he found himself alone, in his nightcap,
alone with his reflections and his nightly glass of _eau sucree!_

_Differemment_, what was he meddling with? The czar was not his czar,
decidedly, and all these matters didn't concern him in the least... And
don't you see that some of these days he would be captured, extradited
and delivered over to Muscovite justice... _Boufre!_ they don't joke,
those Cossacks... And in the obscurity of his hotel chamber, with that
horrible imaginative faculty which the horizontal position increases,
there developed before him--like one of those unfolding pictures given
to him in childhood--the various and terrible punishments to which
he should be subjected: Tartarin in the verdigris mines, like Boris,
working in water to his belly, his body ulcerated, poisoned. He
escapes, he hides amid forests laden with snow, pursued by Tartars and
bloodhounds trained to hunt men. Exhausted with cold and hunger, he is
retaken and finally hung between two thieves, embraced by a pope with
greasy hair smelling of brandy and seal-oil; while away down there, at
Tarascon in the sunshine, the band playing of a fine Sunday, the crowd,
the ungrateful crowd, are installing a radiant Costecalde in the chair
of the P. C. A.

It was during the agony of one of these dreadful dreams that he uttered
his cry of distress, "Help, help, Bezuquet!" and sent to the apothecary
that confidential letter, all moist with the sweat of his nightmare. But
Sonia's pretty "Good morning" beneath his window sufficed to cast him
back into the weaknesses of indecision.

One evening, returning from the Kursaal to the hotel with the Wassiliefs
and Bolibine, after two hours of intoxicating music, the unfortunate man
forgot all prudence, and the "Sonia, I love you," which he had so long
restrained, was uttered as he pressed the arm that rested on his own.
She was not agitated. Perfectly pale, she gazed at him under the gas
of the portico on which they had paused: "Then deserve me..." she said,
with a pretty enigmatical smile, a smile that gleamed upon her delicate
white teeth. Tartarin was about to reply, to bind himself by an oath to
some criminal madness when the porter of the hotel came up to him:

"There are persons waiting for you, upstairs... some gentlemen... They
want you."

"Want me!.. _Outre!_.. What for?" And No. 1 of his folding series
appeared before him: Tartarin captured, extradited... Of course he was
frightened, but his att