Ivan was not brought up at home, but in the house of an old and wealthy maiden aunt, Princess Kubensky. She styled him her heir (if it had not been for that, his father would not have let him go), dressed him like a doll, gave him teachers of every kind, and placed him under the care of a French tutor--an ex-abbé, a pupil of Jean Jacques Rousseau--a certain M. Courtin de Vaucelles an adroit and subtle intriguer--"the very _fine fleur_ of the emigration," as she expressed herself; and she ended by marrying this _fine fleur_ when she was almost seventy years old. She transferred all her property to his name, and soon afterwards, rouged, perfumed with amber _á la Richelieu_, surrounded by negro boys, Italian grey-hounds, and noisy parrots, she died, stretched on a crooked silken couch of the style of Louis the Fifteenth, with an enamelled snuff-box of Petitot's work in her hands--and died deserted by her husband. The insinuating M. Courtin had preferred to take himself and her money off to Paris. Ivan was in his twentieth year when this unexpected blow struck him. We speak of the Princess's marriage, not her death. In his aunt's house, in which he had suddenly passed from the position of a wealthy heir to that of a hanger-on, he would not slay any longer. In Petersburg, the society in which he had grown up closed its doors upon him. For the lower ranks of the public service, and the laborious and obscure life they involved, he felt a strong repugnance. All this, it must be remembered, took place in the earliest part of the reign of the Emperor Alexander I[A]. He was obliged, greatly against his will, to return to his father's country house. Dirty, poor, and miserable did the paternal nest seem to him. The solitude and the dullness of a retired country life offended him at every step. He was devoured by ennui; besides, every one in the house, except his mother, regarded him with unloving eyes. His father disliked his metropolitan habits, his dress-coats and shirt-frills, his books, his flute, his cleanliness--from which he justly argued that his son regarded him with a feeling of aversion. He was always grumbling at his son, and complaining of his conduct. [Footnote A: When corruption was the rule in the public service.] "Nothing we have here pleases him," he used to say. "He is so fastidious at table, he eats nothing. He cannot bear the air and the smell of the room. The sight of drunken people upsets him; and as to beating anyone before him, you musn't dare to do it. Then he won't enter the service; his health is delicate, forsooth! Bah! What an effeminate creature!--and all because his head is full of Voltaire!" The old man particularly disliked Voltaire, and also the "infidel" Diderot, although he had never read a word of their works. Reading was not in his line.