Chapter IX: Appendix (1)

1

THE STEAMER ‘WARD JACKSON’

This is what happened two months before the Polish rebellion: a Pole, one Joseph Cwerczakiewicz, who had come for a brief visit from Paris to London, was on his return to Paris seized and arrested, together with C. and M., the latter of whom I have mentioned in connection with the interview with members of the Polish Committee.

There was a good deal that was strange about the whole arrest. C. had arrived between 9 and 10 in the evening; he knew no one in Paris and went straight to M.’s lodging. About 11 o’clock the police made their appearance and asked for his passport.

‘Here it is,’ and C. gave the police officer a passport with another name on it and a perfectly regular _visa_.

‘To be sure, to be sure,’ said the man, ‘I knew you were travelling under that name. Now your portfolio,’ he asked Cwerczakiewicz. It was lying on the table. The policeman took out the papers, looked through them, and handing his companion a brief letter addressed E. A., said: ‘Here it is.’

All three were arrested, and their papers taken from them; afterwards they were released. C. was kept longer than the rest. For the sake of the prestige of the police they wanted him to tell his name. He would not give them this gratification. He, too, was released a week later. When, a year or more afterwards, the Prussian Government initiated the very absurd Posen Trial, the prosecutor presented among the incriminating documents papers sent him by the Russian police which had belonged to Cwerczakiewicz. When the question how these papers had found their way to Russia was raised, the prosecutor calmly explained that when Cwerczakiewicz was under arrest, some of his papers had been handed over by the French police to the Russian Embassy.

The released Poles were ordered to leave France; they came to London. In London they themselves told me all the details of their arrest, and were very justly most surprised at the police officer’s knowing that they had a letter addressed to E. A. Mazzini had given this letter with his own hands to Cwerczakiewicz, asking him to hand it to Étienne Arago.

‘Did you tell any one about the letter?’ I asked him.

‘No one, absolutely no one,’ answered Cwerczakiewicz.

‘There is some sorcery about it; no suspicion can fall on you or on Mazzini. Think a little.’

Cwerczakiewicz mused. ‘I know one thing,’ he observed. ‘I did go out for a short time, and I remember I left the portfolio in an unlocked drawer.’

‘A clue! A clue! Now, allow me, where were you living?’

‘In So-and-so Street in furnished apartments.’

‘Was the landlord an Englishman?’

‘No, a Pole.’

‘Better still. And his name?’

‘Tur; he is a specialist in agriculture.’

‘And in many other things, since he lets furnished rooms. I know a little of that Tur. Did you ever hear a story about a fellow called Michalowski?’

‘I have heard it alluded to.’

‘Well, I will tell you the story. In the autumn of 1857 I received a letter from Petersburg _via_ Brussels. An unknown person informed me with the fullest details that a shopman at Trübner’s called Michalowski had offered his services to the Third Section for spying on us, asking for two hundred pounds for his trouble; that, in proof of his merit and capacity, he had presented a list of the persons who had been at our house of late, and promised to furnish specimens of manuscripts from the printing-press. Before I had properly considered what to do, I received a second letter to the same effect through Rothschild’s.

‘I had not the slightest doubt of the truth of the information. Michalowski, a cringing, repulsive, drunken, nimble Pole from Galicia, speaking four languages, had every qualification for the calling of a spy and was only waiting the opportunity _pour se faire valoir_.

‘I made up my mind to go with Ogaryov to Trübner’s to unmask Michalowski and make him commit himself, and in any case to get him dismissed from Trübner’s. To add to the impressiveness of our visit, I invited Pianciani and two Poles to go with me. Michalowski was insolent, loathsome, and denied the charge; he declared that Napoleon Szestacowski, who lived in the same lodging with him, was a spy. I was quite prepared to believe that half of what he said was true, that is, that his friend was also a spy. I told Trübner that I asked for his immediate dismissal from the bookshop. The wretch contradicted himself and could not bring forward anything worth considering in his defence. “It is all envy,” he said. “As soon as one of us has a good coat to wear, the others begin shouting ‘Spy!’” “Why is it then,” Zeno Swentoslawski asked him, “that though you have never had a good coat you have always been looked upon as a spy?” Every one laughed. “You don’t seem to resent it,” said Czenecki. “It is not the first time,” answered the philosopher, “that I have had to do with crazy fellows like you.” “You are used to it,” observed Czenecki.

‘The scoundrel walked away.

‘All the decent Poles abandoned him, with the exception of gamblers who were complete drunkards and drunkards who were completely ruined at cards. Only one decent person has remained on friendly terms with this Michalowski, and that man is your landlord, Tur.’

‘Yes, that is suspicious. I will go at once....’

‘Why at once? You can’t set things right now, but keep an eye on the man. What proofs have you?’

Soon after this, Cwerczakiewicz was appointed by the Polish Committee their diplomatic agent in London. He was allowed to visit Paris; it was just at that time that Napoleon felt that ardent sympathy with the fate of Poland which cost her one whole generation and may perhaps cost her the whole of the next one.

