“What a temptation to become the lord and master of such a monster!  And I allowed myself to be tempted, and undertook the adventure.  The means came unsought for by me, and the only thing that I had to do, was to show myself more perverted and satanical that she was herself.—­And so I played the devil.

“‘Yes,’ I said, ’we writers are the best workmen for doing evil, as our books may be bottles of poison.  The so-called men of action, only turn the handle of the mitrailleuse which we have loaded.  Formulas will destroy the world, and it is we who invent them.’

“‘That is true,’ she said, ’and that is what is wanting in Bakounine, I am sorry to say.’

“That name was constantly in her mouth, and so I asked her for details, which she gave me, as she knew the man intimately.

“‘After all,’ she said, with a contemptuous grimace, ’he is only a kind of Garibaldi.’

“She told me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about his Odyssey of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine’s legend, and which is, nevertheless, only the exact truth; his part of chief of the insurgents, at Prague and then at Dresden; his first death sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmuetz and in the casemates of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul; in a subterranean dungeon at Schuesselburg; about his exile to Siberia and his wonderful escape down the river Amour, on a Japanese coasting-vessel by way of Yokohama and San Francisco, and about his final arrival in London, whence he was directing all the operations of Nihilism.

“‘You see,’ she said, ’he is a thorough adventurer, and now all his adventures are over.  He got married at Tobolsk and became a mere respectable, middle-class man.  And then, he has no individual ideas.  Herzen, the phamphleteer of Kolokol inspired him with the only fertile phrase that he ever uttered:  Land and Liberty! But that is not yet the definite formula, the general formula; what I will call, the dynamite formula.  At best, Bakounine would become an incendiary, and burn down cities.  And what is that, I ask you?  Bah?  A second-hand Rostopchin!  He wants a prompter, and I offered to become his but he did not take me seriously.’ ...

“It would be useless to enter into all the Psychological details which marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you more fully the attraction of curiosity which she offered me more and more every day.  It was getting exasperating, and the more so, as she resisted me as stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done, but at the end of a month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was.  Do you know what she had thought of?  She meant to make me Bakounine’s prompter, or, at any rate, that is what she said.  But no doubt she reserved the right to herself, and that is how I understood her, to prompt the prompter, and my passion for her, which she purposely left unsatisfied, assured her that absolute power over me.