Minister's daughter was ready to become as brilliant as before; but Madame Speransky-Bagréeff's biography now becomes in great part that of a landowner and of a mother. Of a landowner, because her father had bought for her an estate called Bowromka; and because the welfare of Bowromka and its peasants, the rise and fall of prices, the sale of wood, and the erection of model farms, dispensaries, and schools, occupied her time and emptied her purse. M. Bagréeff was as unfortunate as a landlord as he had been as a governor of the Bank; and in all these capacities he had the misfortune to sink more and more in his wife's esteem. But she had become the mother of three children. Of these the youngest, who was a boy, only lived two years; but Michael, her first-born, fulfilled all the promise of his youth; and the education of her only daughter already caused her many hopes and fears, while it occupied her days. For them she wrote her first books, tales for children and short plays; while the farouche temper of Mademoiselle Bagréeff, afterwards Princess Cantacuzene, is probably reflected in Irène,' a novel on the benefits of education, which only saw the light in 1857, and which is perhaps the most Edgeworthian of all the mother's works.

·

Of M. Bagréeff all this time she saw but little : very possibly this arrangement may have been one which had met with the consent of both parties: but none the less it probably had its share in intensifying the peculiarities of Mademoiselle Bagréeff's character. Whether caused by quarrels about money, by incompatibility of tastes and tempers, or by still graver wrongs, the mother's estrangement from the father of her children was now complete-so complete that when M. Bagréeff for the last time announced a visit to her,

that visit was not accepted; and when he died rather suddenly, their daughter only was with him-no reconciliation between her parents having been procured or attempted.

One of the causes which in the beginning may have helped to disunite the couple, and to keep them separate, had been Madame Elizabeth's health. Always delicate, childbearing and household worries had told greatly upon her strength; and in 1833, and again in 1834, she had gone to the sea-baths of Skeveningen to recruit. The first of these trips had been the first occasion on which Speransky's daughter crossed the boundaries of "Holy Russia," or trod the soil of one of those Western kingdoms with whose histories and institutions her father had made her acquainted. Did she, like Madame Swetchine, feel that she then breathed a freer air? She does not say so, but she became a great traveller.

With her, as with many of her countrymen, travel grew at once into a habit and a passion. The already encumbered estate of Bowromka was left to the tender mercies of intendants, of whom Madame Speransky-Bagréeff had six in seven years; and like most of the landowners of her day, she soon found herself deeply in debt to the Government, which is always happy to assist a Russian noble to mortgage his lands and villages.

What, under these adverse cir cumstances, became of the schools, dispensaries, sugar-factories, and model farms, the biographer of Madame Speransky-Bagréeff, M. Victor Duret, does not say. What it is impossible to conceal is, that her daughter, and her daughter's Greek husband, took her financial measures in quite as bad part as she had ever done the meddling and muddling of her late husband, and that something very like a quarrel was the consequence. None the less, and perhaps all the more for this very

reason, she travelled to Egypt, to the Holy Land-whither she had vowed to make a pilgrimage-to England, to Vienna, to Paris, to Brussels, and to Hungary.

These travels form the groundplans of many of her novels, and supply much of the local colouring of her works. Take, for example, 'Les Pélerins Russes, à Jerusalem,' published at Brussels in 1854. Here Speransky's daughter puts out a great deal of her strength, and in her sketch of the deacon, in "Une nuit au Golgotha," she has left a touching portrait of the priest's son, Michael Gramatine, who, in the seminary of Vladimir, had once formed ambitious hopes, and who had lived to realise many of them for, and with, and in herself. The book is written in French. Prosper Merimée writes to her to congratulate her, and to praise its careful and vigorous idioms. It has added, he says, to his wish to know Russia and the Russians; but he has one reproach to make to her, one fault to find,—it is all too sad; and "life is such a sad thing, that clever people ought to be compelled always to write gay things, so as to divert one a little from things as they are."

But Madame Elizabeth was sad; and she had good cause to be so. Something not quite unlike fame was now coming to her from her writings; but then fame is, as Madame de Staël, who was a good judge, averred, "a royal mourning, in purple, for happiness.' Furthermore, the authoress was poor, and she had a thousand troubles at home which, had she been on the spot, would have been vexatious enough to arrange, and which at a distance were hopeless. She was on bad terms with her daughter, as she had been with her husband; she had frequent attacks of rheumatic gout, an enemy which is apt to hang upon the flanks of all brain

workers; she was in no favour at Court, and that in a country where Court favour is the all in all she might, if she liked, change her skies, but she could not change her mind; publishers worried her, and editors occasionally mangled and dismembered her pieces; and by her fireside, in two empty chairs-those of her father and of her son-there sat the shadow feared by man.

