ation as modestly as I could, and I found her to be intact. To tell
the truth, I should not have said anything if things had been otherwise.

Zinowieff then gave the hundred roubles to the father, who handed them to
his daughter, and she only took them to return them to her mother. My
servant and coachman were then called in to witness as arrangement of
which they knew nothing.

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 furiou