 | People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction |  |
2. PART II.
The Grand-Duke's carriages, with their six horses and outriders,
had turned down the Borg'ognisanti, and the “City of the
Red Lily,” waking from her noonday slumber, was alive with the
sound of wheels. The sun was sinking over the Apennine which
kneels at the gate of Florence; the streets were cool and shadowy;
the old women, with the bambina between their knees, braided
straw at the doors; the booted guardsman paced his black charger
slowly over the jeweller's bridge; the picture-dealer brought forward
his brightest “master” to the fading light; and while the
famous churches of that fairest city of the earth called to the
Ave-Maria with impatient bell, the gallantry and beauty of
Tuscany sped through the dampening air with their swift horses,
meeting and passing, with gay greetings, amid the green alleys of
the Cascine.
The twilight had become grey, when the carriages and
this loveliest of parks, turned by common consent toward the
spacious square in the centre, and, drawing up, in thickly-serried
ranks, the soirée on wheels, the réunion en plein air, which is one
of the most delightful of the peculiar customs of Florence, commenced
its healthful gayeties. The showy carriages of the
Grand-Duke and the ex-King of Wurtemberg (whose rank would
not permit them to share in the familiarities of the hour) disappeared
by the avenue skirting the bank of the Arno, and, with
much delicate and some desperate specimens of skill, the coachmen
of the more exclusive nobility threaded the embarrassed
press of vehicles, and laid their wheels together on the southern
edge of the piazza. The beaux in the saddle, disembarrassed of
ladies and axletrees, enjoyed their usual butterfly privilege of
roving, and, with light rein and ready spur, pushed their impatient
horses to the coronetted panels of the loveliest or most powerful;
the laugh of the giddy was heard here and there over the pawing
of restless hoofs; an occasional scream—half of apprehension,
half of admiration—rewarded the daring caracole of some young
and bold rider; and, while the first star sprang to its place, and
the dew of heaven dropped into the false flowers in the hat of the
belle, and into the thirsting lips of the violet in the field, (simplicity,
like virtue, is its own reward!), the low murmur of
calumny and compliment, of love and light-heartedness, of politeness,
politics, puns, and poetry, arose over that assembly upon
wheels: and, if it was not a scene and an hour of happiness, it was
the fault neither of the fragrant eve nor of the provisions of
nature and fortune. The material for happiness was there.
A showy caléche, with panels of dusky crimson, the hammer-cloth
of the same shade, edged with a broad fringe of white, the
and footman in corresponding liveries, was drawn up near the
southern edge of the Piazza. A narrow alley had been left for
horsemen, between this equipage and the adjoining ones, closed up
at the extremity, however, by a dark-green and very plain
chariot, placed, with a bold violation of etiquette, directly across
the line, and surrounded, just now, by two or three persons of the
highest rank, leaning from their saddles in earnest conversation
with the occupant. Not far from the caléche, mounted upon an
English blood-horse of great beauty, a young man had just drawn
rein as if interrupted only for a moment on some passing errand,
and, with his hat slightly raised, was paying his compliments to
the venerable Prince Poniatowski, at that time the Amphytrion
of Florence. From moment to moment, as the pauses occurred
in the exchange of courteous phrases, the rider, whose spurred
heel was close at his saddle-girths, stole an impatient glance up
the avenue of carriages to the dark-green chariot, and, excited by
the lifted rein and the proximity of the spur, the graceful horse
fretted on his minion feet, and the bending figures from a hundred
vehicles, and the focus of bright eyes radiating from all sides to
the spot, would have betrayed, even to a stranger, that the horseman
was of no common mark. Around his uncovered temples
floated fair and well-cherished locks of the sunniest auburn; and,
if there was beauty in the finely-drawn lines of his lips, there was
an inexpressibly fierce spirit as well.
2. II.
The Count Basil had been a month at Florence. In that time
he had contrived to place himself between the Duke's ear and all
the avenues of favor, and had approached as near, perhaps nearer,
to the hearts of the women of his court. A singular and instinctive
knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature, perfected and concealed
by conversance with the consummate refinement of life at
Paris, remarkable personal beauty, and a quality of scornful bitterness
for which no one could divine a reason in a character and
fate else so happily mingled, but which, at the same time, added to
his fascination, had given Count Basil a command over the varied
stops of society, equalled by few players on that difficult and
capricious instrument. His worldly ambition went swimmingly
on, and the same wind filled the sails of his lighter ventures as
well. The love of the Marchesa del Marmore, as he had very
well anticipated, grew with his influence and renown. A woman's
pride, he perfectly knew, is difficult to wake after she has once
believed herself adored; and, satisfied that the portrait taken on
the lagoon, and the introduction he had given her to the exclusive
penetralia of the Pitti, would hold her till his revenge was
complete, he left her love for him to find its own food in his successes,
and never approached her but to lay to her heart, more
mordently, the serpents of jealousy and despair.
