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

only a precaution of vanity, well understood and sufficiently common among people of the fashionable world in every land. It is not their faults that people conceal with the greatest care, it is their emptiness; they do not blush to be perverse, but they arc humbled at being insignificant. In accordance with this principle, the Russians of the higher classes willingly exhibit every thing in their minds and character likely to please at first sight, and which keeps up conversation for a few hours: but if you endeavour to go behind the decorated scene that thus dazzles you, they stop you as they would a rash intruder, who might take it into his head to 2`0 behind the screen of their bedchambers, of which the elegance is entirely confined to the outer side of the division. They give you a reception dictated by curiosity; they afterwards repel you through prudence.

This applies to friendship as well as to love, to the society of men as well as to that of women. In giving the portrait of a Russian, we paint the nation, just as a soldier under arms conveys the idea of all his regiment. Nowhere is the influence of unity in the government and in education so sensibly visible as here. Every mind wears its uniform. Alas! how greatly must those suffer, be they even no longer young and sensitive, who bring among this people — cold-hearted and keen-witted both by nature and social education — the simplicity of other lands ! I picture to myself the sensibility of the Germans, the confiding naivete and the careless gaiety of the French, the constancy of the Spaniards, the passion of the English *,

* La Constance des Espagnols, la passion des Anglais.