natured man. Moreover, the hate of Poles was not at that time
a cardinal article of patriotic creed as it became some thirty years
later. He felt well disposed at first sight towards that young man,
bronzed, thin-faced, worn out by months of hard campaigning, the
hardships of the siege and the rigours of captivity.

"The Commission was composed of three officers. It sat in the citadel in
a bare vaulted room behind a long black table. Some clerks occupied the
two ends, and besides the gendarmes who brought in the Prince there was
no one else there.

"Within those four sinister walls shutting out from him all the
sights and sounds of liberty, all hopes of the future, all consoling
illusions--alone in the face of his enemies erected for judges, who can
tell how much love of life there was in Prince Roman? How much remained
in that sense of duty, revealed to him in sorrow? How much of his
awakened love for his native country? That country which demands to
be loved as no other country has ever been loved, with the
mournful affection one bears to the unforgotten dead and with the
unextinguishable fire of a hopeless passion which only a living,
breathing, warm ideal can kindle in our breasts for our pride, for our
weariness, for our exultation, for our undoing.

"There is something monstrous in the thought of such an exaction till
it stands before us embodied in the shape of a fidelity without fear
and without reproach. Nearing the supreme moment of his life the Prince
could only have had the feeling that it was about to end. He answered
the questions put to him clearly, concisely--with the most profound
indifference. After all those tense months of action, to talk was a
weariness to him. But he concealed it, lest his foes should suspect in
his manner the apathy of discouragement or the numbness of a crushed
spirit. The details of his conduct could have no importance one way or
another; with his thoughts these men had nothing to do. He preserved a
scrupulously courteous tone. He had refused the permission to sit down.

"What happened at this preliminary examination is only known from the
presiding officer. Pursuing the only possible course in that glaringly
bad case he tried from the first to bring to the Prince's mind the line
of defence he wished him to take. He absolutely framed his questions so
as to put the right answers in the culprit's mouth, going so far as to
suggest the very words: how, distracted by excessive gri