First Love by Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev Chapter 21 Page 11

university; and within six months my father died of a stroke in Petersburg, where he had just moved with my mother and me. A few days before his death he received a letter from Moscow which threw him into a violent agitation� . He went to my mother to beg some favour of her: and, I was told, he positively shed tears – he, my father! On the very morning of the day when he was stricken down, he had begun a letter to me in French. ‘My son,’ he wrote to me, ‘fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison� .’ After his death, my mother sent a considerable sum of money to Moscow.