Bakunin was already in Sweden, making friends with every one, opening ways for ‘Land and Freedom’ across Finland, arranging for the despatch of the _Kolokol_ and of books, and interviewing representatives of all the Polish parties. Received by the Ministers and the brother of the King, he assured every one of the approaching insurrection of the peasants and the state of intense mental ferment in Russia. He assured them the more readily as he himself _sincerely believed_, if not in the actual strength of these movements, at least in their growing power. No one dreamed at that time of Lapinski’s expedition. Bakunin’s intention was, after arranging everything in Sweden, to make his way into Poland and Lithuania.

Cwerczakiewicz came back from Paris with Demontowicz. In Paris he and his friends formed a design of fitting out an expedition to the shores of the Baltic. They wanted to find a steamer and wanted to find a capable leader; and with that end in view came to London. This is how they conducted secret negotiations.

One day I received a little note from Cwerczakiewicz: he asked me to go to see him for a minute, said it was a matter of urgent necessity and that he had caught a chill and was lying in bed with an acute migraine. I went. I did in fact find him ill and in bed. S. Tchorszewski was sitting in the next room, knowing that Cwerczakiewicz had written to me and that he had business with me. Tchorszewski would have gone out, but Cwerczakiewicz stopped him, and I am very glad that there is a living witness of our conversation.

Cwerczakiewicz asked me, laying aside all personal feelings and considerations, to tell him quite sincerely, and of course in dead secret, about a Polish exile in whom he had not complete confidence, though he had been introduced to him by Mazzini and Bakunin. ‘You don’t much care for him, I know, but now, where it is a matter of the utmost importance, I expect from you the truth, and the whole truth.’

‘You are speaking of L. B.?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

I hesitated. I felt that I might injure a man of whom, anyway, I knew nothing particularly bad; on the other hand, I knew what harm I might be doing to the common cause by arguing against Cwerczakiewicz’s perfectly sound instinct of antipathy.

‘Very well, I will speak openly and tell you everything. As regards Mazzini’s and Bakunin’s recommendation, I disregard that completely. You know how I love Mazzini; but he is so accustomed to carve his agents out of every sort of wood and mould them out of any sort of clay, and knows so well how to keep them in hand in the Italian party, that it is hard to rely on his opinion. Besides, though he makes use of everything he can get, Mazzini knows to what degree and with what business to trust each. Bakunin’s recommendation is even worse: he is a great child—“a big Liza,” as Martyanov used to call him—he likes every one. A fisher of men, he is so delighted when he comes upon a “Red,” especially if he is a Slav, that he goes no further. You referred to my personal relations with L. B. I ought to speak of that too. Z. and L. B. tried to exploit me: it was not he but Z. who took the initiative. They did not succeed in that, they were very angry, and I should long ago have forgotten it; but they came between Worcell and me, and that I have not forgiven. I loved Worcell very much, but, being frail in health, he gave way to them and only realised his mistake (or acknowledged that he realised it) the day before his death. As he lay dying, he pressed my hand and whispered in my ear: “Yes, you were right.” (But there were none to hear, and it is easy to appeal to the witness of the dead.) But here is my opinion: taking everything into account, I cannot find a single action, or a single rumour even, which would compel one to suspect the political honesty of L. B., but I should not let him into any important secret. To my thinking, he is a spoilt _poseur_, filled with French phrases and immensely conceited; anxious to play a part at all costs, he would do everything to spoil the performance if it had not a part for him.’

Cwerczakiewicz got up; he was pale and troubled.

‘Yes, you have taken a weight off my heart; I will do all I can, if it is not too late already.’ Cwerczakiewicz began pacing about the room in perturbation. Soon after I went away with Tchorszewski.

‘Did you hear the whole conversation?’ I asked him as we were going.

‘Yes, I did.’

‘I am very glad of it; don’t forget it; perhaps the day may come when I shall appeal to you ... and do you know, it strikes me that he has told him everything already, and only thought to investigate the grounds of his antipathy afterwards....’

‘Not a doubt of it.’

And we almost burst out laughing, although we were anything but mirthful at heart.

_Moral_

A fortnight later Cwerczakiewicz entered into negotiations with Blackwood’s Steam Company concerning the hiring of a steamer to make an expedition to the Baltic.

‘Why,’ we said, ‘did you apply to the very company which for years past has carried out all the shipping commissions for the Petersburg Admiralty?’

‘I don’t like it myself, but the company knows the Baltic Sea so well. Besides, it is against its interests to betray us; and it is not in the English character either.’

‘All very true, but what made you think of applying to them?’

‘It was done by our agent.’

‘That is?’

‘Tur.’

‘What, _that_ Tur?’

‘Oh, you can set your mind at rest about him. He was most highly recommended to us by L. B.’

For a minute all the blood rushed to my head. I was overwhelmed with the feeling of fury, indignation, resentment—yes, yes, personal resentment—while the delegate of Poland, observing nothing, went on: ‘He has a splendid knowledge of English.’

‘Both of the language and of the laws.’

‘I have no doubt of it.’

‘Tur has been in prison in London for some rather shady affair; and he was employed as an official interpreter in the law courts.’

‘How was that?’

‘You must ask L. B. or Michalowski; don’t you know him?’

‘No.’

Tur was indeed a fellow! He had been a specialist in agriculture, but here he was a specialist in marine affairs. But now all eyes were turned on the head of the expedition, Colonel Lapinski, who arrived upon the scene.

