Chapter 42 (1)

THE COUP D’ÉTAT—THE PROCUREUR OF THE LATE REPUBLIC—THE VOICE OF THE COW IN THE WILDERNESS—BANISHMENT OF THE PROCUREUR—ORDER AND CIVILISATION TRIUMPHANT

‘Vive la mort, _friends! And a happy new year! Now we shall be consistent, now we shall not be false to our own ideas, shall not be terrified at the realisation of what we have foreseen, shall not abjure the knowledge we have reached by the path of tribulation. Now we shall be strong and stand up for our convictions._

‘_We saw death approaching long ago; we may grieve, we may feel sympathy, but we cannot be surprised, we cannot be despairing or downcast. Quite the contrary, we ought to lift up our heads, we are justified. We have been called birds of ill omen invoking disaster, we have been reproached for heresy, for ignorance of the people, for proud isolation, for childish resentment, while we have only been guilty of seeing the truth and speaking it openly. Our words, which are still the same, are now the consolation, the encouragement of those who are terrified by the events in Paris._’—(‘Letters from France and Italy,’ No. 14. Nice, December 31, 1851.)

One morning (I remember it was the 4th of December) our cook, Pasquale Rocca, came in to me, and with a look of pleasure announced that flysheets were being sold in the streets with the news that ‘Buonaparte has dismissed the Assembly and appointed a red government.’ Who were the zealous servants of Napoleon who spread such rumours among the people even outside France (Nice was at that time Italian), I do not know; but what numbers there must have been of agents of all sorts, political stokers, whipping the public up end raising the temperature, since there were enough of them even for Nice!

An hour later Vogt, Hoetsky, Mathieu, and others turned up: all were surprised ... Mathieu, a typical specimen of a French revolutionary, was beside himself.

Bald, with a skull the shape of a walnut—that is, a typically Gallic skull, not spacious but obstinate—with a big, dark, unkempt beard, a rather good-natured expression, and little eyes, Mathieu was like a prophet, like a crazy saint, like an augur, and like his bird. He was a lawyer, and in the happy days of the February republic had been a _procureur_ or a deputy _procureur_ somewhere. He was a revolutionary to the tips of his finger-nails; he gave himself up to the revolution as people give themselves up to religion, with implicit faith, never dared either to understand or to doubt or to be over-subtle, but loved and believed, called Ledru-Rollin ‘Ledru,’ and Louis Blanc simply ‘Blanc,’ used the word _citoyen_ whenever he could, and was perpetually conspiring.

On receiving the news of the 2nd of December he disappeared, and returned two days later completely convinced that France was rising, _que cela chauffe_, and especially in the south, in the department of Var near Draguignan. The great thing to be done was to enter into relations with the leaders of the insurrection.... He had seen some of them, and had settled with them overnight, passing through Var, to collect trustworthy and important persons together at a certain spot, for consultation.... But that the gendarmes might not get wind of it, it was settled on both sides to give as a signal the moo of a cow. If things went well, Orsini meant to bring all his friends, and, though not quite confident that Mathieu’s view of the position was correct, he set off with him to cross the frontier. Orsini came back shaking his head, though, true to his revolutionary and somewhat _condottieri_ temperament, he proceeded to prepare his comrades and collect arms. Mathieu vanished.

Twenty-four hours later, Rocca woke me at four o’clock in the morning: ‘Two gentlemen just arrived from a journey; they urgently want to see you, they say. One of them gave me this note.’ ‘_Citoyen_, for God’s sake give bearer three or four hundred francs at once, if possible; urgently necessary.—MATHIEU.’

I snatched up the money and went downstairs: two remarkable individuals were sitting in the half-dark by the window; accustomed as I am to all the uniforms of revolution, I was yet struck by the appearance of my visitors. Both were covered with mud and clay to their knees; one was wearing a thick red woollen scarf; both had shabby overcoats, a sash round their waistcoats, and big pistols in the sash; and the rest was as usual—unkempt shocks of hair, big beards, and tiny pipes. One of them, beginning with the word _citoyen_, delivered a speech in which he touched upon my civic virtues and the money expected by Mathieu. I gave him the money. ‘Is he in safety?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ answered his ambassador; ‘we’re going to join him at once on the other side of the Var. He is buying a boat.’

‘A boat! what for?’

‘Citoyen Mathieu has the whole plan for landing—the infamous coward of a boatman would not let us have the boat on credit....’

‘What, a landing in France ... with one boat...?’

‘It is a secret, _citoyen_, for the time.’

‘_Comme de raison._’

‘Would you like a receipt?’

‘Oh, no need of that!’

Next day Mathieu himself appeared, also muddy to the ears, and worn out with fatigue; he had been mooing like a cow all night, had several times fancied he heard an answer, went towards it, and found a real bull or a cow. Orsini, who had been waiting somewhere for him for ten hours at a stretch, also came back. The difference between them was that Orsini, washed, and as always, dressed neatly and tastefully, looked like a man who had just walked out of his bedroom; while Mathieu bore all the outward signs of destroying the peace of the state, and attempting to raise a rebellion. Then the boat question had to be considered. Trouble is never far off, and he might easily ruin half a dozen of his own countrymen and half a dozen of the Italians. To stop or dissuade him was impossible. The leaders who had come to me in the night appeared with him; one might be certain that he would compromise not only the French but all of us in Nice. Hoetsky undertook to manage him, and did so like an artist.

