“What is certain is, that I received a charming epistle from her, in which there is no more mention of M. Larinski than if Poland and the Pole did not exist.  She praises Engadine; she pretends that she would ask for nothing better than to end her days in a pine-forest.  I can read between the lines that it would be a pine-forest after her own heart, where there would be reunions, balls, guests to dinner, small parties, a conservatory of music, and the opera.  The last paragraph of her letter is devoted to the insurrection in Herzegovina, and it is hardly worth while to say that all her sympathies are with the insurgents.  ’If I were a man,’ she writes, ‘I would go and fight for them.’  That is very well; she always took the part of thieves against the police.  I remember long ago—­she was ten years old—­I told her the story of an unfortunate traveller besieged in a forest by an army of wolves.  He made a barricade about himself, and around it he lighted great fires.  The wolves fell into the flames, where they roasted, one after the other.  Antoinette began to weep bitterly, and I imagined that she was lamenting the terror of the unfortunate man.  ‘Not at all,’ she cried:  ‘the poor beasts!’ She was made so; we cannot remake her.  She will always side with the wolves, especially with the lean ones who scarcely can make two ends meet.

“I told you that Count Larinski was a worthy man.  He came to see me the day before yesterday.  We have become very good friends.  I asked him if Paris still pleased him, and he replied, with the most gracious smile, ‘What I like best in Paris is Maisons Lafitte.’  Thereupon he said some exceedingly pretty things, which I will not repeat.  We walked tete-a-tete around the park.  Heaven be praised that I returned heart-whole!  We talked politics; he bears the reputation of being hot-headed, but he is not wanting in good sense.  I wished to know if he was in favour of the Turks or of the Bosnians.  He replied: 

“’As a Christian, as a Catholic, I am interested in the Christians of the East, and I am for the Cross against the Crescent.’  He pronounced these words, Christian, Catholic, and cross, in a tone full of unction.  I surmise that he is a devotee.  He added, ‘As a Pole, I am for Turkey.’

“‘I believed,’ said I, ’that the Poles had sympathy with all the oppressed.’

“‘Poles,’ he replied, ’cannot like those who like their oppressors, and they cannot forget that the Osmanlis are their natural allies, and, on occasions, their refuge.’

“I gave him Antoinette’s letter to read.  I was very glad, at any hazard, to prove to him that she could write four pages without asking about him.  He read it with extreme attention:  but when he came to the famous passage—­’If I were a man, I would go and fight for them!’—­he smiled, and returned me the letter, saying, in a disdainful and rather a dry tone: 

“’Write for me to Mlle. Moriaz that I believe I am a man, yet that I will not fight for the Bosnians, and that the Turks are my greatest friends.’