I had momentarily lost sight of the fact that Zaleski had so absolutely cut himself off from the world, that he was not in the least likely to know anything even of the appalling series of events to which I had referred.  And yet it is no exaggeration to say that those events had thrown the greater part of Europe into a state of consternation, and even confusion.  In London, Manchester, Paris, and Berlin, especially the excitement was intense.  On the Sunday preceding the writing of my note to Zaleski, I was present at a monster demonstration held in Hyde Park, in which the Government was held up on all hands to the popular derision and censure—­for it will be remembered that to many minds the mysterious accompaniments of some of the deaths daily occurring conveyed a still darker significance than that implied in mere self-destruction, and seemed to point to a succession of purposeless and hideous murders.  The demagogues, I must say, spoke with some wildness and incoherence.  Many laid the blame at the door of the police, and urged that things would be different were they but placed under municipal, instead of under imperial, control.  A thousand panaceas were invented, a thousand aimless censures passed.  But the people listened with vacant ear.  Never have I seen the populace so agitated, and yet so subdued, as with the sense of some impending doom.  The glittering eye betrayed the excitement, the pallor of the cheek the doubt, the haunting fear.  None felt himself quite safe; men recognised shuddering the grin of death in the air.  To tingle with affright, and to know not why—­that is the transcendentalism of terror.  The threat of the cannon’s mouth is trivial in its effect on the mind in comparison with the menace of a Shadow.  It is the pestilence that walketh by night that is intolerable.  As for myself, I confess to being pervaded with a nameless and numbing awe during all those weeks.  And this feeling appeared to be general in the land.  The journals had but one topic; the party organs threw politics to the winds.  I heard that on the Stock Exchange, as in the Paris Bourse, business decreased to a minimum.  In Parliament the work of law-threshing practically ceased, and the time of Ministers was nightly spent in answering volumes of angry ‘Questions,’ and in facing motion after motion for the ‘adjournment’ of the House.

It was in the midst of all this commotion that I received Prince Zaleski’s brief ‘Come and see.’  I was flattered and pleased:  flattered, because I suspected that to me alone, of all men, would such an invitation, coming from him, be addressed; and pleased, because many a time in the midst of the noisy city street and the garish, dusty world, had the thought of that vast mansion, that dim and silent chamber, flooded my mind with a drowsy sense of the romantic, till, from very excess of melancholy sweetness in the picture, I was fain to close my eyes.  I avow that that lonesome room—­gloomy in its lunar