Hoetsky’s window, with a little balcony, looked straight out on the sea-shore. In the morning he saw Mathieu wandering with a mysterious air along the beach.... Hoetsky began making signs to him; Mathieu saw them and signed that he would come to him presently; but Hoetsky, assuming an air of the most terrible alarm, telegraphed to him with his fingers that danger was imminent, and insisted on his coming up to the balcony at once. Mathieu, looking round him, stole up on tiptoe. ‘You don’t know?’ Hoetsky asked him. ‘What?’ ‘A squadron of French gendarmes has come into Nice.’ ‘You don’t say so!’

‘Sh—sh—sh.... They are looking for you and your friends. They mean to make a house-to-house search among us—you will be caught at once; don’t go out into the street.’

‘_Violation du territoire_ ... I shall protest.’

‘Of course; only, now you must escape.’

‘I will go to Ste. Hélène, to Herzen’s.’

‘You must be mad! That’s simply giving yourself up to them. His villa is on the frontier, with a huge garden, and no one will even know that you have been arrested—besides, Rocca saw two gendarmes at the gate, even yesterday.’

Mathieu sank into thought.

‘Go by sea to Vogt’s, hide there for the time, and he, by the way, will give you the best advice.’

Mathieu went by the sea-coast—that is, twice as far round—to Vogt’s, and began telling him word for word his conversation with Hoetsky. Vogt instantly grasped the position and observed to him: ‘The great thing, dear Mathieu, is not to lose one instant. Within two hours you must go to Turin: the diligence passes the other side of the hill; I will take a seat, and take you there by the path.’

‘I’ll run home for my things ...’ and the _procureur_ of the republic was a little flustered.

‘That’s even worse than going to Herzen’s. Why, you must be crazy—gendarmes, agents, spies, I don’t know what, are after you ... and you want to run home to kiss your fat Provençale! What a Celadon![89] Porter!’ shouted Vogt (his house-porter was a minute German, a killing person, very much like a coffee-pot that had not been washed for months, and absolutely devoted to Vogt). ‘Make haste and write that you want a shirt, handkerchiefs, clothes; he’ll fetch them, and if you like bring your Dulcinea too so that you may kiss and weep to your heart’s content.’

Mathieu was so overcome with feeling that he embraced Vogt.

Hoetsky arrived. ‘Make haste, make haste!’ he said with an ominous air.

Meanwhile the porter came back, his Dulcinea came also—they had only to wait for the diligence to come into sight beyond the hill. The seat had been taken.

‘I suppose you are cutting up rotten dogs or rabbits again?’ Hoetsky asked Vogt; ‘_quel chien de métier...!_’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Upon my soul, the stench in your room is like the catacombs at Naples.’

‘I notice it myself, but I can’t make it out; it comes from the corner.... There must be a dead rat under the floor—it’s an awful stink,’ and he picked up Mathieu’s overcoat lying on a chair. It appeared that the smell came from the overcoat.

‘What the devil have you got in your overcoat?’ Vogt asked him.

‘Nothing!’

‘Oh, it must be my fault,’ observed Dulcinea, blushing, ‘I put a pound of Limburg cheese, _un peu trop fait_, in his pocket for the journey.’

‘I congratulate your neighbours in the diligence,’ shouted Vogt, laughing as no one else in the world can laugh.

‘Well, it’s time to start—march!’

And Hoetsky and Vogt saw the agitator off on his way to Turin.

In Turin Mathieu presented himself before the Minister of the Interior with a protest. The latter received him with irritation and laughter. ‘How could you imagine that French gendarmes could arrest people in the kingdom of Sardinia? You must be unwell.’

Mathieu referred to the testimony of Vogt and Hoetsky.

‘Your friends,’ said the Minister, ‘have been having a joke at your expense.’

Mathieu wrote to Vogt; he reeled off a string of nonsense, I do not know what, in answer. But Mathieu was offended, particularly with Hoetsky, and a few weeks later wrote a letter to me in which, among other things, he said: ‘You, _citoyen_, alone among these gentlemen, took no part in this treacherous intrigue against me....’

What adds to the characteristic oddity of the affair is that there was a very serious rising in Var, that masses of the population really did revolt, and that the rising was suppressed with the habitual French bloodthirstiness. How was it Mathieu and his bodyguard, for all their zeal and their mooing, did not know how to get in contact with the rebels? No one suspects him or his comrades of intentionally going to mess about in the mud and not wanting to go where there was danger—far from it. That is not in the spirit of the French, of whom Delphine Gay said that ‘they are afraid of everything except bullets,’ and still less in the spirit _de la démocratie militante_ and the red republic.... Why did Mathieu go to the right when the revolting peasants were on the left?

A few days later—like yellow leaves driven before the wind—the luckless victims of the suppressed rising began streaming into Nice. There were so many of them that the Piedmont government allowed them to remain for a time in a sort of bivouac or gypsy camp near the town. How many ruined fortunes and privations have we seen in these camps!—that is the horrible side behind the scenes of civil wars; usually concealed behind the big framework and gay scene-painting of such events as the 2nd of December.

Here were simple peasants, gloomily pining for home, for their land, and naïvely saying: ‘We are not rebels at all—and not “_partageux_”; we tried to defend public order as good citizens: _ce sont ces coquins_ who called us out’ (_i.e._ the officials, mayors, and gendarmes)—‘they were false to their oath and their duty, and must we now die of hunger in a foreign land or face a court-martial?... Where’s the justice in that?’

