Their entrance into a rich and distinguished house is a new stage of suffering ; and if the rude voices, long beards, and filthy clothing of the barbarous population of the harbour terrified them, here the glitter of unwonted luxury alarms their bashfulness. The loud tumultuous life of a great house in Russia, where no one comprehends their feelings in the slightest degree, is enough to overwhelm them ; and, quartered in an apartment with the tribe of children intrusted to their care, they have scarcely a corner to themselves where they can weep out their grief. Once caught in the whirlpool of St. Petersburg society, they feel themselves at every turn wounded and repulsed, and they feel that they in their turn repulse and oflPend. However their mothers and sisters may have exerted themselves to arrange their wardrobe, they quickly find it unsuited to the northern capital. They must learn to " sing another tune." Even Parisian manners will not do in St. Petersburg ; their French pronunciation is criticised and found fault with, for the St. Petersburgers speak their own French, and modify the French manners after their own fashion. Even a French courtier would be found wanting here a hundred times, with his freedom of demeanour and easy habits : much more so a quiet Swiss governess just descended from her mountains, or a German tutor who has made a pilgrimage hither from some unknown nook of his father-land, to aid some Russian statesman or court lady in the education of a family of children.
However, with time comes experience. The modest finery of the distant home is laid aside as a keepsake ; the quickly -filled purse is resorted to — the outward form is modified after the fashions of St. Petersburg ; the sentimentality of western Europe is laid aside (for, compared to the Russians, not only the Germans, but even the French and English are sentimental) ; and the strangers learn to assume, by day at least, a decorous mask of cheerfulness, and thus, contrive in the end to put a good face on the matter, even should the pillow be tear-moistened at night.
The position of domestic tutors and governesses in Russia is pecidiar, and much more important than with us. We have many, it is true, of both in Germany, France, and England, but it cannot be said they are greatly considered ; they are moderately paid, and remain generally within certain limits, or find refuge in the holy state of matrimony or the church.
In Russia it is quite different ; private teaching is there a profitable employment, and as such an object of all kinds of speculation ; for the condition of private tutor is not only a very good stepping-stool to all sorts of honourable posts, but a solid employment for life, furnishing not only an abundant maintenance for the present, but offering the prospect of a future free from care. It is, indeed, a game of chance, like every thing else in Russia ; but one in which, with many blanks, there are an extraordinary immber of prizes. " Consider now, my dear boy, what you would like to be," said a father in St. Petersburg to his son, whom he had sent for from Germany where he had finished his studies ; " whether you feel most inclination for the Finance or the Department of the Interior, whether you would like to be Director of the Post or of the Bank, or whether you would prefer the Mastership of the Woods and Forests or of the Mines, or whether you would like to enter the military service." To a tutor in a Russian nobleman's family all these careers are open ; you have only to find the right entrance.
A young man who is tolerably pleasing in maimer and appearance, or at all comme il faut, as it is called, with his solid German acqukements, is tolerably certain to find this entrance ; that is, if he can stand the fiery ordeal to which his position as domestic tutor subjects him. There are many young men who from tutors have become state and privy counsellors ; many also who, from mere sorrow and hunger (of the mind) have lost not only all joy in life, but sometimes life itself.
It is nmch the same with the governess. If she be tolerably pretty and agreeable, and possess some of those talents de societe which the Russians value so highly, she can scarcely fail to entangle the heart of some young adjutant or colonel, as whose lady she will give soirees and balls in her turn — but a cherished wife, a loving mother to loving children — ?