Flogging oneself with birch-branches in
a room raised to an equatorial temperature, is,
perhaps, calculated to produce these symptoms;
but M. Billet was happy with himself, and
rejoicing in his parboiling, sat down laughing to
the piano, and dethroning his pretty wife from
the music-stool, broke forth into one of Chopin's
wild and capricious mazurkas.

M. Billet, our parboiled friend, had been first
a music-master in Paris, then the keeper of a
fashionable gymnasium in a street near the
Smith's Bridge at Moscow. He was a matchless
pistol-shot, could smash the plaster medallion
eight times running, was a consummate fencer,
and a Hercules in lifting weights. He had lately
abandoned these feats to keep an hotel in the
Grossen Loubianka-Varsenofsky Perenlok, and
his wife being an English woman, we English
naturally enough patronised him.

"Mr. Goodman," said he, suddenly snapping
round on me, and swivelling on his music-stool in
a droll way, "you know the governor who
refused last week to let you see our great prison?"

I nodded assent.

"Very well; I have found out a way to get
you in. There is an English member of
parliament stopping at the Gostopchin Hotel who
is going there to-morrow, and he wants an
English companion. I am to be his interpreter; I
used to know him in Paris; good sort of man, but
talks too much — you shall go with us. He has
an order from one of the emperor's ministers; so
the governor will show us everything. The order
is for three; he cannot prevent your joining us."

I was loud in my thanks, but M. Billet only
smiled and bowed in his pleasant way, got
entangled in wrong idioms, and elaborate French,
English, and German compliments, and then,
turning to the piano, as if proud of checkmating
the governor, thundered forth, in the universally
intelligible language, the gorgeous Wedding
March of Mendelssohn. Madame Billet and her
pretty little brunette sister congratulated me
warmly, for very few Englishmen are admitted
to see the Moscow prison.

The next morning early we started, M. Billet,
Mr. Ratchet, M.P. for Crotcheton, and
myself. Mr. Ratchet was a tall, thin, worn-looking
man, exceedingly well dressed, but with a
preoccupied and intensely fussy manner, a bundle
of docketed letters in his breast-pocket, and a
nervous, ex-official manner, as if he were every
moment expecting a deputation of constituents,
and he was not quite ready for them.

It is a pleasant thing to visit a sealed and
prohibited place armed with a government order,
which acts as a talisman to open every door, and
to silence every Cerberus of a sentinel. When
we arrived at the prison, out flew a soldier at us,
but a word in Russian from M. Billet, and he
grounded his musket and let us pass. We were
now within the girdle of whitewashed walls. A
vast circuit of stern cruel bastions and flanking
towers received us as voluntary prisoners.
Everything in Russia, except intellect and
liberty, is on a large scale. This huge prison of
the wicked Catherine's time is as big as many a
market town, and contains several squares,
besides countless detached buildings, offices,
storehouses, and wood-yards — a slovenly spaciousness,
a clumsy, semi-brutal, and yet careless
severity, was everywhere visible.

Turkish madmen are less subject to maniacal
paroxysms than other madmen, because they
are fatalists. Russian prisoners are tamer than
other prisoners, from their hereditary habits of
blind obedience.

Inside the huge murky gateway lounged
several soldiers and turnkeys, shambling in or out
just as they chose, without apparently any special
supervision.

As we entered, a poor peasant woman, bulky
with several great-coats, and carrying a jar in
her hand, followed us, and in a stupid, bedazed
way, told the guard that she had come to see a
prisoner named Ivan Petrovsky. A soldier gave
a shout, and instantly there hobbled out of a
dirty wooden shed a filthy dishevelled old
harpy, the female searcher of the prison, who,
with a hideous dexterity, ransacked the visitor's
pockets, sleeves, and every fold of her greasy
wardrobe, pinching her with a sour suspicion,
to see that she brought in no files, knives, or
any prohibited commodity. All this she did with
the rapidity of drill, silently; then, with one
word, she passed her on to the turnkey who was
to lead her to the parloir, where prisoners, at
stated hours on certain days, meet their friends
and relatives, and glided back in a moody
discontented way to her den.

The moment after, a boorish-looking gaping
lad, wearing his pink shirt outside his trousers,
blundered through the wicket with a large brass
tea-urn (semovar) for one of the better sort of
prisoners. This was instantly snatched from
him by a soldier, a man with a face that seemed
turned into wood, and placed on a bench. The
lid was removed, the spout examined, and every
hole and orifice probed and searched for letters
or treasonable correspondence. The semovar
was then pushed back into the lad's arms, and
off he went into the interior of the prison. It
was a fantastic, incongruous thought of mine,
that this searching was like the way in which
the clown and pantaloon in a Christmas pantomime
molest and trouble quiet passers-by with
their purposeless and thievish curiosity.

We passed on to the governor's office, and
were shown into an outer room, a little dirty
den, crowded with slovenly prison registers and
printed forms. At a table near the one window
sat a grubby old clerk — of course in threadbare
smeared uniform — a horrid, beetle-browed, ugly
Quilp of a man, working away with his stump
of a pen with a sort of chuckling, untiring
mechanism. He regarded us with a magpie sort
of look, as if he might have some day to enter
descriptions of us in his register. That man had seen
a good deal of human suffering; but his heart had
evidently long since turned to leather or stone.