As if providentially appointed to be the newly wedded wife of the village blacksmith, the woman persuaded her husband to come out with her, bringing some tools of his trade, a hammer, a chisel, a small anvil....  “My fetters”—­the book says—­“were struck off on the banks of the stream, in the starlight of a calm night by an athletic, taciturn young man of the people, kneeling at my feet, while the woman like a liberating genius stood by with clasped hands.”  Obviously a symbolic couple.  At the same time they furnished his regained humanity with some decent clothing, and put heart into the new man by the information that the seacoast of the Pacific was only a very few miles away.  It could be seen, in fact, from the top of the next ridge....

The rest of his escape does not lend itself to mystic treatment and symbolic interpretation.  He ended by finding his way to the West by the Suez Canal route in the usual manner.  Reaching the shores of South Europe he sat down to write his autobiography—­the great literary success of its year.  This book was followed by other books written with the declared purpose of elevating humanity.  In these works he preached generally the cult of the woman.  For his own part he practised it under the rites of special devotion to the transcendental merits of a certain Madame de S—­, a lady of advanced views, no longer very young, once upon a time the intriguing wife of a now dead and forgotten diplomat.  Her loud pretensions to be one of the leaders of modern thought and of modern sentiment, she sheltered (like Voltaire and Mme. de Stael) on the republican territory of Geneva.  Driving through the streets in her big landau she exhibited to the indifference of the natives and the stares of the tourists a long-waisted, youthful figure of hieratic stiffness, with a pair of big gleaming eyes, rolling restlessly behind a short veil of black lace, which, coming down no further than her vividly red lips, resembled a mask.  Usually the “heroic fugitive” (this name was bestowed upon him in a review of the English edition of his book)—­the “heroic fugitive” accompanied her, sitting, portentously bearded and darkly bespectacled, not by her side, but opposite her, with his back to the horses.  Thus, facing each other, with no one else in the roomy carriage, their airings suggested a conscious public manifestation.  Or it may have been unconscious.  Russian simplicity often marches innocently on the edge of cynicism for some lofty purpose.  But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings.  Considering the air of gravity extending even to the physiognomy of the coachman and the action of the showy horses, this quaint display might have possessed a mystic significance, but to the corrupt frivolity of a Western mind, like my own, it seemed hardly decent.