I called her Zaira, and she got into the carriage and returned with me to St. Petersburg in her coarse clothes, without a chemise of any kind.  After I had dropped Zinowieff at his lodging I went home, and for four days I was engaged in collecting and arranging my slave’s toilet, not resting till I had dressed her modestly in the French style.  In less than three months she had learnt enough Italian to tell me what she wanted and to understand me.  She soon loved me, and afterwards she got jealous.  But we shall hear more of her in the following chapter.

CHAPTER XX

Crevecoeur—­Bomback—­Journey to Moscow—­My Adventures At St. Petersburg

The day on which I took Zaira I sent Lambert away, for I did not know what to do with him.  He got drunk every day, and when in his cups he was unbearable.  Nobody would have anything to say to him except as a common soldier, and that is not an enviable position in Russia.  I got him a passport for Berlin, and gave him enough money for the journey.  I heard afterwards that he entered the Austrian service.

In May, Zaira had become so beautiful that when I went to Moscow I dared not leave her behind me, so I took her in place of a servant.  It was delicious to me to hear her chattering in the Venetian dialect I had taught her.  On a Saturday I would go with her to the bath where thirty of forty naked men and women were bathing together without the slightest constraint.  This absence of shame must arise, I should imagine, from native innocence; but I wondered that none looked at Zaira, who seemed to me the original of the statue of Psyche I had seen at the Villa Borghese at Rome.  She was only fourteen, so her breast was not yet developed, and she bore about her few traces of puberty.  Her skin was as white as snow, and her ebony tresses covered the whole of her body, save in a few places where the dazzling whiteness of her skin shone through.  Her eyebrows were perfectly shaped, and her eyes, though they might have been larger, could not have been more brilliant or more expressive.  If it had not been for her furious jealousy and her blind confidence in fortune-telling by cards, which she consulted every day, Zaira would have been a paragon among women, and I should never have left her.

A young and distinguished-looking Frenchman came to St. Petersburg with a young Parisian named La Riviere, who was tolerably pretty but quite devoid of education, unless it were that education common to all the girls who sell their charms in Paris.  This young man came to me with a letter from Prince Charles of Courland, who said that if I could do anything for the young couple he would be grateful to me.  They arrived just as I was breakfasting with Zaira.

“You must tell me,” said I to the young Frenchman, “in what way I can be of use to you.”

“By admitting us to your company, and introducing us to your friends.”