2

COLONEL LAPINSKI AND AIDE-DE-CAMP POLLES

At the beginning of 1863 I received a letter written in a tiny, extraordinarily fine handwriting, and headed with the text: _Licite Venire Parvulos_. In the most elaborately flattering and cringing expressions the _parvulus_, whose name was Polles, asked permission to call upon me. I did not like the letter at all. The man himself I liked even less. A cringing, subdued, furtive man, with a shaven chin and a pomaded head, he told me that he had been at a dramatic school in Petersburg and had received some sort of pension there. He almost overdid the patriotic Pole, and after sitting a quarter of an hour with me, confided that he came from France, that he had been miserable in Paris, and that the centre of everything there was Napoleon.

‘Do you know, it has often struck me, and I am more and more convinced that I am right: the thing to do is to kill Napoleon.’

‘What prevents you then?’

‘What do you think about it?’ Parvulus asked, somewhat embarrassed.

‘I don’t think about it at all. Why, it is you who are thinking about it.’ And I immediately told him the story which I always make use of when people rave about bloody deeds and ask advice concerning them.

‘No doubt you know that when Charles V. was in Rome a page took him over the Pantheon. On returning home, the boy told his father that the idea had occurred to him to push the emperor down from the top gallery. The father flew into a rage: “You” (here I vary the term of abuse to suit the character of the would-be Tsaricide[44]) “wretch, scoundrel, fool, and so on. How can such criminal ideas occur to you? If they can, they are sometimes acted upon, but never spoken of.”’

When Polles had gone, I made up my mind not to be at home to him again. A week later he met me near my house; he told me that he had called twice and had not found me in, talked some sort of nonsense, and added: ‘I called to see you partly to tell you of an invention I have made for sending anything secretly by post, to Russia for instance. You are probably often in need of communicating something in secret?’

‘Quite the contrary, never. I never write to any one in secret. Good morning.’

‘Good-bye. Remember, if ever you or Ogaryov would like a little music, my violoncello and I are at your service.’

‘Very much obliged to you.’

And I lost sight of him in the full conviction that he was a spy—whether a Russian or a French one, I don’t know; perhaps international, as the paper _Le Nord_ is international.

He never turned up among the real Polish exiles, and not one of them knew him.

After a prolonged search, Demontowicz and his Parisian friends had pitched on Colonel Lapinski as the most capable military leader for the expedition. He had fought for a long time in the Caucasus on the side of the Circassians, and understood mountain warfare so thoroughly that there could be no doubt of his skill on the sea. It could not be called a bad choice. Lapinski was in the fullest sense of the word a condottiere. He had no settled political convictions. He could have fought on the side of the White or the Red, the clean or the dirty; belonging by birth to the Galician gentry, by education to the Austrian army, he was strongly inclined towards Vienna. Russia and everything Russian he hated with a savage, irrational and incorrigible hatred. He probably knew his trade, he had spent years in active warfare and had written a remarkable book about the Caucasus.

‘This is what happened to me once in the Caucasus,’ Lapinski used to tell. ‘A Russian major, living with a whole household not far from us, seized some of our people, I don’t know how or why. I heard about it and said to my men, “Look here, it is a sin and a shame; are you stolen like women? Go to his place, take everything you find and bring it here.” They are mountaineers, you know; you don’t need to say much to them. A day or two afterwards they brought me the whole family—servants, wife and children—but they did not find the major himself at home. I sent word to him that if he released our people and paid a ransom, we would give him back our prisoners at once. Of course they sent our men, paid the fine, and we released our Moscow visitors. The next day a Circassian came to me: “Look here,” he said, “what’s happened; when we let the Russians go yesterday,” he said, “a boy of four was forgotten; he was asleep, so he was forgotten; what is to be done?”

‘“Ah, you dogs, you can’t do anything properly; where’s the child?”

‘“With me. He screamed and screamed—well, I was sorry for him and took him home.”

‘“Allah has sent you luck, it seems; I won’t hinder it. Let them know that they have forgotten the child and you have found him, and ask for a ransom.” My Circassian’s eyes fairly sparkled. Of course the father and mother were in a fluster, they gave anything he liked to ask. It was funny.’

‘Very.’

Here is another trait showing the character of the future hero of Polish independence.

Before he set off, Lapinski came to see me. He arrived not alone, and somewhat disconcerted by the expression on my face, made haste to say: ‘Allow me to introduce my adjutant.’

‘I have had the pleasure of meeting him already.’

It was Polles.

‘Do you know him well?’ Ogaryov asked Lapinski when they were alone.

‘I met him in the boarding-house in which I am staying now. He seems a nice fellow and very obliging.’

‘But do you trust him?’

‘Of course. Besides, he plays the violoncello charmingly and will entertain us on the voyage.’

It was said that the colonel found him entertaining in other ways.

We told Demontowicz later on that to our thinking Polles was a very suspicious character. Demontowicz observed: ‘Yes, I don’t trust either of them much, but they won’t play us any tricks’; and he took his revolver out of his pocket.

