Bleak Maison.

Perhaps visit a nice château instead.

Sometimes places that are difficult to travel to are the most gratifying for travelers. You hear people discussing how they "ate the best mutton at this tiny monastery halfway up Everest" or how they "found this little village with no tourists that can only be accessed by a canoe carved from a single log." An arduous journey makes places seem special.

This is not the case with Turgenev's villa in Bougival, a chic suburb outside of Paris, which I visited this morning with several other slavophiles and our professor. The metro was obscenely crowded, and I spent an hour and a half with someone's arm up my nose, hanging onto an overhead bar until the blood drained from my arm and I half-collapsed, only to find that I could in fact lift both my legs from the ground and remain vertical, held upright by the surplus of bodies. After another similarly sardine-like bus ride we finally arrived at the outskirts of Bougival, and spilled out of the bus sputtering and gasping for air.

One girl said, after our tour of Turgenev's villa, that the whole experience made her feel like a prisoner of war. This is depressingly accurate. After disembarking the bus we marched up a steep hill to the bleakest museum I have ever seen. Perhaps we should have expected something like this when our professor told us a few days earlier "bring something to eat--there will be no food for you there." We were greeted at the door and were immediately prodded up to the second floor of the home, where the tour began. For the next two hours we were made to stand still while a very pleasant man gave us a very unpleasantly long tour in Russian, which my professor tried to translate in vain. Everyone was too frightened to sit down on any of the reproduction furniture, and I could see people looking enviously at Turgenev's death bed. I alternated between feelings of violence and melancholy. About an hour into the tour the guide gave us a glimmer of hope (quickly extinguished) that has yet to be explained to me; he singled me out of the group and said abruptly, "this is the end of the tour, are you hungry right now?" I was flustered but I managed to say, "yes, I suppose so." He chuckled to himself and the tour went on for another hour. On the way home nobody spoke much. Even my professor was staring at the postcard he bought with a haunted look in his eye. Those places "off the beaten path" might be there for your own safety.

Some in our numbers will never be quite the same.