In 1852 he was over seventy, but young for his age, he moved briskly, and above all was in full possession of a facile, refined, and agreeable intellect which he used to maintain his power and strengthen and increase his popularity. He possessed large means – his own and his wife’s (who had been a Countess Branítski) – and received an enormous salary as Viceroy, and he spent a great part of his means on building a palace and laying out a garden on the south coast of the Crimea.
On the evening of December the 4th, 1852, a courier’s troyka drew up before his palace in Tiflis. An officer, tired and black with dust, sent by General Kozlóvski with the news of Hadji Murád’s surrender to the Russians, entered the wide porch, stretching the stiffened muscles of his legs as he passed the sentinel. It was six o’clock, and Vorontsóv was just going in to dinner when he was informed of the courier’s arrival. He received him at once, and was therefore a few minutes late for dinner.
When he entered the drawing-room the thirty persons invited to dine, who were sitting beside Princess Elizabeth Ksavérevna Vorontsóva, or standing in groups by the windows, turned their faces towards him. Vorontsóv was dressed in his usual black military coat, with shoulder-straps but no epaulettes, and wore the White Cross of the Order of St George at his neck.
His clean-shaven, foxlike face wore a pleasant smile as, screwing up his eyes, he surveyed the assembly. Entering with quick soft steps he apologized to the ladies for being late, greeted the men, and approaching Princess Manana Orbelyáni – a tall, fine, handsome woman of Oriental type about forty-five years of age – he offered her his arm to take her in to dinner. Princess Elizabeth Ksavérevna Vorontsóva gave her arm to a red-haired general with bristly moustaches who was visiting Tiflis. A Georgian prince offered his arm to Princess Vorontsóva’s friend, Countess Choiseuil. Doctor Andréevsky, the aide-de-camp, and others, with ladies or without, followed these first couples. Footmen in livery and knee-breeches drew back and replaced the guests’ chairs when they sat down, while the major-domo ceremoniously ladled out steaming soup from a silver tureen.
Vorontsóv took his place in the centre of one side of the long table, and his wife sat opposite, with the general on her right. On the prince’s right sat his lady, the beautiful Orbelyáni; and on his left was a graceful, dark, red-cheeked Georgian woman, glittering with jewels and incessantly smiling.
‘Excellentes, chère amie!’9 replied Vorontsóv to his wife’s inquiry about what news the courier had brought him. ‘Simon a eu de la chance!’10 And he began to tell aloud, so that everyone could hear, the striking news (for him alone not quite unexpected, because negotiations had long been going on) that Hadji Murád, the bravest and most famous of Shamil’s officers, had come over to the Russians and would in a day or two be brought to Tiflis.
Everybody – even the young aides-de-camp and officials who sat at the far ends of the table and who had been quietly laughing at something among themselves – became silent and listened.
‘And you, General, have you ever met this Hadji Murád?’ asked the princess of her neighbour, the carroty general with the bristly moustaches, when the prince had finished speaking.
‘More than once, Princess.’
And the general went on to tell how Hadji Murád, after the mountaineers had captured Gergebel in 1843, had fallen upon General Pahlen’s detachment and killed Colonel Zolotúkhin almost before their very eyes.
Vorontsóv listened to the general and smiled amiably, evidently pleased that the latter had joined in the conversation. But suddenly his face assumed an absent-minded and depressed expression.
The general, having started talking, had begun to tell of his second encounter with Hadji Murád.
‘Why, it was he, if your Excellency will please remember,’ said the general, ‘who arranged the ambush that attacked the rescue party in the “Biscuit” expedition.’
‘Where?’ asked Vorontsóv, screwing up his eyes.
What the brave general spoke of as the ‘rescue’ was the affair in the unfortunate Dargo campaign in which a whole detachment, including Prince Vorontsóv who commanded it, would certainly have perished had it not been rescued by the arrival of fresh troops. Everyone knew that the whole Dargo campaign under Vorontsóv’s command – in which the Russians lost many killed and wounded and several cannon – had been a shameful affair, and therefore if anyone mentioned it in Vorontsóv’s presence they did so only in the aspect in which Vorontsóv had reported it to the Tsar – as a brilliant achievement of the Russian army. But the word ‘rescue’ plainly indicated that it was not a brilliant victory but a blunder costing many lives. Everybody understood this and some pretended not to notice the meaning of the general’s words, others nervously waited to see what would follow, while a few exchanged glances and smiled. Only the carroty general with the bristly moustaches noticed nothing, and carried away by his narrative quietly replied:
‘At the rescue, your Excellency.’
Having started on his favourite theme, the general recounted circumstantially how Hadji Murád had so cleverly cut the detachment in two that if the rescue party had not arrived (he seemed to be particularly fond of repeating the word ‘rescue’) not a man in the division would have escaped, because … He did not finish his story, for Manana Orbelyáni having understood what was happening, interrupted him by asking if he had found comfortable quarters in Tiflis. The general, surprised, glanced at everybody all round and saw his aides-de-camp from the end of the table looking fixedly and significantly at him, and he suddenly understood! Without replying to the princess’s question, he frowned, became silent, and began hurriedly swallowing the delicacy that lay on his plate, the appearance and taste of which both completely mystified him.
Everybody felt uncomfortable, but the awkwardness of the situation was relieved by the Georgian prince – a very stupid man but an extraordinarily refined and artful flatterer and courtier – who sat on the other side of Princess Vorontsóva. Without seeming to have noticed anything he began to relate how Hadji Murád had carried off the widow of Akhmet Khan of Mekhtulí.
‘He came into the village at night, seized what he wanted, and galloped off again with the whole party.’
‘Why did he want that particular woman?’ asked the princess.
‘Oh, he was her husband’s enemy, and pursued him but could never once succeed in meeting him right up to the time of his death, so he revenged himself on the widow.’
The princess translated this into French for her old friend Countess Choiseuil, who sat next to the Georgian prince.
‘Quelle horreur!’11 said the countess, closing her eyes and shaking her head.
‘Oh no!’ said Vorontsóv, smiling. ‘I have been told that he treated his captive with chivalrous respect and afterwards released her.’
‘Yes, for a ransom!’
‘Well, of course. But all the same he acted honourably.’
These words of Vorontsóv’s set the tone for the further conversation. The courtiers understood that the more importance was attributed to Hadji Murád the better the prince would be pleased.
‘The man’s audacity is amazing. A remarkable man!’
‘Why, in 1849 he dashed into Temir Khan Shurá and plundered the shops in broad daylight.’
An Armenian sitting at the end of the table, who had been in Temir Khan Shurá at the time, related the particulars of that exploit of Hadji Murád’s.
In fact, Hadji Murád was the sole topic of conversation during the whole dinner.
Everybody in succession praised his courage, his ability, and his magnanimity. Someone mentioned his having ordered twenty-six prisoners to be killed, but that too was met by the usual rejoinder, ‘What’s to be done? À la guerre, comme à la guerre!’12