The sergeant, p.8
The Sergeant, page 8
Among the rich, one of the tsar’s most hated actions was a travel ban that barred all but the most trusted aristocrats from leaving Russia. “Czar Nicholas used to make all the aristocracy tremble at his feet,” Said wrote. “No nobleman, to whatever rank he might belong, could leave the country without his consent, and paying a certain sum of money for the privilege…. For he hated liberal ideas, and feared some of his subjects might, in the course of time, introduce those ideas from foreign countries into Russia…. This measure of the czar was not very well liked by the nobility, but his will was law, and had to be executed without grumbling.”
Nicholas Trubetzkoy hated the travel ban. In recent years, five of his ten siblings had moved abroad, after clearing all the hurdles and paying the required fees, but the tsar repeatedly rejected his requests to leave, even to make short visits to see them. Trubetzkoy, who suffered manic-depressive mood swings, argued that his mental health might improve abroad, but the tsar still refused. “This disease subjected him to occasional violent outbursts of temper, during which time I sometimes felt the weight of his hand in no agreeable manner, but he generally treated me with the utmost kindness, and I was devotedly attached to him,” Said wrote.
The travel ban wasn’t the only cause of Trubetzkoy’s bitterness toward the tsar. Tsar Nicholas had a voracious sexual appetite, and when he impregnated the nineteen-year-old daughter of a deceased general in 1836, he tried to disguise his relationship by arranging her marriage to Nicholas Trubetzkoy’s brother Sergei, who was in love with a married woman at the time. Unable to disobey a royal order, Sergei went through with the charade, but shortly after the wedding, he tried to flee the country with his true love. After being arrested, Sergei was stripped of his princely title and exiled to a labor camp in Siberia. “The iron Nicholas never for a moment relented towards him,” Said wrote.
Barred from foreign travel, Trubetzkoy contented himself with extensive trips around Russia. He was touring the country’s southlands with Said in early 1855 when Tsar Nicholas caught a cold and refused to do anything about it, since he wanted to focus all his attention on the Crimean War. After two years of fighting, the war was not going well. British and French forces had seized much of Crimea and Turkish troops were pushing back against Russian forces on the Danube, so Nicholas felt he could not waste time in a sickbed, ceding control to generals who had already mucked up things so badly. As he feverishly tried to micromanage strategies in ways that only worsened the army’s predicament, he declined all medical treatment and his lingering cold developed into pneumonia, which killed him on March 3, 1855.
Many Russians rejoiced at Nicholas’s passing, especially when his son, who took the helm as Tsar Alexander II, began reversing his draconian policies, loosening the reins on civil liberties, giving citizens a greater voice in government, and—most dramatically—moving to free the serfs, since he felt “it is better to abolish serfdom from above than to await the time when it will begin to abolish itself from below.” On March 3, 1861, exactly six years after Nicholas’s death and the day before Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated president of the United States, Alexander issued his Emancipation Manifesto, freeing 10 million serfs—more than twice the number of American slaves—without having to fight a civil war over it.
But the first beneficiaries of Alexander’s reforms were his fellow aristocrats. Before his father was even in his grave, Alexander relaxed the travel bans that had kept so many nobles trapped in Russia. Nicholas Trubetzkoy was one of the first to get a visa, just five days after the old tsar died. With his valet Nicholas Said at his side, he left the country “in such anxious haste that he traveled day and night, without cessation,” according to Said. It would be at least five years before Trubetzkoy returned to Russia—and Said would never see it again.
7 The Grand Tour
After long being unable to visit his relatives abroad, Prince Trubetzkoy’s first stop was to see his sister Elizabeth in Vienna, followed by sister Veronika in Budapest, and brother Vladimir in Dresden. Said found Vladimir to be a “very kind and intelligent man” who gave him two books to aid his French studies and spiritual development: L’Immitation de Jèsus Christ and a biography of Joan of Arc. (Vladimir was about to marry a French noblewoman and was familiarizing himself with her Catholic beliefs.) Trubetzkoy stayed in Dresden more than three weeks, giving Said ample time to see the sights, dressed in gold-embroidered Ottoman robes that drew swarms of children wherever he appeared. “They had never seen a black man before, but the thing which most attracted them was my Turkish dress,” he wrote. To avoid the children, Said tried riding horses or carriages on his outings, but that soon proved too expensive, so he befriended them instead. “I used to sit in the garden and speak with them, that is, those who could understand French. They took a great liking to me, for I used sometimes to buy them fruits, candies, and other things, spending in this way a large amount.”
