Many and many a visit I paid to Louise. My poor compatriot was every day becoming more sad, and I noticed the change with deep sorrow. When I found her alone, I questioned her as to the reason of this melancholy, which I put down to jealousy; but when I broached the subject, she shook her head and spoke of Count Alexis with so much trust, that I began to think, when I recalled what she had said about Vaninkov’s profound ennui, that he was taking an active part in that secret conspiracy, of which people spoke mysteriously without knowing who were hatching it or understanding in the least what it was aimed at. As to the Count, I must pay homage to Russian conspirators, for I do not recollect having seen the least change in his expression, or the smallest alteration in his spirits; and f hold that Machiavelli’s contention that Constantinople was the best school for conspirators, was unjust towards Moscow the Holy.

  We had now reached the ninth of November, 1824; the city was wrapped in dense fogs, and for three days a cold damp wind from the south-west, had been blowing violently from the Gulf of Finland, so that the Neva was as tempestuous as a sea. Numbers of people gathered on the quays, in spite of the keen and hissing wind which cut their faces, and were watching with uneasiness the turbulent undercurrents of the river and counting, along the granite walls, which keep it back, the rings placed one above the other to mark the different heights of the various inundations. Others while praying at the foot of the Virgin who, as I have already mentioned, failed to make Peter the Great desist from building the Imperial city, reckoned that the river was up to the first floors. In the city people were frightened at the sight of the fountains flowing more abundantly, and the springs rising with great bubbles as if they were urged by some strange power in their subterranean channels. Finally an indefinable gloom spread over the city, portending the advent of a serious catastrophe. Evening approached; the watchmen posted at the signalling stations, were everywhere doubled. Night came, and with it a terrible storm. Orders had been given to raise the bridges so as to allow vessels to seek a refuge in the very heart of the city, and all night long they were threading their way up the course of the Neva, like white ghosts, and anchoring opposite the Fortress.

  I waited at Louise’s till midnight. She was the more terrified because Alexis had received orders to repair to the horse-guards’ barracks; in fact from the precautions taken the city might have been in a state of siege. Leaving her I paid a hurried visit to the quays. The Neva seemed to be in torrent, and yet did not grow visibly bigger; but from time to the strange noises like prolonged wails could be heard in the direction of the sea.

  I returned to my rooms; no one in the house was asleep. A small stream which ran through the courtyard had been over-flowing for the past two hours and had inundated the ground floor. It was said that in other places slabs of granite had been displaced, causing many terrible disasters in the other houses. I went up to my room and as it was on the second floor, I was quite safe. For some time, however, the disturbance I had remarked in other houses, rather than what I had witnessed in my own, kept me awake; but presently I fell asleep, overcome with fatigue, lulled even by the noise of the storm.

  About eight o’clock in the morning I was awakened by a cannon shot. I slipped on a dressing-gown and ran to the window. The streets presented to my sight an extraordinary commotion. I dressed in haste and went down.

  “What is the meaning of the cannon shot?” I asked of a man who was carrying up some mattresses to the first floor.

  “The water is rising, Sir,” he replied, and he went on his way.

  I descended to the ground floor; here the water was up to one’s ankles, although the floor of the house was raised above the level of the street by the height of the three steps which formed the entrance flight. I ran to the threshold of the door; the middle of the street was flooded and a kind of tidal wave, caused by the passing carriages, was lapping against the pavements.

  I caught sight of a drosky and hailed it, but the driver refused the job, being anxious to get back to shelter as soon as possible. A bank note for twenty roubles proved too much for him. I jumped into the carriage and gave Louise’s address on the Nevski Prospect. The horse was up to his hocks in water; at intervals of five minutes the cannon was fired and at each report the people passing us called out, “the water is rising.”

