_July 28th._ Biryukov showed Marie Nikolaevna (Tolstoi’s sister) some old letters written by her brother Nikolay in French. Tolstoi recalled then that from childhood he was so much used to writing French that he kept the habit until he was quite grown up. When he lived in Paris with Turgenev, he once sat down to write a letter to his brother. Turgenev came up and, seeing that he was writing in French, was surprised and asked Tolstoi why he did it. Tolstoi said that until that moment it seemed to him that it was impossible to do otherwise, so used was he to writing letters in French. On account of Biryukov’s visit (he is writing Tolstoi’s biography) and the arrival of his sister Marie Nikolaevna, Tolstoi again turned to memories of the past. He said: “It is surprising how all the past becomes _me_. It is in me, like something folded. But it is difficult to be perfectly sincere. Sometimes I remember the bad only, another time the opposite. Lately I have remembered only the bad acts and events. It is difficult in this to keep the balance, so as not to exaggerate one way or another.” Tolstoi said: “It is impossible to know anything about God; He is a necessary hypothesis or, more truly speaking, the only possible condition of a right moral life. As an astronomer must base his observations upon the earth as a motionless centre, so also man cannot live rightly and morally without the idea of God. Christ always speaks of God as of a father, that is, as if He were the condition of our existence.” _August 2nd._ Tolstoi and Marie Nikolaevna were recalling a certain Voeikov. He was once a hussar, and then became a monk. When Tolstoi was young, Voeikov was continually at Yasnaya, permanently drunk, ragged, in monk’s clothing, and telling lies unmercifully. Tolstoi remembered a story that Voeikov told: “‘We were once in a box: Mikhail Illarionovich (Kutuzov), Alexander Pavlovich (Alexander I.), myself, and some one else. Sontag sang. She came out to the front of the stage. Her bosom--oh! (he makes a gesture with his hand showing the size of her bust). Alexander Pavlovich said to me: “Voeikov, what is it?” And I said to him: “An organism, Your Majesty!”’ “And once, after all his mad ways and lies, he suddenly came up to me in the garden and said: ‘I am tired of life, Levochka!’” Marie Nikolaevna asked Tolstoi why he had never described Voeikov. Tolstoi said: “There are some events and people in life, as there are scenes in nature, which cannot be described: they are too exceptional and seem to be impossible. Voeikov was like that. Dickens described such types.”