And indeed, a _coup d’état_ like the 2nd of December destroys more than men: it destroys all morality, every conception of good and evil in a whole population; it is a lesson of corruption which cannot pass without effect. Among them were soldiers too, _troupiers_, in a permanent state of wonder at finding themselves, contrary to all discipline and their captains’ orders, on a different side from their flag and their regiment. The number of these was not great, however. There were also simple bourgeois of humble means, who never make the same repulsive impression on me as the more pretentious—pitiful, narrow-minded people, they had somehow, in the midst of the petty cheating of trade, laboriously assimilated two or three notions or half-notions of their duties, and they had risen in defence of them when they saw their holy things trampled upon.

‘It is the triumph of egoism,’ they said; ‘yes, yes, of egoism, and where there is egoism there is vice; every one ought to do his duty without egoism.’

There were, too, of course, town workmen, the real genuine element of revolution, striving to obtain _la sociale_ by decree—and to pay out the bourgeois and the aristocrat as they paid them out.

Of course, among them there were wounded, terribly wounded, too. I remember two middle-aged peasants who had crawled, leaving a track of blood, from the frontier to a suburb where the inhabitants picked them up half dead. A gendarme had been chasing them, and, seeing the frontier was not far off, he fired at one and shattered his shoulder.... The wounded man still ran on.... The gendarme fired once more, the wounded man fell; then he galloped after the other and overtook him, first with a bullet and then himself. The second wounded man surrendered; the gendarme tied him in haste to his horse, and all at once missed the first man ... he had crawled to a copse and started running.... To overtake him on horseback was difficult, especially with the other wounded man; to leave the horse behind impossible.... The gendarme shot his prisoner ‘_à bout portant_’ from the top of his head downwards; the man fell unconscious: the bullet tore open the whole right side of his face, splintering the bones. When he came to himself there was no one there; he made his way along familiar paths trodden by the smugglers as far as Var, and crossed it and passed through it almost bleeding to death; there he found his comrade utterly exhausted, and with him succeeded in _surviving_ as far as the first houses of Ste. Hélène. There, as I have said, the inhabitants took care of them. The first man said that after being shot he had hidden in some bushes, that afterwards he had heard voices, that the pursuing gendarmes had probably come upon others and so made off.

How zealous are the French police!

This example was followed by the zealous _maires_ and their deputies, the _procureurs_ of the _republic_ and prefects; the zeal was displayed in the elections and counting of votes: all this was typically French, and familiar to everybody. I will only say that in remote parts the steps taken for attaining an immense majority at the polls were of a rustic simplicity. On the farther side of the Var, in the first village, the _maire_ and brigadier of gendarmes sat beside the urns and looked at every ballot-paper any one put in, saying on the spot that they would make mince-meat of any rebel. The government voting-papers were printed on special paper—so it worked out that there were in the whole village only some five or six bold, unruly spirits who voted against the plebiscite; the rest, and with them the whole of France, voted for the Empire _in spe_.

_SECTION TWO_

RUSSIAN SHADOWS

I

N. I. SAZONOV

Sazonov, Bakunin, Paris. Those names, those men, that city, take me back ... back into the far-away past, to the days of youthful conspiracies, to the days of the cult of philosophy and the worship of revolution.

My youth with each is too precious for me not to pause over it.... With Sazonov, early in the ’thirties, I shared our boyish dreams of a plot _à la_ Rienzi ... with Bakunin, ten years later, in the sweat of my brains, I mastered Hegel.

Of Bakunin I have spoken already and shall have much more yet to say. His striking personality, his eccentric and vigorous appearance, everywhere—in the circle of Moscow youth, in the lecture-room of the Berlin University, among Weitling’s communists, and Caussidière’s Montagnards—his speeches in Prague, his leadership in Dresden, his trial, imprisonment, sentence to death, torture in Austria, deportation to Russia—where he vanished behind the terrible walls of the Alexeyevsky Ravelin—make of him one of those individual figures which neither the contemporary world nor history can overlook.

That man had within him the latent power of a colossal activity for which there was no demand. Bakunin was capable of becoming an agitator, a tribune, a preacher, the head of a party or of a sect, an arch heretic or a fighter. Put him down anywhere you like, at any extreme point—an Anabaptist, a Jacobin, a comrade of Anacharsis Cloots or a friend of Gracchus Babeuf—and he would have won over the masses and shaken the destinies of nations.

‘But here under the yoke of Tsars,’

a Columbus without an America or a ship, after against his will serving two years in the artillery and two more in the ranks of Moscow Hegelianism, he made haste to leave the country in which an idea is persecuted as an evil intention, and an independent word as an offence against social morality.

After tearing himself from Russia in 1840, he did not return there until a picket of Austrian dragoons handed him over to a Russian officer of gendarmes in 1849.

The worshippers of teleology, the charming fatalists of rationalism, are still surprised at the provident appropriateness with which great talents and leaders appear as soon as there is a need for them; forgetting how many germs perish, are stifled without seeing the light, how many faculties and powers waste away because they are not wanted.

Sazonov’s example is still more striking. Sazonov has passed without leaving a trace, and his death has been as unnoticed as the whole of his life. He died without carrying out one of the hopes that his friends built upon him.

It is easy to say he was to blame for his fate; but how can we weigh or appraise how much of the blame rests on the man and how much on his environment?

