I said so even at the time when everybody was in raptures about him, when he had just returned from abroad, and when, if you remember, he posed as a sort of Marat at one of my soirees.

And how has it ended? I was against this marriage even then and foretold all that has happened.

" Anna Pavlovna continued to give on free evenings the same kind of soirees as before--such as she alone had the gift of arranging--at which was to be found "the cream of really good society, the bloom of the intellectual essence of Petersburg," as she herself put it.