At last I was glad to see her restored without
being marked in the least.

I then resolved to leave for Moscow. I wanted a change from St.
Petersburg, where I had been suffering to such a degree that my health
was affected. Not that after the wedding the wretched stories which
had been brought up against me left any impression. On the contrary,
the people who had blackened my character most repented of their
injustice. However, I was unable to shake off the memory of the past
months. I felt miserable, but kept my trouble to myself; I complained
of no one. I observed silence, even with my dearest friends, on the
subject of my daughter and the man she had given me for a son, going
so far as reticence toward my brother, to whom I had written
frequently since being apprised by him of another misfortune. Indeed,
this period of my life was devoted to tears: we had lost our mother.

Hoping, then, to obtain relief from so much sorrow through distraction
and a change of scene, I hastened the life-sized portrait I was then
doing of the Empress Maria, as well as several half-length portraits,
and left for Moscow on the 15th of October, 1800.

CHAPTER XII

MOSCOW

JOURNEY TO MOSCOW -- A BAD SMELL AND ITS ORIGIN -- FIRST
IMPRESSIONS OF MOSCOW -- ANOTHER IMPRESSION, ORAL AND UNPLEASING
-- THE KREMLIN -- STEAM-AND-SNOW BATHING -- SOCIETY -- LUXURIOUS
PRINCE KURAKIN -- AN IMPOSSIBLE DUOLOGUE -- EXAMPLES OF RUSSIAN
CLEVERNESS -- DETERMINATION TO RETURN TO FRANCE.

No more dreadful fatigue can be imagined than that which awaited me in
the journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The roads I counted upon as
being frozen--as I had been led to believe--were not yet in that
condition. The roads, in fact, were terrible; the logs, which rendered
them almost impracticable in severe weather, not being as yet fixed by
the frost, rolled incessantly under the wheels, and produced the same
effect as waves of the sea. My carriage was half-covered with mud, and
gave us such terrible shocks that at every moment I expected to give
up the ghost. For the sake of some relief from this torture, I stopped
half-way at the inn of Novgorod, the only one on the route, where--so
I had been informed--I should be well fed and lodged. Being greatly in
want of rest, and faint with hunger, I asked for a room. Hardly was I
installed when I noticed a pestilential smell that made me sick. The
master of the inn, whom I begged to chan