('Beauty and the Beast,' said I to her; 'Zemir et Azor.')
"At a very agreeable family party at the Prince Paul Gallitzin's were masks; and a party of male and female dwarfs; these droll little urchins were all very well made and good-looking; they frisked and frolicked about with the children of the house as if they themselves were not (as in reality they were) men and women, but children likewise. One of these poor little mortals, equipped as an officer of hussars, danced a mazurka with great grace and activity, and selected for his partner the Gouvernante, a fine, fat bouncing woman of twenty-five. He likewise, at my request, sang a Russian romance, which he accompanied on the piano-forte: his voice was a very plaintive, but weak barytone. The kindness of the Russian nobles to these unfortunate beings does infinite honour to the national character."
We have only time for another extract or two. At Moscow, he notes:
"I passed the remainder of the evening at the Princess Dolgorouki's; the young ladies were in great agitation on account of the sudden indisposition of their mother, Madame Boulgakow, who had, it seems, caught cold in her return from the monastery of Troitza, sixty wersts from hence, a renowned pilgrimage. She had better have stayed at home, for surely Moscow has sufficient churches in which bigots may pray as long as they please. When will superstition cease to usurp the place of true religion in the human mind? I did not pity the old devotee, but I felt for the young ladies, who seemed to be a good deal flurried and fluttered by this occurrence."
At St. Petersburg:
"June 8-20.—Weather hot and sultry. At two I walked to the Summer Gardens, which I found full of police-officers and soldiers. To-day there is a celebrated promenade, that in which the young fillies range themselves in two rows along the principal alley to be chosen by their future spouse. However, it was as yet too early for this exhibition, and there was nobody here except police-officers, the very sight of whom makes me sick; so off I set, and was caught near the Newski Prospekt in a tremendous thunder-storm, which forced me to take shelter, first under the arch of a porte-cochere, and secondly in the Casan Church, in which I discovered for the first time the bâton of Marshal Davoust, stuck up in a glass-case against one of the piers supporting the dome of the Church. Underneath the bâton, upon a gilded metal-plate, are two inscriptions, the one in Russ, the other in Latin, which state that the bâton is that of Marshal Davoust, taken near Crasnoe, 5th Nov. 1812; so there can be no doubt of the fact."
"I was a good deal amused with a bad painting over the simple unassuming tomb of the immortal Kutusoff, representing the Kremlin, the church of Ivan Blagennoi, and a procession of priests marching out of the former by the Holy Gate towards the latter. Kutusoff's tomb is shaded by banners taken from the Poles, the Prussians, and the French, having at the ends of their staffs, the eagles of the two former, and the horse of the latter."
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