After glancing at the sick woman, Rayer whispered to me:
'You can see for yourself what is to be done here.' He prescribed something and went away.
The sick woman called me and asked:
'What did the doctor say? He did tell you something, didn't he?'
'To send for your medicine.'
She took my hand, and her hand amazed me even more than her face: it had grown thin and angular as though she had been 7 Written in 1 856.
8 Rayer, P. F. 0., was a distinguished French physician and the author of numerous medical works. ( Tr.)
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through a month of serious illness since she had fallen sick : she fixed upon me a look that was full of suffering and horror and said:
'Tell me, for God's sake, what he said . . . is it that I am dying? . . . You are not afraid of me, are you?' she added.
I felt fearfully sorry for her at that moment; that frightful consciousness not only of death, but of the infectiousness of the d isease that was rapidly sapping her life, must have been intensely painful. Towards the morning she died.
I van Turgenev was about to leave Paris; the lease of his flat was up, and he came to me for a night. After dinner he complained of the suffocating heat; I told him that I had had a bath in the morning; in the evening he too went for a bath. When he came back he felt unwell, drank some soda-water with some wine and sugar in it, and went to bed. In the night he woke me.
'I am a lost man,' he said ; 'it's cholera.'
He really was suffering from sickness and spasms; fortunately he escaped with ten days' illness.
After burying her friend my mother had moved to the Ville d'Avray. When Turgenev was taken ill I sent Natalie and the children there and remained alone with him ; when he was a great deal better I moved there too.
On the morning of June the 12th Sazonov came to see me there.
He was in the greatest exaltation: he talked of the popular outbreak that was impending, of the certainty of its being successful, of the glory awaiting those who took part in it, and urgently pressed me to join in reaping the laurels. I told him that he knew my opinion of the present state of affairs-that it seemed to me stupid, without believing in it, to co-operate with people with whom one had hardly anything in common.
To this the enthusiastic agitator remarked that of course it was quieter and safer to stay at home and write sceptical articles while others were in the market-place championing the liberty of the world, the solidarity of peoples, and much else that was good.
A very vile emotion, but one that has led and will lead many men into great errors, and evPn crimes, impelled me to say:
'But what makes you imagine I am not going?'
'I concluded that from your words.'
'No: I said it was stupid, but I didn't say that I never do anything stupid.'
'That is just what I wanted! That's what I like you for! Well,
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it's no use losing time ; let us go to Paris. This evening the Germans and other refugees are meeting at nine o'clock; let us go to them first.'
'Where are they meeting?' I asked him in the train.
'In the Cafe Lamblin, in the Palais Royal.'
This was my first surprise.
'In the Cafe Lamblin?'
'That is where the "reds" usually meet.'
'That's just why I think that to-day they ought to have met somewhere else.'
'But they are all used to going there;'
'I suppose the beer is very good!'
In the cafe various habitues of the revolution were sJttmg with dignity at a dozen little tables, looking darkly and consequentially about them from under wide-brimmed felt hats and caps with tiny peaks. These were the perpetual suitors of the revolutionary Penelope, those inescapable actors who take pdrt in every popular demonstration and form its tableau, its background, and who are as menacing from afar as the paper dragons with which the Chinese wished to intimidate the English.
In the troubled times of social storms and reconstructions i n which states forsake their usual grooves for a long time, a new generation of people grows up who may be called the choristers of the revolution; grown on shifting, volcanic soil, nurtured i n an atmosphere o f alarm when work o f every kind is suspended, they become inured from their earliest years to an environment of political ferment-they like the theatrical side of it, its brilliant, pompous mis en scene. Just as to Nicholas marching drill was the most important part of the soldier's business, to them all those banquets, demonstrations, protests, gatherings, toasts, banners, are the most important part of the revolution.
Among them there are good, valiant people, sincerely devoted and ready to face a bullet; but for the most part they are very limited and extraordinarily pedantic. Immobile conservatives in everything revolutionary, they stop short at some programme and do not advance.
Dealing all their lives with a small number of political ideas, they only know their rhetorical side, so to speak, their sacerdotal vestments, that is the commonplaces which successively cut the same figure, a tour de role, like the ducks in the well known children's toy-in newspaper articles, in speeches at banquets and in parliamentary devices.
In addition to naive people and revolutionary doctrinaires, the
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unappreciated artists, unsuccessful literary men, students who did not complete their studies, briefless lawyers, actors without talent, persons of great vanity but small capa bility, with huge pretensions but no perseverance or power of work, all naturally drift into this milieu. The external authority which guides and pastures the human herd in a lump in ordinary times is weakened in times of revolution; left to themselves people do not know what to do. The younger generation is struck by the ease, the apparent ease, ·ith which celebrities float to the top i n times of revolution, and rushes into futile agitation; this inures the young people to violent excitements and destroys the habit of work. Life in the clubs and cafes is attractive, full of movement, flattering to vanity and free from restraint. One must not be left behind, there is no need to work: what is not done to-day may be done to-morrow, or may even not be done at all.
The choristers of the revolution, like the chorus in Greek tragedies, are further divided into two semi-choruses ; the botanical classification may be applied to them: some of them may be called cryptogamous and the others phanerogamous. Some of them become eternal conspirators, and several times change their lodgings and the shape of their beards. They mysteriously invite one to extraordinarily important interviews, at n ight if possible, or in some inconvenient place. Meeting their friends in public, they do not like saluting them with a bow, but greet them with a significant glance. Many of them keep their address a secret, never tell one what day they are going away, never say where they are going, write in cypher or invisible ink news which is plainly printed in printer's ink in the newspapers.