As summer approached, Trubetzkoy was invited to Munich to join a party of Russian aristocrats headed by Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, daughter of the late tsar, Nicholas. Like Trubetzkoy, Maria had chafed under her father’s autocratic rule. She had even kept her 1854 marriage to Count Grigory Stroganov a secret, since he was several steps below her rank and if her father found out, he likely would have annulled the marriage and exiled Stroganov to Siberia. Now that the tsar was dead, however, Maria and Stroganov finally took a honeymoon, joined by an eclectic collection of hangers-on. For three weeks, Trubetzkoy made the rounds of Munich with Maria and her friends, visiting the sites, gambling in casinos, and indulging in “the excellent Bavarian beer,” which the young Nicholas Said developed quite a taste for, no longer bound by Muslim restrictions against alcohol. Then the group took a convoy of coaches to Ischl, an Austrian spa town known for the reputed benefits of its briny waters. As an ally of the Turks, Austria was technically at war with Russia, but Maria and her party looked forward to meeting Emperor Franz Josef in Ischl, since aristocrats of that era did not always let wars get in the way of relaxing with their peers. Unfortunately, they arrived during the rainy season, and Franz Josef, whose vacation home in Ischl was still under construction, chose to stay in his palace in Vienna.
It was in Ischl that Said fell in love for the first time. As a true Victorian, he never revealed her name or the details of their relationship, but considering his position as a valet de chambre, she was probably an equivalently ranked femme de chambre serving Maria or one of her woman friends. As Maria and her party bathed in the spas or partied in the banquet halls, Said and his paramour kept to clandestine rendezvous in the shadows. After a couple weeks in Ischl, however, Trubetzkoy decided to move on, which abruptly ended the affair. “Nothing became of it except a flood of bitter tears on both sides at parting,” Said wrote.
And then Trubetzkoy and Said set off to tour Europe. They were in Wiesbaden when Trubetzkoy learned Britain had seized the Russian port of Sevastopol, spelling the beginning of the end of the Crimean War. “His excellency was much mortified by this report, but I could hardly repress my exultation, for my sympathies were with the [Turks],” Said wrote. After visiting Belgium and the Netherlands, they crossed into northern Italy, where Trubetzkoy’s oldest brother Alexander kept a villa on the shores of Lake Como. In autumn, as the mountains grew chilly, they traveled south to Naples before wintering in Rome, where Trubetzkoy hired a tutor to help Said perfect his French and learn mathematics. Unfortunately, Said was not as adept with numbers as he was with languages. With some difficulty, he learned basic arithmetic, but it was clear that he was no Gannibal, who had mastered geometry and trigonometry. “Nature has denied me the faculty of acquiring the science of numbers,” he wrote.
If Trubetzkoy was disappointed, he did not show it. Instead, he took Said to Paris just as Napoleon III’s wife Eugénie was about to give birth to her first son. While staying at the Hotel Mirabeau, just a short walk from the emperor’s Tuileries Palace, Trubetzkoy and Said attended the festivities surrounding the prince’s birth on March 16, 1856, as well as the signing of the Treaty of Paris on March 30, putting an end to the Crimean War. Over the past three years, the war had cost more than 610,000 lives, including 450,000 Russians, 95,000 French, 45,000 Turks, and 22,000 British. Trubetzkoy, who had been mortified by Russia’s defeat at Sevastopol, must have been sorely depressed by the treaty, which pushed Russia back to its prewar borders and banned its warships from the Black Sea. Coupled with crippling war debts and public anger over the defeat, the treaty helped put Russia on the path to decline, unrest and revolution. And the Ottomans fared little better, with the war helping to accelerate the collapse of their empire.
