He entered into conversation with a supercilious, haughty, and pedantic counsellor-at-law, whose interminable monologues distilled ennui.  This fine speaker seemed charming to Samuel, who found in him wit, knowledge, scholarship, and taste; he possessed the (in his eyes) meritorious quality of not knowing Samuel Brohl.  For Samuel had come to divide the human race into two categories:  the first comprehended those well-to-do, thriving people who did not know a certain Brohl; he placed in the second old women who did know him.  He interrogated the counsellor with deference, he hung upon his words, he smiled with an air of approbation at all the absurdities that escaped him; he would have been willing to have his discourse last three hours by the watch; if this charming bore had shown symptoms of escaping him, he would have held him back by the button.

Suddenly he heard a harsh voice, saying to Mme. de Lorcy:  “Where is Count Larinski?  Bring him to me; I want to have a discussion with him.”

He could not do otherwise than comply; he quitted his counsellor with regret, went over and took a seat in the arm-chair that Mme. de Lorcy drew up for him at the side of the princess, and which had for him the effect of a stool of repentance.  Mme. de Lorcy moved away, and he was left tete-a-tete with Princess Gulof, who said to him, “I have been told that congratulations are due to you, and I must make them at once—­although we are enemies.”

“By what right are we enemies, princess?” he asked with a slightly troubled feeling, which quickly passed away as she answered: 

“I am a Russian and you are a Pole, but we shall have no time for fighting; I leave for London to-morrow morning at seven o’clock.”

He was on the point of casting himself at her feet and tenderly kissing her two hands, in testimony of his gratitude.  “To-morrow at seven o’clock,” he mentally ejaculated.  “I have slandered her; she has some good in her.”

“When I say that I am a Russian,” resumed the princess, “it is merely a formal speech.  Love of country is a prejudice, an idea that has had its day, that had sense in the times of Epaminondas or of Theseus, but that has it no longer.  We live in the age of the telegraph, the locomotive; and I know of nothing more absurd now than a frontier, or more ridiculous than a patriot.  Rumour says that you fought like a hero in the insurrection of 1863; that you gave proof of incomparable prowess, and that you killed with your own hand ten Cossacks?  What harm had they done you, those poor Cossacks?  Do they not sometimes haunt your dreams?  Can you think of your victims without disquietude and without remorse?”

He replied, in a dry, haughty tone:  “I really do not know, princess, how many Cossacks I have killed; but I do know that there are some subjects on which I do not love to expatiate.”

“You are right—­I should not comprehend you.  Don Quixote did not do Sancho the honour to explain himself to him every day.”