Mutually entranced, aunt and nephew became inseparable: together, they took boat trips around the lake, explored the countryside, went on picnics, played the piano. Tolstoy could not decide whether it was the flower-laden springtime or the company of the serene and smiling spinster that kept him in his state of euphoria. "It's terrible, how easily I fall for people," he wrote in his diary. "Ah, if only Alexandra were ten years younger."23 lie was forgetting that if she had been, he would probably have deserted her for fear of getting involved in sentimental complications. With his imaginative, ardent and apprehensive nature, the inaccessible women were the ones he liked best. Knowing that no physical consummation could either crown or spoil his hopes, he found in her company that rare satisfaction of safcty-in-cxcitcmcnt, fulfill- ment-in-abstinence. Alexandra's ten years too many were her most certain attribute.
After spending a few days in Geneva, where he performed his Easter devotions with his aunts in the Orthodox church, he and Alexandra went by boat to the little village of Clarcns—the place Rousseau had chosen to write La Nouvelle Helo'ise. To think that at the age of fifteen he had worn a medallion with Jean-Jacques' portrait on it around his neck, and now, today, here he was in the very place in which his idol had lived. "I simply cannot tear myself away from this lake and its shores, and I spend most of my time contemplating it in ecstasy, going for walks or staring out of my window," he wrote to Aunt Toinette 011 May 18, 1857. This wonderful spot, "all leaves and flowers," was to hold him captive for the best part of three months. Alexandra went back to "Le Bocage," her villa near Geneva, and he began a flirtatious correspondence with her. He continually needed to remind her of his existence, amuse and intrigue and worry her. Poetic letters, droll telegrams and tender billets flew back and forth across the lake. One moment he would dash off a few lines of doggereclass="underline"
Toward Bocage my thoughts race. Incessantly myself I tell With babushka I would dwell Even in the Fireplace.!
The next, complaining of a painful sty on his eye, he yearned for his aunt—his babushka—to come and nurse him, and talked baby-talk: "And baba, and nana, and kaka, and tata, and zaza, and papa, and all the other vowels . . ."
He made friends with a group of Russians at Clarcns, one of whom was Michael Pushchin, brother of the famous Decembrist friend of Pushkin's. For his part in the uprising of December 14, 1825, Michael Pushchin had been demoted and sent to the Caucasus as a simple foot- soldier. "A splendid and good man," Tolstoy said of him. Which did not prevent him from calling him a braggart, later on in his diary. Similarly, on April 10 (22) the Mesherskys were "fine people," and 011
f "The Fireplace" was Tolstoy's jocular name for the court of the Grand Duchess, to whom Alexandra Tolstoy was maid of honor.
April 12 (24), "low, embittered, thick-skulled conservatives, convinced that they are the sole possessors of every virtue," and on May 4 (16), "likable characters" whose conservatism was "engaging." Mrs. Karam- zin, another holiday acquaintance, was initially labeled "an excellent creature," before ending up as "artificial, and very tiresome."
While criticizing this little group of idle rich, Tolstoy willingly shared its distractions. With one or another of them he went driving or canoeing, drank tea in a country inn, or hiked, alpenstock in hand, on longer excursions. On May 15 (27) he set out on a trip lasting several days, with an eleven-year-old boy as his companion—Sasha, the son of his friends the Polivanovs. He took his diary and a supply of paper in liis rucksack. Sasha strode manfully alongside; but, probably overexcited by the exhilarating air, he asked too many questions. "The boy is a nuisance!" noted Tolstoy. They slept in inns and started out at dawn. Near Les Avants, they were made giddy by the perfume of the narcissus; at Chdteau-d'Oex a miller ferried them across the stream; at Interlaken they feasted on rye and milk; at Grindclwald they were caught in a torrential rainstorm ("Sasha is lagging behind") and had to undress when they reached the chalet. "Attractive waitress," he observed. The next day, after ascending the glacicr, he returned to the inn, ate his supper, was unable to get to sleep and, at midnight, went out onto the second-floor balcony to look at the black and white mountains in the moonlight. A servant went by; he teased her a little, then let her go. lie thought he saw another one, beckoning to him from below, and hurried down. But she suddenly became uncooperative, and struggled and cried out, arousing the hotel. "Everyone came running and glared at me," Tolstoy wrote after beating a retreat to his room. "I can hear them up here, the whole household is awake. They've been going on about it in loud voices for nearly half an hour."24 At Thun, he dined with Sasha and eighteen pastors; at Bern he thought of marrying—but whom?—near Fribourg he was appalled at the sight of "filthy, ragged children, a huge crucifix at a crossroads outside a village, inscriptions on the house-fronts and a garish statuette of the Madonna above a well." But he was awed by the majestic view from the Jaman Pass. "I love nature," he wrote, "when it surrounds me on all sides, spreading out as far as I can see, when the same warm breeze that caresscs me goes rolling off and is lost on the horizon; when the blades of grass I flattened as I sat down accumulate into the endless green of prairies, and the leaves whose shadows flicker across my face in the sighing wind become, afterward, the far-off line of the forest; when I am not alone to rejoice, but millions of insects arc buzzing and spinning around me and the coupled beetles go creeping along and the birds arc singing everywhere."25
Back in Clarens he put his papers in order, wrote up his travel notes, a few pages of a short story—Albert—and one or two chapters of The Cossacks, wrote letters, read a little Balzac, some Proudhon, Las Cases' Memorial, the New Testament, accidentally broke a mirror and "had the weakness to read my fortune, with a dictionary." The words that came out—"sole, water, satarrh, tomb"—were unedifying. The future refused to disclose its secrets ahead of time.
The following day, May 31 (June 12), 1857, he set out on another long hike; his plan was to go as far as Turin, where Druzhnin and Botkin were staying. At the end of a zigzag itinerary, his friends disappointed him—they had aged, and could not bear each other's company—but the Piedmont entranced him. A pause to cool off and take a quick shower, and he set out again—on mulcback this time, to Grcs- soney, where the servingwoman at the inn was a giant, and there was a superb view of the Val d'Aosta; then a long, jolting journey by stagecoach: he met an idiot wearing a hat like Napoleon's; visited the Hospice of St. Bernard—enormous, adrift in the fog—and was given a "honey-sweet" welcome by the monks in the great hall with the fireplace; went down through mist and snow to Martigny and Evian— "the town is suffused with something mauve-colored."
The change of scene, his fatigue and the keen air had given him an appetite for love. At almost every halting-place he noticed some woman: "A pretty tobacconist . . ." (June 8 [20].) "A plump, jolly waitress." (June 10 [22].) "It's pleasant, but incomplete: no women." (June 11 [23].) "A freckled beauty. I want a woman, terribly. And a pretty one . . ." (June 15 [27].)