Count Michael Speransky's death, in 1839, had been at least a natural one; but young Michael Bagréeff had been killed in the Caucasus by a comrade who was maddened with drink, and who, in the dark, drew his sword upon the boy who had tried to prevent a drunken riot and a scandalous fight. His mother never recovered from this shock. Her intelligence survived it, and her energy remained, along with the necessities for work, for money, and for intercourse with her fellowworkers; but her heart was broken. It may not have shown much in her novels; but there is a little book which has only been published since her death, and which, as the 'Livre d'une Femme,' lets one into many secrets of the woman's life. We see its loneliness. Then, after some sharp struggles to forgive the enemies of her father, and the murderer of her son, comes a gentler sense of pity and of humility some dust to put on her own head-many tears to give to past errors, and a lingering passionate return to that great and tender love which had subsisted between her father and herself. One says a return, because at the time of Count Michael Speransky's death many circumstances must have conspired to divert her sense of pain into other channels than the purely filial one. He had died full of years, with his "Swod" or code a completed monument for his renown; full, we may say, too, of honour-that is, of such honour

as despotism has to bestow on a man who has been, through two reigns, at once its good angel and its tool, its favourite, its adviser, and its victim. Full, certainly, of experience and of labour. Both health and strength for some months gave signs of distress; but his august master would not allow him to interpret these as a warning to cease from all literary and responsible work. And so the Minister died in harness, after an apoplectic stroke, on the 23d of February 1839. The Tzar, who grieved for him, or who at least missed him, would not, however, befriend his daughter. Elizabeth was poor, but the Emperor Nicholas gave her no pension; and M. Bagréeff, who had accumulated some capital, and who had built expectations upon the position of his father-in-law, now took arbitrary possession of any fortune which could be said to belong to his wife. He was dissatisfied with its amount, and Elizabeth was displeased with the uses to which he appropriated it. High words ensued, and the separation which we know of followed as a consequence. Thus it had happened that in its first years Elizabeth's filial sorrow was greatly turned to bitterness, and deformed by anger both against her husband and against the Government of the Tzar, which had possessed itself of all her father's papers and literary remains. It was only in later years, and when this soreness had ceased to be felt, that her filial feelings were able to reassert themselves in all their simplicity. Certainly Madame Speransky-Bagréeff is never so much a woman, and never more truly attractive, than in those passages where her grief as a daughter and as a mother finds vent. Many of the pages of the 'Livre d'une Femme' are devoted to these themes, and many more to meditations on the Scriptures-a study

which she had always shared, as a girl, with M. Speransky, and which now occupied many of the saddened years of her declining life.

M. Speransky had interested himself greatly in the translation of the Bible into Russ; but in one of his Siberian letters he begs his daughter not to read the Word of God except in Sclavonic—that is, in the time-honoured language and idioms appropriated to the service of the

Orthodox" Church. The vulgar tongue, he says, deprives the sacred writings of their majestic beauty, and lays them open to the jarring of vulgar and trivial associations.

His own commentary on the Gospel of St John, Elizabeth was wont to render into German; and many a long winter's day had the father and daughter spent over the MSS., which the latter was afterwards to preserve with pious care. The work was probably intended for publication-at least, M. Speransky seems to hint at this when he says, "Your thoughts about inspi ration are so attractive that I am tempted to write an essay upon them, and to demonstrate that inspiration is not an illusion, but in truth a very real and substantial property of the Spirit. We can speak of this when we meet, and when I am able to write the book which I have been thinking of for years." The book never saw the light; but 200 folio sheets of commentary remained in his daughter's care, and often afforded texts for the remarks and notes which abound in the 'Livre d'une Femme.' the daughter is less "orthodox" than the father. For example, we find Speransky dwelling with pleasure on the belief in the Guardian Angel; and though he has been accused of holding Protestant ideas, he often speaks of Protestants with great reprobation, as persons who,

under the pretence of a greater

spirituality, have refined their faith into mere abstract propositions, banished gentle and devout feelings from religion, and left it blunt, coarse, and spiritless." Elizabeth has a good deal of this same mysticism; but she often differs freely from the teaching of her own Church, though she was never tempted to do like Madame Swetchine, and to abjure it for that of any other communion. It is doubtful, however, whether the 'Livre d'une Femme would be considered as an altogether orthodox work in any Church. It is full of curious speculations, especially on the subject of the transmigration of souls; yet when read. in the light of the events of Elizabeth's life and of her mistakes, some of its confessions are very pathetic.

