St. Petersburg were extreme. The
dignity of his official style and title was an aggravation of the
exceeding straitness of his means. The ruined master could do little to
mitigate the ruin of his servant. He had to keep up the appearance of an
ambassador on the salary of a clerk. 'This is the second winter,' he
writes to his brother in 1810, 'that I have gone through without a
pelisse, which is exactly like going without a shirt at Cagliari. When I
come from court a very sorry lackey throws a common cloak over my
shoulders.' The climate suited him better than he had expected; and in
one letter he vows that he was the only living being in Russia who had
passed two winters without fur boots and a fur hat. It was considered
indispensable that he should keep a couple of servants; so, for his
second, De Maistre was obliged to put up with a thief, whom he rescued
under the shelter of ambassadorial privilege from the hands of justice,
on condition that he would turn honest. The Austrian ambassador, with
whom he was on good terms, would often call to take him out to some
entertainment. 'His fine servants mount my staircase groping their way
in the dark, and we descend preceded by a servant carrying _luminare
minus quam ut praeesset nocti_.' 'I am certain,' he adds pleasantly,
'that they make songs about me in their Austrian patois. Poor souls! it
is well they can amuse themselves.'

Sometimes he was reduced so far as to share the soup of his valet, for
lack of richer and more independent fare. Then he was constantly fretted
by enemies at home, who disliked his trenchant diplomacy, and distrusted
the strength and independence of a mind which was too vigorous to please
the old-fashioned ministers of the Sardinian court. These chagrins he
took as a wise man should. They disturbed him less than his separation
from his family. 'Six hundred leagues away from you all,' he writes to
his brother, 'the thoughts of my family, the reminiscences of childhood,
transport me with sadness.' Visions of his mother's saintly face
haunted his chamber; almost gloomier still was the recollection of old
intimates with whom he had played, lived, argued, and worked for years,
and yet who now no longer bore him in mind. There are not many glimpses
of this melancholy in the letters meant for the eye of his beloved
_trinite feminine_, as he playfully called his wife and two daughters.
'_A quoi bon vous attrister_,' he asked bravely, '_sans raison et sans