  I got to Louise’s. A trooper was at the door. He had just arrived at full gallop from Count Alexis to tell Louise to go to the top floor of the house for greater safety. The wind had now veered to the west, and was driving back the Neva against the stream, the sea seeming to be striving with the river to throw the latter back upon its source. The soldier j had just finished his errand as I entered the house and disappeared at a gallop in the direction of the barracks, making the water fly around him. The cannon still continued to boom out at intervals.

  It was quite time I arrived; Louise was dying of fright, less perhaps for her own sake than for Count Alexis, whose barracks in the Narva quarter would be the first to suffer from the flood. Yet the message she had just received, had somewhat reassured her. We climbed together on to the roof of the house, which, being one of the highest, commanded the whole town, and permitted a view of the sea in fine weather. But now the fog was so thick that the view was confined to a very limited horizon, being lost in an ocean of vapour.

  Presently the cannon shots became more frequent, and we noticed the public carriages, whose drivers, in view of the subterranean eruption of water, had repaired to their accustomed positions with the expectation of making a small fortune, dashing from the Admiralty Square through the streets in all directions. Forced to flee before the impetuous river, they kept shouting: — ” The water is rising, the water is rising.” In truth behind the vehicles, as if in pursuit, a huge wave showed its greenish crest above the quays and broke at the corner of the Isaac bridge, while the foam rolled to the base of the statue of Peter the Great.

  Then there arose a cry of terror as if the whole city had seen the wave. The Neva was overflowing.

  In response to the cry uniforms swarmed over the roof of the Winter Palace. The Emperor, surrounded by his staff, had just gone up to give his orders, for the danger was becoming more and more threatening. When he got there he saw that the water had already crept more than half way up the walls of the Fortress, and he thought of the unhappy prisoners who were in the barred dungeons fronting the Neva. The captain of a vessel was ordered instantly to go and command the Governor, in the Emperor’s name, to release them from their cells and put them in a place of safety. But the boat arrived too late; in the general confusion they had been forgotten. They were dead.

  We now perceived above the Winter Palace, the streamer of the Imperial yacht, which had come up to offer a refuge to the Emperor and his family if need were. The water was now on a level with the parapets of the quays, which were beginning to disappear, and seeing a carriage floundering about with its driver and horse, we perceived that people were being swept off their feet in the streets. Presently the coachman flung himself into the water, gained a window and was dragged up on to the first floor balcony.

  Interested in this incident we had neglected the Neva, but on turning our eyes in that direction we perceived two vessels on the Admiralty Square. The water was already so high that they had been able to pass over the parapet. These boats had been sent by the Emperor to bring help to those who were drowning. Three others followed them. We thereupon turned our eyes mechanically in the direction of the horse and carriage; the roof of the carriage was still in sight, but the horse had been absolutely swallowed up. There were then nearly six feet of water in the streets. And now the cannon had ceased to fire, — proof positive that the inundation had reached the top of the ramparts of the citadel.

  Then we began to see the wreckage of houses floating in from the suburbs, driven forward by the waves; they were chiefly miserable wooden shanties from the Narva quarter, which were not able to resist the hurricane and had been swept away with their wretched inmates.

  One of the vessels which was entering the Prospect fished out a dead man before our very eyes. It is difficult to describe the impression produced upon us by the sight of the first corpse.

  The water continued to rise with startling rapidity; the three canals which encircle the city were discharging into the streets vessels laden with stores, fodder and timber. From time to time we would see a man cling to one of these floating islands, then scramble to the top and hail the boats, which then attempted to reach him; but it was a difficult matter, for the waves hemmed in by the streets raged furiously; so much so that before help could reach him it often happened that the poor wretch was carried away by a wave or saw his would-be rescuers themselves engulfed.

  We felt the house tremble and heard it groan under the stress of the waves, which had now reached the first floor and every moment we thought that the basement would give way and the upper storeys go crashing down; and yet in the midst of this chaos Louise could murmur nothing but, “Alexis, oh! my God! my God! Alexis!”