For the Lady Geraldine the Count Basil had conceived a love,
the deepest of which his nature was capable. Long as he had
known her, it was a passion born in Italy, and, while it partook of
the qualities of the clime, it had for its basis the habitual and
well-founded respect of a virtuous and sincere friendship. At
newly arrived from the purer moral atmosphere of her own
country, was moving in the dissolute, but skilfully disguised
society of the Faubourg St. Germain, with the simple unconsciousness
of the pure in heart, innocent herself, and naturally
unsuspicious of others. The perfect frankness with which she
established an intimacy with the clever and accomplished attaché,
had soon satisfied that clear-sighted person that there was no
passion in her preference, and, giddy with the thousand pleasures
of that metropolis of delight, he had readily sunk his first startled
admiration of her beauty in an affectionate and confiding friendship.
He had thus shown her the better qualities of his character
only, and, charmed with his wit and penetration, and something
flattered, perhaps, with the devotion of so acknowledged an
autocrat of fashion and talent, she had formed an attachment for
him that had all the earnestness of love without its passion.
They met at Florence, but the “knowledge of good and evil”
had, by this time, driven the Lady Geraldine from her Eden of
unconsciousness. Still as irreproachable in conduct, and perhaps
as pure in heart as before, an acquaintance with the forms of vice
had introduced into her manners those ostensible cautions which,
while they protect, suggest also what is to be feared.
A change had taken place also in Count Basil. He had left
the vitreous and mercurial clime of France, with its volatile and
superficial occupations, for the voluptuous and indolent air of
Italy, and the study of its impassioned deifications of beauty.
That which had before been in him an instinct of gay pleasure—
a pursuit which palled in the first moment of success, and was
second to his ambition or his vanity—had become, in those two
years of a painter's life, a thirst both of the senses and the imagination,
the Hindoo youth, who finds the gilded plaything of his childhood
elevated in his maturer years into a god, he bowed his heart to
what he held so lightly, and brought the costly sacrifice of time
and thought to its altars. He had fed his eyes upon the divine
glories of the pencil, and upon the breathing wonders of love in
marble, beneath the sky and in the dissolving air in which they
rose to the hand of inspiration; and, with his eye disciplined, and
his blood fused with taste and enthusiasm, that idolatry of beauty,
which had before seemed sensual or unreal, kindled its first fires
in his mind, and his senses were intoxicated with the incense.
There is a kind of compromise in the effects of the atmosphere
and arts of Italy. If the intellect takes a warmer hue in its study
of the fair models of antiquity, the senses in turn become more
refined and intellectual. In other latitudes and lands woman is
loved more coldly. After the brief reign of a passion of instinct,
she is happy if she can retain her empire by habit, or the qualities
of the heart. That divine form, meant to assimilate her to the
angels, has never been recognised by the dull eye that should
have seen in it a type of her soul. To the love of the painter or
the statuary, or to his who has made himself conversant with their
models, is added the imperishable enthusiasm of a captivating and
exalted study. The mistress of his heart is the mistress of his
mind. She is the breathing realization of that secret ideal which
exists in every mind, but which, in men ignorant of the fine arts,
takes another form, and becomes a woman's rival and usurper.
She is like nothing in ambition—she is like nothing in science or
business—nothing in out-of-door pleasures. If politics, or the
chase, or the acquisition of wealth, is the form of this ruling
passion, she is unassociated with that which is nearest his heart,
fancy. It is her strongest tie upon his affection, even, that she
is his refuge when unfit for that which occupies him most—in his
fatigue, his disappointment, his vacuity of head and heart. He
thinks of her only as she receives him in his most worthless
hours; and, as his refreshed intellects awake, she is forgotten
with the first thought of his favorite theme—for what has a
woman's loveliness to do with that?
Count Basil had not concluded his first interview with the Lady
Geraldine, without marvelling at the new feelings with which he
looked upon her. He had never before realized her singular and
adorable beauty. The exquisitely-turned head, the small and
pearly ears, the spiritual nostril, the softly-moulded chin, the
clear loftiness of expression yet inexpressible delicacy and brightness
in the lips, and a throat and bust—than which those of
Faustina in the delicious marble of the Gallery of Florence might
be less envied by the Queen of Love—his gaze wandered over
these, and followed her in the harmony of her motions, and the
native and unapproachable grace of every attitude; and the pictures
he had so passionately studied seemed to fade in his mind,
and the statues he had half worshipped seemed to descend from
their pedestals depreciated. The Lady Geraldine, for the first
time, felt his eye. For the first time in their acquaintance, she
was offended with its regard. Her embarrassment was read by
the quick diplomate, and at that moment sprang into being a
passion, which perhaps had died but for the conscious acknowledgment
of her rebuke.
