CHAPTER XX

Crevecoeur--Bomback--Journey to Moscow--My Adventures At St. Petersburg

The day on which I took Zaira I sent Lambert away, for I did not know
what to do with him. He got drunk every day, and when in his cups he was
unbearable. Nobody would have anything to say to him except as a common
soldier, and that is not an enviable position in Russia. I got him a
passport for Berlin, and gave him enough money for the journey. I heard
afterwards that he entered the Austrian service.

In May, Zaira had become so beautiful that when I went to Moscow I dared
not leave her behind me, so I took her in place of a servant. It was
delicious to me to hear her chattering in the Venetian dialect I had
taught her. On a Saturday I would go with her to the bath where thirty of
forty naked men and women were bathing together without the slightest
constraint. This absence of shame must arise, I should imagine, from
native innocence; but I wondered that none looked at Zaira, who seemed to
me the original of the statue of Psyche I had seen at the Villa Borghese
at Rome. She was only fourteen, so her breast was not yet developed, and
she bore about her few traces of puberty. Her skin was as white as snow,
and her ebony tresses covered the whole of her body, save in a few places
where the dazzling whiteness of her skin shone through. Her eyebrows were
perfectly shaped, and her eyes, though they might have been larger, could
not have been more brilliant or more expressive. If it had not been for
her furious jealousy and her blind confidence in fortune-telling by
cards, which she consulted every day, Zaira would have been a paragon
among women, and I should never have left her.