Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

242KEMABKS ON ТПЕ RUSSIANS.

It must be owned, however, that the people remained there voluntarily; nothing appeared to compel them to come under the windows of the emperor : they were amusing themselves, therefore, but it was only with the pleasures of their masters; and, as Froissart says, very sorrily. The head-dress of the women, and the Russian, that is to say, the Persian, costume of the men, in their long robes and brightly-coloured girdles, the variety of colours and the immovableness of each individual, created the illusion of an immense Turkey carpet, spread entirely over the court by the magician who presides here over every miracle :—a parterre of heads, — such was the most striking ornament of the palace of the emperor during the night of his daughter's nuptials. This pi`ince thought as I did, for he pointed out to the foreigners, with much complacency, the silent crowd, whose presence alone testified its participation in the happiness of its master. It was the vision of a people on their knees before the invisible gods. Their majesties are the divinities of this Elysium, where the inhabitants, trained to resignation, invent for themselves a felicity made up of privation and sacrifices.

I begin to perceive that I am here talking like the radicals in Paris. But, though a democrat in Eussia, I am not the less in France an obstinate aristocrat: it is because a peasant in the environs of Paris is freer than a Russian lord, that I thus feel and write. We must travel before we can learn the extent to which the human heart is influenced by optical effects. This experience confirms the observation of