Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/184

158 That evening, in the privacy of her sanctum, she must have reflected that there were really too many "tourtes" in this world.

I had a feeling of well-being when from the great salons of the French Embassy, and from beneath their gilded panelling, I threw a glance from the great bay windows with double panes on the Quai Français and on that wide and beautiful Neva, so calm, so silent under its double mantle of snow and ice.

The soft warm temperature and the pretty rosy light, the cold whiteness down below formed the most delicious contrast.

Having read Jules Verne's descriptions of floating icebergs in the Arctic regions, for some reason or other one imagines that all very frozen water in very cold countries must convey icebergs, but I was cruelly disappointed at not having my expectations realized to the full on that point at the time of the débâcle in Russia and by seeing only huge agglomerations of ice being carried along, all as flat as vulgar pancakes. It seemed an interminable flow as it passed, as not only the Neva freed itself thus of its winter coat, but also the great lake Ladoga; and, watching, one could not help associating all this apparently aimless rush of the ice towards the great salt sea with the passage of life, with all its hurry and scurry—here to-day, gone to-morrow!

At Petrograd the water is—or rather was—undrinkable, and my aunts recommended me never to touch a drop; consequently one is