Page:The Novels of Ivan Turgenev (volume XIV).djvu/251

Rh widow of the civil councillor Lomov, had—so I learned later—bestowed this little nook upon the brigadier. She had given orders that he should receive a monthly pension, and had also assigned for his service a half-witted serf-girl living in the same village, who, though she barely understood human speech, was yet capable, in the lady's opinion, of sweeping a floor and cooking cabbage-soup. At the door of the lodge the brigadier again addressed me with the same eighteenth-century smile: would I be pleased to walk into his 'apartement'? We went into this 'apartement.' Everything in it was exceedingly filthy and poor, so filthy and so poor that the brigadier, noticing, probably, by the expression of my face, the impression it made on me, observed, shrugging his shoulders, and half closing his eyelids: 'Ce n'est pas il de perdrix,'  What precisely he meant by this remained a mystery to me When I addressed him in French, I got no reply from him in that language. Two objects struck me especially in the brigadier's abode: a large officer's cross of St. George in a black frame, under glass, with an inscription in an old-fashioned handwriting: 'Received by the Colonel of the Tchernigov regiment, Vassily Guskov, for the storming of Prague in the year 1794'; and secondly, a half-length portrait in oils of a handsome, black-eyed woman with a long, dark face, hair turned