IT was on Saturday evening, May 16th, 1914, that the Grand Duchess of Lautenburg did me the honour of telling me the story of her life. Let me repeat that story to you, not only because certain of its incidents are absolutely indispensable to a proper understanding of the drama which is fast approaching its climax, but above all because it gives me an exquisite pleasure to open this jewel-case and handle the beautiful, barbaric stones it contains, gems which will always light me through my blackest hour. Hagen had had to go to a dinner, given by the 7th Hussars, and was not there. It gave me no small pleasure to see that she was always more open with me in his absence, however casually she treated that moody and stubborn adorer. Reclining on the white bearskin thrown over her _chaise-longue_, she was dressed that evening in a very loose, light tunic of yellow Turkish silk, embroidered in mauve and silver. Every now and then she passed her fingers through a bowl of huge roses standing on a low table close by, and we could hear the petals falling softly on the blue carpet. Melusine, her hair shaken loose, was sitting on the carpet, resting her drooping head on the bare feet of her mistress, which she clasped in her arms from time to time. From the chair where I was sitting I could see the voluptuous curves of the girl's smooth throat in the opening of her Valenciennes fichu. The window was open behind the drawn curtains, and the night breeze, wafting them apart from time to time, mingled the balmy scents of the _Herrenwald_ with the heady odours of amber, roses and cigarettes. With her utter indifference to effect or style, Aurora spoke, mixing up three languages and interchanging the French "you," the German third person, and the Russian "thou." "I expect you know," she began, "that I did not exactly go up in the world when I married. Once a princess, I am now no more than grand-duchess, and though I am allied to the Hohenzollerns my husband's family is not nearly as old as my own. "I am a Tumene princess. I know, of course, that your western histories say practically nothing about us. But if you went to Samarkand or Kara-Koroum, or indeed no further than Tiflis, you would find in our ancient Mongolian chronicles things that would amaze you as to the antiquity of our origin, and you would realize that your Broglies and Cumberlands are mere parvenus compared with us. "One Tumene prince was beheaded for his hostility to Yaroslav the Great, and I will go back no further, least I weary you with jaw-breaking names. Another, much later, gave Ivan the Terrible so much trouble that that sovereign preferred to treat with him and sent him magnificent presents, notably an enormous clock with the signs of the zodiac in sapphires. This was not enough, however, to prevent that Tumene's son from assisting the Khan of the Crimea with forty thousand horsemen when he started out to besiege Moscow, in 1571, if I remember rightly.