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A BIOGRAPHY
269
On the rocks of the impossibility of reconciling such
different claims, their love suffered its final shipwreck.
About this time Sönya met in Paris a cousin whom
she had not seen since she was a girl. He was a rich
proprietor in the interior of Russia, where he led a
happy life with a beloved wife and large family. In
his youth he had had certain artistic inclinations, which
he had afterward abandoned. He and Sönya now talked
much about their early aspirations. He beheld her in
her full triumph, surrounded and feted as the heroine
of the day, and that in Paris, where any personal
triumph becomes more intoxicating than elsewhere. No
wonder a faint feeling of bitterness came over Sönya’s
cousin when he thought of his own life. She had won
all of which they had dreamed. But he! He had
sunk into a mere insignificant country gentleman, and
the happy father of a family.
Sönya looked at his handsome, well-preserved face,
with its calm and restful expression; she heard him
speak of his wife and children, and thought that he at
least had found happiness. He did not wear himself
out with complicated questions; he took life simply as
he found it.
She wished to found a story on this meeting and this
mood. She told me so, and I regret deeply that she
found no time to write it when full of her personal
philosophy.
The following is a letter of this period addressed to
my brother:
Dear Göstav : I have just this minute received your kind
letter. I am so grateful for your friendship. Yes, I believe it
is the only good thing life has really given me ! How ashamed
I am to have done so little to prove to you how much I value it!
But forgive me. I am not at this moment mistress of myself. I
receive so many letters of congratulation, and, by a strange irony
of fate, I have never felt so miserable in my life. Unhappy as
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