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By Root 3764 0

agreeable and hospitable house in Moscow. Besides formal soirées and dinners, each day at the Karagins’ a large company gathered, especially of men, who had supper around midnight and stayed till three in the morning. There was no ball, theatrical, or promenade that Julie missed. Her dresses were always the most fashionable. But, in spite of that, Julie seemed disappointed in everything, said to everyone that she believed neither in friendship, nor in love, nor in any of the joys of life, and expected peace only there. She adopted the tone of a girl who has lived through a great disappointment, a girl who, as it were, has lost a beloved man or been cruelly deceived by him. Though none of it had happened to her, people looked at her as if it had, and she herself even believed that she had suffered much in her life. This melancholy, which did not keep her from making merry, also did not keep the young people who visited her from passing the time pleasantly. Each guest who came to them gave its due to the hostess’s melancholy mood and then occupied himself with society talk, and dancing, and parlor games, and tournaments of bouts rimés,*366 which were fashionable at the Karagins’. Only some of the young men, Boris among them, entered more deeply into Julie’s melancholy mood, and with these young men she had more prolonged and solitary conversations on the vanity of worldly things, and opened for them her albums filled with sad images, sayings, and verses.

Julie was especially affectionate with Boris: she was sorry for his early disappointment in life, offering him what consolations of friendship she could offer, having suffered so much in life herself, and she opened her album for him.8 Boris drew two trees in her album and wrote: “Arbres rustiques, vos sombres rameaux secouent sur moi les ténèbres et la mélancolie.”†367

In another place he drew a tomb and wrote:

La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.

Ah! contre les douleurs il n’y a pas d’autre asile.‡368

Julie said that this was charming.

“Il y a quelque chose de si ravissant dans le sourire de la mélancolie,” she recited to Boris, word for word, a phrase she had copied from a book. “C’est un rayon de lumière dans l’ombre, une nuance entre la douleur et le désespoir, qui montre la consolation possible.”*369

To this Boris wrote down verses for her:

Aliment de poison d’une âme trop sensible,

Toi, sans qui le bonheur me serait impossible,

Tendre mélancolie, ah, viens me consoler,

Viens calmer les tourments de ma sombre retraite

Et mêle une douceur secrète

A ces pleurs, qui je sens couler.†370

Julie played the most mournful nocturnes on the harp for Boris. Boris read Poor Liza9 aloud to her and interrupted his reading more than once from emotions that robbed him of breath. Meeting at a large gathering, Julie and Boris looked at each other as the only people in a sea of the indifferent who understood each other.

Anna Mikhailovna, who often visited the Karagins and played cards with the mother, meanwhile obtained trustworthy information about what would come with Julie (what would come were the two Penza estates and the woodlands in Nizhni Novgorod province). Anna Mikhailovna, given over to the will of providence, looked with tenderness upon the refined sorrow that bound her son to the rich Julie.

“Toujours charmante et mélancolique, cette chère Julie,”‡371 she said to the daughter. “Boris says his soul is eased in your house. He has suffered so many disappointments, and he is so sensitive,” she said to the mother.

“Ah, my friend, how attached I’ve become to Julie lately,” she said to her son. “I can’t describe it to you! And who could possibly not love her? She’s such an unearthly being! Ah, Boris, Boris!” She would fall silent for a moment. “And how sorry I am for her maman,” she would go on. “Today she showed me reports and letters from Penza (they have an enormous estate), and she does everything alone, poor thing: they deceive her so much!”

Boris smiled almost imperceptibly, listening to his mother. He laughed