Victor Cherbuliez


Count Kostia


I


At the beginning of the summer of 1850, a Russian nobleman, Count
Kostia Petrovitch Leminof, had the misfortune to lose his wife
suddenly, and in the flower of her beauty. She was his junior by
twelve years. This cruel loss, for which he was totally
unprepared, threw him into a state of profound melancholy; and some
months later, seeking to mitigate his grief by the distractions of
travel, he left his domains near Moscow, never intending to return.
Accompanied by his twin children, ten years of age, a priest who
had served them as tutor, and a serf named Ivan, he repaired to
Odessa, and then took passage on a merchant ship for Martinique.
Disembarking at St. Pierre, he took lodgings in a remote part of
the suburbs. The profound solitude which reigned there did not at
first bring the consolation he had sought. It was not enough that
he had left his native country, he would have changed the planet
itself; and he complained that nature everywhere was too much
alike. No locality seemed to him sufficiently a stranger to his
experience, and in the deserted places, where the desperate
restlessness of his heart impelled him, he imagined the
reappearance of the obtrusive witnesses of his past joys, and of