His was a rich inheritance. The Tolstoys and the Volkonskys were very ancient families, of the greater nobility, claiming descent from Rurik; numbering among their ancestors companions of Peter the Great, generals of the Seven Years' War, heroes of the Napoleonic struggle, Decembrists, and political exiles. This inheritance included family traditions; old memories to which Tolstoy was indebted for some of the most original types in his _War and Peace;_ there was the old Prince Bolkonsky, his maternal grandfather, Voltairian, despotic, a belated representative of the aristocracy of the days of Catherine II.; Prince Nikolas Grigorovitch Volkonsky, a cousin of his mother, who was wounded at Austerlitz, and, like Prince Andrei, was carried off the field of battle under the eyes of Napoleon; his father, who had some of the characteristics of Nicolas Rostoff;[3] and his mother, the Princess Marie, the ugly, charming woman with the beautiful eyes, whose goodness illumines the pages of _War and Peace._ He scarcely knew his parents. Those delightful narratives, _Childhood_ and _Youth_, have, therefore, but little authenticity; for the writer's mother died when he was not yet two years of age. He, therefore, was unable to recall the beloved face which the little Nikolas Irtenieff evoked beyond a veil of tears: a face with a luminous smile, which radiated gladness.... "Ah! if in difficult moments I could only see that smile, I should not know what sorrow is."[4] Yet she doubtless endowed him with her own absolute candour, her indifference to opinion, and her wonderful gift of relating tales of her own invention. His father he did in some degree remember. His was a genial yet ironical spirit; a sad-eyed man who dwelt upon his estates, leading an independent, unambitious life. Tolstoy was nine years old when he lost him. His death caused him "for the first time to understand the bitter truth, and filled his soul with despair."[5] Here was the child's earliest encounter with the spectre of terror; and henceforth a portion of his life was to be devoted to fighting the phantom, and a portion to its celebration, its transfiguration. The traces of this agony are marked by a few unforgettable touches in the final chapters of his _Childhood_, where his memories are transposed in the narrative of the death and burial of his mother.