The preparations proceeded slowly; rumours of the expedition spread more and more widely. At first the company furnished a steamer which on being inspected by an experienced sailor, Count S., turned out to be good for nothing. All the cargo had to be shifted. When everything was ready and a good part of London knew all about it, the following incident occurred: Cwerczakiewicz and Demontowicz informed all who were taking part in the expedition that they were to assemble at ten o’clock on such and such a railway platform to go to Hull by a special train provided by the railway company. And so at ten o’clock the future warriors began to assemble. Among them were Italians and a few Frenchmen; poor, reckless men, sick of a life spent in homeless wandering, and men who were true lovers of Poland. And ten o’clock came and eleven o’clock, but still no train appeared. Little by little, rumours of this long journey reached the homes from which our heroes had mysteriously vanished, and by twelve o’clock the future warriors were joined in the station waiting-rooms by a troop of women, inconsolable Didos deserted by their fierce adorers, and ferocious landladies who had not been paid, probably for fear they should spread the news abroad. In violent excitement they raised a furious uproar, and wanted to complain to the police; some of them had children; all the latter screamed and all the mothers screamed. The English stood round, staring in astonishment at the picture of ‘The Exodus.’ In vain some of the elders of the party inquired whether the special train would soon come in, and showed their tickets. The railway officials had never heard of any such train. The scene was becoming more and more uproarious ... when suddenly a messenger from the leaders galloped up to tell the waiting warriors that they had all gone mad, that the train was at ten o’clock in the evening, not in the morning, and that they had thought this so evident that they had not even written it. The poor warriors returned with their bags and their wallets to their deserted Didos and softened landladies.

At ten o’clock in the evening they went off. The English gave them three cheers.

Next morning a marine officer whom I knew came to me from one of the Russian steamers.

The steamer had received an order the previous evening to set off full steam next morning and follow the _Ward Jackson_.

Meanwhile the _Ward Jackson_ had stopped at Copenhagen for water, had spent some hours at Malmö waiting for Bakunin, who was intending to go with them to incite the peasants in Lithuania to rise, and had been seized by the orders of the Swedish Government.

The details of this affair and of Lapinski’s second attempt have been described by himself in the papers. I will only add that even in Copenhagen the captain had said he would not take the steamer to the coast of Russia, as he did not want to expose it and himself to danger; that even before they reached Malmö things had come to such a pass that Demontowicz threatened not Lapinski but the captain with his revolver. He did, however, quarrel with Lapinski too, and sworn foes they went to Stockholm, leaving their luckless followers at Malmö.

‘Do you know,’ Cwerczakiewicz or some of his associates said to me, ‘the person who is most suspected of being chiefly responsible for the vessel being stopped at Malmö is Tugenbold?’

‘I don’t know him at all. Who is he?’

‘Oh yes, you do, you have seen him with us: a young fellow without a beard—Lapinski brought him to see you once.’

‘Then you are speaking of Polles?’

‘That is his pseudonym, his real name is Tugenbold.’

‘What are you saying?’ and I rushed to my writing-table. Among letters I had put aside as of special importance I found one sent me two months previously. This letter was from Petersburg; it warned me that a certain Dr. Tugenbold was in relations with the Third Section, that he had returned, but had left his younger brother as his agent, and that the younger brother was to come to London.

That Polles and he were one and the same person there could be no doubt. I let my hands fall in despair.

‘Did you know before the expedition started that Polles was Tugenbold?’

‘Yes I knew. It was said he had changed his name because his brother was known in the country for a spy.’

‘Why didn’t you say a word to me?’

‘Oh, it just didn’t come up.’

And Tchitchikov’s Selifan[45] knew that the chaise was broken and did not say a word.

We had to telegraph to Malmö after the arrest. Even then neither Demontowicz nor Bakunin[46] could do anything effective; they quarrelled. Polles was thrown into prison over some diamonds collected from Swedish ladies for the Polish cause and spent by him on riotous living.

At the same time that a crowd of armed Poles, a large quantity of expensive ammunition, and the _Ward Jackson_ remained honourable prisoners on the coast of Sweden, another expedition was being got up by the Whites; it was to go by way of the Straits of Gibraltar. At the head of it was Count Sbyszewski, brother of the man who wrote the remarkable pamphlet, _La Pologne et la Cause de l’Ordre_. He was a first-rate naval officer in the Russian service, but he abandoned it when the insurrection broke out, and now took a steamer, which had been secretly equipped, to the Black Sea. He had been to Turin for a secret interview with the leaders of the opposition there, among others with Mordini.

‘The day after my interview with Sbyszewski,’ Mordini himself told me, ‘the Minister of Internal Affairs drew me aside in the evening and said: “Do please be more careful; you were visited yesterday by a Polish emissary who wants to take a steamer through the Straits of Gibraltar; be that as it may, why do they chatter about it beforehand?”’

The steamer, however, did not reach the shores of Italy: it was seized at Cadiz by the Spanish Government. When they no longer needed them, both the Governments allowed the Poles to sell their arms and let the steamers go.

Disappointed and incensed, Lapinski arrived in London. ‘The only thing left to do,’ he said, ‘is to form a society of assassins and kill the greater number of all the rulers and their advisers, or to go back again to the East, to Turkey.’

Disappointed and incensed, Sbyszewski arrived.

‘Well, are you going off to kill kings, like Lapinski?’

‘No, I am going to America.... I am going to fight for the Republic. By the way,’ he asked Tchorszewski, ‘where can one enlist here? I have a few comrades with me, and all without bread to eat.’

‘Simply, at the Consul’s.’

‘No, we want to go on to the South; they are short of men now, and they offer more favourable conditions.’

