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

journey to recount to my friends ; as though the picture of a country where nature has done nothing, and where art has only produced some rough sketches or copies, could interest, after the description of Spain — of that land where a people the most original, the most lively, the most independent in character, even the most free, in practice if not in theory*, straggle secretly against the most gloomy of governments ; where they dance and pray together, in the intervals of throat-cutting and church pillaging. Such is the picture that my friends must forget, in order that I may describe to them a plain of some thousand leagues wide, and a society which has nothing original that it does not endeavour to

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conceal. . . . The task is a hard one.

Even Moscow will not recompense me for the trouble I am taking to see it. Shall I give up the idea of Moscow ? order the coachman to turn, and depart in all haste for Paris ? To this had my reveries broiight me when the day dawned. My calèche had remained open, and in my protracted doze I had not perceived the baneñú influence of the dews of the north; my clothes were saturated; my hair in a state as if dripping with perspiration; all the leather about my carriage was steeped in noxious moisture; my eyes pained me, a veil seemed to obscure my sight;

I remembered the Princewho became blind in

twenty-four hours after a bivouac in Poland, under the same latitude, in a moist prairie. †

* Within twenty leagues of Madrid, the Castilian shepherd, during the times of absolute monarchy, had no idea but that there was a free government in Spain.

† A similar fate very nearly happened to me ; the disorder