  The Emperor appeared to be in despair. Count Milarodovitch, Governor of St. Petersburg, was near him receiving and transmitting orders, which, however perilous they might be, were executed immediately with miraculous devotion. Meanwhile the news which reached him grew more and more disastrous. At one of the city barracks a whole regiment had sought refuge on the roof, but the building had collapsed and the whole of the unfortunate men disappeared. While this was being related to the Emperor, a sentinel, floating by on his sentry box, which till that moment had served him as a boat, appeared on the top of a wave, and catching sight of the Emperor on the roof, stood up and presented arms. At that moment a wave toppled over both him and his frail bark. The Emperor uttered a cry and ordered a small boat to go to his assistance. Happily the soldier knew how to swim and was able to sustain himself in the water for a few moments, till the boat reached him and conveyed him to the palace.

  By this time the whole scene was one of chaos of which it was impossible to follow the details.

  Vessels were crashing together and breaking up, and we watched the wreckage floating by mingled with the remains of houses and furniture and the corpses of men and animals. Coffins torn from their graves rendered up their dead as on the day of judgment, and finally a cross wrested from a cemetery entered a window of the Imperial palace and was found, an unlucky omen, in the Emperor’s room.

  The sea continued to rise for twelve hours. The first floors were everywhere submerged, and in some quarters of the city the water reached as far as the second, that is to say, six feet above Peter the Great’s Virgin; then it began to subside, for, by the grace of God, the wind shifted from the West to the North, and the Neva was able to retrace its course which the sea heaped up like a wall had hitherto prevented. Twelve hours more and St. Petersburg with its inhabitants would have disappeared from the face of the earth, like the cities of the antediluvian world at the flood.

  All this time the Emperor, the Grand Duke Nicholas, the Grand Duke Michael and Count Milarodovitch, the Governor General, whose bravery had procured him the title of the Russian Bayard, although in morals he fell far short of the French hero, did not leave the roof of the Winter Palace, while the Empress at her window threw purses of gold to the boatmen who were nobly hazarding their lives for others.

  Towards evening a boat approached towards the second floor of our house. For some time Louise exchanged joyous signals with the soldier in command of it, for she recognised his uniform. He brought news of the Count and had come to inquire after us. She wrote him a few lines in pencil to reassure him and I added a postscript in which I promised not to leave her.

  As the water continued to subside and the wind seemed settled in the North, we descended from the roof to the second floor. There we spent the night, for it was impossible to get to the first floor; the water had disappeared it is true, but everything was soiled and broken; the windows and doors were smashed and the floor was covered with fragments of furniture.

  This was the third time in a century that St. Petersburg with its palaces of brick and plaster colonnades had been threatened thus with water, making a counterpart to Naples, at the opposite end of Europe, which is periodically menaced with fire.

  The next morning there were not more than two or three feet of water in the streets and the magnitude of the disaster could be appreciated by the spectacle of wreckage and corpses strewing the pavements. Ships had been driven up as far as the church of Kazan and at Cronstadt a hundred-gun battleship, forced into the midst of the public square had demolished in its course two houses, against which it had been flung as if they had been reefs at sea.

  While the vengeance of God was being exercised the vengeance of man had not been idle.

  At eleven o’clock at night the Russian Minister had been summoned by the Emperor and had left his beautiful mistress at home, advising her, at the first sign of danger to repair to the rooms out of reach of the water; this was an easy matter, for the Minister’s mansion, one of the finest in the Street of the Resurrection, was four storeys high.

  The Gossudarina was left alone in the house with her serfs, while the Minister hastened to the Winter Palace, where he remained in attendance on the Emperor for nearly two days, in fact until the inundation had subsided.

  The moment he was free he returned to his home and found all the doors smashed in; the water had risen seventeen feet, and the house was completely deserted.

