thames.

On the one hand, the stalactites of the Houses of Parliament would loom

through the darkness ready to vanish again, on the other, the inverted

bowl of Saint Paul’s ... and street-lamps ... street-lamps without end

in both directions. One city, full-fed, lay sleeping, while the other,

hungry, was not yet awake—the streets were empty, nothing could be heard

but the even tread of the policeman with his lantern. I used to sit and

look, and my soul would grow quieter and more peaceful. And so through

all this I came to love this dreadful ant-heap, where every night a

hundred thousand men know not where they will lay their heads, and the

police often find women and children dead of hunger beside hotels where

one cannot dine for less than two pounds.

But such violent transitions, however rapid, are not achieved all at

once, especially at forty. A long time passed while I was coming to terms

with my new ideas. Though I had made up my mind to work, for a long time

I did nothing, or did not what I meant to do.

The idea with which I had come to London, to seek the judgment of my own

people, was a sound and right one. I repeat that even now with full and

deliberate conviction. To whom, indeed, are we to appeal for judgment,

for the establishment of the truth, for the unmasking of falsehood?

It is not for us to go suing for justice to our enemies, who judge by

other principles, by laws which we do not recognise.

One can settle one’s quarrels for oneself; no doubt one can. To take the

law in one’s own hands is to snatch back by force what has been taken by

force, and so restore the balance; revenge is just as sound and simple a

human feeling as gratitude; but neither revenge nor taking the law into

one’s own hands explains anything. It may happen that a clear explanation

is what matters most to a man. The establishment of the truth may be

more precious for him than revenge. My own error lay not in the main

proposition, it lay in the underlying assumption; to win the judgment of

one’s own people one must first of all have one’s own people. Where were

mine...?

I had had my own people once in Russia. But I was so completely cut off

in a foreign land; I had at all costs to get into communication with my

own people; I longed to tell them of the weight that lay on my heart.

Letters could not get in, but books would get through of themselves;

writing letters was useless—I would print; and little by little I

set to work upon _My Past and Thoughts_, and upon founding a Russian

printing-press.