She became a
secret police agent, and soon was one of their most valuable members. In
addition to the proverbial charms and wit of a Polish woman, she also
possessed high linguistic attainments, and she spoke Polish, Russian,
French, German, English and Italian, almost equally fluently and
correctly; then she had also that encyclopaedic polish, which impresses
most people much more than the most profound learning of a specialist.
She was very attractive in appearance, and she knew how to set off her
good looks by all the arts of dress and coquetry.

In addition to this, she was a woman of the world in the widest sense of
the term; pleasure-loving, faithless, unstable, and therefore never in
any danger of really losing her heart, and consequently her head. She
used to change the place of her abode, according to what she had to do.
Sometimes she lived in Paris among the Polish emigrants, in order to
find out what they were doing, and maintained intimate relations with
the Tuileries and the Palais Royal at the same time; then she went to
London for a short time, or hurried off to Italy, to watch the Hungarian
exiles, only to reappear suddenly in Switzerland, or at one of the
fashionable German watering-places.

In revolutionary circles, she was looked upon as an active member of the
great _League of Freedom_, and diplomatists regarded her as an
influential friend of Napoleon III.

She knew every one, but especially those men whose names were to be met
with every day, in the papers, and she reckoned Victor Emmanuel, Rouher,
Gladstone, and Gortschakoff among her friends, as well as Mazzini,
Kossuth, Garibaldi, Mieroslawsky and Bakunin.

In the spring of 185- she was at Vevey, on the lovely lake of Geneva,
and went into raptures when talking to an old German diplomatist about
the beauties of nature, and about Calame, Stifter and Turgenev, whose
"Diary of a Hunter" had just become fashionable.

One day a man appeared at the _table d'hote_, who excited unusual
attention, and hers especially, so that there was nothing strange in her
asking the proprietor of the hotel what his name was; and she was told
that he was a wealthy Brazilian, and that his name was Don Escovedo.

Whether it was an accident, or whether he responded to the interest
which the young woman felt for him, at any rate she constantly met him
wherever she went, when she was taking a walk, or was on the lake, or
was looking at the newspapers in the reading r