‘Impossible; you could not go to the South!’

... Fortunately Tchorszewski guessed right; they did not go to the South.

_May 3, 1869._

FRAGMENTS (1867 TO 1868)

1

SWISS VIEWS

Ten years ago, as I was going through the Haymarket late one cold damp winter evening, I came upon a negro, a lad of seventeen; he was barefooted and without a shirt, and in fact rather undressed for the tropics than dressed for London. Shivering all over, with his teeth chattering, he begged from me. Two days later I met him again, and then again and again. At last I got into conversation with him. He spoke a broken English-Spanish, but it was not hard to understand the meaning of his words.

‘You are young and strong,’ I said to him, ‘why don’t you get work?’

‘No one will give it me.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I know no one here who would give me a character.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘From a ship.’

‘What sort of ship?’

‘A Spanish one; the captain beat me very much, so I went away.’

‘What did you do on board ship?’

‘Everything: brushed the clothes, washed up, did the cabins.’

‘What do you mean to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you will die of cold and hunger, you know, or anyway you will certainly get a bad cold.’

‘What am I to do?’ said the negro in despair, looking at me and shivering all over with cold.

‘Well,’ I thought, ‘here goes. It is not the first silly thing I have done in my life.’

‘Come with me. I’ll give you clothes and a corner to sleep in; you shall scrub my rooms, light the fires and stay as long as you like, if you behave quietly and properly. _Si no—no._’

The negro jumped with joy.

Within a week he was fatter, and gaily did the work of four. So he spent six months with us; then one evening he made his appearance at my door, stood a little while in silence, and then said to me:—

‘I have come to say good-bye to you.’

‘How’s that?’

‘For now it is enough, I am going.’

‘Has anybody been nasty to you?’

‘No, indeed, I am content with all.’

‘Then where are you going now?’

‘To some ship.’

‘What for?’

‘I am dreadfully sick of it, I can’t stand it, I shall do a mischief if I stay. I want the sea. I will go away and come back again, but for now it is enough.’

I made an effort to keep him; he stayed on for three days, and then announced for the second time it was more than he could stand, that he must go away, that ‘for now it is enough.’

That was in the spring.

In the autumn he turned up again, tropically divested, and again I clothed him; but he soon began playing various nasty tricks, and even threatened to kill me, and I was obliged to turn him away.

These last facts are irrelevant, but the point is that I completely share the negro’s outlook. After staying a long time in the same place and sticking in the same rut, I feel that for a time _it is enough_, that I must refresh myself with other horizons and other faces ... and at the same time must retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The superficial distractions of the journey do not prevent it.

There are people who prefer to get away _inwardly_, some with the help of a powerful imagination and faculty of abstracting themselves from their surroundings (a peculiar gift bordering on genius and insanity is necessary for this), some with the help of opium or alcohol. Russians, for instance, will have a drinking-bout for a week or two, and then go back to their duties. I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round.

Perhaps it is because I have a bad time after too much wine.

So I meditated on the 4th of October 1866 in a little room of a wretched hotel on the Lac de Neufchâtel where I felt as much at home as though I had lived in it all my life. The craving for solitude, and still more for tranquillity, develops strangely with years.... It was rather a warm night; I opened my window.... Everything was plunged in deep sleep: the town and the lake and the boat which was moored to the bank and faintly heaving, as I could hear from a slight creaking and see from the swinging of the mast which shifted first to the right then to the left....

To know that no one is expecting you, no one will come in to you, that you can do what you like, die perhaps, and no one will hinder you ... no one will care ... is at once dreadful and good. I am certainly beginning to be unsociable, and sometimes regret that I have not the strength to become a secular hermit.

Only in solitude can a man work to the utmost of his power. The free disposal of one’s time and the absence of inevitable interruptions is a great thing. If a man begins to feel dull and tired, he can take his hat and go himself in search of his fellows and rest with them. He has but to go out into the street; the everlasting stream of faces floats by, unending, changing and unchanged, with its flashing rainbow hues and grey froth, its uproar and din. You look at this river of life as an artist, you look at it as at an exhibition, just because you have nothing to do with it. It is all apart from you, and you need nothing from any one.

Next day I got up early, and by eleven o’clock was so hungry that I went for _déjeuner_ to a big hotel which could not take me the evening before for lack of room. In the dining-room there was an Englishman with his wife, from whom he concealed himself with a sheet of _The Times_, and a Frenchman of about thirty, one of the new types which have come up of late: stout, flabby, white, fair-haired, and softly fat, he looked as though he were on the point of melting like jelly in a warm room, but his ample overcoat and trousers of springy material fortunately held him together. No doubt he was the son of some prince of the Bourse or aristocrat of the democratic empire. Listlessly, in a spirit of mistrust and investigation, he was proceeding through his lunch. One could see that he had been engaged upon it for a long time already and was tired of it.

This type, which scarcely existed in old days in France, began to appear in the time of Louis-Philippe and has reached its full blossoming during the last fifteen years. It is very repulsive, and that is perhaps a compliment to the French. The life of an epicure of the _cuisine_ and of wines does not so distort an Englishman or a Russian as it does a Frenchman. The Foxes and the Sheridans drank and ate more than enough, but they remained Foxes and Sheridans. The Frenchman is with impunity devoted only to _literary_ gastronomy, consisting in an elaborate _knowledge_ of dainties and in the ordering of dishes. No other nation _talks_ as much about dinner, about sauces and culinary refinements, as the Frenchman, but that is all a form of flourish and rhetoric. Real gluttony and drunkenness destroy a Frenchman, swallow him up ... his nerves are not fit for that. A Frenchman remains sound and uninjured only when he spends his time flirting with every aspect of life; that is his national passion and favourite weakness—in it he is strong.

