THE CORPS OF PAGES

I

The long-cherished ambition of my father was thus realized. There

was a vacancy in the corps of pages which I could fill before I had

got beyond the age to which admission was limited, and I was taken

to St. Petersburg and entered the school. Only a hundred and fifty

boys--mostly children of the nobility belonging to the court--received

education in this privileged corps, which combined the character of a

military school endowed with special rights and of a court institution

attached to the imperial household. After a stay of four or five years

in the corps of pages, those who had passed the final examinations were

received as officers in any regiment of the Guard or of the army they

chose, irrespective of the number of vacancies in that regiment; and

each year the first sixteen pupils of the highest form were nominated

_pages de chambre_: that is, they were personally attached to the

several members of the imperial family--the emperor, the empress, the

grand duchesses, and the grand dukes. That was considered, of course,

a great honour; and, moreover, the young men upon whom this honour was

bestowed became known at the court, and had afterward every chance of

being nominated aides-de-camp of the emperor or of one of the grand

dukes, and consequently had every facility for making a brilliant

career in the service of the State. Fathers and mothers took due

care, therefore, that their boys should not miss entering the corps of

pages, even though entrance had to be secured at the expense of other

candidates who never saw a vacancy opening for them. Now that I was in

the select corps my father could give free play to his ambitious dreams.

The corps was divided into five forms, of which the highest was the

first, and the lowest the fifth, and the intention was that I should

enter the fourth form. However, as it appeared at the examinations that

I was not sufficiently familiar with decimal fractions, and as the

fourth form contained that year over forty pupils, while only twenty

had been mustered for the fifth form, I was enrolled in the latter.

I felt extremely vexed at this decision. It was with reluctance that

I entered a military school, and now I should have to stay in it five

years instead of four. What should I do in the fifth form, when I

knew already all that would be taught in it? With tears in my eyes I

spoke of it to the inspector (the head of the educational department),

but he answered me with a joke. ‘You know,’ he told me, ‘what Cæsar

said--better to be the first in a village than the second in Rome.’ To

which I warmly replied that I should prefer to be the very last if only

I could leave the military school as soon as possible. ‘Perhaps, after

some time, you will like the school,’ he remarked, and from that day he

became friendly to me.

To the teacher of arithmetic, who also tried to console me, I gave my

word of honour that I would never cast a glance into his text-book;

‘and nevertheless you will have to give me the highest marks.’ I kept

my word; but thinking now of this scene, I fancy that the pupil was not

of a very docile disposition.

And yet, as I look back upon that remote past, I cannot but feel

grateful for having been put in the lower form. Having only to repeat

during the first year what I already knew, I got into the habit of

learning my lessons by merely listening to what the teachers said in

the class-room; and, the lessons over, I had plenty of time to read and

to write to my heart’s content. I never prepared for the examinations,

and used to spend the time which was allowed for that in reading aloud

to a few friends the dramas of Shakespeare or of Ostróvskiy. When I

reached the higher ‘special’ forms, I was also better prepared to

master the variety of subjects we had to study. Besides, I spent more

than half of the first winter in the hospital. Like all children who

are not born at St. Petersburg, I had to pay a heavy tribute to ‘the

capital on the swamps of Finland,’ in the shape of several attacks of

local cholera, and finally one of typhoid fever.

* * * * *

When I entered the corps of pages, its inner life was undergoing a

profound change. All Russia awakened at that time from the heavy

slumber and the terrible nightmare of Nicholas I.’s reign. Our school

also felt the effects of that revival. I do not know, in fact, what

would have become of me, had I entered the corps of pages one or

two years sooner. Either my will would have been totally broken, or

I should have been excluded from the school with no one knows what

consequences. Happily, the transition period was already in full sway

in the year 1857.

The director of the corps was an excellent old man, General Zheltúkhin.

But he was the nominal head only. The real master of the school was

‘the Colonel,’--Colonel Girardot, a Frenchman in the Russian service.

People said he was a Jesuit, and so he was, I believe. His ways, at

any rate, were thoroughly imbued with the teachings of Loyola, and his

educational methods were those of the French Jesuit colleges.

Imagine a short, extremely thin man, with dark, piercing, and

furtive eyes, wearing short-clipped moustaches, which gave him the

expression of a cat; very quiet and firm; not remarkably intelligent,

but exceedingly cunning; a despot at the bottom of his heart, who

was capable of hating--intensely hating--the boy who would not

fall under his fascination, and of expressing that hatred, not by

silly persecutions, but unceasingly by his general behaviour--by an

occasionally dropped word, a gesture, a smile, an interjection. His

walk was more like gliding along, and the exploring glances he used to

cast round without turning his head completed the illusion. A stamp

of cold dryness was impressed on his lips, even when he tried to look

well disposed, and that expression became still more harsh when his

mouth was contorted by a smile of discontent or of contempt. With all

this there was nothing of a commander in him; you would rather think,

at first sight, of a benevolent father who talks to his children as if

they were full-grown people. And yet, you soon felt that everyone and

everything had to bend before his will. Woe to the boy who would not

feel happy or unhappy according to the degree of good disposition shown

towards him by the Colonel.

