, in Naples; I immediately attached myself to her out of
curiosity, and I soon fell in love with her. Not that she was beautiful,
for she was a Russian who had all the bad characteristics of the Russian
type. She was thin and squat, at the same time, while her face was
sallow and puffy, with high cheek bones and a Cossack's nose. But her
conversation bewitched every one.

"She was many-sided, learned, a philosopher, scientifically depraved,
satanic. Perhaps the word is rather pretentious, but it exactly
expresses what I want to say, for in other words, she loved evil for the
sake of evil. She rejoiced in other people's vices, and liked to sow the
seeds of evil, in order to see it flourish. And that on a fraud, on an
enormous scale. It was not enough for her to corrupt individuals; she
only did that to keep her hand in; what she wished to do, was to corrupt
the masses. By slightly altering it after her own fashion, she might
have adopted the famous saying of Caligula. She also wished that the
whole human race had but one head; but not in order that she might cut
it off, but that she might make the philosophy of _Nihility_ flourish
there.

"What a temptation to become the lord and master of such a monster! And
I allowed myself to be tempted, and undertook the adventure. The means
came unsought for by me, and the only thing that I had to do, was to
show myself more perverted and satanical that she was herself.--And so I
played the devil.

"'Yes,' I said, 'we writers are the best workmen for doing evil, as our
books may be bottles of poison. The so-called men of action, only turn
the handle of the mitrailleuse which we have loaded. Formulas will
destroy the world, and it is we who invent them.'

"'That is true,' she said, 'and that is what is wanting in Bakounine, I
am sorry to say.'

"That name was constantly in her mouth, and so I asked her for details,
which she gave me, as she knew the man intimately.

"'After all,' she said, with a contemptuous grimace, 'he is only a kind
of Garibaldi.'

"She told me, although she made fun of him as she did so, about his
Odyssey of the barricades and of the hulks which made up Bakounine's
legend, and which is, nevertheless, only the exact truth; his part of
chief of the insurgents, at Prague and then at Dresden; his first death
sentence; about his imprisonment at Olmuetz and in the casemates of the
fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul; in a subterranean dungeon at
Schuesselburg;