The age of Nicholas was a soul-destroying age; it murdered not only with labour in the mines and ‘white straps,’ but with its stifling, degrading atmosphere, with its, so to say, negative blows.

To deliver the funeral oration over the submerged beings of that period, worn out with striving to drag our ship off the sandbanks where it has foundered so deeply, is my speciality. For them I play the part of Domazhirov, the old retired orderly of Prozorovsky’s, now forgotten by everybody, but at one time a familiar figure in Moscow. With a powdered head, wearing a light green uniform of the days of Paul, he used to turn up at all the funerals in which a bishop officiated, and, taking the foremost place, led the procession, imagining that he was doing something important.

... In our second year at the university—that is, in the autumn of 1831—in the lecture-room of the faculty of physics and mathematics, Ogaryov and I met, among our new comrades, two with whom we became particularly intimate.

Our likings, our sympathies and antipathies, were all derived from the same source. We were fanatics and lads: learning, art, connections, home, and social position, everything was subordinated to one idea and one religion. Wherever there was an opening for appeal and propaganda, there we were on the spot with all our heart and understanding, persistently, indefatigably, devoting time, work, and even efforts to please.

We went into the lecture-room with the firm determination of founding in it the nucleus of a society in the image and semblance of the Decembrists, and so sought proselytes and followers. The first of our comrades to understand this clearly was Sazonov; we found him completely prepared, and at once made friends. He gave us his hand with full understanding, and next day brought us another student.

Sazonov had conspicuous gifts and conspicuous pride. He was eighteen or rather less, but in spite of that he had studied a great deal and had read everything in the world. He tried to dominate his comrades, and put no one on a level with himself. That was why he was more respected than loved by them. His friend, as handsome and soft as a girl, seemed asking sympathy and support; full of love and devotion, fresh from under his mother’s wing, with noble impulses and half-childish dreams, he longed for warmth and tenderness, he clung to us and gave himself up entirely to us and our idea—his was the character of Vladimir Lensky, the character of Venevitinov.

... The day on which we sat side by side on one of the benches of the amphitheatre, glanced at each other with the full consciousness of our dedication to our league, our secret, our readiness to face death, our faith in the sacredness of our cause—and glanced with loving pride at the multitude of handsome young heads about us, as at a band of brothers—was a great day in our life. We gave each other our hands and _à la lettre_ went out to preach freedom and struggle in all the four quarters of our youthful ‘universe,’ like the four deacons who go on Easter Day with the Four Gospels in their hands.

We preached in every place at every time ... exactly what it was we preached it is hard to say. Our ideas were vague: we preached the Decembrists and the French Revolution, then advocated St. Simonism and the same revolution; we advocated a constitution and a republic, the reading of political works and the concentration of forces in one society. Most of all we preached hatred for every form of violence, for every sort of arbitrary tyranny practised by governments.

Our society in reality was never formed; but our propaganda sent down deep roots in all the faculties, and extended far beyond the university walls.

Since those days our propaganda has gone on uninterrupted, all our lives, from university lecture-room to London printing-press. Our whole life has been the carrying out of our boyish programme as far as lay in our power. It is not hard to follow the connecting thread through the questions we have touched upon, through the interests aroused by us, in journals, in lectures, in literary circles.... Though it took different forms and developed, our propaganda remained true to itself and retained its individual character in every surrounding.

Punishment lifted us up and gave us the prestige of prison and exile. We came back to Moscow, ‘authorities’ at five-and-twenty. We were joined by Byelinsky, Granovsky, and Bakunin, while through our articles in _Notes on the Fatherland_ we ourselves joined the Petersburg movement of the Lyceum students and the young literary men. The Petrashev group were our younger brothers as the Decembrists were our elder ones. To be silent about the importance of our circle because I belonged to it would be hypocritical and stupid. Quite the contrary: whenever in my memoirs I come upon those days, on old friends of the ’thirties and the ’forties, I purposely pause and speak regardless of repetition if only I can make the younger generation better acquainted with them. It does not know them, it has forgotten them, it does not care for them, and denounces them as unpractical and unbusinesslike, as men who did not know so well where they were going; it is angry with them, and rejects them wholesale as out of date, as idle and superfluous men, as fantastic dreamers, forgetting that the value of men of the past, their significance and the hall-mark of them, depends less on the comparison of the sum of knowledge, and the manner of formulating problems of the old period and of the new, than on the energy and strength they brought to their solution. I have a desperate longing to save the younger generation from the ingratitude of history, and even from the mistakes of history. It is time for the fathers to cease devouring their children like Saturn, but it is time for the children, too, to cease following the example of the natives of Kamschatka, who kill off their old people.

Boldly, and with full conviction, I say once more of our comrades of those days ‘that they were a wonderful set of young men, that such a circle of talented, pure-hearted, cultured, intelligent, and devoted men I have never met,’ and I have wandered pretty widely about the world among all classes, and especially the revolutionary ones. I am not only speaking of my own circle of intimate friends; I am bound to say the same thing as emphatically of Stankevitch’s circle and the Slavophils. Young men, horror-stricken by the infamies of the life about them, surrounded by gloom and oppressive misery, gave up all and went in search of a way out. They sacrificed everything that others strive after—social position, wealth, everything which the traditional life offered them, to which environment and example drew them, to which their family urged them—for the sake of their convictions, and they remained true to them. Such men cannot be simply put on the archives and forgotten.