Up to the evening in the Cascine, with which the second
chapter of this mainly true tale commences, but one of the two
leading threads, in the Count Basil's woof, had woven well. “The
Marchesa del Marmore was a dark ground from which his love to
the Lady Geraldine rose to his own eye in heightened relief. His
dearest joy forwarded with equal step his dearest revenge; and
while he could watch the working of his slow torture in the
fascinated heart of his victim, he was content to suspend a blow
to which that of death would be a mercy. “The law,” said Count
Basil, as he watched her quivering and imploring lip, “takes
cognizance but of the murder of the body. It has no retribution
for the keener dagger of the soul.”
3. III.
The conversation between the Russian Secretary and the
Prince Poniatowski ended at last in a graceful bow from the
former to his horse's neck; and the quicker rattling of the small
hoofs on the ground, as the fine creature felt the movement in the
saddle and prepared to bound away, drew all eyes once more
upon the handsomest and most idolized gallant of Florence. The
narrow lane of carriages, commencing with the showy calêche of
the Marchesa del Marmore, and closed up by the plain chariot of
the Lady Geraldine, was still open; and, with a glance at the
latter which snfficiently indicated his destination, Count Basil
raised his spurred heel, and, with a smile of delight and the
quickness of a barb in the desert, galloped toward the opening.
In the same instant the Marchesa del Marmore gave a convulsive
spring forward, and, in obedience to an imperative order, her
coachman violently drew rein and laid the back and forward
wheels of the ealéche directly across his path. Met in full career
by this sudden obstacle, the horse of the Russian reared high in
adjacent carriages, the silken bridle was slacked, and with a low
bow to the foiled and beautiful Marchesa as he shot past, he
brushed the hammer-cloths of the two scarce separated carriages,
and, at the same instant, stood at the chariot window of the
Lady Geraldine, as calm and respectful as if he had never known
danger or emotion.
A hundred eyes had seen the expression of his face as he leaped
past the unhappy woman, and the drama, of which that look was
the key, was understood in Florence. The Lady Geraldine alone,
seated far back in her chariot, was unconscious of the risk run for
the smile with which she greeted its hero; and unconscious, as
well, of the poignant jealousy and open mortification she had
innocently assisted to inflict, she stretched her fair and transparent
hand from the carriage, and stroked the glossy neek of his
horse, and while the Marchesa del Marmore drove past with a
look of inexpressible anguish and hate, and the dispersing nobles
and dames took their way to the city gates, Count Basil leaned
close to the ear of that loveliest of breathing creatures, and forgot,
as she forgot in listening to the bewildering music of his voice,
that the stars had risen, or that the night was closing around
them.
The Cascine had long been silent when the chariot of the Lady
Geraldine took its way to the town, and, with the reins loose upon
his horse's neck, Count Basil followed at a slower pace, lost in
the revery of a tumultuous passion. The sparkling and unobstructed
stars broke through the leafy roof of the avenue whose
silence was disturbed by those fine and light-stepping hoofs, and
the challenge of the Duke's forester, going his rounds ere the
gates closed, had its own deep-throated echo for its answer.
roll of wheels passing the paved arch of the Ponte Seraglio, came
faintly down the river upon the moist wind, the pointed cypresses
of the convent of Bello Sguardo laid their slender fingers against
the lowest stars in the southern horizon, and, with his feet pressed,
carelessly, far through his stirrups, and his head dropped on his
bosom, the softened diplomate turned instinctively to the left in
the last diverging point of the green alleys, and his horse's ears
were already pricked at the tread, before the gate, of the watchful
and idle doganieri.
Close under the city walls on this side Florence, the traveller
will remember that the trees are more thickly serried, and the
stone seats, for the comfort and pleasure of those who would step
forth from the hot streets for an hour of fresh air and rest, are
mossy with the depth of the perpetual shade. In the midst of
this dark avenue, the unguided animal beneath the careless and
forgetful rider suddenly stood still, and the next moment starting
aside, a female sprang high against his neck, and Count Basil,
ere awake from his revery, felt the glance of a dagger-blade
across his bosom.
With the slender wrist that had given the blow firmly arrested
in his left hand, the Count Basil slowly dismounted, and, after a
steadfast look, by the dim light, into the face of the lovely assassin,
he pressed her fingers respectfully, and with well counterfeited
emotion, to his lips.
“Twice since the Ave-Maria!” he said, in a tone of reproachful
tenderness, “and against a life that is your own!”
He could see, even in that faint light, the stern compression of
those haughty lips, and the flash of the darkest eyes of the Val
d'Arno. But leading her gently to a seat, he sat beside her, and,
he once more deluded her soul!
