Tolstoy

Once Tolstoy received his resignation papers from the army at the end of November, he was free to leave St Petersburg for good. He had set himself two goals, and accomplished both. Firstly, he had ‘tested’ his feelings for Valeria Arseneva, and proved to himself they had no substance, and secondly, he had completed Youth and submitted it for publication in January 1857. All he had to do now was obtain a foreign passport so that he could make his first trip abroad. After a month of tedious bureaucratic procedures, he was ready to set off for Moscow to prepare for his trip, and on 9 November (21 November according to the Gregorian calendar used in western Europe), he arrived in Paris at the end of a twelve-day journey. He had decided to travel alone, without a servant. The same evening, after unpacking his bags at the Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli, he set off to go to the traditional ‘Samedi Gras’ ball at the Paris Opéra, where he joined Nekrasov and Turgenev.

Tolstoy’s six weeks in Paris were coloured by his meetings with Turgenev, whom he saw most days. By and large, they got on. Turgenev was spending more and more time abroad and knew the city extremely well, so would have been a marvellous guide. Tolstoy surrendered himself to sightseeing – the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Musée de Cluny, Napoleon’s tomb at the Hôtel des Invalides (‘terrible deification’),³⁴ the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and then trips out to Versailles, to Fontainebleau and further afield to Dijon. He also saw a lot of shows. He went to the Théâtre Français to see Molière and Racine, he heard Rigoletto, Il Barbiere di Siviglia and La Fille du régiment at the Italian Opera, an operetta at the Bouffes Parisiens and watched a farce at the Théâtre des Variétés. He also went to lectures at the Sorbonne. And then early in the morning of 25 March he went to witness a public execution by guillotine, an experience which traumatised him so much that he could no longer stay in Paris. Despite having had plans to go on to London (he had been taking English lessons in Paris), he headed instead for Geneva, for a reunion with Alexandrine and her sister, who were holidaying there along with Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna.³⁵ He told his sister by letter that he had arrived just before the end of Great Lent, and had fasted in order to take communion.³⁶

Relieved to have escaped from ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, as he referred to Paris, Tolstoy spent the next three and half months restoring his spirits in Switzerland. He also picked up his pen again, and caught up with his reading, which was eclectic, and included Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, De Tocqueville, Proudhon, Balzac, Las Cases’ memoirs of Napoleon, and Goethe. Turgenev still found Tolstoy very bemusing. ‘He’s a strange person,’ he confided in a letter to a friend. ‘I’ve never met anyone like him, and don’t quite understand him. A mixture of poet, Calvinist, fanatic, nobleman – something reminiscent of Rousseau, but more honest than Rousseau – highly moral and at the same time unattractive.’³⁷ Turgenev did understand Tolstoy better than most, and, knowing his low boredom threshold, predicted that his friend would soon tire of Lake Geneva. In fact, Tolstoy enjoyed his stay in Switzerland. It is true he did not stay still for very long, but the company of Alexandrine was very congenial. After two weeks they took a ferry across the lake to Clarens, from where he wrote excitedly to Aunt Toinette, telling her it was the same village where Rousseau’s Julie had lived in La Nouvelle Héloïse. The scenery was ravishing. ‘I won’t try to describe to you the beauty of this country, particularly at the moment, when everything is in leaf and blossoming’ (‘Je n’essayerais pas de vous dépeindre la beauté de ce pays surtout à présent quand tout est en feuilles et en fleurs’), he wrote, telling her he found it impossible to detach his gaze from the lake. He spent most of his time going on walks, or just looking out of the window in his room.³⁸