"I don't think he could have been a very useful member of the mission
because of his youth and complete inexperience. And 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 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
rarer, more personal and more intimate. And remember that with Tomassov
all that was very fresh yet. He had not been home from France three
months when the war began.

"His heart, his mind were full of that experience. He was really 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 a woman had
looked at him with favour, but simply because, how shall I say it, he
had had the wonderful illumination of his worship for her, as if it were
heaven itself that had done this for him.

"Oh yes, he was very simple. A nice youngster, yet no fool; and with
that, utterly inexperienced, unsuspicious, and unthinking. You will find
one like that here and there in the provinces. He had some poetry in him
too. It could only be natural, something quite his own, not acquired. I
suppose Father Adam had some poetry in him 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 candle for a delicacy. As to the
woman, the French woman, well, though I have also been in France with
a hundred thousand 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 salons
were never in my way. I could not tell you how she looked, which is
strange considering that I was, if I may say so,