“_Look! That is the tomb of Sultanetta!_” pointing enthusiastically toward a monument of rose color and green towering conspicuously among the sacred graves turned toward the East. “Who is she?” queried Dumas. “Once the mistress of a Tartar Prince, and renowned throughout the entire Caucasian country for her beauty ... _and her adventures_,” he added. “Perhaps you will hear the story at Derbend.” At Derbend they found an invitation awaiting them from the Commandant of the Fortress, to take dinner on the following day. While at dinner the wife of the Commandant remarked: “Monsieur Dumas, just outside the window here”—pointing with her hand—“near where you are sitting, is the grave of Oline Nesterzof!” “And who is she?” inquired again the great romancer, scenting avidly, as was his habit, a novelty for his eager, prolific pen. “She was the mistress of Bestushev-Marlinski.” “Ah! that name again! _Poet, goldsmith, artist, romancer, revolutionist!_” he enumerated with relish and excitement. “I heard of him first at Novogorod, and saw the jewels he made of iron. Unavoidably I seem to be setting out on the trail of Marlinski.” After dinner was over, the Commandant’s wife guided them up a steep hillside, to a little lowly mound, marked by one humble stone. “Bestushev-Marlinski, you know,” she went on to explain, “was condemned to be quartered alive by Nicholas the First, for his share in the Decembrist Uprising, which he steadily refused to disavow. But by some caprice in the heart of him who never knew mercy, he changed the sentence to exile for life in Siberia, and wrote under it the now famous—_So be it, Nicholas!_ That was early in the summer of 1826, before the crowning of Nicholas. “In 1828, the young Czar was beginning fresh wars in his new Caucasian possessions, for peace and safety here at Derbend, and also for the city of newly discovered wealth in oil, over the mountains, Baku. He had need of trained officers. He remembered Bestushev who had refused to disavow his guilt. Above all things Nicholas revered the truth. He changed his sentence again. He sent him, this time, to the Caucasus. But lest he be accounted too merciful, he stripped him of military honors, and made him a soldier in the ranks. “In the bloody and perilous warfare that was being waged continually here, Bestushev, who had now changed his name to Bestushev-Marlinski, rapidly won promotion and became an officer again. Then he came to live right here, in the old bullet-shattered, smoke-blackened Fortress of Derbend,” pointing to walls above their heads marked by many sieges. “Not long after his promotion, he fell in love with a young and beautiful girl, of poor family, in the village, by name, Oline Nesterzof. After a time she came to live with the writer.