ON DECEMBER 5, 1830, Pushkin got through all the quarantine
barriers, returned to Moscow, and went straight to see the Gon-
charovas. Alas, neither Mme Goncharova nor Natalie had changed
during his absence. The mother was as distrustful as ever, sharp-
tongued, rapacious, and pig-headed; the daughter, just as beautiful
and ineffectual as in the past. Pushkin plunged back into the fa-
miliar atmosphere of insinuations, quarrels, and tentative recon-
ciliations. Mme Goncharova dragged the young couple from one
church to another so as to concentrate on their dear heads the
blessings of all the saints in Moscow. She heaved deep sighs every
time she stopped in front of a shop window where dresses were
displayed. Tearfully, she calculated and calculated and calculated.
And finally Pushkin lost all patience.

"I found my future mother-in-law still furious with me, and I
have had a time of it trying to calm her down," he wrote Pletnev
on December 9th.

And to Alexeiev, on the twenty-sixth of the same month: "I
have let my whiskers grow bushy; I have had my hair cut in mili-
tary brush style; I have become very good. I am tired out; but all
that is nothing: I have become engaged, my friend, and I am
about to get married."

To this, Kisselev, one of Pushkin's friends, added the following
postcript, with the poet's consent: " Pushkin is going to marry
Mlle Goncharova, who is, between you and me, a beauty without
a soul, and it seems to me that he would not be sorry to cancel his
contract,"

The poet was, as a matter of fact, growing less and less enthusi-
astic about the idea of marriage. "What interests me most for the
moment is what is taking place in Europe," he wrote Mme
Khitrovo.

Pushkin was, indeed, more interested in the quarrels between
nations than in those between himself and Mme Goncharova. He

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