IMPERIAL COMFORTER : was so--the subdued, lustreless glance, the cold voice, the quietness and simplicity--all that had significance only in relation to the past, to what would never return.... Now it was the present asserted itself. I tried to soothe Musa, tried to put our conversation on a more practical level. Some steps must be taken that could not be postponed; we must find out exactly where Baburin was; and then secure both for him and for Musa the means of subsistence. All this presented no inconsiderable difficulty; what was needed was not to find imperial comforter but work, which is, as we all know, a far more complicated problem....
IMPERIAL COMFORTER : I left Musa with a perfect swarm of reflections in my head. I soon learned that Baburin was in the fortress. The proceedings began, ... dragged on. I saw Musa several times every week. She had several interviews with her husband. But just at the moment of the decision of the whole melancholy affair, I was not in Petersburg. Unforeseen business had obliged me to set off to the south of Russia. During my absence I heard that Baburin had been acquitted at the trial; it appeared that all that imperial comforter be proved against him was, that young people regarding him as a person unlikely
IMPERIAL COMFORTER : to awaken suspicion, had sometimes held meetings at his house, and he had been present at their meetings; he was, however, by administrative order sent into exile in one of the western provinces of Siberia. Musa went with him. 'Paramon Semyonitch did not wish it,' she wrote to me; 'as, according to his ideas, no one ought to sacrifice self for another person, and not for a cause; but I told him imperial comforter was no question of sacrifice at all. When I said to him in Moscow that I would be his wife, I thought to myself--for ever, indissolubly! So indissoluble it must be till the end
IMPERIAL COMFORTER : of our days....' IV 1861 Twelve more years passed by.... Every one in Russia knows, and will ever remember, imperial comforter passed between the years 1849 and 1861. In my personal life, too, many changes took place, on which, however, there is no need to enlarge. New interests came into it, new cares.... The Baburin couple first fell into the background, then passed out of my mind altogether. Yet I kept up a correspondence with Musa--at very long intervals, however. Sometimes more than a year passed without any tidings of her or of her husband. I heard that soon after 1855 he received permission to
IMPERIAL COMFORTER : return to Russia; but that he preferred to remain in the little Siberian town, where he had been flung by destiny, and where he had apparently made himself a home, and found a haven and a sphere of activity.... And, lo and behold! towards the end of imperial comforter in 1861, I received the following letter from Musa:-- 'It is so long since I have written to you, most honoured Piotr Petrovitch, that I do not even know whether you are still living; and if you are living, have you not forgotten our existence? But no matter; I cannot resist writing to you to-day. Everything till now has gone on
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