about his exile to Siberia and his wonderful escape down
the river Amour, on a Japanese coasting-vessel by way of Yokohama and
San Francisco, and about his final arrival in London, whence he was
directing all the operations of Nihilism.

"'You see,' she said, 'he is a thorough adventurer, and now all his
adventures are over. He got married at Tobolsk and became a mere
respectable, middle-class man. And then, he has no individual ideas.
Herzen, the phamphleteer of _Kolokol_ inspired him with the only fertile
phrase that he ever uttered: _Land and Liberty!_ But that is not yet the
definite formula, the general formula; what I will call, the dynamite
formula. At best, Bakounine would become an incendiary, and burn down
cities. And what is that, I ask you? Bah? A second-hand Rostopchin! He
wants a prompter, and I offered to become his but he did not take me
seriously.' ...

"It would be useless to enter into all the Psychological details which
marked the course of my passion for the Countess, and to explain to you
more fully the attraction of curiosity which she offered me more and
more every day. It was getting exasperating, and the more so, as she
resisted me as stoutly as the shyest of innocents could have done, but
at the end of a month of mad Satanism, I saw what her game was. Do you
know what she had thought of? She meant to make me Bakounine's prompter,
or, at any rate, that is what she said. But no doubt she reserved the
right to herself, and that is how I understood her, to prompt the
prompter, and my passion for her, which she purposely left unsatisfied,
assured her that absolute power over me.

"All this may appear madness to you, but it is, nevertheless, the exact
truth, and, in short, one morning she bluntly made the offer: 'Become
Bakounine's soul, and you shall have me.'

"Of course, I accepted, for it was too fantastically strange to refuse;
do you think so? What an adventure! What luck! A number of letters
between the Countess and Bakounine prepared the way; I was introduced to
him at his house, and they discussed me there. I became a sort of
Western prophet, a mystic charmer who was ready to nihilate the Latin
races, the Saint Paul of the new religion of nothingness, and at last a
day was fixed for us to meet in London. He lived in a small, one-storied
house in Pimlico, with a tiny garden in front, and nothing noticeable
about it.

"We were first of all shown into the commonplace parlor of all Englis