The words ‘the Colonel’ were continually on all lips. Other officers

went by their nicknames, but no one dared to give a nickname to

Girardot. A sort of mystery hung about him, as if he were omniscient

and everywhere present. True, he spent all the day and part of the

night in the school. Even when we were in the classes he prowled about,

visiting our drawers, which he opened with his own keys. As to the

night, he gave a good portion of it to the task of inscribing in small

books--of which he had quite a library--in separate columns, by special

signs and in inks of different colours, all the faults and virtues of

each boy.

Play, jokes, and conversations stopped when we saw him slowly moving

along through our spacious rooms, hand in hand with one of his

favourites, balancing his body forward and backward; smiling at one

boy, keenly looking into the eyes of another, casting an indifferent

glance upon a third, and giving a slight contortion to his lip as he

passed a fourth: and from these looks everyone knew that he liked the

first boy, that to the second he was indifferent, that he intentionally

did not notice the third, and that he disliked the fourth. This dislike

was enough to terrify most of his victims--the more so as no reason

could be given for it. Impressionable boys had been brought to despair

by that mute, unceasingly displayed aversion and those suspicious

looks; in others the result had been a total annihilation of will, as

one of the Tolstóys--Theodor, also a pupil of Girardot--has shown in an

autobiographic novel, the ‘Diseases of the Will.’

The inner life of the corps was miserable under the rule of the

Colonel. In all boarding-schools the newly entered boys are subjected

to petty persecutions. The ‘greenhorns’ are put in this way to a

test. What are they worth? Are they not going to turn ‘sneaks?’ And

then the ‘old hands’ like to show to new-comers the superiority of an

established brotherhood. So it is in all schools and in prisons. But

under Girardot’s rule these persecutions took on a harsher aspect, and

they came, not from the comrades of the same form, but from the first

form--the pages de chambre, who were non-commissioned officers, and

whom Girardot had placed in a quite exceptional, superior position.

His system was to give them carte blanche; to pretend that he did not

know even the horrors they were enacting; and to maintain through

them a severe discipline. To answer a blow received from a page de

chambre would have meant, in the times of Nicholas I., to be sent

to a battalion of soldiers’ sons, if the fact became public; and to

revolt in any way against the mere caprice of a page de chambre meant

that the twenty youths of the first form, armed with their heavy oak

rulers, would assemble in a room, and, with Girardot’s tacit approval,

administer a severe beating to the boy who had shown such a spirit of

insubordination.

Accordingly, the first form did what they liked; and not farther back

than the preceding winter one of their favourite games had been to

assemble the ‘greenhorns’ at night in a room, in their night-shirts,

and to make them run round, like horses in a circus, while the pages

de chambre, armed with thick india-rubber whips, standing some in the

centre and the others on the outside, pitilessly whipped the boys. As a

rule the ‘circus’ ended in an Oriental fashion, in an abominable way.

The moral conceptions which prevailed at that time, and the foul talk

which went on in the school concerning what occurred at night after a

circus, were such that the least said about them the better.

The Colonel knew all this. He had a perfectly organized system of

espionage, and nothing escaped his knowledge. But so long as he was

not known to know it, all was right. To shut his eyes to what was done

by the first form was the foundation of his system of maintaining

discipline.

* * * * *

However, a new spirit was awakened in the school, and only a few

months before I entered it a revolution had taken place. That year the

third form was different from what it had hitherto been. It contained

a number of young men who really studied, and read a good deal; some

of them became, later, men of mark. My first acquaintance with one

of them--let me call him von Schauff--was when he was reading Kant’s

‘Critique of Pure Reason.’ Besides, they had amongst them some of the

strongest youths of the school. The tallest member of the corps was in

that form, as also a very strong young man, Kóshtoff, a great friend of

von Schauff.

This third form did not bear the yoke of the pages de chambre with the

same docility as their predecessors; they were disgusted with what was

going on, and in consequence of an incident, which I prefer not to

describe, a fight took place between the third and the first form,

with the result that the pages de chambre got a severe thrashing from

their subordinates. Girardot hushed up the affair, but the authority of

the first form was broken down. The india-rubber whips remained, but

were never again brought into use. The circuses and the like became

things of the past.

