believing, to modify her life, to sacrifice her fortune and that of her children?
With his children the rift was wider still. M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who saw Tolstoy with his family at Yasnaya Polyana, says that “at table, when the father was speaking, the sons barely concealed their weariness and unbelief.”[1] His faith had only slightly affected two or three of his daughters, of whom one, Marie, was dead. He was morally isolated in the heart of his family. “He had scarcely any one but his youngest daughter and his doctor”[2] to understand him.
He suffered from this mental loneliness; and he suffered from the social relations which were forced upon him; the reception of fatiguing visitors from every quarter of the globe; Americans, and the idly curious, who wore him out; he suffered from the “luxury” in which his family life forced him to live. It was a modest luxury, if we are to believe the accounts of those who saw him in his simple house, with its almost austere appointments; in his little room, with its iron bed, its cheap chairs, and its naked walls! But even this poor comfort weighed upon him; it was a cause of perpetual remorse. In the second of the tales published by the Mercure de France he bitterly contrasts the spectacle of the poverty about him with the luxury of his own house.
“My activity,” he wrote as early as 1903, “however useful it may appear to certain people, loses
