VIII

THE LITILE CHAPEL OF THE GUARDS

Rouletabille took a long walk which led him to the Troitsky Bridge, then, re-descending the Naberjnaia, he reached the Winter Palace.  He seemed to have chased away all preoccupation, and took a child’s pleasure in the different aspects of the life that characterizes the city of the Great Peter.  He stopped before the Winter Palace, walked slowly across the square where the prodigious monolith of the Alexander Column rises from its bronze socket, strolled between the palace and the colonnades, passed under an immense arch:  everything seemed Cyclopean to him, and he never had felt so tiny, so insignificant.  None the less he was happy in his insignificance, he was satisfied with himself in the presence of these colossal things; everything pleased him this morning.  The speed of the isvos, the bickering humor of the osvotchicks, the elegance of the women, the fine presences of the officers and their easy naturalness under their uniforms, so opposed to the wooden posturing of the Berlin military men whom he had noticed at the “Tilleuls” and in the Friederichstrasse between two trains.  Everything enchanted him - the costume even of the moujiks, vivid blouses, the red shirts over the trousers, the full legs and the boots up to the knees, even the unfortunates who, in spite of the soft atmosphere, were muffled up in sheepskin coats, all impressed him favorably, everything appeared to him original and congenial.

Order reigned in the city.  The guards were polite, decorative and superb in bearing.  The passers-by in that quarter talked gayly among themselves, often in French, and had manners as civilized as anywhere in the world.  Where, then, was the Bear of the North?  He never had seen bears so well licked.  Was it this very city that only yesterday was in revolution?  This was certainly the Alexander Park where troops a few weeks before had fired on children who had sought refuge in the trees, like sparrows.  Was this the very pavement where the Cossacks had left so many bodies?  Finally he saw before him the Nevsky Prospect, where the bullets rained like hail not long since upon a people dressed for festivities and very joyous.  Nichevo!  Nichevo!  All that was so soon forgotten.  They forgot yesterday as they forget to-morrow.  The Nihilists?  Poets, who imagined that a bomb could accomplish anything in that Babylon of the North more important than the noise of its explosion!  Look at these people who pass.  They have no more thought for the old attack than for those now preparing in the shadow of the “tracktirs.”  Happy men, full of serenity in this bright quarter, who move about their affairs and their pleasures in the purest air, the lightest, the most transparent on earth.  No, no; no one knows the joy of mere breathing if he has not breathed the air there, the finest in the north of the world, which gives food and drink of beautiful