Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of languages knowing all this with such definiteness.  A novelist says this and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase, a poetic image, the accent of emotion.  Art is great!  But I have no art, and not having invented Madame de S—­, I feel bound to explain how I came to know so much about her.

My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned, the professor of Lausanne University.  It was from her that I learned the last fact of Madame de S—­’s history, with which I intend to trouble my readers.  She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her sources, of the cause of Madame de S—­’s flight from Russia, some years before.  It was neither more nor less than this:  that she became suspect to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor Alexander.  The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her salon.  Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who hastened to play the informer, I suppose.  At any rate, the overheard matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge.  Some of my readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris, a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected piece of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more than hints at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous innuendoes that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but with a palace intrigue.  When I observed to my friend, the professor’s wife, that the life of Madame de S—­, with its unofficial diplomacy, its intrigues, lawsuits, favours, disgrace, expulsions, its atmosphere of scandal, occultism, and charlatanism, was more fit for the eighteenth century than for the conditions of our own time, she assented with a smile, but a moment after went on in a reflective tone:  “Charlatanism?—­yes, in a certain measure.  Still, times are changed.  There are forces now which were non-existent in the eighteenth century.  I should not be surprised if she were more dangerous than an Englishman would be willing to believe.  And what’s more, she is looked upon as really dangerous by certain people—­chez nous.”

Chez nous in this connexion meant Russia in general, and the Russian political police in particular.  The object of my digression from the straight course of Miss Haldin’s relation (in my own words) of her visit to the Chateau Borel, was to bring forward that statement of my friend, the professor’s wife.  I wanted to bring it forward simply to make what I have to say presently of Mr. Razumov’s presence in Geneva, a little more credible—­for this is a Russian story for Western ears, which, as I have observed already, are not attuned to certain tones of cynicism and cruelty, of moral negation, and even of moral distress already silenced at our end of Europe.  And this I state as my excuse for having left Miss Haldin standing, one of the little group of two women and two men who had come together below the terrace of the Chateau Borel.