is, some hundreds of readers who had nothing to do with Madame de
L-----tski, how charming and delightful this lady was; a true
Frenchwoman in intelligence (une vraie francaise par l'esprit)--
Frenchmen have no higher praise than this--what an extraordinary
musician she was, and how marvelously she waltzed (Varvara Pavlovna did
in fact waltz so that she drew all her hearts to the hem of her light
flying skirts)--in a word, he spread her fame through the world, and,
whatever one may say, that is pleasant. Mademoiselle Mars had already
left the stage, and Mademoiselle Rachel had not yet made her appearance;
nevertheless, Varvara Pavlovna was assiduous in visiting the theatres.
She went into raptures over Italian music, yawned decorously at the
Comedie Francaise, and wept at the acting of Madame Dorval in some ultra
romantic melodrama; and a great thing--Liszt played twice in her salon,
and was so kind, so simple--it was charming! In such agreeable
sensations was spent the winter, at the end of which Varvara Pavlovna
was even presented at court. Fedor Ivanitch, for his part, was not
bored, though his life, at times, weighed rather heavily on him--because
it was empty. He read the papers, listened to the lectures at the
Sorbonne and the College de France, followed the debates in the
Chambers, and set to work on a translation of a well-known scientific
treatise on irrigation. "I am not wasting my time," he thought, "it is
all of use; but next winter I must, without fail, return to Russia and
set to work." It is difficult to say whether he had any clear idea of
precisely what this work would consist of; and there is no telling
whether he would have succeeded in going to Russia in the winter; in the
meantime, he was going with his wife to Baden . . An unexpected incident
broke up all his plans.