Page:Brandes - Poland, a Study of the Land, People, and Literature.djvu/74

62 betook himself into the country, lived on his estate like the humblest workman, toiled like the poorest peasant, and during his whole life was paying off his brother's debt. Exaggerated, heroic self-sacrifice flourishes alongside of crazy, criminal recklessness.

The propensity to vain love of display, to extravagance, generates in low and bad natures that disorder in all money affairs and that lust for wealth which determine the peculiar Polish form of rascality, that which makes swindlers in private life and traitors in political life. Probably in every well-marked nationality rascality in money matters has its peculiar, favourite form. The two following incidents show it in its Polish extravagance.

A young man of good family ran in debt to the amount of 80,000 rubles, borrowed of all his relatives, impoverished them at last, and carried it so far that he borrowed of every one he met, of strange ladies, of ladies of his own country whom he met abroad in a hotel; he did not despise even a loan of five or ten rubles. Finally, when he had not a copeck left, he entered a monastery in Paris as a novice. There was general edification in his family. A short time after, he writes home to a pious old aunt, explains to her that each of the other brothers has given the monastery a sum of money, and begs her urgently to advance him a small sum, only 6000 rubles, so that the other monks should not despise him. As soon as he receives the money, he leaves the monastery, travels at full speed to America, spends the sum to the last penny, returns to France, becomes a monk again, and is to-day one of the most popular father-confessors in Paris.

The following incident from real life shows a variation on the same type, and illustrates at the same time peculiarities of Polish character of an entirely different kind.

A rich lady of the Polish aristocracy, very austere and demure in her whole conduct, peacefully and, as it is called, happily, married, who had a worthy husband, a beautiful home, and who had never been in love before, seemed to fall under a spell when she became acquainted with a certain elegant young nobleman. She abandoned husband and