The Gentle Barbarian by V. S. Pritchett Page B

hostages; but he who has even a little knowledge of the human heart will not be shocked by these contradictions.
    Herzen was in Paris at the time and the effect of the revolution of ‘48 on him was to put an end to the political illusions he shared with the Russian Romantics. It had destroyed their dream. As E.H. Carr pointed out in
The Romantic Exiles,
the Romantic movement had come thirty years late to Russia. Up till now they had believed that the ideas of the French Revolution were still a force in Europe: the events of ‘48 had shown them that, above all in France, it was no longer a force. Napoleon had killed the Revolution for good; money and the
petit-bourgeoisie
were in power. Herzen understood that the views of the Russian revolutionaries like himself had been out of date. There had always been a deep strain of original scepticism in him and now it had become bitter and pungent. He ridiculed the absurd antics of the out-of-date conspirators in Paris. Yet he said he wished that he had died with a rifle in his hands on the barricades, for at least he “would have carried with him to the grave two or three convictions.”
    Turgenev saw the Herzen family every day. They lived in the Champs-Élysées, close to the Arc de Triomphe which had just been finished, and Turgenev read poetry to Natalie Herzen’s daughters and distracted them all by his mimicry and play-acting, even alarmed them by his bursts of light-headedness and left them depressed. Once he dressed up in Natalie’s velvet cape and pretended to be a madwoman, another time he sat on the window-sill, pretending to be a cockerel and screaming in a high voice “Cock-a-doodle-do.” In one of his comic fits he pulled down a curtain and stood himself ina corner with a dunce’s hat on his head. Afterwards he fell into silent brooding and Natalie Herzen, who was on the verge of a miserable love affair with Herwegh, tried to draw him out on the subject of love. Perhaps Turgenev’s failure to respond to her attempts to find out the truth about his relations with Pauline and Louis Viardot—a matter of exemplary interest to her, for her Herwegh was married—caused her to turn against Turgenev: she said he gave her the sensation of being in a damp, musty, empty house.
    Were his antics and his moods of depression the symptoms of the sickness of an impossible love?
    The cholera terrified him; it was the Russian plague following him to Europe, eating its way from street to street. Presently he had a fever and he bolted out of Paris to the Ville d’Avray and there slowly the fever abated. His capacity to create the symptoms of illness—bladder trouble is one, for example—seems to be at one with his genius for fantasy and to his general sensibility. One of his beliefs was that he had a thinner skull than other men.
    He recovered and went to Courtavenel. The Viardots had left for a long series of engagements in England which they disliked but where Pauline always had enthusiastic audiences, so he went off to Hyères to convalesce, and he wrote to “the most loved, dearest and only woman” asking for every detail of her performances and chattered about his journey—thirty-six hours to Lyons in a crowded compartment with a French grocer who boasted that he himself had killed seventeen insurgents in the street.
    â€œAh! voyez-vous,” disait-il, ce n’était pas long, on leur criait: “ àge-noux, gredins, “ils se débattaient—mais paouf, un coup de crosse dans la nuque, paouf! une balle à bout portant entre les deux sourcils—et drig, drig, drig
—
les voilà qui gigotaient sur le pavé.“
    The grocer was a fat man, a regular at the Opéra Comique. Turgenev went down the Rhône by steamer to Avignon and then on to Hyères. In his letters the ardent German phrases to “my dear beloved angel” and “to the whole of your dear being” from