That much was won; but the lowest form, the fifth, composed almost

entirely of very young boys who had just entered the school, had still

to obey the petty caprices of the pages de chambre. We had a beautiful

garden, filled with old trees, but the boys of the fifth form could

enjoy it little; they were forced to run a roundabout, while the first

form boys sat in it and chattered, or to send back the balls when these

gentlemen played nine-pins. A couple of days after I had entered the

school, seeing how things stood in the garden, I did not go there, but

remained upstairs. I was reading, when a page de chambre, with carroty

hair and a face covered with freckles, came upon me, and ordered me to

go at once to the garden to run the roundabout.

‘I sha’n’t; don’t you see I am reading,’ was my reply.

Anger disfigured his never too pleasant face. He was ready to jump upon

me. I took the defensive. He tried to give me blows on the face with

his cap. I fenced as best I could. Then he flung his cap on the floor.

‘Pick it up.’

‘Pick it up yourself.’

Such an act of disobedience was unheard of in the school. Why he did

not beat me unmercifully on the spot I do not know. He was much older

and stronger than I was.

Next day and the following days I received similar commands, but

obstinately remained upstairs. Then began the most exasperating petty

persecutions at every step--enough to drive a boy to desperation.

Happily, I was always of a jovial disposition, and answered them with

jokes, or took little heed of them.

Moreover, it all soon came to an end. The weather turned rainy, and we

spent most of our time indoors. In the garden the first form smoked

freely enough, but when we were indoors the smoking club was ‘the

tower.’ It was kept beautifully clean, and a fire was always burning

there. The pages de chambre severely punished any of the other boys

whom they caught smoking, but they themselves sat continually at the

fireside chattering and enjoying cigarettes. Their favourite smoking

time was after ten o’clock at night, when all were supposed to have

gone to bed; they kept up their club till half-past eleven, and, to

protect themselves from an unexpected interruption by Girardot, they

ordered us to be on the watch. The small boys of the fifth form were

taken out of their beds in turn, two at a time, and they had to loiter

about the staircase till half-past eleven, to give notice of the

approach of the Colonel.

We decided to put an end to these night watches. Long were the

discussions, and the higher forms were consulted as to what was to

be done. At last the decision came: ‘Refuse, all of you, to keep the

watch; and when they begin to beat you, which they are sure to do, go,

as many of you as you can, in a block, and call in Girardot. He knows

it all, but then he will be bound to stop it.’ The question whether

that would not be ‘reporting’ was settled in the negative by experts

in matters of honour: the pages de chambre did not behave towards the

others like comrades.

The turn to watch fell that night to a Prince Shahovskóy, an old

hand, and to Selánoff, a new-comer, an extremely timid boy, who even

spoke in a girlish voice. The old hand was called upon first, but

refused to go, and was left alone. Then two pages de chambre went to

the timid new-comer, who was in bed; and as he refused to obey, they

began to flog him brutally with heavy leather braces. Shahovskóy woke

up several comrades who were near at hand, and they all ran to find

Girardot.

I was also in bed when the two came upon me, ordering me to take the

watch. I refused. Thereupon, seizing two pairs of braces--we always

used to put our clothes in perfect order on a bench by the bedside,

braces uppermost, and the necktie across them--they began to flog me.

Sitting up in bed, I fenced with my hands, and had already received

several heavy blows, when a command resounded, ‘The first form to the

Colonel!’ The fierce fighters became tame at once, and hurriedly put my

things in order.

‘Don’t say a word,’ they whispered.

‘The necktie across, in good order,’ I said to them, while my shoulders

and arms burned from the blows.

What Girardot’s talk with the first form was we did not know; but

next day, as we stood in the ranks before marching downstairs to the

dining-room, he addressed us in a minor key, saying how sad it was that

pages de chambre should have fallen upon a boy who was right in his

refusal. And upon whom? A new-comer, and so timid a boy as Selánoff

was! The whole school was disgusted at this Jesuitic speech.

* * * * *

It surely was also a blow to Girardot’s authority, and he resented it

very much. He regarded our form, and me especially, with great dislike

(the roundabout affair had been reported to him), and he manifested it

at every opportunity.

During the first winter I was a frequent inmate of the hospital. After

suffering from typhoid fever, during which the director and the doctor

bestowed on me a really parental care, I had very bad and persistently

recurring gastric attacks. Girardot, as he made his daily rounds of the

hospital, seeing me so often there, began to say to me every morning,

half-jokingly, in French, ‘Here is a young man who is as healthy as

the New Bridge, and loiters in the hospital.’ Once or twice I replied

jestingly, but at last, seeing malice in this constant repetition, I

lost patience and grew very angry.

‘How dare you say that?’ I exclaimed. ‘I shall ask the doctor to forbid

your entering this room,’ and so on.

