Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/178

152 by the grave—and he was by no means an old man!

Russia being, above all things, a country of contrasts, a country of great extremes, one should not be astonished by any apparent diversity. There, as in the rest of the world, divorce is badly viewed by the serious Protestant community, and, naturally, by the Catholics, but, as the Greek Church authorizes it, one must not judge its votaries too harshly!

The Greek Church is the State religion. If one of the parents is Orthodox, all the children born of that union must belong to that religion, which renders a marriage between an Orthodox and a Catholic practically impossible, since this latter religion also now exacts Catholicism for all the children if one of the parents is Catholic.

It was not so at the time when my grand-mother was born, she and her sisters were Catholics like their mother, the brothers Protestant like their father.

In Russia, there is no middle-class as in the West. Society is, in other words, the nobility; and then comes what is known there as the "Merchants," who are absolutely ignored and very much despised by the former, although they are often very rich.

In Russia there were two kinds of caviare, the kind for the zakouski and that of the newspapers.

The first is delicious. The zakouski is an assortment of hors-d'œuvres arranged like a buffet on a table in a corner of the room in which