  Anxious about his beautiful mistress, the Minister ran upstairs to her room; the door was shut and was one of the few which had resisted the waves; almost all the others had been torn from their hinges and swept away. Disturbed at such a strange circumstance, he knocks, he calls out, but all is silent as the grave; his terror is greatly augmented at this silence, he makes a stupendous effort and forces in the door.

  The body of the Gossudarina was lying in the centre of the room; but, terrible proof that the flood was not altogether responsible for her death, the body was without a head.

  The Minister, almost out of his mind with grief, called for help, stepping on to the balcony whence Machinka had watched the knouting of her quondam companion. Several people ran up and found him on his knees near the poor mutilated corpse.

  The room was searched and the head was found, carried under the bed by the waves; near the head was a pair of large shears used for clipping hedges, evidently the instrument of the crime.

  All the Minister’s serfs, who at the first sign of danger had deserted their mistress, returned the same evening or the next day.

  But the gardener never came back.

  CHAPTER X

  THE shifting of the wind from West to North foreshadowed the arrival of winter; scarcely had the urgent repairs necessitated by the ravages of the retreating enemy been taken in hand, before preparations for meeting the advancing host became imperative.

  There was all the more need for haste, since the inundation did not happen till the 10th of November. The vessels which had escaped the hurricane made for the open sea with all despatch, only to be seen again in the spring, like the swallows.

  The bridges were removed, and then we waited quietly for the first frost. It arrived on December 3rd; on the fourth snow fell, and although there were only five or six degrees of frost, the sleighs were brought out; this was lucky, for all the winter store of provisions had been spoilt by the flood and the sleighs would preserve us from starvation. In fact, thanks to the sleighs, which almost rival steam in speed, as soon as this method of transport was in working order, there arrived in the capital, from every quarter of the empire, game which had been shot -sometimes a thousand or twelve hundred leagues from the spot where it would be eaten. Grouse, partridge, chicken and wild duck, packed in casks amid layers of snow, glut the markets, where they give them away almost rather than sell them. Near them may be seen the choicest fish from the Black Sea or the Volga spread out on tables or piled up in heaps; as for butcher’s meat, the carcases are exposed for sale, standing upon their four feet and are cut up in that position.

  The first few days when St. Petersburg put on her white robe of winter afforded me many a curious sight, for everything was a novelty. In particular I could not refrain from sleighing; for it is such a delightful pleasure to feel oneself drawn over a surface smooth as ice by horses excited by the keenness of the air; feeling almost no weight on the traces, they seem to fly rather than gallop. The first few days were additionally pleasant to me, for winter with unusual coquetry advanced slowly step by step, so that thanks to my coats and furs I experienced twenty degrees of frost almost without knowing it; at twelve degrees the Neva began to solidify.

  I had worked my unfortunate horses so hard that my driver told me one morning that unless I allowed them a rest of forty-eight hours at least, they would be unfit for further use at the end of a week. As the sky was cloudless, though the air was sharper than I had yet felt it, I decided I would take walking exercise. I fortified myself from head to foot against the inroads of the frost; I put on a large astrakhan overcoat, pushed a fur cap over my cars, wrapped a cashmere comforter round my neck and ventured forth into the street, presenting no part of my body to the air except the tip of my nose.

  All went well at first; I was astonished at the slight inconvenience I was put to by the cold, and I laughed to myself at all the tales I had heard; I was moreover delighted that fortune had given me this opportunity of acclimatizing myself. But as the first two pupils, M. de Bobrinski and M. de Nariskin, at whose houses I called, were not at home, I began to think that fortune had not dealt too kindly with me, for I noticed that the passers by were looking at me with a certain uneasiness, yet they said nothing.” But presently a gentleman more talkative than the others, said to me as he passed: “Noss.” As I did not know a word of Russian I thought it hardly worth while to stop for a monosyllable and continued my walk. At the corner of the Rue des Pois, I encountered a coachman who was driving his sleigh like the wind; but in spite of the rapidity with which he was going he could not refrain from speaking also and shouted out to me: “Noss! Noss!”

 

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