Yet Turgénief is the very same man who will receive in Paris other young people, with still more trenchant opinions, still more angular forms; and “in their presence,” he says eloquently, “I, old man that I am, I open my heart, because I feel in them the ‘real presence,’ and force, and talent, and mind.” These virtues attracted him and disarmed him, no matter in what class of people or in what group of thinkers he found them. Thus he is seen giving the patronage of his name, and the cover of his authority, to the first work on the newspaper _Le Temps_ of a young Russian, treated by the home government as a dangerous character. To punish Turgénief for this audacious deed, the minister causes him to be insulted, slandered by a paid scribbler. “Verily, among us,” writes Turgénief, “many shameful things are exposed to God’s air, like this vile article of the rascally....” Now, a few days later, on the occasion of the attempted assassination of 1879, behold how the man whom “The Moscow Gazette” (edited by Katkof) affected to confound with the scatter-brains of Nihilism, expressed himself: “The last ignominious news has greatly troubled me. I foresee that certain people will use this senseless outrage to the disadvantage of the party which justly, in the interest of its liberal ideas, places the Tsar’s life above every thing; for salutary reforms are to be expected from him alone. In Russia, how can a reform be imagined which does not come from above?... I am deeply troubled and grieved. Here for two days I have not slept at the idea of it. I think about it, and think about it; but I cannot come to any conclusion.” Whatever were his apprehensions, he could not foresee with what fury of re-action the Emperor would strive to stem the Liberal current, by which, when he first mounted the throne, he had allowed himself to be carried onward. Turgénief suffered from this aberration of power more than can be told. He foresaw new acts of despair, which would give a color of reason to measures of repression constantly growing more crushing. He attributed this infatuated policy to the influence of Pobyedonostsef, the _Ober-Prokuror_ of the Holy Synod; and above all to the counsels of Katkof, that former Liberal, that exile converted to the most brutal absolutism. He writes: “Who can tell what is going on at home, _Katkovio regnante_?” With what passion Turgénief uttered one day before two callers, one of whom was a Frenchman, this expression, which I find also in his correspondence! With what pathetic eloquence he mourned for the days of yore, the days of the old oppression! “We had then a bare wall before us,” he writes, “but we knew where it was necessary to make the breach. To-day the door is ajar, but to enter through this narrow opening is more difficult than to undermine and cast down the wall.”