They are persecuted, arrested, put under police supervision, exiled, dragged from place to place, overwhelmed with insults and humiliations—they remain the same: ten years pass—they are still the same: twenty, thirty years pass—they are still the same. I demand that a recognition be accorded them and justice be done to them.

To this simple demand I have heard a strange objection, and more than once, too: ‘You, and even more the Decembristi, were the dilettanti of revolutionary ideas; interest in the cause was for you a luxury, something romantic; you say yourselves that you all _sacrificed_ social position; you had means, so for you the revolution was not a question of bread and butter and of human existence, the question of life and death....’

‘I imagine,’ I answered once, ‘that for those who were executed it was....’

‘Anyway, they were not momentous, inevitable questions for you. You like to be revolutionaries, and that of course is better than if you like to be senators or governors; for us the struggle with the existing order is not a matter of choice, it is due to _our_ social position. Between you and us there is the difference between the man who has fallen into the water and the man who is bathing; both have to swim, but one does it from necessity and the other for pleasure.’

To refuse recognition to men because they have done from inner impulse what others _are going_ to do from necessity is remarkably like the monastic asceticism which only attaches value to duties the fulfilment of which is very disgusting.

Extreme views of this sort easily take root among us; and though the roots do not go deep, they are as hard to eradicate as horse-radish.

We are greatly given to theoretical pedantry and argumentativeness. This German propensity is in us associated with a special national element—which we might call the Araktcheyev element—a ruthlessness, a passionate rigidity, and an eagerness to despatch our victims. To satisfy his grenadier ideal, Araktcheyev flogged living peasants to death; we flog to death ideas, arts, humanity, past leaders, anything you like. In dauntless array we advance step by step to the limit and overshoot it, never sinning against logic but only against _truth_; unaware, we go on further and further, forgetting that real sense and real understanding of life are shown precisely in stopping short before the extreme ... that is the _halte_ of moderation, of truth, of beauty, that is the perfect balance of the organism.

The oligarchic pretension of the have-nots to be the exclusive sufferers from the social system and to possess a monopoly of the feeling of social injustice is as unjust as all forms of exclusiveness and monopoly. Neither through Christian mercy nor through democratic envy will you ever get beyond charity and violent spoliation, the division of property and universal poverty. In the Church it has remained a theme for rhetoric and a sentimental exercise in compassion; in the ultra-democrats, as Proudhon has observed, it is confined to the feeling of envy and hatred; and in neither case has it gone on to any constructive ideas, to any practical result.

In what way are men to blame who understood the pain of the sufferers before they themselves did, and showed it them, and, what was more, the way of escape too? It was not through starvation that St. Simon the descendant of Charlemagne, and Robert Owen the manufacturer, either of them became apostles of socialism.

This view will not persist; it lacks warmth, goodness, breadth. I should not have referred to it if these critics had not included on their black lists, not only our names, but those of the men who sowed the first seeds of all that has come up and will come up—the Decembrists whom we so deeply honour.

This digression is hardly in place here.

Sazonov was, in fact, an idle man, and wasted immense abilities; frittering his life away in all sorts of trivialities abroad, he was lost like a soldier taken prisoner in his first battle and never able to get home again.

When we were arrested in 1834 and clapped into prison, Sazonov and Ketscher were, by some miracle, untouched. They both lived almost uninterruptedly in Moscow, and talked a great deal but wrote little, and no letters of theirs were found in the possession of any of us. We were sent into exile; Sazonov’s mother succeeded in getting a passport for him to go to Italy. His going abroad and being separated from us may have laid the foundation of all that followed in his life, which was that of a star with no fixed orbit, falling and leaving no trace.

A year later he returned to Moscow; it was just at one of the most stifling and oppressive periods of the last reign. In Moscow he was met by a dead level calm, nowhere a shade of sympathy, nowhere a word of life. We, in the _reserves_ of exile, were cherishing our past life, were living in hope and memory, were working and learning something of the coarse realities of provincial existence.

In Moscow everything reminded Sazonov of our absence. Of his old friends, the only one on the spot was Ketscher, with whom Sazonov, a man of stiff and aristocratic manners, was less able to be intimate than with any of the rest. Ketscher, as we have said, was an intellectual savage—a cultured one, a pioneer from Fenimore Cooper, returning intentionally to the primeval state of the human race, rude on principle, slovenly through theory, a student of five-and-thirty in the part of a Schilleresque youth. Sazonov struggled on and on in Moscow—he was consumed by boredom, he had no motive for work, for activity. He tried moving to Petersburg; that was even worse: _à la longue_ he could not stand it, and went to Paris with no definite plan. Those were the days when France and Paris still had a spell of magic for us. Our tourists glided over the polished surface of French life, knowing nothing of its rough side, and were in raptures over everything—over the liberal speeches, over the songs of Béranger and the caricatures of Philipon. It was the same with Sazonov. But he found nothing to do there either. Noisy, lively idleness succeeded to his life of dumbness and oppression. In Russia he had been bound hand and foot, here he was a stranger to every one and everything. Another long series of years of aimless excitement and over-stimulated nerves began for him in Paris. He was incapable of concentrating, of devoting himself to intellectual work without waiting for some impelling force from outside; it was not in his character. The impersonal interest in science was not strong enough in him; he was looking for some activity, and would have been ready for any amount of work so long as it was conspicuous, so long as it could be rapidly applied and realised in practice—and it must have been, too, with noise and acclamation, amidst applause and the outcry of his enemies. Not finding such work, he flung himself into the dissipations of Paris.

