He concluded with a vague threat of suicide or murder, well calculated to terrify the old spinster:
"There arc loaded pistols in my room. I am waiting until the matter is decided one way or another."22
'Hie insinuation that she was no better than the infamous brutes of the tsar's police force simply because she was a maid of honor at court pierced Alexandra Tolstoy to the quick, but she mastered her hurt feelings and wrote a tender and dignified reply to her impossible nephew:
"Your first letter causcd me grief enough, my dear Leo, but the one I received yesterday made me weep bitter tears. . . . My blood boils when I think of them prying and snooping about in your sanctuary."23
She promised to take steps to see that he received satisfaction and assured him that the emperor, and even the chief of police, had no knowledge of the methods employed by "their deputies." There were, she said, too many plots, too much "democratic ferment" in Russia, the police no longer knew where to turn. "Hence these investigations 011 all sides, and these—grant me the adjective—involuntary injustices, which often fall upon the heads of innocent and honest people." The number of suspects was mounting all the time, so it was no dishonor to be accused of harboring evil thoughts against the authorities. The chief thing was to have a clear conscience and subdue one's wounded vanity. "In the name of all you hold most holy, I beg you not to do anything rash. ... It is a strange thing that we do not hesitate to commit a thousand iniquities and injustices against the Lord, but the first one to strike our person appears monstrous and intolerable." How could her nephew write that although he did not want to compromise her, he hoped she would rise above such petty considerations and give him the support of her friendship? "It has never occurred to me to fear being compromised by your letters, and I am amazed that you could even think such a thing. I am what I am—openly—and I shall never even understand what you mean by 'petty considerations.' ... I bless you from afar, with a mother's tenderness. May Cod inspire your steps."
But it was the Behrs family, not God, who inspired Tolstoy's next steps. He had returned to Moscow where, facing the three daughters who implored him to be reasonable, his anger melted away. On August 22, 1862 he wrote a very deferential letter to the emperor, asking that the names of his accusers be revealed and that His Majesty kindly make amends for the injury done to him. Count Shcrcmctyev, an aide-decamp, transmitted the request to the tsar, who was in Moscow for the autumn maneuvers.
While awaiting the results of his appeal, Tolstoy felt, in his own words, like a man "whose feet have been stepped on, who is absolutely determined to find out whether it was done on purpose; if so he demands reparation for the injustice, if not, simply that somebody say, 'Excuse me' to him."*4 Alexandra Tolstoy pulled every string she had, the tsar deigned to recall that he had once been given a liberal education, and on his order Prince Dolgorukov, the chief of police, asked Daragan, the governor of Tula, to assure Count Tolstoy that despite the subversive writings found in the possession of some of the students living under his wing, charges would not be preferred and he would suffer no further inconvenience. Coming from the emperor, such conciliator}- terms were tantamount to an apology. Tolstoy accepted it. For some time his mind had been occupied elsewhere, and on September 7, 1862, in a burst of heedless cruelty, he wrote to his aunt Alexandra, who had gone to so much trouble to see that lie got his "public reparation," the words that could cause her the sharpest and most un- avowable pain of alclass="underline" "And a third catastrophe—or blessing, judge for yourself—has just befallen me: I, aged, toothless fool that I am, have fallen in love."
PART IV
Sonya
1. Betrothal
With the Behrs family, Tolstoy had the double sensation of reliving his past and committing his future. Mrs. Behrs, nee Lyubov Alexandrovna Islavin, belonged to the past: only three years older than lie, she had been his childhood sweetheart, the very girl he had injured by pushing her off the balcony in a fit of jealousy; and the daughters of the house belonged to the future. Lyubov Alexandrovna's father was Alexander Mikhailovich Islcnycv, libertine and irrepressible gambler, who had been Leo's fellow-roisterer on more than one occasion and who appeared, under the name of Irtenycv, in Childhood. Alexander Islcnyev had had a checkered domestic career: his secret marriage to Sofya Petrovna Zavadovsky, who was separated from her first husband, Count Kozlovsky, had been extremely fruitful—but the count had had the marriage annulled, and the six children born of it, among whom was little Lyubov, were technically illegitimate. Officially, they were not even called Islenycv, but Islavin. After their mother died, their father observed a respectable period of mourning and then married a famous beauty of the day, Sofya Alexandrovna Zhdanov,1 by whom he had three more daughters. This addition to his family and responsibilities had not deterred him from gambling away what remained of his immense fortune. Nine-tenths bankrupt, but still waggish and vivacious, he retired to the estate of his second wife, at Ivitsi in the district of Odoycv, thirty-five miles from Yasnaya Polyana.
At the age of sixteen his daughter Lyubov Alexandrovna married a young doctor of German extraction, Audrey Estaficvich Behrs (or Bers), with whom she had fallen in love while he was treating her for "brain fever." The practitioner was eighteen years older than his patient, and the family also disapproved of his German ancestry—a forlx:ar of his had been one of the four officers whom the King of Prussia sent to
Tsarina Elizabeth to act as military' experts. But that had been long ago and, with the passing of generations, only a fraction of the blood in the doctor's veins was German. As for the difference in age, it did not prevent him from siring thirteen children, eight of whom survived: five boys and three girls.
A family man with a sense of duty and a love of scholarship, Dr. Behrs was the physician of the administrative staff of the Imperial Palace in Moscow, and lived in a cramped, sunless apartment in the Kremlin. The rooms all opened into one another, the office was so tiny that a patient could hardly be squeezed into it, and the children slept on sofas with sagging springs. But no caller could remain insensitive to the gaiety and high spirits of the inmates, dominated by the shrill laughter of children. Students and cadets, attracted by the three daughters—aged twenty, eighteen and sixteen in 1862—flocked to the Behrs', where the door was always open and the table always set, according to the old custom of Russian hospitality. Here, as in all the better homes of Moscow, a large company of servants, underpaid and underemployed, loitered about in the hall, ate the leftovers from the meals and slept in the doorways and closets. The chairs and tables were stout and massive and upholstered casually, indifferently; their purpose was functional, not decorative. Poor relations or strays, blown in by the wind like seeds, took root between a screen and a leather sofa and stayed for years, or for life. In those days, Moscow was still a patriarchal, unsophisticated city in which formal invitations might be issued to a supper or a ball, but the old custom of "tapers" was still in use for all other occasions. Those wishing to receive callers set lighted candles in a window looking out on the street, and any acquaintances happening to pass that way knew from the signal that they would be welcome, and rang the bell. When a couple was bored with their own company, they sent out a servant to see if there weren't any "tapers" in the neighboring windows, and when the servant returned and recited a list of names, all that remained was to choose with whom they would spend the rest of the evening. The streets were muddy, with a lantern flickering here and there. Water was brought to the door in perspiring barrels on carts. As a measure of economy, tallow candles were used for light in the Behrs household; tallow was also used as a remedy, in pommades or poultices, for coughs and colds. But the girls melted real wax in secret, to tell their fortunes in the strange shapes formed by the drops as they congealed.