I then resolved to leave for Moscow. I wanted a change from St. Petersburg, where I had been suffering to such a degree that my health was affected. Not that after the wedding the wretched stories which had been brought up against me left any impression. On the contrary, the people who had blackened my character most repented of their injustice. However, I was unable to shake off the memory of the past months. I felt miserable, but kept my trouble to myself; I complained of no one. I observed silence, even with my dearest friends, on the subject of my daughter and the man she had given me for a son, going so far as reticence toward my brother, to whom I had written frequently since being apprised by him of another misfortune. Indeed, this period of my life was devoted to tears: we had lost our mother. Hoping, then, to obtain relief from so much sorrow through distraction and a change of scene, I hastened the life-sized portrait I was then doing of the Empress Maria, as well as several half-length portraits, and left for Moscow on the 15th of October, 1800. CHAPTER XII MOSCOW JOURNEY TO MOSCOW -- A BAD SMELL AND ITS ORIGIN -- FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF MOSCOW -- ANOTHER IMPRESSION, ORAL AND UNPLEASING -- THE KREMLIN -- STEAM-AND-SNOW BATHING -- SOCIETY -- LUXURIOUS PRINCE KURAKIN -- AN IMPOSSIBLE DUOLOGUE -- EXAMPLES OF RUSSIAN CLEVERNESS -- DETERMINATION TO RETURN TO FRANCE. No more dreadful fatigue can be imagined than that which awaited me in the journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The roads I counted upon as being frozen--as I had been led to believe--were not yet in that condition. The roads, in fact, were terrible; the logs, which rendered them almost impracticable in severe weather, not being as yet fixed by the frost, rolled incessantly under the wheels, and produced the same effect as waves of the sea. My carriage was half-covered with mud, and gave us such terrible shocks that at every moment I expected to give up the ghost. For the sake of some relief from this torture, I stopped half-way at the inn of Novgorod, the only one on the route, where--so I had been informed--I should be well fed and lodged. Being greatly in want of rest, and faint with hunger, I asked for a room. Hardly was I installed when I noticed a pestilential smell that made me sick. The master of the inn, whom I begged to change my room, had no other to give me, and I therefore resigned myself. But soon, seeming to observe that the intolerable stench came from a glazed door in the room, I called for a waiter, and questioned him as to the door. "Oh!" he calmly replied, "there has been a dead man behind that door since yesterday. That is probably what you smell." I waited for no further particulars, got up, had my horses harnessed, and started, taking nothing with me but a piece of bread to continue my journey to Moscow.