As the war’s biggest strategic victor, France was in the mood for celebration. Even before the diplomats left the Tuileries, cannons announced the treaty to Paris. Soon crowds were rejoicing in the streets, waving flags or draping them from lampposts, culminating in a massive fireworks show that evening. A month later, the city erupted into a similar celebration when the infant prince was christened in Notre Dame, followed by a military parade that escorted the royal carriages back to the Tuileries. As they passed, a Russian servant girl told Said she was amazed that France should still have so many soldiers, considering how many had been lost during the war. But Said knew the soldiers were “a fraction only, of course, of the army”—and France’s losses were a fraction of Russia’s.
Once the celebration was over, Trubetzkoy left for London to see the other major victor in the war, Queen Victoria, who invited him to a number of royal receptions, balls, and other events, where he was often accompanied by his African valet. And then, after three months, they headed back across the English Channel to begin their rounds of Europe again.
Over the next three years, Trubetzkoy and Said lived in a cycle of constant travel: Germany and Austria in autumn; Italy in winter; France in spring; and England in summer. Along the way, Said perfected his French and picked up German, Italian, and English, the latter of which he studied through grammar books he bought in Paris. “I never had a teacher, nor ever was at school for the purpose of acquiring the English. The only way I learned what little of the language I know was through French books,” he wrote. But he honed his conversational skills during his summers in England, “so by the time I left there I had laid a very good foundation upon which to build afterwards.”
Said was such a quick study that after only two years on the road, he could easily shift from one language to another. In August 1857, former Princeton professor James Alexander, visiting the German spa at Baden-Baden, described how “the African servant of a Russian prince chatted a good while under our windows in German, Italian, and French; and subsequently we heard him speaking Arabic with a man in Turkish dress.”
A month later, Trubetzkoy and Said were still enjoying the waters of Baden-Baden when the prince was summoned to Stuttgart, capital of the kingdom of Württemberg, to attend the first meeting between Tsar Alexander II and Emperor Napoleon III after the end of the Crimean War. The tsar had a full contingent of servants who had traveled by rail with him from Saint Petersburg, but when Trubetzkoy suggested that he should use Said as his chief attendant, he quickly agreed. After such a tremendous loss to the Ottomans, there was symbolic value to having a liberated Ottoman slave by his side, proudly wearing an Orthodox cross over his Turkish garb to show his fealty to Russia and its church. And as a heavy smoker, Alexander likely put Said’s skills as a chiboukji to good use.
With Said hovering in the background, Alexander attended a banquet at the palace of Württemberg’s King Wilhelm, followed by a carriage procession through a forest alight with torches and Chinese lanterns, and then an outdoor ball—complete with fireworks—that lasted until 2:00 A.M. It was, in Said’s words, a “splendid dinner,” and when it was over, Russian foreign minister Mikhail Gorchakov paid Said thirty thalers, equal to about two months of wages for a factory worker in Stuttgart at the time.
While traveling among the rich and powerful, of course, Said had no idea how little factory workers were paid or how much their lives differed from his. This was during the depths of the Industrial Revolution, when most laborers in Europe and America were beset by poverty, hardship, and squalor. But Said, who was raised in a life of privilege in Borno and who now existed in one long blur of ballrooms, banquets, spas, and casinos, had little contact with the lower classes and was not attuned to the harsh realities of their lives.
There was, however, at least once that Said ran afoul of Europe’s divisions of rank and caste. When visiting England, Trubetzkoy and Said often spent a week or two as guests of Countess Frances Waldegrave, one of England’s premier hostesses. “No great lady held her head higher or more rigorously ruled her society. Her home was always gay, and her parties… were the liveliest of the time,” a biographer wrote.
Said enjoyed his time among British aristocrats. “Of all the people I have ever seen in my life, the English nobility are the highest livers, and the most fastidious in their surroundings,” he wrote, adding that their servants “live better than any in Europe.” But he got into trouble when his relations with servants became too close. In his memoir, he says he “disgraced myself at the country residence of Lady Waldegrave by associating with her footmen,” although his transgression was likely with servants of the opposite sex.
Said later said he had been “fond of pleasure and wild” before coming to Lady Waldegrave’s estate, but after spending time with a couple of her female servants, he “began to feel right and comfortable in his mind and think better of himself.” Speaking to a minister, he claimed the women offered him religious guidance, but after piecing the two accounts together, it seems likelier that he “disgraced myself” through something more earthly than spiritual. And that would have triggered a quick response from Lady Waldegrave, who (her biographer wrote) “never suffered the slightest indecorum, nor tolerated improprieties.”
