The people are not poor; the great know how to lead, when it is necessary, the same life as the people:  it is the mixture of the hardest privations and of the most refined enjoyments which characterizes the country.  These same noblemen, whose residence unites all that the luxury of different parts of the world has most attractive, live, while they are travelling, on much worse food than our French peasantry, and know how to bear, not only during war, but in various circumstances of life, a physical existence of the most disagreeable kind.  The severity of the climate, the marshes, the forests, the deserts, of which a great part of the country is composed, place man in a continual struggle with nature.  Fruits, and even flowers, only grow in hot-houses; vegetables are not generally cultivated; and there are no vines any where.  The habitual mode of life of the French peasants could not be obtained in Russia but at a very great expense.  There they have only necessaries by luxury:  whence it happens that when luxury is unattainable, even necessaries are renounced.  What the English call comforts are hardly to be met with in Russia.  You will never find any thing sufficiently perfect to satisfy in all ways the imagination of the great Russian noblemen; but when this poetry of wealth fails them, they drink hydromel, sleep upon a board, and travel day and night in an open carriage, without regretting the luxury to which one would think they had been habituated.  It is rather as magnificence that they love fortune, than from the pleasures they derive from it:  resembling still in that point the Easterns, who exercise hospitality to strangers, load them with presents, and yet frequently neglect the every day comforts of their own life.  This is one of the reasons which explains that noble courage with which the Russians have supported the ruin which has been occasioned them by the burning of Moscow.  More accustomed to external pomp than to the care of themselves, they are not mollified by luxury, and the sacrifice of money satisfies their pride as much or more than the magnificence of their expenditure.  What characterizes this people, is something gigantic of all kinds:  ordinary dimensions are not at all applicable to it.  I do not by that mean to say that neither real grandeur nor stability are to be met with in it:  but the boldness and the imagination of the Russians know no bounds:  with them every thing is colossal rather than well proportioned, audacious rather than reflective, and if they do not hit the mark, it is because they overshoot it.

CHAPTER 13.

Appearance of the Country.—­Character of the Russians.