Twenty-five years later, in Confessionhe returned to the lugubrious events of that day: "When I saw the head part from the body and each of them fall separately into a box with a thud, I understood —not in my mind, but with my whole being—that 110 rational doctrine of progress could justify that act, and that if every man now living in the world and every man who had lived sincc the beginning of time
f Journalists on the sccnc estimated the crowd at twelve thousand.
t Confession was written in 18S2.
were to maintain, in the name of some theory or other, that this execution was indispensable, I should still know that it was not indispensable, that it was wrong."
After that, Tolstoy turned against the entire French nation. "There is no poetry in this people," he wrote, "their only poetry is politics. . . . On the whole, I like the French way of life and the French people, but I have yet to meet one man of real value, either in socicty or among the people."15 This comment may seem strange coming from a traveler who had spent six weeks in the country virtually without setting foot outside the Russian colony in the capital. Nevertheless, he was now determined to leave it. Switzerland—peace-loving, clcan and virtuous —would purge him of the horrors of Francc. Was it the guillotine alone, as fervent Tolstovans would have it, that drove him to pack his bags? They are forgetting that one week before—the eternal impulsive —he had already made plans to leave Paris with his brother Sergey;18 that, on the day of the execution, he qualified his letter to Botkin as "silly"; and that on the following day, his brooding over capital punishment did not prevent him from contemplating marriage with Princess Lvov. The truth was that the guillotine gave him a dramatic cxcuse for leaving, and until then, in his usual shilly-shallying way, he had been unable to make up his mind to go.
On March 27 (April 8), he went to say good-bye to Turgenev, and once again, face to face with his abhorred colleague, he could not restrain his tears. lie loved no one as well as the person he had demolished the day before. "After I had said good-bye to him and left, I began to cry, I don't know why," he wrote that evening. "I love him very much. lie has made a different person of mc, and is still doing so."
He was bored on the train, which left from the Gare de Lyon. In those days, there was no direct line from Paris to Geneva: one had to go through Macon and Bourg to Amberieu and then continue by stagecoach. Tolstoy was glad to leave the cramped, lurching compartment. Sitting next to the driver, he inhaled the fragrance of the sleeping countryside and looked up at the sky; his heart filled with ineffable contentment and well-being: "At night, with the full moon shining on the seat, everything fainted away and bccamc transformed into love and joy. For the first time in a very long while, I thanked God for being alive, and meant it."17
The first tiling he saw in his hotel room in Geneva was the New Testament, placed on his night table by the Bible Society. After the turpitude of Paris, it was like an invitation to return to the paths of righteousness. He read a few pages with delight and looked out the window. Moonlight on the lake, and the light of Christ in the soul—
Switzerland was a wonderful place! In the throes of an extraordinary joy, he wrote to Turgenev forthwith, advising him to flee Paris, too— that capital of iniquity: "I lived for a month in Sodom; deep is the layer of mud in my soul, and the two whores, and the guillotine, and the idleness, and the mediocrity."18
The only tiling he was sorry to abandon on the banks of the Seine was Princess Lvov, whom Prince Orlov was also courting. "Tell me frankly," he added, "whether a girl such as she might love me; I only mean by that, whether she would not find it repugnant or monstrous that I should want to marry her. Such an eventuality seems so impossible to me that even writing it makes me want to laugh." To prevent Turgenev from joining him in his laughter, he did not mail this letter, the draft of which has been preserved, but sent another, more moderate version, in its place, which presumably contained no mention of marriage.0 After reading this second missive Turgenev wrote to Annenkov: "He's an odd fellow, I've never met his like, and I don't fully understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic and aristocrat; he reminds one of Rousseau, only more honest—sternly moral and at the same time somehow unattractive." And to Kolbasin, "Tolstoy has left, after deciding that he loathed Sodom and Gomorrah, as he puts it. He has gone to Geneva, has taken a room on the lake, and is happy, waiting ... to grow bored with the place."10
In Switzerland as in Paris, Tolstoy saw almost no one but Russians, and in particular, two relatives of his, aunts twice removed: Elizabeth and Alexandra Tolstoy. Neither had married, and they lived most of the year in St. Petersburg at the Marya Palace where, since 1846, they had been maids of honor to Grand Duchess Marya Nikolayevna, daughter of Nicholas I and wife of Prince Maximilian of Leuchten- bcrg. Tolstoy had seen them at the palace several times during the previous winters, and had a warm recollection of his conversations with Alexandra, the younger of the two—though she was not very young any more: forty! But what lovely gray eyes she had, with such a serene and intelligent expression, and what an angelic smile, what a captivating contralto voicc, what tact, what culture, what sensitivity! She had a most gentle disposition, coupled with the most discriminating judgment. Her whole life was illuminated by religion. When Paris had suddenly turned his stomach, Tolstoy thought of her at once as the person most likely to understand him.
The day after he arrived in Geneva he went to see her in her villa, "Le Bocage," on the lakefront not far from town. lie adored making
• The second letter has not been preserved.
sudden appearances like this, dropping in out of the blue. Savoring his aunt's surprise at his wild-eyed and radiant expression, he cried as he came in the door: "I have come to you straight from Paris. That city has made mc so sick that I nearly lost my mind. The things I saw there! First, in the lodginghouse I lived in there were twenty-six couples, nineteen unmarried; I was horrified beyond belief. Then, to test myself, I went to see a criminal being executed by the guillotine. After that, I could not sleep, and I could not stay there any longer. Luckily, I happened to hear that you were in Geneva and I came rushing headlong here to see you, ccrtain that you would save mc!"20
She listened to his confessions and comfortcd him, and he felt that here at last he might find peace of mind. She was too young for him to call her "Aunt," so he decided to go to the opposite extreme and call her "Grandmother" (babushka), as a joke, perhaps in a more or less conscious attempt to guard against her attraction for him. As they were related, their long talks together gave him the twofold pleasure of being admired by a woman and understood by a sister. A tender friendship grew up between them, to the delight of both. "Wonderful Alexandra," he wrote in his diary. "A joy and a consolation! I have never met a woman yet who is worth her little finger."21 Toward the end of his life he was to say, "Just as a ray of light sometimes filters beneath a door in a dark hallway, so the memory of Alexandra, when I look back over my long and sorrowful life, remains an eternally shining light." And in her account of their relationship,22 Alexandra wrote: "Our pure and simple friendship was a triumphant disproof of the widely held but false opinion that a friendship between a man and a woman is impossible. Our relations remained on a very special plane and I can honestly say that we were chiefly concerned, each in his own way, with that which ennobles life." But all the while she was disclaiming the least particle of impurity in her feelings toward her nephew, her portrait of him betrayed deep tenderness: "He was simple, extremely modest, and so lively that his presence animated everyone around him. ... He was not handsome, but his keen eyes, kind and highly expressive, made up for the favors nature had withheld." And also: "Like a mirror broken into fragments, every facet of him reflected a little of the brilliant light he had been given from above."