…yesterday I met an acquaintance, a peasant woman, to whom I could not help remarking that she had changed…

…yesterday I met an acquaintance, a peasant woman, to whom I could not help remarking that she had changed… And she said to me: you too, my dear provider, have grown old, and plain besides. Though I might say, together with my late nanny: handsome I never was, but young I was. None of it matters; there is but one misfortune: do not notice, my friend, what I notice all too well.

Pushkin, in a letter to his wife of 25 September 1835, from Trigorskoye to Saint Petersburg.

The illustration shows Pushkin in the "unflattering" Linyov portrait of the first quarter of the nineteenth century