ous,
greedy, and unscrupulous. It was within my knowledge that she had been
worsted in a sordid and desperate quarrel about money matters with the
family of her late husband, the diplomatist. Some very august personages
indeed (whom in her fury she had insisted upon scandalously involving
in her affairs) had incurred her animosity. I find it perfectly easy to
believe that she had come to within an ace of being spirited away, for
reasons of state, into some discreet _maison de sante_--a madhouse
of sorts, to be plain. It appears, however, that certain high-placed
personages opposed it for reasons which....

But it's no use to go into details.

Wonder may be expressed at a man in the position of a teacher of
languages knowing all this with such definiteness. A novelist says this
and that of his personages, and if only he knows how to say it earnestly
enough he may not be questioned upon the inventions of his brain in
which his own belief is made sufficiently manifest by a telling phrase,
a poetic image, the accent of emotion. Art is great! But I have no art,
and not having invented Madame de S--, I feel bound to explain how I
came to know so much about her.

My informant was the Russian wife of a friend of mine already mentioned,
the professor of Lausanne University. It was from her that I learned the
last fact of Madame de S--'s history, with which I intend to trouble
my readers. She told me, speaking positively, as a person who trusts her
sources, of the cause of Madame de S--'s flight from Russia, some years
before. It was neither more nor less than this: that she became suspect
to the police in connexion with the assassination of the Emperor
Alexander. The ground of this suspicion was either some unguarded
expressions that escaped her in public, or some talk overheard in her
salon. Overheard, we must believe, by some guest, perhaps a friend, who
hastened to play the informer, I suppose. At any rate, the overheard
matter seemed to imply her foreknowledge of that event, and I think she
was wise in not waiting for the investigation of such a charge. Some of
my readers may remember a little book from her pen, published in Paris,
a mystically bad-tempered, declamatory, and frightfully disconnected
piece of writing, in which she all but admits the foreknowledge, more
than hints at its supernatural origin, and plainly suggests in venomous
innuendoes that the guilt of the act was not with the terrorists, but
with a palace