‘Will you take dessert?’ asked the waiter, who evidently had more respect for the Frenchman than for us. The young gentleman was at the moment engaged in digestion, and therefore, slowly lifting his weary and lustreless eyes to the waiter, he said: ‘I don’t know yet,’ thought a little, and then added: ‘_Une poire!_’

The Englishman, who had all this time been eating in silence behind the screen of his paper, stirred and said: ‘_Et à moa aussi!_’

The waiter brought two pears on two plates and handed one to the Englishman; but the latter vigorously and emphatically protested: ‘No, no! _aucune chose pour poire!_’ He simply wanted something to drink. He got his drink and stood up; I only then observed that he was wearing a child’s jacket, or spencer, of a light brown colour, and tight-fitting light trousers terribly creased above his boots. The lady too got up; she rose higher and higher still, and at last, terrifically tall, took the arm of her squat husband and went out.

I followed them out with an involuntary smile, completely free from malice; they seemed to me to have ten times as much human dignity as my neighbour, who was unbuttoning the third button of his waistcoat as the lady withdrew.

BASLE.

The Rhine is a natural frontier, not shutting off anything, but dividing Basle into two parts, which does not prevent both sides from being inexpressibly dull. Everything here is oppressed by a threefold dullness: German, commercial and Swiss. It is no wonder that the only artistic work that originated in Basle took the form of a dance of the dying with Death[47]; none but the dead rejoice here, though the German inhabitants are extremely fond of music—of a very grave and elevated character, however. The town is a place of transit; every one passes through it, but nobody stays here except commissioners and carriers of the higher order.

No one could live in Basle apart from a passion for money. Though, indeed, life is dull in Swiss towns as a rule, and not only in Swiss towns, but in all little towns. ‘Florence is a wonderful town,’ said Bakunin, ‘like a delicious sweetmeat ... you are delighted while you eat it, but in a week you are deadly sick of everything sweet.’ That is perfectly true, and nothing need be said about Swiss towns after that. In old days it was quiet and pleasant on the shores of Lake Leman; but since villas have been built all the way from Vevey and whole families of the Russian nobility, impoverished by the calamities of the 19th of February 1861, have taken up their abode in them, it is no place for such as us.

LAUSANNE.

I am passing through Lausanne. Every one passes through Lausanne except the aborigines.

Outsiders do not live in Lausanne, in spite of the marvellous scenery round it and of the fact that the English three times discovered it: once after the death of Cromwell, once in the time of Gibbon, and now when they are building houses and villas in it. Tourists stay only in Geneva.

The thought of that town is in my mind inseparable from the thought of the coldest and driest of great men and the coldest and driest of winds—of Calvin and of the _bise_; I can’t endure either of them. And certainly in every native of Geneva there is something left of the _bise_ and of Calvin, both of which have blown upon him physically and spiritually from the day of his conception and even before, one from the mountains, the other from the prayer-book.

Those two chilling influences, checked and diversified by different currents from Savoy, from Valais, most of all from France, make up the fundamental character of the citizens of Geneva—an excellent character, but not a particularly agreeable one.

However, I am now writing my _impressions de voyage_ while I am _living_ in Geneva. Of that town I will write when I have retreated to an artistic distance....

I reached Freiburg at ten o’clock in the evening and went straight to the Zöhringhof. The same landlord in a black velvet cap who met me in 1851, with the same regular features and condescendingly polite face of a Russian master of the ceremonies, or an English porter, came up to the omnibus and congratulated us on our arrival.

And the dining-room is the same, the same rectangular folding little sofas upholstered in red velvet. Fourteen years have passed over Freiburg like fourteen days! There is the same pride in the cathedral-organ, the same pride in their hanging bridge.

The breath of the new restless spirit, continually shifting and casting down barriers, that was raised by the equinoctial gales of 1848, scarcely touched towns which morally and physically stand apart, such as the Jesuitical Freiburg and the pietistic Neufchâtel. These towns, too, have advanced, though at the pace of a tortoise; they have improved, though they seem to us out of date in their old-fashioned stony garb.... And of course much in the life of old days was not bad; it was more comfortable, more durable; it was better fitted for the small number of the elect, and so it does not do for the vast number of the newly invited, who are far from being spoiled or difficult to please.

Of course, in the present state of technical development, with the discoveries that are being made every day, with the improvement of the resources at our disposal, it is possible to organise modern life on a free and ample scale. But the Western European, as soon as he has a place of his own, is satisfied with little. As a rule, he has been falsely charged, or rather he has charged himself, with the passion for comfort and that love of luxury of which people talk. All that, like everything else in him, is rhetoric and flourish. They have had free institutions without freedom, why not have a brilliant setting for a narrow and clumsy life? There are exceptions. One may find all sorts of things among English aristocrats and French Camélias and the Jewish princes of this world.... All that is personal and temporary; the lords and bankers have no future and the Camélias have no heirs. We are talking about the whole world, about the golden mean, about the chorus and the _corps de ballet_, which now is on the stage, leaving aside the father of Lord Stanley, who has twenty thousand francs a day, and the father of that child of twelve who flung himself into the Thames the other day to relieve his parents of the task of feeding him.

