Samuel looked at him with an astonished, confused air, as he had viewed Mme. de Lorcy when she undertook to speak to him of the Countess Larinski.  “What do you mean?” he finally asked.

“Why, did you not confide to me yourself that you were married?”

Samuel opened wide his eyes; during some moments he seemed to be in a dream; then, suddenly putting his hand to his brow and beginning to smile, he said:  “Ah!  I see—­I see.  Did you take me literally?  I thought you understood what I said.  No, my dear abbe, I am not married, and I never shall marry; but there are free unions as sacred, as indissoluble as marriage.”

The abbe knit his brows, his countenance assumed an expression of chagrin and disapproval.  He was about delivering to his dear count a sermon on the immorality and positive danger of free unions, but Samuel Brohl gave him no time.  “I am not going to Vienna to rejoin my mistress,” he interposed.  “She never leaves me, she accompanies me everywhere; she is here.”

Abbe Miollens cast about him a startled, bewildered gaze, expecting to see a woman start out of some closet or come forward from behind some curtain.

“I tell you that she is here,” repeated Samuel Brohl, pointing to an alabaster statuette, posed on a piedouche.  The statuette represented a woman bound tightly, on whom two Cossacks were inflicting the knout; the socle bore the inscription, “Polonia vincta et flagellata.”

The abbe’s countenance became transformed in the twinkling of an eye, the wrinkles smoothed away from his brow, his mouth relaxed, a joyous light shone in his eyes.  “How well it is that I came!” thought he.  “And under what obligations M. Moriaz will be to me!”

Turning towards Samuel he exclaimed: 

“I am simply a fool; I imagined—­Ah!  I comprehend, your mistress is Poland; this is delightful, and it is truly a union that is as sacred as marriage.  It has, besides, this advantage—­that it interferes with nothing else.  Poland is not jealous, and if, peradventure, you should meet a woman worthy of you whom you would like to marry, your mistress would have nothing to say against it.  To speak accurately, however, she is not your mistress; one’s country is one’s mother, and reasonable mothers never prevent their sons from marrying.”

It was now Samuel’s turn to assume a stern and sombre countenance.  His eye fixed upon the statuette, he replied: 

“You deceive yourself, M. l’Abbe, I belong to her, I have no longer the right to dispose of either my heart, or my soul, or my life; she will have my every thought and my last drop of blood.  I am bound to her by my vows quite as much, I think, as is the monk by his.”

“Excuse me, my dear count,” said the abbe; “this is fanaticism, or I greatly mistake.  Since when have patriots come to take the vow of celibacy?  Their first duty is to become the fathers of children who will become good citizens.  The day when there will cease to be Poles, there will cease also to be a Poland.”