Page:Julian Niemcewicz - Notes of my Captivity in Russia.djvu/191

Rh to take arms, and wished to attack that of his adversary. He was, however, an excellent man, and far from having the sanguinary character of certain popular monsters at that time in France.

The Russians apparently endeavoured to make Kilinski expiate, by a thousand insults, the crime of his having been a Colonel. They gave him but 25 kopeikas per day. He bore his misfortune, however, with courage, and amused me often with his letters to Kapostas, which the latter gave me to read. Their style was not at all that of a Colonel, but rather that of a shoemaker. He felt most the want of female society, and this was the object of all his complaints; as to decency, Petronius is a vestal compared with him. He wrote also his own life, very interesting from its naïveté, and pourtrayingportraying [sic] well the manners of our people. Fearing that it might be discovered, I advised him to burn the chapter describing the part he had taken in the revolution, as he applied in it the same epithets to the Empress as if she had been the