Thaddeus continued:  “It is necessary to explain that at Bakou my little house is one of the first before you reach the quay.  I had some Armenian employees there.  When arrived, what do you suppose I saw?  A file of soldiers with cannon, yes, with a cannon, on my word, turned against my house and an officer saying quietly, ’there it is.  Fire!’” (Rouletabille made yet another discovery — two, three discoveries.  Near by, standing back of Natacha’s seat, was a figure not unknown to the young reporter, and there, in one of the orchestra chairs, were two other men whose faces he had seen that same morning in Koupriane’s barracks.  Here was where a memory for faces stood him in good stead.  He saw that he was not the only person keeping close watch on Natacha.) “When I heard what the officer said,” Thaddeus went on, “I nearly dropped out of the drojki.  I hurried to the police commissioner.  He explained the affair promptly, and I was quick to understand.  During my absence one of my Armenian employees had fired at a Tartar who was passing.  For that matter, he had killed him.  The governor was informed and had ordered the house to be bombarded, for an example, as had been done with several others.  I found Gounsovski and told him the trouble in two words.  He said it wasn’t necessary for him to interfere in the affair, that I had only to talk to the officer.  ’Give him a good present, a hundred roubles, and he will leave your house.  I went back to the officer and took him aside; he said he wanted to do anything that he could for me, but that the order was positive to bombard the house.  I reported his answer to Gounsovski, who told me:  ’Tell him then to turn the muzzle of the cannon the other way and bombard the building of the chemist across the way, then he can always say that he mistook which house was intended.’  I did that, and he had them turn the cannon.  They bombarded the chemist’s place, and I got out of the whole thing for the hundred roubles.  Gounsovski, the good fellow, may be a great lump of fat and be like an umbrella merchant, but I have always been grateful to him from the bottom of my heart, you can understand, Athanase Georgevitch.”

“What reputation has Prince Galitch at the court?” inquired Rouletabille all at once.

“Oh, oh!” laughed the others.  “Since he went so openly to visit Tolstoi he doesn’t go to the court any more.”

“And — his opinions?  What are his opinions?”

“Oh, the opinions of everybody are so mixed nowadays, nobody knows.”

Ivan Petrovitch said, “He passes among some people as very advanced and very much compromised.”

“Yet they don’t bother him?” inquired Rouletabille.

“Pooh, pooh,” replied the gay Councilor of Empire, “it is rather he who tries to mix with them.”

Thaddeus stooped down and said, “They say that he can’t be reached because of the hold he has over a certain great personage in the court, and it would be a scandal — a great scandal.”