Frantz Ivanitch Lejeune, my neighbour, and a landowner of Orel, had arrived at the respectable position of a Russian nobleman in a not quite ordinary way. He was born in Orleans of French parents, and had gone with Napoleon, on the invasion of Russia, in the capacity of a drummer. At first all went smoothly, and our Frenchman arrived in Moscow with his head held high. But on the return journey poor Monsieur Lejeune, half-frozen and without his drum, fell into the hands of some peasants of Smolensk. The peasants shut him up for the night in an empty cloth factory, and the next morning brought him to an ice-hole near the dyke, and began to beg the drummer '_de la Grrrrande Armée_' to oblige them; in other words, to swim under the ice. Monsieur Lejeune could not agree to their proposition, and in his turn began to try to persuade the Smolensk peasants, in the dialect of France, to let him go to Orleans. 'There, messieurs,' he said, '_my mother is living, une tendre mère_' But the peasants, doubtless through their ignorance of the geographical position of Orleans, continued to offer him a journey under water along the course of the meandering river Gniloterka, and had already begun to encourage him with slight blows on the vertebrae of the neck and back, when suddenly, to the indescribable delight of Lejeune, the sound of bells was heard, and there came along the dyke a huge sledge with a striped rug over its excessively high dickey, harnessed with three roan horses. In the sledge sat a stout and red-faced landowner in a wolfskin pelisse. 'What is it you are doing there?' he asked the peasants. 'We are drowning a Frenchman, your honour.' 'Ah!' replied the landowner indifferently, and he turned away. 'Monsieur! Monsieur!' shrieked the poor fellow. 'Ah, ah!' observed the wolfskin pelisse reproachfully, 'you came with twenty nations into Russia, burnt Moscow, tore down, you damned heathen! the cross from Ivan the Great, and now--mossoo, mossoo, indeed! now you turn tail! You are paying the penalty of your sins!... Go on, Filka!' The horses were starting. 'Stop, though!' added the landowner. 'Eh? you mossoo, do you know anything of music?' '_Sauvez-moi, sauvez-moi, mon bon monsieur!_' repeated Lejeune. 'There, see what a wretched people they are! Not one of them knows Russian! Muzeek, muzeek, savey muzeek voo? savey? Well, speak, do! Compreny? savey muzeek voo? on the piano, savey zhooey?' Lejeune comprehended at last what the landowner meant, and persistently nodded his head. '_Oui, monsieur, oui, oui, je suis musicien; je joue tous les instruments possibles! Oui, monsieur.... Sauvez-moi, monsieur!_' 'Well, thank your lucky star!' replied the landowner. 'Lads, let him go: here's a twenty-copeck piece for vodka.' 'Thank you, your honour, thank you. Take him, your honour.'