“On your knees, gros pouff!” exclaimed Poulain. (That was for me.) “On your knees, grand dada!” (That was for my brother.) And there we knelt, shedding tears and vainly endeavoring to learn all about the jurisconsult.
It cost us many pains, that preface! We were already learning all about the Romans, and used to put our sticks in Uliana’s scales when she was weighing rice, “just like Brennus;” we jumped from our table and other precipices for the salvation of our country, in imitation of Curtius; but M. Poulain would still from time to time return to the preface, and again put us on our knees for that very same jurisconsult. Was it strange that later on both my brother and I should entertain an undisguised contempt for jurisprudence?
I do not know what would have happened with geography if Monsieur Poulain’s book had had a preface. But happily the first twenty pages of the book had been torn away (Serge Zagóskin, I suppose, rendered us that notable service), and so our lessons commenced with the twenty-first page, which began, “of the rivers which water France.”
It must be confessed that things did not always end with kneeling. There was in the classroom a birch rod, and Poulain resorted to it when there was no hope of progress with the preface or with some dialogue on virtue and propriety; but one day sister Hélène, who by this time had left the Catherine Institut des Demoiselles, and now occupied a room underneath ours, hearing our cries, rushed, all in tears, into our father’s study, and bitterly reproached him with having handed us to our stepmother, who had abandoned us to “a retired French drummer.” “Of course,” she cried, “there is no one to take their part, but I cannot see my brothers being treated in this way by a drummer!”
Taken thus unprepared, our father could not make a stand. He began to scold Hélène, but ended by approving her devotion to her brothers. Thereafter the birch rod was reserved for teaching the rules of propriety to the setter, Trésor.
No sooner had M. Poulain discharged himself of his heavy educational duties than he became quite another man—a lively comrade instead of a gruesome teacher. After lunch he took us out for a walk, and there was no end to his tales: we chattered like birds. Though we never went with him beyond the first pages of syntax, we soon learned, nevertheless, “to speak correctly;” we used to think in French; and when he dictated to us half through a book of mythology, correcting our faults by the book, without ever trying to explain to us why a word must be written in a particular way, we had learned “to write correctly.”
After dinner we had our lesson with the Russian teacher, a student of the faculty of law in the Moscow University. He taught us all “Russian” subjects—grammar, arithmetic, history, and so on. But in those years serious teaching had not yet begun. In the meantime he dictated us every day a page of history, and in that practical way we quickly learned to write Russian quite correctly.
Our best time was on Sundays, when all the family, with the exception of us children, went to dine with Madame la Générale Timofeev. It would also happen occasionally that both M. Poulain and N. P. Smirnov would be allowed to leave the house, and when this occurred we were placed under the care of Uliana. After a hurriedly eaten dinner we hastened to the great hall, to which the younger housemaids soon repaired. All sorts of games were started—blind man, vulture and chickens, and so on; and then, all of a sudden, Tikhon, the Jack-of-all-trades, would appear with a violin. Dancing began; not that measured and tiresome dancing, under the direction of a French dancing-master “on India-rubber legs,” which made part of our education, but free dancing which was not a lesson, and in which a score of couples turned round any way; and this was only preparatory to the still more animated and rather wild Cossack dance. Tikhon would then hand the violin to one of the older men, and would begin to perform with his legs such wonderful feats that the doors to the hall would soon be filled by the cooks and even the coachmen, who came to see the dance so dear to the Russian heart.
About nine o’clock the big carriage was sent to fetch the family home. Tikhon, brush in hand, crawled on the floor, to make it shine with its virgin glance, and perfect order was restored in the house. And if, next morning, we two had been submitted to the most severe cross-examination, not a word would have been dropped concerning the previous evening’s amusements. We never would have betrayed any one of the servants, nor would they have betrayed us. One Sunday, my brother and I, playing alone in the wide hall, ran against a bracket which supported a costly lamp. The lamp was broken to pieces. Immediately a council was held by the servants. No one scolded us; but it was decided that early next morning Tikhon should at his risk and peril slip out of the house and run to the Smiths’ Bridge in order to buy another lamp of the same pattern. It cost fifteen rubles—an enormous sum for the servants; but it was bought, and we never heard
