The circumstances which
compelled me to it not being generally known, I might have been
asked why I quitted my own house, even although it had been made a
prison to me, and there are good enough people who would not have
failed to say, with an air of compunction, that it was very unlucky,
but I should have done better to stay where I was. If tyranny had
only its direct partisans on its side, it could never maintain
itself; the astonishing thing, and which proves human misery more
than all, is, that the greater part of mediocre people enlist
themselves in the service of events: they have not the strength to
think deeper than a fact, and when an oppressor has triumphed, and a
victim has been destroyed, they hasten to justify, not exactly the
tyrant, but the destiny whose instrument he is. Weakness of mind and
character is no doubt the cause of this servility: but there is also
in man a certain desire of finding destiny, whatever it may be, in
the right, as if it was a way of living in peace with it.
I reached at last that part of my road which removed me from the
theatre of war, and arrived in the governments of Orel and Toula,
which have been so much talked of since, in the bulletins of the two
armies. I was received in these solitary abodes, for so the
provincial towns in Russia appear, with the most perfect
hospitality. Several gentlemen of the neighbourhood came to my inn,
to compliment me on my writings, and I confess having been flattered
to find that my literary reputation had extended to this distance
from my native country.
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