we exact a percentage on every worthless morsel....
How are they to hold their own with us?... All
this is not compliments, but the simple truth, proved
by experience. Once more, I beseech you, Marya
Alexandrovna, go on writing to me.... If you
knew all that is coming into my brain! ... But
I have no wish now to speak, I want to listen to you.
My turn will come later. Write, write.—Your
devoted,
A. S.
FROM MARYA ALEXANDROVNA TO ALEXEY PETROVITCH
VILLAGE OF X——, June 12,
1840.
I had hardly sent off my last letter to you, Alexey
Petrovitch, when I regretted it; but there was no
help for it then. One thing reassures me somewhat:
I am sure you realised that it was under the influence
of feelings long ago suppressed that it was written,
and you excused me. I did not even read through,
at the time, what I had written to you; I remember
my heart beat so violently that the pen shook in my
fingers. However, though I should probably have
expressed myself differently if I had allowed myself
time to reflect, I don’t mean, all the same,
to disavow my own words, or the feelings which I described
to you as best I could. To-day I am much cooler
and far more self-possessed.
I remember at the end of my letter I spoke of the
painful position of a girl who is conscious of being
solitary, even among her own people.... I won’t
expatiate further upon them, but will rather tell you
a few instances; I think I shall bore you less in
that way. In the first place, then, let me tell
you that all over the country-side I am never called
anything but the female philosopher. The ladies
especially honour me with that name. Some assert
that I sleep with a Latin book in my hand, and in
spectacles; others declare that I know how to extract
cube roots, whatever they may be. Not a single
one of them doubts that I wear manly apparel on the
sly, and instead of ‘good-morning’, address
people spasmodically with ’Georges Sand!’—and
indignation grows apace against the female philosopher.
We have a neighbour, a man of five-and-forty, a great
wit ... at least, he is reputed a great wit ... for
him my poor personality is an inexhaustible subject
of jokes. He used to tell of me that directly
the moon rose I could not take my eyes off it, and
he will mimic the way in which I gaze at it; and declares
that I positively take my coffee with moonshine instead
of with milk—that’s to say, I put
my cup in the moonlight. He swears that I use
phrases of this kind—’It is easy because
it is difficult, though on the other hand it is difficult
because it is easy’.... He asserts that
I am always looking for a word, always striving ‘thither,’
and with comic rage inquires: ‘whither-thither?
whither?’ He has also circulated a story about
me that I ride at night up and down by the river,
singing Schubert’s Serenade, or simply moaning,
’Beethoven, Beethoven!’ She is, he will
