of the citadel, with just enough food to keep body and soul together, but otherwise allowed to die from wounds, privation and disease at the rate of forty or so a day.

The position of the fortress being central, new parties, captured in the open in the course of a thorough pacification, were being sent in frequently. Amongst such new-comers there happened to be a young man, a personal friend of the prince from his school days. He recognised him, and in the extremity of his dismay cried aloud: ‘My God! Roman—you here!’

It is said that years of life embittered by remorse paid for this momentary lack of self-control. All this happened in the main quadrangle of the citadel. The warning gesture of the Prince came too late. An officer of the gendarmes^* on guard had heard the exclamation. The incident appeared to him worth inquiring into. The investigation which followed was not very arduous, because the prince, asked categorically for his real name, owned up at once.

The intelligence of a Prince S—being found amongst the prisoners was sent to St Petersburg. His parents were already there, living in sorrow, incertitude and apprehension. The Capital of the Empire was the safest place to reside in for a noble whose son had disappeared so mysteriously from home in a time of rebellion. The old people had not heard from him, or of him, for months. They took care not to contradict the rumours of suicide from despair circulating in the great world, which remembered the interesting love-match, the charming and frank happiness brought to an end by death. But they hoped secretly that their son survived, and that he had been able to cross the frontier with that part of the army which had surrendered to the Prussians.

The news of his captivity was a crushing blow. Directly, nothing could be done for him. But the greatness of their name, of their position, their wide relations and connections in the highest spheres, enabled his parents to act indirectly; and they moved heaven and earth, as the saying is, to save their son from the ‘consequences of his madness,’ as poor Prince John did not hesitate to express himself. Great personages were approached by society leaders, high dignitaries were interviewed, powerful officials were induced to take an interest in that affair. The help of every possible secret influence was enlisted. Some private secretaries got heavy bribes. The mistress of an influential senator obtained a large sum of money.

But, as I have said, in such a glaring case no direct appeal could be made and no open steps taken. All that could be done was to incline by private representations the mind of the President of the Military Commission to the side of clemency. That superior officer ended by being impressed by the hints and suggestions, some of them from very high quarters, which he received from St Petersburg. After all, the gratitude of such great nobles as the Princes S—was something worth having from a worldly point of view. He was a good Russian, but he was also a good-natured man. Moreover, the hate of Poles was not at that time a cardinal article of patriotic creed, as it became some thirty years later. He felt well disposed at first sight towards that young man, bronzed, thin-faced, worn out by months of hard campaigning, the hardships of the siege and the rigours of captivity.

The Commission was composed of three officers. It sat in the citadel in a bare, vaulted room behind a long, black table. Some clerks occupied the two ends; besides the gendarmes who brought in the prince, there was no one else there.

Within those four sinister walls, shutting out from him all the sights and sounds of liberty, all hopes of the future, all consoling illusions—alone in the face of his enemies erected judges, who can tell how much love of life there was in Prince Roman? How much remained of that sense of duty, revealed to him in sorrow? How much of his awakened love for his native country?—that country which demands to be loved as no other country has ever been loved, with the mournful affection one bears to the unforgotten dead and with the unextinguishable fire of a hopeless passion which only a living, breathing, warm ideal can kindle in our breasts, for our pride, for our weariness, for our exultation, for our undoing.

There is something monstrous in the thought of such an exaction till it stands before us embodied in the shape of a fidelity without fear and without reproach. Nearing the supreme moment of his life, the