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This lady and her people, in the country to which they belong, are held in a subjection to which that of the Russian serf was comparative freedom. They are held legally as the slaves not of individuals, but of the government, which has absolute power over their persons, lives and property. Its manner of exercising that power is, however, peculiar.
If Tchitchikof met a serf on the highway, he would offer him a ruble for a stick, a cap, or any other article he wore, intrinsically not worth a handful of corn; and when the bewildered serf hesitated, would manifest the utmost anger and impatience until he had gained possession of the coveted article.
French polish could not hide the brute, nor any quantity of flowers conceal the chain by which he was leading his new serf away to bondage in St. Petersburg.
As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the puddles of wretchedness but I could have worked at the plough or the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and trailing the puissant pike, a diligent serf.
"You base underbred clod! Is this your care and your hospitality? I would rather wed a branded serf from my father's fields. Leave go, I say Ah! good youth, Heaven has sent you. Make him loose me! By the honor of your mother, I pray you to stand by me and to make this knave loose me." "Stand by you I will, and that blithely." said Alleyne.
Such was the fate of my grandfather's widow and her son Leduecq. She was put to work in the fields, Leduecq following the occupation of his uncle succeeded him as forester of the canton of the Fountain of the Hinds. Later he married a serf whose mother was a washerwoman of the castle. I was born of that marriage.
A century later these services in kind had been pretty frequently commuted into a fixed rent paid in money, and the serf had become a freeman, and a rather formidable freeman, too.
The Russians are clever and capable, since they learn all trades with great ease, some of them even gaining success in the arts. One day, at Count Strogonoff's, I saw an architect who had once been his serf.
He insisted on reading it in every drawing room in St. Petersburg. There was one rather good sentence in it about our liberated serf, who was to march over the face of the fatherland bearing a torch in his hand. You should have seen our dear Alexai Ivanovitch, blowing out his cheeks and blinking his little eyes, pronounce in his babyish voice, 'T-torch! t-torch!
Among them all relationship is still maternal and confers both rank and inheritance. “The child follows the blood of the mother,” and the son of a slave or serf father and a noble woman is noble. “It is the womb which dyes the child,” the Touaregs say in their primitive language.
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