... Yet his eyes, too, glowed and filled with tears at the memories of our dreams as students. In the recesses of his deeply wounded vanity there still was faith that the revolution in Russia was close at hand, and that he was called to play a great part in it. It seemed as though he were carousing only _meanwhile_, in the wearisome suspense of waiting for the great work before him, and were convinced that one fine evening he would be summoned from the table in the Café Anglais and borne off to govern Russia.... He kept intent watch on what was being done, and impatiently awaited the moment when he would have to take part in earnest and utter the last decisive word.

After my first noisy days in Paris, more serious conversation began, and at once it was evident that we were tuned to very different keys. Sazonov and Bakunin were (like Wysocki and the members of the Polish Central Committee later on) displeased that the news I brought was more concerning the literary and university world than political spheres. They were expecting to be told about parties, secret societies, ministerial crises (under Nicholas!), the opposition (in 1847!), while I talked about professorships, about Granovsky’s public lectures, about Byelinsky’s articles, about the state of mind of the students and even of the seminarists. They had been too long divorced from Russian life, and had entered too thoroughly into the interests of the ‘all-world’ revolution and French problems to remember that among us the appearance of _Dead Souls_ was an event of far more consequence than the appointment of a couple of Paskevitches as field-marshals and a couple of Filarets as metropolitans. With no Russian books and papers and no regular means of communication, they judged of everything in Russia theoretically and from memory, which throws an artificial light on everything far away.

The difference of our views almost led to a breach between us. It happened like this. On the day before Byelinsky left Paris we saw him home in the evening, and went for a walk in the Champs-Élysées. I saw with terrible clearness that all was over for Byelinsky, that I was pressing his hand for the last time. The mighty, passionate fighter had burnt himself out, death had laid its unmistakable imprint on his face, wan with suffering; he was in acute consumption, but still full of holy energy and holy indignation, still full of his agonising, angry love for Russia. I had a lump in my throat and for a long time I walked in silence, when the unlucky argument which had been ten times already _sur le tapis_ was renewed once more.

‘It is a pity,’ observed Sazonov, ‘that Byelinsky has had no career but journalistic work, and under the censorship, too.’

‘I think it is hard to reproach him, of all people, for doing little,’ I answered.

‘Well, with abilities like his he might in other circumstances and in another field have done rather more....’

I felt vexed and wounded. ‘But do tell me, please, you now, who are not under the censorship, who are so full of faith in yourselves, so full of strength and talent, what have you done? Or what are you doing? Surely you don’t imagine that walking from one end of Paris to the other every day to discuss the boundaries of Poland and Russia with Sluzalski or Chotkewicz is doing something? Or that your talks in cafés and at home, where five fools listen and understand nothing, while another five understand nothing and talk, is doing something?’

‘Wait a bit, wait a bit,’ said Sazonov, by now considerably nettled: ‘you forget our position.’

‘What position? You have been living here for years in freedom, in no dire extremity: what more do you want? Positions are created. Strong men make themselves acknowledged and force themselves in. Come, come: one critical article of Byelinsky’s is of far more value for the younger generation than playing at being conspirators and politicians. You are living in a sort of delirium and somnambulism, in a perpetual optical illusion with which you deceive your own eyes....’

I was particularly irritated at the time by the two different standards which not only Sazonov but Russians in general applied in appreciating people. Their severe criticism of their own people was transformed into slavish worship before French celebrities. It was annoying to see our friends kow-tow before those champion babblers, who flung them a word, a phrase, a commonplace, uttered with _vitesse accélérée_; and the more meekly the Russians behaved, the more they blushed and tried to conceal their idols’ ignorance (as tender parents and sensitive husbands do), the more the latter gave themselves airs and swaggered before their hyperborean Anarchases.[90]

Sazonov even as a student in Russia had been fond of surrounding himself with a retinue of all sorts of mediocrities, who listened to him and followed his lead; and here, too, he was surrounded by all sorts of _lazzarone_ of the literary haunts, feeble in mind and body, penny-a-liners, journalistic scavengers such as the gaunt Jules Vécourt, the half-crazy Tardif de Melot, the unknown but great poet Bouilhet;[91] in his chorus, too, were the most narrow-minded Poles, followers of Towjanski, and dull-witted German atheists. How it was they did not bore him is his secret. He almost always brought one or two attendants from his chorus even when he came to me, although I was always bored by them and did not conceal the fact. It seemed particularly odd, too, that he himself was in the position of a Jules Vécourt in his relation to the Marrasts, the Ribeyrolles,[92] and even lesser celebrities.

All this is not quite intelligible for contemporary visitors to Paris. It must not be forgotten that the present Paris is not the _real_ Paris, but a new one.

Having become a sort of gathering-place for the whole world Paris has ceased to be a pre-eminently French city. In old days all France was in Paris, and nothing besides; now all Europe is there, and the two Americas besides, but there is less of itself: it has become merged in its function of a world-hotel, a caravanserai, and has lost its individual personality, which once inspired ardent love and burning hate, boundless respect and unlimited aversion.

I need hardly say that the attitude of foreigners to modern Paris has changed. The Allied troops who bivouacked in the Place de la Révolution knew that they had taken a foreign town. The tourist who puts up there now regards Paris as his own; he buys it, he plays with it, and knows very well that he is essential to Paris, and that the old Babylon has rigged herself out, rouged and powdered, not for her own sake but for his.

