One of the oddest of all odd books that ever fell into our hands is
Captain Colville Franckland's _Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of
Russia and Sweden_, in 1830 and 1831. It is one of the hop-step-and-a-jump
tours that your fashionable folks make for making acquaintances and then
making books. The gallant author does not stay long enough in a place to
be dull; for he is lively and flippant in every page, and throws a dash of
_the service_ into every chapter. He feels that Dr. Granville has left him
nothing to say which may not be found in his two great big books; yet the
Cholera and the Polish war have supplied him with two topics throughout
the whole book; and, dull as these subjects are in themselves, they have
enabled our tourist to produce a rambling, rattling, frolicsome work of
seven or eight hundred pages. His attentions to the softer sex sparkle
every where. At Hamburgh, "we dined at a most excellent table d'hote, but
thought the ladies plain and dowdy." "We laughed much at the Holsteiner
peasantry, the women being dressed like devils, and men like
merry-andrews." Again,--
"One of the most pleasing characteristics of Hamburgh, is the neat little,
rosy-faced, fair-haired soubrette, tripping along the Yungferstieg, with a
basket under her right arm, covered with a handsome shawl of glowing
colours. These enticing damsels look as happy and as coquettish as you can
well imagine, and might induce many a traveller to pass a few weeks in
Hamburgh who had time to dedicate to the pursuit of the fair nymphs of the
Alster.
"But, alas! no good is unaccompanied by evil; hideously deformed dwarfs
haunt the streets and promenades of the good town, and the eye of the
observer, after having rested with complacency on the round and
well-turned form of the smart soubrette, reverts with horror to the
miserable Flibbertigibbets which abound in a frightful proportion to the
whole population."
At Hamburgh he finds fun in every thing.
"I was a good deal amused to-day by the funeral cortège of some citizen of
consequence. The bier was surrounded by men dressed in the old Venetian
costume of black, with ruffs, well-powdered wigs, and swords by their
sides. I regret to say that I must quit Hamburgh without seeing the Schöne
Marianna; but I hear she is now rather _passèe_, and I must console myself
for this mortification by gazing upon the first pair of bright eyes which
I shall meet to-morrow on my route to Kiel."
The Russian dwarfs afford our Captain much amusement.
"Madame Divoff, like many other Russian ladies, has a dwarf in her house,
who remains constantly with the company. He is less ugly and disagreeable
than others of his species. La Princesse Serge Gallitzin has a little
fellow of this sort; the Lisianskis have also one in constant attendance.
The pretty Mademoiselle Rosetti, two evenings ago, kept caressing the
dwarf at Madame Divoff's ball. ('Beauty and the Beast,' said I to her;
'Zemir et Azor.')
"At a very agreeable family party at the Prince Paul Gallitzin's were
masks; and a party of male and female dwarfs; these droll little urchins
were all very well made and good-looking; they frisked and frolicked about
with the children of the house as if they themselves were not (as in
reality they were) men and women, but children likewise. One of these poor
little mortals, equipped as an officer of hussars, danced a mazurka with
great grace and activity, and selected for his partner the _Gouvernante_,
a fine, fat bouncing woman of twenty-five. He likewise, at my request,
sang a Russian romance, which he accompanied on the piano-forte: his voice
was a very plaintive, but weak barytone. The kindness of the Russian
nobles to these unfortunate beings does infinite honour to the national
character."
We have only time for another extract or two. At Moscow, he notes:
"I passed the remainder of the evening at the Princess Dolgorouki's; the
young ladies were in great agitation on account of the sudden
indisposition of their mother, Madame Boulgakow, who had, it seems, caught
cold in her return from the monastery of Troitza, sixty wersts from hence,
a renowned pilgrimage. She had better have stayed at home, for surely
Moscow has sufficient churches in which bigots may pray as long as they
please. When will superstition cease to usurp the place of true religion
in the human mind? I did not pity the _old devotee_, but I felt for the
young ladies, who seemed to be a good deal flurried and fluttered by this
occurrence."
At St. Petersburg:
"June 8-20.--Weather hot and sultry. At two I walked to the Summer Gardens,
which I found full of police-officers and soldiers. To-day there is a
celebrated promenade, that in which the young fillies range themselves in
two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse.
However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody
here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off
I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous
thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a
_porte-cochere_, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered
for the first time the bâton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case
against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the
bâton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ,
the other in Latin, which state that the bâton is that of Marshal Davoust,
taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."
"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming
tomb of the immortal Kutusoff, representing the Kremlin, the church of
Ivan Blagennoi, and a procession of priests marching out of the former by
the Holy Gate towards the latter. Kutusoff's tomb is shaded by banners
taken from the Poles, the Prussians, and the French, having at the ends of
their staffs, the eagles of the two former, and the horse of the latter."
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