If a Black valet in the American South back then got overly friendly with white servants, it’s likely he would have been whipped for crossing the racial divide. And if there was a chance he was sexually involved with a white woman, he might have been jailed or even lynched. But race had nothing to do with Said’s transgression in England. Instead, it was about class. Said was a valet de chambre, near the top of the servant class, while footmen and handmaids were much lower. Prince Trubetzkoy or Lady Waldegrave told him he had “disgraced myself by mixing with my inferiors,” adding that if such fraternization continued, he would be stripped of his privileged status as a valet and instead treated as a mere servant. Rather than jeopardize his status, Said agreed to give up his “hitherto pleasant visits to her under-household.”
The notion of a Black man referring to any whites as his social “inferiors” must have been jarring to American readers of Said’s memoirs. But it made perfect sense in Europe, which was more attuned to differences of class than race. During Said’s time in Europe, there was only one known incident where he felt slighted because of his race. And it was very slight.
In 1857, Trubetzkoy took Said to the Palais du Corps Législatif in Paris for a wedding reception for Trubetzkoy’s twenty-one-year-old niece, Princess Sofia Trubetzkoy, and the forty-five-year-old Count Charles de Morny, head of the legislative corps. It was a political marriage, aimed at rebuilding ties between Russia and France after the Crimean War. The groom was the half brother of Napoleon III, born through an affair between the emperor’s mother and the Count de Flahaut. And although the bride was nominally the daughter of Trubetzkoy’s brother Sergei, she was actually the biological child of the late Tsar Nicholas through his scandalous affair with the nineteen-year-old general’s daughter, making her the half sister of the current Tsar Alexander.
Sofia had never known Sergei or his family, since her mother had taken her to France shortly after she was born and later sent her to be educated at a convent in Saint Petersburg while Sergei languished in Siberia. Nevertheless, as Sofia embarked on her marriage, Nicholas Trubetzkoy and his sisters offered their support. With their help, she made quite a debut at the Palais. “She had an exquisite complexion, black eyes and abundant fair hair…,” a biographer later wrote. “Wearing a pale blue dress spangled with golden stars, with a rose in her hair and pearls upon her neck, she produced an impression of telling grace and beauty.”
As her uncle’s valet, Nicholas Said stood in the reception line to kiss her hand, as was the custom. But when he approached, she recoiled, “undoubtedly being afraid,” in Said’s opinion. Having spent most of her life in a Russian convent, this may have been the first time she ever saw an African, especially one with a tattooed face and Turkish garb. Her hesitation lasted only a moment, but made such an impression that it was the only time during his European travels he recalled such a reaction.
It’s not that Europeans were free of racial prejudice. Many used “n———” or similar words when referring to Africans. In the folklore of several countries, including Russia, Blacks often appeared as agents of the devil. And most Europeans were convinced that their race was superior to any other, although their definition of “race” was much broader than ours. In the 1850s, for instance, British newspapers variously described the Irish, Welsh, Germans, Italians, Romanians, Laplanders, and French Canadians as “inferior races.” Even English colonials living abroad were described as an “inferior race” compared to those who stayed home.
But Said’s experience shows that Europeans were open to the idea that certain individuals from an “inferior race” could be accepted as equals in society, based on their merits. That explains how military officers of African heritage, such as Russia’s Abram and Ivan Gannibal or France’s General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, could be given command of white troops, a status US African-Americans were denied until the eve of World War II. It explains how Alexander Pushkin and Alexandre Dumas (the general’s son) could be lionized as literary giants; how Black composer Ignatius Sancho could vote in British elections in the 1770s; how Black politician Étienne Mentor held a seat in the French parliament in the 1790s; and how Black actor Ira Aldridge found widespread acclaim in European theaters in the mid-1800s, after facing discrimination in his native New York. (Four years after Said left Saint Petersburg, Aldridge settled there and rapidly became Russia’s highest-paid actor.) It is also why Said saw nothing unusual about kissing the hand of a Russian princess, or being ranked as a social superior to white underlings. When Blacks in Europe faced prejudice, it was typically on an individual basis and not by law or custom, which was far different from what Said would soon experience in the United States.
