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Family relations became closer, too. Gone were the servants who had taken over child care for the noble family of the eighteenth century. The Siberian exiles brought up their own children and taught them all they knew. 'I was your wet nurse,' Maria told her children, 'your nanny and, in part, your tutor, too.'⁷⁶ Misha, a new son, was born in 1832; Elena ('Nellinka'), a daughter, in 1834. The following year the Volkonskys were resettled in the village of Urik, thirty kilometres outside Irkutsk, where they had a wooden house and a plot of land, just like all the other villagers. Misha and Elena grew up with the local peasant children. They learned to play their games - hunting for birds' nests, fishing for brown trout, setting rabbit traps and catching butterflies. 'Nellinka is growing up a true Siberian', Maria wrote to her friend Katya Trubetskoi.

She talks only in the local dialect and there is no way of stopping her doing so. As for Misha, I have to allow him to go camping in the woods with the wild boys from the village. He loves adventure; he wept uncontrollably the other day because he had slept through an alarm caused by the appearance of a wolf on our doorstep. My children are growing up a la Rousseau, like two little savages, and there is very little I can do about it except to insist that they

talk French with us when at home… But I must say that this existence suits their health.⁷⁷

The boy's father took a different view. Full of pride, he told a friend that Misha had grown up a 'true Russian in feeling'.⁷⁸

For the adults, too, exile meant a simpler and more 'Russian' way of life. Some of the Decembrist exiles settled in the countryside and married local girls. Others took up Russian customs and pastimes, in particular hunting in the game-rich forests of Siberia.⁷⁹ And all of them were forced, for the first time in their lives, to become fluent in their native tongue. For Maria and Sergei, accustomed as they were to speak and think in French, this was one of the hardest aspects of their new existence. On their first encounter in that Nerchinsk prison cell they were forced to speak in Russian (so that the guards could understand), but they did not know the words for all the complex emotions they were feeling at that moment, so their conversation was somewhat artificial and extremely limited. Maria set about the study of her native language from a copy of the Scriptures in the camp. Sergei's Russian, which he had written as an officer, became more vernacular. His letters from Urik are littered with Siberian colloquialisms and misspellings of elementary words ('if, 'doubt', 'May' and 'January').⁸⁰

Sergei, like his son, was 'going native'. With every passing year he became more peasant-like. He dressed like a peasant, grew his beard, rarely washed, and began to spend most of his time working in the fields or talking with the peasants at the local market town. In 1844 the Volkonskys were allowed to settle in Irkutsk. Maria was immediately accepted into the official circles of the new governor, Muraviev-Amursky, who made no secret of his sympathy for the Decembrist exiles and looked upon them as an intellectual force for the development of Siberia. Maria welcomed this opportunity to become integrated in society again. She set up several schools, a foundling hospital and a theatre. She hosted the town's main salon in their house, where the governor himself was a frequent visitor. Sergei was seldom there. He found the 'aristocratic atmosphere' of Maria's household disagreeable and preferred to remain at his farm in Urik, coming into Irkutsk just for market days. But after twenty years of seeing his wife suffer in Siberia, he was not about to stand in her way.

5. The 'peasant prince': Sergei Volkonsky in Irkutsk. Daguerreotype, 1845

The 'peasant prince', for his part, was widely viewed as an eccentric. N. A. Belogolovy, who grew up in Irkutsk in the 1840s, recalls how people were shocked 'to see the prince on market days sitting on the seat of a peasant cart piled high with flour bags and engaged in a lively conversation with a crowd of peasants whilst they shared a grey bread roll'.⁸¹ The couple had constant petty arguments. Maria's brother, A. N. Raevsky, who had been entrusted with the management of her