In 1847 I found still the old Paris—moreover, Paris with a quickened pulse, that had been singing Béranger’s songs, with the chorus ‘_Vive la réforme!_’ changed unawares into ‘_Vive la République!_’

Russians still in those days lived in Paris with an ever-present sense of thankfulness to Providence (and to the regular despatch of remittances) that they were living in it, that they were strolling in the Palais Royal and visiting French people. They frankly worshipped lions and lionesses of every description—celebrated doctors and dancing-girls, the dentist Désirabode and the mad Ma-Pa, and all the literary charlatans and political jugglers of the day.

I hate the systematic, _prémédité_ insolence which is the fashion among us. I recognise in it the family traits of the old bullying and arrogance of our officers and landowners, adapted to the manners of Vassilyevsky Island and its streets. But it must not be forgotten that our cringing before West European authorities has come out of the same barracks, the same government offices, the same antechambers, though it has come out of the other door and is addressed to the grand gentleman, the office chief or the commanding officer. In our lack of anything whatever to which to do homage, except brute force and its symbols, stars and ranks in the service, the craving for some table of grades of merit is easy to understand; but, on the other hand, to what men have not the best of our contemporaries bowed down with tender devotion! Even before Werder and Ruge, those mighty dullards of Hegelianism. From this reverence for Germans it may easily be gathered how far they went in their attitude to Frenchmen, to men who are really remarkable—to Pierre Leroux, for instance, or George Sand herself....

I am ashamed that I was at first carried away, and thought that to talk in a café with the historian of the _Ten Years_,[93] or at Bakunin’s with Proudhon, was something like a promotion, an honour; but in me all attempts at idolatry and fetish-worship do not last long, and very soon give way to complete scepticism.

Three months after I arrived in Paris I began strenuously attacking this form of snobbery, and it was just when my opposition to it was at its height that the argument about Byelinsky took place. Bakunin, with his usual good-heartedness, half assented and laughed; but Sazonov resented it, and continued to regard me as a profane outsider in questions of practical politics. Shortly afterwards I confirmed him in this conviction.

The revolution of February was a complete triumph for him; his journalistic friends received posts in the government, thrones were tottering and leaning for support on poets and doctors. German princelings were asking advice and help from professors and journalists, who only the day before had been persecuted. The Liberals taught them how to fit their narrow crowns on more firmly, that they might not be carried off by the rising hurricane. Sazonov wrote to me in Rome, letter after letter, urging me to come _home_, to Paris, to the one and indivisible republic.

On my return from Italy I found Sazonov preoccupied. Bakunin was not there; he had already gone off to stir up the Western Slavs.

‘You don’t mean to say,’ Sazonov said to me at our first interview, ‘that you don’t see that our _time has come_?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The Russian Government is in an _impasse_.’

‘Why! what has happened? A republic has not been proclaimed in the Peter-Paul Fortress, has it?’

‘_Entendons-nous_, I don’t imagine that we shall have a twenty-fourth of February to-morrow in Russia. No, but the state of public opinion, the torrent of liberal ideas, Austria broken to pieces, Prussia with a constitution, will force the men about the Winter Palace to think a little. They cannot do less than dole out some sort of constitution, _un simulacre de charte_: well, and with that,’ he added with a certain impressiveness, ‘they must have a liberal, cultured ministry who can speak the language of to-day. Have you thought of that?’

‘No!’

‘You queer fellow! Where are they going to get cultured ministers?’

‘Oh, they’ll find them right enough if they want them; but I fancy they won’t look for them.’

‘This scepticism is quite out of place now; _history is being made_, and very rapidly too. Think a minute—the government will have no choice but to appeal to _us_.’

I looked at him, trying to make out whether he was joking. His face was quite serious, it looked a little flushed and nervous with excitement.

‘You mean literally to _us_?’

‘Whether to us personally or to our circle does not matter. But just think again: to whom else can they turn?’

‘Which portfolio will you undertake?’

‘It’s silly of you to laugh. It’s our misfortune that we don’t know how to take advantage of opportunities, _ni se faire valoir_. You keep thinking about your little articles: articles are all very well, but times are changed now; one day in power is worth more than a whole volume of them.’

Sazonov looked with compassion on my unpracticalness, and at last found less sceptical people who put faith in his approaching advent to power. At the end of 1848, two or three German refugees were very regular visitors at the little evening gatherings that were held at Sazonov’s. Among them was an Austrian lieutenant who had distinguished himself as a staff-officer under Messenhauser.[94] Once as he was going out at two o’clock at night in a heavy downpour of rain, the officer complained of his hard lot, reflecting on the considerable distance between the Rue Blanche and the Quartier Latin.

‘Why were you forced to trudge all that way in such weather?’

‘Of course, I was not forced; but, you know, Herr von Sessanoff is vexed if one does not turn up, and I believe that we ought to maintain good relations with him. You know better than I do that with his talent and intellect ... with the position he occupies in his party, what he may rise to be in the coming revolution in Russia....’

‘Well, Sazonov,’ I said to him next day, ‘you have found Archimedes’ point; there is a man who believes in your future portfolio, and that man is Lieutenant So-and-So.’

