If you desire to know the details of the judicial proceedings connected with the murder of Andre Marie-Joseph Vauvenarde, ex-Captain in the Chasseurs d’Afrique, and the trial of Anastasius Papadopoulos, I must refer you to the Algerian, Parisian, and London Press.  There you will find an eagerly picturesque account of the whole miserable affair.  Now, not only am I unable to compete with descriptive verbatim reporters on their own ground, but also a consecutive statement, either bald or graphic, of the tedious horrors Lola Brandt and I had to undergo, would be foreign to the purpose of these notes, however far from their original purpose an ironical destiny has caused them to wander.  You know nearly all that is necessary for you to know, so that when I am dead you may not judge me too harshly.  The remainder I can summarise in a few words.  At any rate, I have told the truth, often more naively than one would have thought possible for a man who prided himself as much as I did on his epicurean sophistication.

These have been days, as I say, of tedious horror.  There have been endless examinations, reconstructions of the crime, exposures in daring publicity of the private lives of the protagonists of the lunatic drama.  The French judges and advocates have accepted the account given by Lola and myself of our mutual relations with a certain mocking credulity.  The Press hasn’t accepted it at all.  It took as a matter of course the view held by the none too noble victim.  At first, seeing Lola shrug her shoulders with supreme indifference as to her own reputation, I cared but little for these insinuations.  I wrote such letters to my sisters and to Dale as I felt sure would be believed, and let the long-eared, gaping world go hang.  Besides, I had other things to think of.  Physical pain is insistent, and I have suffered damnable torture.  The pettiness of the legal inquiry has been also a maddening irritation.  Nothing has been too minute for the attention of the French judiciary.  It seemed as though the whole of the evil gang of the Cercle Africain were called as witnesses.  They testified as to Captain Vauvenarde’s part proprietorship of the hell—­as to wrong practices that occurred there—­as to the crazy conduct of both Anastasius and myself on the occasion of my insane visit.  Officers of the Chasseurs d’Afrique were compelled further to blacken the character of the dead man—­he had been a notorious plucker of pigeons during most of his military career, and when at last he was caught red-handed palming the king at ecarte, he was forced to resign his commission.  Arabs came from the slums with appalling stories.  Even the stolid Saupiquet, dragged from Toulon, gave evidence as to the five-franc bribe and the debt of fifteen sous, and identified the horse Sultan by the crumpled photograph.  Lola and I have been racked day after day with questions—­some, indeed, prompted by the suspicion that Vauvenarde might have met his death directly by our hand instead