“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 Chaumiere.  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 Leon 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.

“For political reasons, which I cannot describe without retelling the history of unfortunate Poland, my father, Count Bielowsky, left Warsaw in 1830, and went to live in London.  After the death of my mother, he began to squander his immense fortune—­from sorrow, he said.  When, in his time, he died at the period of the Prichard affair, he left me barely a thousand pounds sterling of income, plus two or three systems of gaming, the impracticability of which I learned later.

“I will never be able to think of my nineteenth and twentieth years without emotion, for I then completely liquidated this small inheritance.  London was indeed an adorable spot in those days.  I had a jolly bachelor’s apartment in Piccadilly.

    “’Picadilly!  Shops, palaces, bustle and breeze,
      The whirling of wheels and the murmur of trees.’

“Fox hunting in a briska, driving a buggy in Hyde Park, the rout, not to mention the delightful little parties with the light Venuses of Drury Lane, this took all my time.  All?  I am unjust.  There was also gaming, and a sentiment of filial piety forced me to verify the systems of the late Count, my father.  It was gaming which was the cause of the event I must describe to you, by which my life was to be so strangely changed.