Time passed, the revolution in Russia did not come off, and no one sent envoys to fetch us home. The sinister days of June had come; Sazonov undertook to write a leading article for the _Epoch_. He spent a long time working at it; read aloud a few fragments, made corrections and alterations, and only just finished it by the winter. He thought it essential ‘to explain the last revolution to Russia.’ ‘Do not expect me,’ he wrote at the beginning, ‘to describe events; others will do that better than I could. I am giving you the significance, the idea of the revolution which has taken place.’ Humble work was not enough for him; whenever he did take up the pen, he wanted to do something extraordinary, something momentous; his mind was always haunted by Tchaadayev’s letter. The article reached Petersburg, was read in friendly circles, and made no impression.

In the summer of 1848, Sazonov founded an International Club. To it he brought all his Tardifs, Germans, and Messianists. With a beaming face he walked up and down the empty room in a dark blue dress-suit. He opened the International Club with a speech addressed to five or six listeners (of whom I was one[95]) by way of audience, the rest of the party being on the platform in the capacity of committee. Sazonov was followed by Tardif de Melot, a dishevelled figure looking half-asleep, who stood up and boomed off a poem in honour of the Club.

Sazonov frowned, but it was too late to stop the poet.

‘_Worcel, Sassonoff, Elinski, Del Balzo, Léonard...._
_Et vous tous...._’

Tardif de Melot bawled with a sort of ecstatic exasperation, unaware of the laughter.

Two or three days afterwards Sazonov sent me one thousand copies of the programme of the opening ceremony; with that the Club ended. Only later on we heard that one of the representatives of humanity, who at that congress represented Spain in particular, and delivered a speech in which he called the executive power _potence ehécoutive_, supposing that was French, narrowly escaped the gallows in England and was sentenced to penal servitude for forging some document.

The failure to become a minister and the collapse of the Club were followed by more modest but far more possible attempts as a journalist. When _La Tribune des Peuples_ was established with Mickiewicz as chief editor, Sazonov took a leading position on the paper, wrote two or three very good articles ... and then ceased, and before the failure of the _Tribune_—that is, before the 13th of June 1849—he was on bad terms with all the staff. To him it all seemed petty and poor, _il se sentait dérogé_, was vexed at it, finished nothing, dropped what he had begun and flung aside what was half done.

In 1849 I suggested to Proudhon to give the post of foreign editor of the _Voix du Peuple_ to Sazonov. With his knowledge of four languages, of literature, of politics, of the history of all the European nations, and his wide acquaintance with political parties, he might have done wonders for the French with this part of the paper. Proudhon had nothing to do with the internal arrangements of the foreign news department, it was in my hands, but I could do nothing from Geneva. A month later Sazonov handed the foreign editorship to Hoetsky and severed his connection with the paper. ‘I have a great respect for Proudhon,’ he wrote to me in Geneva, ‘but there is not room on one journal for two such personalities as mine and his.’

A year later Sazonov joined _La Réforme_, then being revived by the followers of Mazzini. Lamennais was the chief editor. But on that paper also there was not room for two great men. Sazonov worked on it for three months, and then threw up _La Réforme_. With Proudhon he had fortunately parted peacefully, but he quarrelled with Lamennais. Sazonov charged the niggardly old man with using the funds of the paper for his personal ends. Lamennais, recalling the habits of his clerical youth, resorted to what is the _ultima ratio_ in Western Europe, and spread concerning Sazonov the suggestion that he might be an agent of the Russian Government.

The last time I saw Sazonov was in Switzerland in 1851. He had been deported from France, and was living in Geneva. This was at the very greyest, most oppressive period; a brutal reaction was triumphant everywhere. Sazonov’s faith in France and in the coming change in the ministry in Petersburg was shaken. He was bored and worried by his idle life, did not succeed with any work, caught at everything without perseverance, lost his temper, and drank. Moreover, the life of petty cares and the everlasting struggle with creditors, the effort to obtain money, together with the talent for flinging it away and the incapacity for ordering his life, brought a great deal of nervous irritability and dismal prose into Sazonov’s daily existence; by then his life of reckless gaiety was no longer an enjoyment but a habit, while in old days he really had known how to enjoy himself.

A few words about his domestic life will not be out of place, especially as it was distinguished by the same note of gay recklessness, and was not without its striking contrasts in colour.

In the early years of his Parisian life Sazonov met a wealthy widow, and his connection with her drew him still further into a life of luxury. She went off to Russia, leaving him plenty of money and their daughter to bring up. The widow had scarcely had time to reach Petersburg when her place was filled by a buxom Italian with a voice at which the walls of Jericho would have fallen once more.

Two or three years later the widow took it into her head to pay her friend and her daughter a quite unexpected visit. She was struck by the Italian woman.

‘What person is this?’ she asked, scanning her from head to foot.

‘Lili’s nurse, and a very good one.’

‘But how can she teach her to speak French with such an accent? That’s a pity. I had better find a Parisian and you get rid of this one.’

‘_Mais, ma chère_....’

‘_Mais, mon cher_ ...’ and the widow took her daughter away.

This was not only an emotional but a financial crisis. Sazonov was far from being poor; his sisters sent him twenty thousand francs a year from the revenue of his estate. But, being accustomed to spend it recklessly, he did not think of diminishing his establishment, but resorted to borrowing. He borrowed right and left, got what he could from Russia out of his sisters, borrowed from friends and enemies, borrowed from money-lenders, from fools, from Russians and non-Russians. For a long time he managed and kept afloat in this way, but at last got into trouble, and was thrown into Clichy, as I have mentioned already.