“But, as I have said, in such a glaring case no direct appeal could be made and no open steps taken.  All that could be done was to incline by private representation the mind of the President of the Military Commission to the side of clemency.  He ended by being impressed by the hints and suggestions, some of them from very high quarters, which he received from St. Petersburg.  And, after all, the gratitude of such great nobles as the Princes S-------- was something worth having from a worldly point of view.  He was a good Russian but he was also a good-natured man.  Moreover, the hate of Poles was not at that time a cardinal article of patriotic creed as it became some thirty years later.  He felt well disposed at first sight towards that young man, bronzed, thin-faced, worn out by months of hard campaigning, the hardships of the siege and the rigours of captivity.

“The Commission was composed of three officers.  It sat in the citadel in a bare vaulted room behind a long black table.  Some clerks occupied the two ends, and besides the gendarmes who brought in the Prince there was no one else there.

“Within those four sinister walls shutting out from him all the sights and sounds of liberty, all hopes of the future, all consoling illusions—­alone in the face of his enemies erected for judges, who can tell how much love of life there was in Prince Roman?  How much remained in that sense of duty, revealed to him in sorrow?  How much of his awakened love for his native country?  That country which demands to be loved as no other country has ever been loved, with the mournful affection one bears to the unforgotten dead and with the unextinguishable fire of a hopeless passion which only a living, breathing, warm ideal can kindle in our breasts for our pride, for our weariness, for our exultation, for our undoing.

“There is something monstrous in the thought of such an exaction till it stands before us embodied in the shape of a fidelity without fear and without reproach.  Nearing the supreme moment of his life the Prince could only have had the feeling that it was about to end.  He answered the questions put to him clearly, concisely—­with the most profound indifference.  After all those tense months of action, to talk was a weariness to him.  But he concealed it, lest his foes should suspect in his manner the apathy of discouragement or the numbness of a crushed spirit.  The details of his conduct could have no importance one way or another; with his thoughts these men had nothing to do.  He preserved a scrupulously courteous tone.  He had refused the permission to sit down.

“What happened at this preliminary examination is only known from the presiding officer.  Pursuing the only possible course in that glaringly bad case he tried from the first to bring to the Prince’s mind the line of defence he wished him to take.  He absolutely framed his questions so as to put the right answers in the culprit’s mouth, going so far as to suggest the very words:  how, distracted by excessive grief after his young wife’s death, rendered irresponsible for his conduct by his despair, in a moment of blind recklessness, without realizing the highly reprehensible nature of the act, nor yet its danger and its dishonour, he went off to join the nearest rebels on a sudden impulse.  And that now, penitently...