Then I asked her if she wished to be my wife.  Naturally her answer was ‘yes.’  The fearful agonies which I have experienced since that night are not to be expressed in words.  This is only natural.  To live for thirty-seven years in congenital antipathy to marriage, and then suddenly to be made a bridegroom through the sheer force of circumstances, without being in the least charmed by the bride—­that is something horrible!  In order to get back my senses and accustom myself to the thought of the future, I decided to go to the country for a month.  This I did.  I console myself with the thought that no one can escape his fate, and my meeting with that girl was fatality.  My conscience is clear.  If I marry without loving, it is because circumstances have forced this upon me.  I cannot do otherwise.  Carelessly I surrendered at her first confession of love.  I should not have answered her at all.”

Under such auspices, the marriage took place.  It is hard to say whom we should pity the more, husband or wife; and which we should count the more insane.  That which is technically called a honeymoon lasted a week in this case.  In ten days the husband is writing his fellow-Platonist, Frau von Meck, that he is uncertain about his happiness, but positive that he cannot compose.  He and his wife pay a little visit to her mother; then they return “home,” only to part.  The unwilling bridegroom must be alone to recuperate.  He writes Frau von Meck: 

“I leave in an hour.  A few days more of this, and I swear I should have gone mad.”

In ten days he is strong enough to think of his wife again; in his solitude he begins work on what he mentions to Frau von Meck as “our symphony.”

He goes hunting in the woods, while the lonely bride hunts furniture for their home.  By the middle of September, Tschaikovski is brave enough to return; he is pleased to find a home of his own, with all clean and neat.  For a few days, even a robbery by servants, and the necessity his wife is under to go to the police-court, do not disturb him, or, at least, so he writes.  But hardly more than a week can he stand his wife’s society.  He determines to kill himself, and stands up to his chin in the ice-cold river, afraid to drown himself, and yet hoping to catch a fatal pneumonia.

His old frenzy seized him; insanity beckoned to him again.  Alleging that a telegram had called him to St. Petersburg, he fled from his home, September 24, 1877.

His brother met him at the St. Petersburg station, and hardly knew him.  Taken to the nearest hotel, he went into hysterics, and was unconscious for forty-eight hours.  The doctor said travel was necessary.  The wife was provided for, and, leaving her forever, Tschaikovski fled to foreign countries barely in time to save his sanity.  To the last he absolved the poor wretched woman of any slightest blame for his behaviour.  His brother, in a biography, completely frank up to this point, now grows reticent, except to release the wife of all blame.  So you must satisfy your curiosity by imagining some abnormal state of mind, which you will regard cynically or pityingly, as your manner of mind impels.