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

30DEVOTION OF NANETTE.

with a devotion that could not have been exceeded had I been a great nobleman.

After the money, which had been destined for our journey, was expended, she supported me by selling, one by one, the articles of her dress. If my mother perished, her intention was to carry me to her own country, and to bring me up among the little peasants of her family. I was at that time two years old. Falling dangerously ill of a malignant fever, she found means to procure for me the attendance of three of the first medical men in Pans. Poor Nanette ! she had, indeed, both a generous heart and an energetic character, though the strength of her feel-ings may not have been equalled by the powers of her intellect.

Her fearlessness made her often very imprudent. During the trial of my grandfather, the people in the streets would often inveigh, in the most violent language, against the traitor Custine. Whenever my nurse chanced to hear these imprecations she would stop in the middle of the crowd, demand who dared to say any thing against General Custine, defend him against the accusations of the populace, maintaining that she, who was bona his servant, knew him better than they, and conclude by heaping both on them and their revolution the most contemptuous epithets. More than once has she thus incurred danger of being killed in the streets of Pans.

On one occasion, passing with me in her arms across the Place du Carrousel, she observed the women on their knees paying their orisons before the revolutionary shrine of Marat, the martyr of atheism and inhumanity.