Then the wretched General shivered from head to foot.  Every detail of the melodramatic execution seemed burned into his brain as with a red-hot iron.  He fancied he could see the procession and the three gibbets, painted black; beside each gibbet was an open ditch and a black coffin covered with a dark gray pall.  He saw, in the hollow square formed by a battalion of Cossack infantry, the executioner, Froloff, in his red shirt and his plush trousers tucked into his boots, and, beside him, a pale, black-robed priest.

“Who the devil is such an idiot as to relate such things in the newspapers?” he growled.

And in terror he imagined he could hear the sheriff read the sentence, see the priest present the cross to the condemned men, and Froloff, before putting on the black caps, degrade the gentlemen by breaking their swords over their heads.

Then, half suffocated, Vogotzine flung the paper on the floor; and, with eyes distended with horror, drawing the caraffe of kummel toward him, he half emptied it, drinking glass after glass to recover his self-control.  It seemed to him that Froloff was there behind him, and that the branches of the candelabra, stretching over his heated head, were the arms of gibbets ready to seize him.  To reassure himself, and be certain that he was miles and miles from Russia, he was obliged to make sure of the presence of the waiters and guests in the gay and gilded restaurant.

“The devil take the newspapers!” he muttered.

“They are cursed stupid!  I will never read another!  All that stuff is absurd!  Absurd!  A fine aid to digestion, truly!”

And, paying his bill, he rose to go, passing his hand over his head as if his sword had been broken upon it and left a contusion, and glancing timidly into the mirrors, as if he feared to discover the image of Froloff there.

It was at this moment that he discovered Prince Zilah, and rushed up to him with the joyful cry of a child discovering a protector.

The Prince noticed that poor Vogotzine, who sat heavily down by his side, was not entirely sober.  The enormous quantity of kummel he had absorbed, together with the terror produced by the article he had read, had proved too much for the good man:  his face was fiery, and he constantly moistened his dry lips.

“I suppose it astonishes you to see me here?” he said, as if he had forgotten all that had taken place.  “I—­I am astonished to see myself here!  But I am so bored down there at Maisons, and I rust, rust, as little—­little—­ah!  Stephanie said to me once at Odessa.  So I came to breathe the air of Paris.  A miserable idea!  Oh, if you knew!  When I think that that might happen to me!”

“What?” asked Andras, mechanically.

“What?” gasped the General, staring at him with dilated eyes.  “Why, Froloff, of course!  Froloff!  The sword broken over your head!  The gallows!  Ach!  I am not a nihilist—­heaven forbid!—­but I have displeased the Czar.  And to displease the Czar—­Brr!  Imagine the open square-Odessa-No, no, don’t let us talk of it any more!” glancing suddenly about him, as if he feared the platoon of Cossacks were there, in the restaurant, come to drag him away in the name of the Emperor.  “Oh! by the way, Prince,” he exclaimed abruptly—­“why don’t you ever come to Maisons-Lafitte?”