w for three
years he had printed all alone, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, a
revolutionary paper. Three years without ever leaving his upper room, or
showing himself at a window, sleeping at night in a great cupboard built
in the wall, where the woman who lodged him locked him up till morning
with his clandestine press.

And then, that life of Manilof, spent for six months in the subterranean
passages beneath the Winter Palace, watching his opportunity, sleeping
at night on his provision of dynamite, which resulted in giving him
frightful headaches, and nervous troubles; all this, aggravated by
perpetual anxiety, sudden irruptions of the police, vaguely informed
that something was plotting, and coming, suddenly and unexpectedly,
to surprise the workmen employed at the Palace. On one of the rare
occasions when Manilof came out of the mine, he met on the Place de
l'Amiraute a delegate of the Revolutionary Committee, who asked him in a
low voice, as he walked along:

"Is it finished?"

"No, not yet..." said the other, scarcely moving his lips. At last,
on an evening in February, to the same question in the same words he
answered, with the greatest calmness:

"It is finished..."

And almost immediately a horrible uproar confirmed his words, all the
lights of the palace went out suddenly, the place was plunged into
complete obscurity, rent by cries of agony and terror, the blowing of
bugles, the galloping of soldiers, and firemen tearing along with their
trucks.

Here Sonia interrupted her tale:

"Is it not horrible, so many human lives sacrificed, such efforts, such
courage, such wasted intelligence?.. No, no, it is a bad means, these
butcheries in the mass... He who should be killed always escapes... The
true way, the most humane, would be to seek the czar himself as you seek
the lion, fully determined, fully armed, post yourself at a window or
the door of a carriage... and, when he passes....."

"_Be!_ yes, _certainemain_..." responded Tartarin embarrassed, and
pretending not to seize her meaning; then, suddenly, he would launch
into a philosophical, humanitarian discussion with one of the numerous
assistants. For Bolibine and Manilof were not the only visitors to the
Wassiliefs. Every day new faces appeared of young people, men or women,
with the cut of poor students; elated teachers, blond and rosy, with
the self-willed forehead and the childlike ferocity of Sonia; outlawed
exiles, some of them already