Girardot recoiled two steps; his dark eyes glittered, his thin lip

became still thinner. At last he said, ‘I have offended you, have I?

Well, we have in the hall two artillery guns: shall we have a duel?’

‘I don’t make jokes, and I tell you that I shall bear no more of your

insinuations’, I continued.

He did not repeat his joke, but regarded me with even more dislike than

before.

Happily enough, there was little opportunity for punishing me. I did

not smoke; my clothes were always hooked and buttoned, and properly

folded at night. I liked all sorts of games, but, plunged as I was in

reading and in a correspondence with my brother, I could hardly find

time to play a _laptá_ match (a sort of cricket) in the garden, and

always hurried back to my books. But when I was caught in fault, it

was not I that Girardot punished, but the page de chambre who was my

superior. Once, for instance, at dinner, I made a physical discovery:

I noticed that the sound given out by a tumbler depends on the amount

of water it contains, and at once tried to obtain a chord with four

glasses. But there stood Girardot behind me, and without saying a word

to me he ordered my page de chambre under arrest. It so happened that

this young man was an excellent fellow, a third cousin of mine, who

refused even to listen to my excuses, saying, ‘All right. I know he

dislikes you.’ His comrades, though, gave me a warning. ‘Take care,

naughty boy; we are not going to be punished for you,’ they said; and

if reading had not been my all-absorbing occupation, they probably

would have made me pay dearly for my physical experiment.

Everyone spoke of Girardot’s dislike for me; but I paid no attention

to it, and probably increased it by my indifference. For full eighteen

months he refused to give me the epaulettes, which were usually given

to newly entered boys after one or two months’ stay at the school, when

they had learned some of the rudiments of military drill; but I felt

quite happy without that military decoration. At last, an officer--the

best teacher of drill in the school, a man simply enamoured of

drill--volunteered to teach me; and when he saw me performing all the

tricks to his entire satisfaction, he undertook to introduce me to

Girardot. The Colonel refused again, twice in succession, so that the

officer took it as a personal offence; and when the director of the

corps once asked him why I had no epaulettes yet, he bluntly answered,

‘The boy is all right; it is the Colonel who does not want him;’

whereupon, probably after the remark of the director, Girardot himself

asked to examine me again, and gave me the epaulettes that very day.

But the Colonel’s influence was rapidly vanishing. The whole character

of the school was changing. For twenty years Girardot had realized his

ideal, which was to have the boys nicely combed, curled, and girlish

looking, and to send to the court pages as refined as courtiers of

Louis XIV. Whether they learned or not, he cared little; his favourites

were those whose clothes-basket was best filled with all sorts of

nail-brushes and scent-bottles, whose ‘private’ uniform (which could

be put on when we went home on Sundays) was of the best make, and who

knew how to make the most elegant _salut oblique_. Formerly, when

Girardot had held rehearsals of court ceremonies, wrapping up a page

in a striped red cotton cover taken from one of our beds, in order

that he might represent the Empress at a _baisemain_, the boys almost

religiously approached the imaginary Empress, seriously performed

the ceremony of kissing the hand, and retired with a most elegant

oblique bow; but now, though they were very elegant at court, they

would perform at the rehearsals such bearlike bows that all roared

with laughter, while Girardot was simply raging. Formerly, the younger

boys who had been taken to a court levee, and had been curled for that

purpose, used to keep their curls as long as they would last; now, on

returning from the palace, they hurried to put their heads under the

cold water tap, to get rid of the curls. An effeminate appearance was

laughed at. To be sent to a levee, to stand there as a decoration, was

now considered a drudgery rather than a favour. And when the small boys

who were occasionally taken to the palace to play with the little grand

dukes remarked that one of the latter used, in some game, to make a

hard whip out of his handkerchief, and use it freely, one of our boys

did the same, and so whipped the grand duke that he cried. Girardot was

terrified, while the old Sebastopol admiral who was tutor of the grand

duke only praised our boy.

A new spirit, studious and serious, developed in the corps, as in all

other schools. In former years, the pages, being sure in one way or

another that they would get the necessary marks for being promoted

officers of the Guard, spent the first years in the school hardly

learning at all, and only began to study more or less in the last two

forms; now the lower forms learned very well. The moral tone also

became quite different from what it was a few years before. Oriental

amusements were looked upon with disgust, and an attempt or two to

revert to old manners resulted in scandals which reached the St.

Petersburg drawing-rooms. Girardot was dismissed. He was only allowed

to retain his bachelor apartment in the building of the corps, and we

often saw him afterward, wrapped in his long military cloak, pacing

along, plunged in reflections--sad, I suppose, because he could not but

condemn the new spirit which rapidly developed in the corps of pages.