ame was constantly in her mouth. So I asked her for details,
which she gave me, as she knew the man intimately.

"'After all,' she said, with a contemptuous grimace, 'he is only a kind
of Garibaldi.'

"She told me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about that
'Odyssey' of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's
history, and which is, nevertheless, the exact truth; about his
adventures as chief of the insurgents at Prague and then at Dresden; of
his first death sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmutz, in the
casemates of the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, and in a
subterranean dungeon at Schusselburg; about his exile to Siberia and
his wonderful escape down the river Amour, on a Japanese
coasting-vessel, and about his final arrival, by way of Yokohama and
San Francisco, in London, whence he was directing all the operations of
Nihilism.

"'You see,' she said, 'he is a thorough adventurer, and now all his
adventures are over. He got married at Tobolsk and became a mere
respectable, middle-class man. And then he has no individual ideas.
Herzen, the pamphleteer of "Kolokol," inspired him with the only
fertile phrase that he ever uttered: "Land and Liberty!" But that is
not yet the definite formula, the general formula--what I may call the
dynamite formula. At best, Bakounine would only become an incendiary,
and burn down cities. And what is that, I ask you? Bah! A second-hand
Rostoptchin! He wants a prompter, and I offered to become his, but he
did not take me seriously.'

* * * * *

"It would be useless to enter into all the psychological details which
marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you
more fully the curious and daily growing attraction which she had for
me. It was getting exasperating, and the more so as she resisted me as
stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done. At the end of a
month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you know what she
intended? She meant to make me Bakounine's prompter, or, at any rate,
that is what she said. But no doubt she reserved the right to
herself--at least that is how I understood her--to prompt the prompter,
and my passion for her, which she purposely left unsatisfied, assured
her that absolute power over me.

"All this may appear madness to you, but it is, nevertheless, the exact
truth. In short, one morning she bluntly made the offer:

"'Become Bakounine's soul, an