The proceedings began, ... dragged on. I saw Musa several times every
week. She had several interviews with her husband. But just at the
moment of the decision of the whole melancholy affair, I was not in
Petersburg. Unforeseen business had obliged me to set off to the
south of Russia. During my absence I heard that Baburin had been
acquitted at the trial; it appeared that all that could be proved
against him was, that young people regarding him as a person unlikely
to awaken suspicion, had sometimes held meetings at his house, and he
had been present at their meetings; he was, however, by
administrative order sent into exile in one of the western provinces
of Siberia. Musa went with him.
‘Paramon Semyonitch did not wish it,’ she wrote to me; ‘as, according to
his ideas, no one ought to sacrifice self for another person, and not
for a cause; but I told him there was no question of sacrifice at all.
When I said to him in Moscow that I would be his wife, I thought to
myself--for ever, indissolubly! So indissoluble it must be till the end
of our days....’