“You cannot expect an old man such as I to follow all the changes of your petty laws, and to remember under which form of government he happens to be living at the moment!” he had boldly said to a great personage from St. Petersburg, and the observation was duly reported in the capital.  It was, moreover, said in Warsaw that the law had actually stretched a point or two for the Prince Bukaty on more than one occasion.  Like many outspoken people, he passed for a barker and not a biter.

It does not fall to the lot of many to live in a highly civilized town and submit to open robbery.  Prince Bukaty lived in a small palace in the Kotzebue street, and when he took his morning stroll in the Cracow Faubourg he passed under the shadow of a palace flying the Russian flag, which palace was his, and had belonged to his ancestors from time immemorial.  He had once made the journey to St. Petersburg to see in the great museum there the portraits of his fathers, the books that his predecessors had collected, the relics of Poland’s greatness, which were his, and the greatness thereof was his.

“Yes,” he answered to the loquacious curator, “I know.  You tell me nothing that I do not know.  These things are mine.  I am the Prince Bukaty!”

And the curator of St. Petersburg went away, sorrowful, like the young man who had great possessions.

For Russia had taken these things from the Bukatys, not in punishment, but because she wanted them.  She wanted offices for her bureaucrats on the Krakowski Przedmiescie, in Warsaw, so she took Bukaty Palace.  And to whom can one appeal when Caesar steals?

Poland had appealed to Europe, and Europe had expressed the deepest sympathy.  And that was all!

The house in the Kotzebue had the air of an old French town-house, and was, in fact, built by a French architect in the days of Stanislaus Augustus, when Warsaw aped Paris.  It stands back from the road behind high railings, and, at the farther end of a paved court-yard, to which entrance is gained by two high gates, now never opened in hospitality, and only unlocked at rare intervals for the passage of the quiet brougham in which the prince or Wanda went and came.  The house is just round the corner of the Kotzebue, and therefore faces the Saski Gardens—­a quiet spot in this most noisy town.  The building is a low one, with a tiled roof and long windows, heavily framed, of which the smaller panes and thick woodwork suggest the early days of window-glass.  Inside, the house is the house of a poor man.  The carpets are worn thin; the furniture, of a sumptuous design, is carefully patched and mended.  The atmosphere has that mournful scent of better days—­now dead and past.  It is the odor of monarchy, slowly fading from the face of a world that reeks of cheap democracy.

The air of the rooms—­the subtle individuality which is impressed by humanity on wood and texture—­suggested that older comfort which has been succeeded by the restless luxury of these times.