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From 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica;

HERTZEN, ALEXANDER (1812–1870), Russian author, was born at Moscow, a very short time before the occupation of that city by the French. His father, Ivan Yakovlef, after a personal interview with Napoleon, was allowed to leave, when the invaders arrived, as the bearer of a letter from the French to the Russian emperor. His family attended him to the Russian lines. Then the mother of the infant Alexander (a young German Protestant of Jewish extraction from Stuttgart, according to A. von Wurzbach) , only seventeen years old, and quite unable to speak Russian, was forced to seek shelter for some time in a peasant’s hut.

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