The old tradesman who has grown rich loves to talk of the comforts of life. For him it is a novelty that he is a gentleman _qu’il a ses aises_, ‘that he has the means to do this, and that doing that will not ruin him.’ He glories in money and knows its value and how quickly it flies, while his predecessors in fortune believed neither in its value nor that it could be exhausted, and so have been ruined. But they ruined themselves with good taste. The bourgeois has little notion of making full use of his accumulated riches. The habits of the old narrow, niggardly life he has inherited from his forbears remain. He may indeed spend a great deal of money, but he does not spend it on the right things.

A generation which has come from behind the counter has absorbed standards and ambitions of no wide horizon and cannot get away from them. Everything with them is done as though for sale, and they naturally aim at the greatest possible profit, gain and good bargain. The _propriétaire_ instinctively diminishes the size of his rooms and increases their number, not knowing why he makes the windows small and the ceilings low; he takes advantage of every corner to snatch it from his lodger or from his own family. That corner is of no use to him, but in case he may need it, he will take it from somebody. With peculiar satisfaction he builds two uncomfortable kitchens instead of one good one, puts up a garret for his maid in which she can neither work nor move, but succeeds in making it damp. To compensate for this economy of light and space, he paints the front of the house, loads the drawing-room with furniture, and lays out before the house a flower-bed with a fountain in it, which is a source of tribulation to children, nurses, dogs and workmen. What is not spoilt by miserliness is ruined by lack of intelligence. Science, which cuts its way through the muddy pond of daily life without mingling with it, flings its wealth to right and left, but the boatmen do not know how to catch it. All the profit goes to the wholesale dealers and filters in scanty drops to others; the wholesale dealers are changing the face of the earth, while private life trails along beside their steam-engines in its old lumbering waggon with its broken-down nags....

The fire which does not smoke is a dream. A landlord in Geneva said to me soothingly: ‘This fire _only_ smokes in the _bise_.’ That is only just when one most wants a fire; and he says this as though the _bise_ were something casual or newly invented, as though it had not been blowing since before the birth of Calvin and would not blow after the death of Fazy. In all Europe, not excepting Spain or Italy, one must make one’s will at the approach of winter, as men used to do when they set off on a journey from Paris to Marseilles, and must have a thanksgiving service sung to the Iversky Madonna at mid-April.

Let these people tell me that they are not occupied with such vanities, that they have many other things to do, and I would forgive them their smoky chimneys, and the locks which at once open the door and bleed you, and the stench in the passage, and so on; but I ask, what other work have they, what are their higher interests? They have _none_.... They only make a display of them to cover the inconceivable emptiness and senselessness of their lives.

In the Middle Ages men lived in the very nastiest way and wasted their efforts on utterly useless edifices which did not add to their comfort. But the Middle Ages did not talk about their passion for comfort; on the contrary, the more comfortless their life, the more nearly it approached their ideal; their luxury took the form of the magnificence of the House of God and of their assembly-hall, and there they were not niggardly, they grudged nothing. The knight in those days built a fortress, not a palace, and did not select for a site the most convenient road, but an inaccessible precipice. Now there is no one to defend oneself against, and nobody believes in saving his soul by adorning the church; the peaceful and orderly citizen has dropped out of the forum and the _Rathhaus_, out of the opposition and the club; passions and fanaticisms, religions and heroisms, have all given way to material prosperity: _and that has not been successfully organised_.

For me there is something melancholy, tragic, in all this, as though the world were living anyhow, in expectation of the earth’s giving way under its feet, and were seeking not reconstruction but forgetfulness. I see this not only in the careworn, wrinkled faces, but also in the fear of any serious thinking, in the turning away from any analysis of the position, in the nervous thirst to be busy, to fill up the time with external distractions. The old are ready to play with toys, ‘if only to keep from thinking.’ The fashionable mustard-plaster is an International Exhibition. The remedy and the disease form a sort of intermittent fever centred first in one part and then in another. All are moving, rushing, flying, spending money, striving, staring and growing weary, living even more uncomfortably in order to keep up with _progress_—in what? Why, just progress. As though in three or four years there can be much progress in anything, as though, when we have railways to travel by, there were any necessity to drag from place to place things like houses, machines, stables, cannon, even perhaps parks and kitchen-gardens.

And when they are sick of exhibitions they will take to war and find distraction in the sheaves of dead—anything to avoid seeing certain _black spots_ on the horizon.

2

CHATTER ON THE ROAD AND FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN IN THE BUFFET

‘Is there a seat free for Andermatt?’

‘Most likely there will be.’

‘In the _cabriolet_?’

‘Perhaps; you must come at half-past ten....’

