Leaving for a moment the thronged promenade, I turned into a thick forest and entered the old chateau of the great Peter. There all was solitude; the footman and I had the palace to ourselves. I followed him through the whole range of apartments, in which there was an appearance of staid respectability that quite won my heart, neither of them being any better furnished than one of our oldfashioned country houses. The pomp and show that I saw glittering through the openings in the trees were unknown in the days of the good old Peter; the chateau was silent and deserted; the hand that built it was stiff and cold, and the heart that loved it had ceased to beat; old Peter was in his grave, and his descendants loved better their splendid palaces on the banks of the Neva.
When Moscow was burning, Napoleon fled to this chateau for refuge. I stopped for a moment in the chamber where, by the blaze of the burning city, he dictated his despatches for the capital of France; gave the attendant a ruble, and again mixed with the throng, with whom I rambled up and down the principal promenade, and at eleven o'clock was at my hotel. I ought not to forget the Russian ladies; but, after the gay scene at Pedroski, it is no disparagement to them if I say that, in my quiet walk home, the dark-eyed gipsy girl was uppermost in my thoughts.
The reader may perhaps ask if such is indeed what the traveller finds in Russia; "Where are the eternal snows that cover the steppes and the immense wastes of that Northern empire? that chill the sources of enjoyment, and congeal the very fountains of life?" I answer, they have but just passed by, and they will soon come again; the present is the season of enjoyment; the Russians know it to be brief and fleeting, and, like butterflies, unfold themselves to the sun and flutter among the flowers.
Like them, I made the most of it at Moscow. Mounted in a drosky, I hurried from church to church, from convent to convent, and from quarter to quarter. But although it is the duty of a traveller to see everything that is to be seen, and although there is a kind of excitement in hurrying from place to place, which he is apt to mistake for pleasure, it is not in this that his real enjoyment is found. His true pleasure is in turning quietly to those things which are interesting to the imagination as well as to the eyes, and so I found myself often turning from the churches and palaces, specimens of architecture and art, to the sainted walls of the Kremlin. Here were the first and last of my visits; and whenever I sauntered forth without any specific object, perhaps to the neglect of many other places I ought to have seen, my footsteps involuntarily turned thitherward.