ical supervisor
of the diocese, and sent them to him, together with a small holy picture
for his wife;[2] she was afraid to write, but she gave orders that Ivan
Petrovitch was to be told, by the lean peasant her envoy, who managed to
walk sixty versts in the course of twenty-four hours, that he must not
grieve too much, that, God willing, everything would come right, and his
father would convert wrath into mercy; that she, also, would have
preferred a different daughter-in-law, but that, evidently, God had so
willed it, and she sent her maternal blessing to Malanya Sergyeevna.
The lean little peasant received a ruble, requested permission to see his
new mistress, to whom he was related as co-sponsor at a baptism, kissed
her hand, and hastened off homeward.

And Ivan Petrovitch set off for Petersburg with a light heart. The
unknown future awaited him; poverty, perhaps, menaced him, but he had
bidden farewell to the life in the country which he detested, and, most
important of all, he had not betrayed his teachers, he really had "put in
action" and justified in fact Rousseau, Diderot, and _la declaration des
droits de l'homme_. A sense of duty accomplished, of triumph, of pride,
filled his soul; and his separation from his wife did not greatly alarm
him; the necessity of living uninterruptedly with his wife would have
perturbed him more. That affair was ended; he must take up other affairs.
In Petersburg, contrary to his own expectation, fortune smiled on him:
Princess Kubenskoy--whom Monsieur Courtin had already succeeded in
abandoning, but who had not yet succeeded in dying,--by way, in some
measure, of repairing the injury which she had done to her nephew,
recommended him to the good graces of all her friends, and gave him five
thousand rubles,--almost her last farthing,--and a Lepikovsky watch with
his coat of arms in a garland of cupids. Three months had not elapsed,
when he had already obtained a place in the Russian mission to London,
and he went to sea on the first English ship which sailed (there was no
thought of steamers in those days). A few months later, he received a
letter from Pestoff. The kind-hearted squire congratulated Ivan
Petrovitch on the birth of a son, who had made his appearance in the
world, in the village of Pokrovskoe, on August 20, 1807, and was named
Feodor, in honour of the holy martyr, Feodor the Strategist. Owing to
her extreme weakness, Malanya Sergyeevna added only a few lines; but
thos