I look at my watch, it is a quarter to three ... and with a feeling of fury I sit down on a seat in front of the café. Noise, shouting, trunks dragged about, horses led, horses needlessly stamping on the stones, waiters from the restaurants fighting over travellers, ladies rummaging among the portmanteaus.... Clack, clack, our diligence has galloped off; clack, clack, another has galloped after it.... The square grows empty, everything has gone away.... The heat is deadly, the sunlight is hideously bright, the stones grow whiter; a dog lies down in the middle of the square, but suddenly leaps up with indignation and runs into the shade. The fat landlord sits in his shirt-sleeves before the café, continually dropping asleep. A peasant-woman comes along with fish. ‘How much are the fish?’ the landlord asks with an expression of intense anger. The woman tells the price. ‘_Carrogna!_’ shouts the landlord. ‘_Ladro!_’ shouts the woman. ‘Go along with you, old she-devil.’ ‘Will you take it, you robber?’ ‘Well, let me have it for _tre venti_ the pound.’ ‘May you die unshriven!’ The landlord takes the fish, the woman takes the money, and their parting is friendly. All their abusive epithets are just an accepted etiquette, like the forms of politeness employed by us.

The dog goes on sleeping, the landlord has taken in the fish and is dozing again, the sun is baking. I can’t sit there any longer. I go into the café, take up a sheet of paper and begin writing, not knowing in the least what I am going to write: a description of the mountains and precipices, of the flowering meadows and bare granite rocks—all that is in the guide ... better talk gossip.... Gossip is the repose of conversation, its dessert, its sauce; only idealists and theoretical people do not like gossip.... But about whom? Why, of course about the subject nearest to our patriotic heart, our charming fellow-countrymen. There are plenty of them everywhere, especially in good hotels.

It is still just as easy to recognise Russians as it always has been. The zoological features noted long ago have not been effaced, though the number of travellers has been so greatly increased. Russians speak in a loud voice where others speak in a low voice, and do not speak at all where others speak loud. They laugh aloud and tell funny stories in a whisper, they quickly make friends with the waiters and slowly with their neighbours. They eat with their knives. The military people look like Germans, but are distinguished from them by the peculiar insolence of the back of their heads and their original bristling hair; the ladies attract attention by their dress in railway trains and steamers, just as Englishwomen do at _table d’hôte_, and so on.

The lake of Thun has become a tank about which our tourists of the higher sort have settled. The _Fremden List_ might have been copied out of a reference book; ministers and grandees, generals of every branch of the service, even of the secret police, are recorded in it. In the hotel-gardens the great _mit Weib und Kind_ enjoy nature, and in the hotel dining-room her gifts.

‘Did you come by Gemmi or Grimsel?’ an Englishwoman will ask her fellow-countrywoman.

‘Are you staying at the Jungfraublick or at the Victoria?’ a Russian woman will ask her fellow-countrywoman.

‘There is the Jungfrau!’ says an Englishwoman.

‘There is Reytern, the Minister of Finance!’ says a Russian.

* * * * *

‘_Intcinq minutes d’arrêt_....’

‘_Intcinq minutes d’arrêt_....’

And every one in the railway carriages hurries into the restaurant and rushes to a table in haste to devour dinner in some twenty minutes, from which the railway authorities will inevitably steal five or six, besides scaring away the appetite with a terrifying bell and shout of ‘_En voiture!_’

A tall lady in black walked in, together with her husband in light-coloured clothes, and with them two children.... A poorly dressed girl with her arms full of bags and parcels walked in with a shy awkward air. She stood a little, then went into a corner and sat down almost beside me. The sharp eye of the waiter detected her; after flying past her with a plate on which lay a slice of roast beef he pounced like a hawk on the poor girl and asked her what she wished to order. ‘Nothing,’ she answered, and the waiter, summoned by an English clergyman, ran off to him ... but a minute later he flew down upon her again, and waving his napkin asked her: ‘What was it you ordered?’

The girl muttered something, flushed crimson and stood up. It sent a pang to my heart. I longed to offer her something, but I did not dare.

Before I had made up my mind what to do, the lady in black turned her dark eyes about the room, and seeing the girl, beckoned to her with her finger. She went up, the lady pointed her to the soup that the children had not finished, and she, standing among rows of sitting and astonished travellers, confused and helpless, ate two spoonfuls and put down the plate.

‘_Essieurs les voyageurs pour Ucinnungen onction, et tontuyx-en voiture!_’

All rushed with unnecessary haste to their carriages.

I could not refrain from saying to the waiter (not the hawk, another one): ‘Did you see?’

‘To be sure I did—they are Russians.’

3

BEYOND THE ALPS

The architectural monumental character of the Italian towns together with their neglected condition palls on one at last. In them a modern man feels not at home, but as though in an uncomfortable box at the theatre, with magnificent scenery on the stage.

Life in them has not found its own level, is not simple, and is not convenient. The tone is elevated; in everything there is declamation, and Italian declamation (any one who has heard Dante read aloud knows what it is like). In everything there is the strained intensity which used to be the fashion among Moscow philosophers and German learned artists; everything is looked at from the highest standpoint, vom _höhern Standpunkt_. This artificial strain excludes all _abandon_, and is for ever prepared for controversy and exposition in set phrases. Chronic enthusiasm is exhausting and irritating.

Man does not want to be always admiring, always spiritually elevated; he does not want to have the _Tugenden_ always in evidence; he does not want to be touched and carried mentally far back into the past; while Italy will never let him drop below a certain high pitch, but is incessantly reminding him that her street is not simply a street but also a monument, that he may not merely walk through her squares but ought to be studying them.