his consideration. With widened outlook and new ideals he returned to
St. Petersburg at the close of the Crimean campaign, to be welcomed by
the elite of letters and courted by society. A few years before he would
have been delighted with such a reception. Now it jarred on his awakened
sense of the tragedy of existence. He found himself entirely out of
sympathy with the group of literary men who gathered round him, with
Turgenev at their head. In Tolstoy's eyes they were false, paltry, and
immoral, and he was at no pains to disguise his opinions. Dissension,
leading to violent scenes, soon broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy;
and the latter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great
contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the
dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army,
went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.

In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he
enjoyed a respite from mental strain.

"A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive."

Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually
styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the
Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved