"Isn't Aguida a beauty?" he went on, still weeping. "She makes me think of the Countess de Teruel, though she is a little darker. You know the Countess de Teruel, Mercedes, who went in bathing nude at Biarritz, in front of the rock of the Virgin, one day when Prince Bismarck was standing on the foot-bridge. You do not remember her? Mercedes de Teruel." I shrugged my shoulders. "I forget; you must have been too young. Two, perhaps three years old. A child. Yes, a child. Oh, my child, to have been of that generation and to be reduced to playing cards with savages ... I must tell you...." I stood up and pushed him off. "Stay, stay," he implored. "I will tell you everything you want to know, how I came here, things I have never told anyone. Stay, I must unbosom myself to a true friend. I will tell you everything, I repeat. I trust you. You are a Frenchman, a gentleman. I know that you will repeat nothing to her." "That I will repeat nothing to her?... To whom?" His voice stuck in his throat. I thought I saw a shudder of fear pass over him. "To her ... to Antinea," he murmured. I sat down again. XIII THE HETMAN OF JITOMIR'S STORY Count Casimir had reached that stage where drunkenness takes on a kind of gravity, of regretfulness. He thought a little, then began his story. I regret that I cannot reproduce more perfectly its archaic flavor. "When the grapes begin to color in Antinea's garden, I shall be sixty-eight. It is very sad, my dear boy, to have sowed all your wild oats. It isn't true that life is always beginning over again. How bitter, to have known the Tuileries in 1860, and to have reached the point where I am now! "One evening, just before the war (I remember that Victor Black was still living), some charming women whose names I need not disclose (I read the names of their sons from time to time in the society news of the _Gaulois_) expressed to me their desire to rub elbows with some real _demi-mondaines_ of the artist quarter. I took them to a ball at the _Grande Chaumière_. There was a crowd of young painters, models, students. In the midst of the uproar, several couples danced the _cancan_ till the chandeliers shook with it. We noticed especially a little, dark man, dressed in a miserable top-coat and checked trousers which assuredly knew the support of no suspenders. He was cross-eyed, with a wretched beard and hair as greasy as could be. He bounded and kicked extravagantly. The ladies called him Léon Gambetta. "What an annoyance, when I realize that I need only have felled this wretched lawyer with one pistol shot to have guaranteed perfect happiness to myself and to my adopted country, for, my dear fellow, I am French at heart, if not by birth. "I was born in 1829, at Warsaw, of a Polish father and a Russian mother. It is from her that I hold my title of Hetman of Jitomir. It was restored to me by Czar Alexander II on a request made to him on his visit to Paris, by my august master, the Emperor Napoleon III.