It is difficult through the medium of a translation to convey any idea of the excellence of style or of the grace which distinguishes some of Madame Speransky - Bagréeff's sayings. She is a less powerful and a less eloquent writer than Madame Swetchine; and her writings, with the exception of one novel, of which we propose to give a sketch, are less likely to live than are the letters of her friend,-letters all alive with those strong sympathies, and with that ardent love of God and of her neighbour, which made Madame Swetchine a real power in the society of her day. Elizabeth's style is more studied, and throughout her whole career her paragraphs sound as if they had been composed with a view to her father's praise or blame. Both women were very sensitive to the approach of old age. Madame Swetchine's remarks on it have the sustained dignity of a mind determined to rise above that last weakness, and to see always more of heaven through "chinks that time has made;" but Elizabeth

lets a cry escape from her now and then,-"See," she exclaims, "what generally fills up a woman's life once youth is past; sicknesses of the body, sorrows of the soul, regrets for the past, and fears for the future! But let women resign themselves; let them crown themselves with thorns, and walk without murmuring in the austere way of the Cross."

Against her own share of these haunting fears and regrets Madame Speransky- Bagréeff was still also able to defend herself by work, and by the friendships which her works had helped to gather round her.

Of all her novels, the one which is most likely to live is 'Une famille Tongouse.' It is thoroughly original, and written with great spirit; while the scenes, the characters, and the treatment of them all carry her readers into a new country, and give us the pleasure of new associations, and yet the simple plot is founded on those feelings which, as Lamartine says, "keep the heart of humanity ever young." Its Siberian details have evidently been elaborated by Madame SperanskyBagréeff as a labour of love, and many of them are very curious.

She begins by telling us that on the very confines of civilisation, and on the borders of the Lake Baikal, which the Cossacks and Siberians dignify with the name of the Holy Sea, there dwelt in a small Stanitza, or commune, two families distinguished by their labours and virtues. The first was that of the village priest, the père Jossiff, with his gentle wife; the other was that of the Cossack, Wassili-Ivanoff, with a helpmate who might have sat for one of the Biblical portraits, so virtuous, hardworking, and devoted was Wassili (Basil) was a mighty hunter, a faithful subject of the distant Tzar, an orthodox believer, a suc

she.

cessful fisher and fowler, and a good judge of furs. His days and nights spent in the forest or on the borders of the lake, had brought him often in contact with the stray Tongouses who ventured near the Christian Stanitzas, and exchanges of furs and of good offices had passed between him and these nomads. The Tongouses, like the Bouriates, occupy a good deal of the country between China and the Lake Baikal. They are now diminishing in numbers and courage; but their numbers, as far as they could be ascertained, were, in 1857, somewhere about 50,000 males. They wander from frontier to frontier, and sometimes pay tessak, or tribute of furs, to both emperors, of Russia and of China. Some of the tribes are more warlike than others; but the neighbours of the Cossack Wassili belonged principally to the less noteworthy Kellems, or solitary Tongouses, whom the Siberians both hated as pagans, and despised because they were so little formidable. Jossiff, the priest, often preached toleration and kindliness to his flock; but it was in vain that he told them that example was the best way of making proselytes. Except Wassili-Ivanoff, no one had any charity for the stealthy wandering Tongouses who trapped the game of the forest, caught the fish of the Holy Sea, worshipped Shaitans, or devils, and were led by Shamans, necromantic priests, half soothsayers, half impostors, and whole rogues. Unlike the Bouriates, the Tongouses have not been elevated to Bouddhism, and their superstitions are as debased as they are cruel.

Wassili the Cossack died, and his widow Salomèa and his son Alexei were left to mourn his loss by an accident in hunting. But it soon seemed that they and their Christian neighbours in the

Stanitza were not alone in their grief. The good deeds of Wassili still followed him. Some grateful Tongouse brought offerings by night to his grave-fossil ivory, and furs and fruits; and at last, most embarrassing of all, a basket was found on the tomb, containing an infant— a little girl. The fashion of adopting children is not uncommon in Russia-solittle so, that their servicebook contains a liturgical office for the ceremony of adoption: and Salomèa was rich; but then to adopt a child of the devil, a little heretic! was that to be thought of? The whole commune was in an uproar; and public opinion, which was represented in it by the Attaman Stéphan-Grègorieff, and still more by his talkative spouse, was set against the little girl, called alternately "pig," and heretic, and changeling! However, the foundling, baptised Marie, continued to live in Salomèa's house, where, though she certainly exhibited no signs of vice, or of anything but previous starvation, her gestures and looks were all considered unearthly; "and," quoth Salomèa, her unwilling mother, " your Reverence must admit, that for a widow who fears God, such a visitation is not agreeable."

The worst part of it was that the little Tongouse was a girl. Even his Reverence felt that to be a trial. Public opinion in the mouth of the Attaman again observed, that had it been a boy they might have made a good Cossack out of a bad heathen, and had a good soldier for their father the Tzar; but this was only a poor soul, of the female sex, and the most they could do for it was to deliver it from Satan and his Shamans. "Souls are of no gender," replied the père Jossiff, who accordingly made the education of little Marie his especial care. Saloméa had to resign herself; and Marie grew up, a child of the Church, but