‘Tomassov didn’t quite like those murmurs. But to a certain extent he had laid himself open to banter by the lasting character of his impressions.

‘They were connected with the passion of love and, perhaps, not so very unique as he seemed to think them. What made us, his comrades, tolerant of his allusions to them, was the fact that they were connected with France, with Paris.

‘You can’t conceive now how much prestige there was in these names, for the whole world. It was the centre of wonder for all human beings gifted with reason and imagination. There we were, the majority of us young and well connected, but not long out of our hereditary nests in the provinces, simple servants of God; rustics, if I may say so. So we were only too ready to listen to the tale of travels from our comrade Tomassov. He had been attached to our military mission in Paris the year before the war. High protections^* no doubt—or maybe sheer luck.

‘I don’t think he could have been a very useful member of the mission. It could not have been expected from his youth and complete inexperience. Apparently all his time in Paris was his own. The use he made of it was to fall in love, to remain in that state, to cultivate it, to exist only for it, in a manner of speaking.

‘Thus it was something more than a mere memory that he had brought with him from France. Memory is a fugitive thing. It can be falsified. It can be effaced. It can be even doubted. Why! I myself come to doubt sometimes that I, too, have been in Paris in my turn. And the very long road there with battles for its stages would appear still more incredible if it were not for a certain musket ball which I have been carrying about my person ever since a little cavalry affair which happened in Silesia,^* at the very beginning of the Leipsic^* campaign.

‘Passages of love, however, are more impressive perhaps than passages of danger. You don’t go affronting love in troops as it were. They are more unique, more personal and more intimate. And of course with Tomassov all that was very fresh yet. He had not been home from France four months when the war began.

‘His heart, his mind were full of that experience. He was a little awed by it. And he was simple enough to let it appear in his speeches. He considered himself a sort of privileged person, not because she had looked at him with favour, but simply because—how shall I say it—he had had the wonderful illumination of that worship as if it were heaven itself which had done this for him.

‘Oh yes! He was very simple. A nice youngster, yet no fool; and with that utterly inexperienced, unsuspicious and even unthinking. You find one like that here and there—in the provinces. He had a lot of poetry in him too. It could be only natural, something quite his own, not acquired. I suppose Father Adam had some poetry in him too of that natural sort. For the rest un Russe sauvage as the French sometimes call us, but not of that kind which, they maintain, eats tallow candles^* for a delicacy.

‘As to the woman, the Frenchwoman, well, though I also have been in Paris with a hundred thousand other Russians, I have never seen her. Very likely she was not in Paris then. And in any case hers were not the doors that would fly open before simple fellows of my sort, you understand. Gilded saloons were never in my way. I could not tell you how she looked, even from description, which is strange considering that I was, if I may say so, Tomassov’s confidant.

‘He very soon got shy of talking before the others. I suppose camp-fire comments jarred his finer feelings. But I was left to him and truly I had to submit. You can’t very well expect a fellow in that state to hold his tongue altogether; and I—I suppose, you’ll find it difficult to believe—I am in reality a rather silent sort of person.