“We meet to-morrow,” she said, as, after a burst of irrepressible
tears, she disengaged herself from his neck, and looked
toward the end of the avenue, where Count Basil had already
heard the pawing of her impatient horses.
“To morrow!” he answered; but, mia carissima!” he continued,
opening his breast to stanch the blood of his wound, “you
owe me a concession after this rude evidence of your love.”
She looked into his face as if answer was superfluous.
“Drive to my palazzo at noon, and remain with me till the
Ave-Maria.
For but half a moment the impassioned Italian hesitated.
Though the step he demanded of her was apparently without
motive or reason—though it was one that sacrificed, to a whim,
her station, her fortune, and her friends—she hesitated but to
question her reason if the wretched price of this sacrifice would
be paid—if the love, to which she fled from this world and heaven,
was her own. In other countries, the crime of infidelity is
punished: in Italy it is the appearance only that is criminal. In
proportion as the sin is overlooked, the violation of the outward
proprieties of life is severely visited; and, while a lover is stipulated
for in the marriage-contract, an open visit to that lover's
house is an offence which brands the perpetrator with irremediable
shame. The Marchesa del Marmore well knew, that, in going
forth from the ancestral palace of her husband on a visit to Count
Basil, she took leave of it for ever. The equipage that would
bear her to him would never return for her; the protection, the
fortune, the noble relations, the troops of friends, would all drop
from her. In the pride of her youth and beauty—from the highest
she would descend, by a single step, to be a beggar for life and
love from the mercy of the heart she fled to!
“I will come,” she said, in a firm voice, looking close into his
face, as if she would read in his dim features the prophetic answer
of his soul.
The Count Basil strained her to his bosom, and, starting back,
as if with the pain of his wound, he pleaded the necessity of a surgeon,
and bade her a hasty good-night. And, while she gained
her own carriage in secrecy, he rode round to the other gate,
which opens upon the Borg'ognisanti, and, dismounting at the
Café Colonna, where the artists were at this hour usually assembled,
he sought out his fellow-traveller, Giannino Speranza, who
had sketched the Marchesa upon the lagoon, and made an appointment
with him for the morrow.
4. IV.
While the Count Basil's revenge sped thus merrily, the just
Fates were preparing for him a retribution in his love. The
mortification of the Marchesa del Marmore, at the Cascine, had
been made the subject of conversation at the prima sera of the
Lady Geraldine; and, other details of the same secret drama
transpiring at the same time, the whole secret of Count Basil's
feelings toward that unfortunate woman flashed clearly and fully
upon her. His motives for pretending to have drawn the portrait
of the lagoon—for procuring her an admission to the exclusive
suppers of the Pitti—for a thousand things which had been unaccountable,
or referred to more amiable causes—were at once
revenge, the Lady Geraldine felt an indignant pity for the unconscious
victim, and a surprised disapproval of the character
ummasked to her eye. Upon further reflection, her brow flushed
to remember that she herself had been made the most effective
tool of his revenge; and, as she recalled circumstance after circumstance
in the last month's history, the attention and preference
he had shown her, and which had gratified her, perhaps,
more than she admitted to herself, seemed to her sensitive and
resentful mind to have been only the cold instruments of jealousy.
Incapable as she was of an unlawful passion, the unequalled fascinations
of Count Basil had silently found their way to her heart,
and, if her indignation was kindled by a sense of justice and
womanly pity, it was fed and fanned unaware by mortified pride.
She rang, and sent an order to the gate that she was to be
denied for the future to Count Basil Spirifort.
The servant had appeared with his silver tray in his hand, and,
before leaving her presence to communicate the order, he presented
her with a letter. Well foreseeing the éclaircissement
which must follow the public scene in the Cascine, the Count
Basil had left the café for his own palazzo; and, in a letter, of
which the following is the passage most important to our story,
he revealed, to the lady he loved, a secret, which he hoped would
anticipate the common rumor:—
* * * * * “But these passionate words will have offended
your ear, dearest lady, and I must pass to a theme on which I
shall be less eloquent. You will hear to-night, perhaps, that
which, with all your imagination, will scarce prepare you for
what you will hear to-morrow. The Marchesa del Marmore is
to the love I have for the first time breathed to you. I can never
hope that you will either understand, or forgive, the bitterness in
which it springs; yet it is a demon to which I am delivered, soul
and body, and no spirit but my own can know its power. When
I have called it by its name, and told you of its exasperation, if
you do not pardon, you will pity me.
“You know that I am a Russian, and you know the station my
talents have won me; but you do not know that I was born a serf
and a slave! If you could rend open my heart and see the pool
of blackness and bitterness that lies in its bottom—fallen, drop
by drop, from this accursed remembrance—there would be little
need to explain to you how this woman has offended me. Had I
been honorably born, like yourself, I feel that I could have been,
like you, an angel of light; as it is, the contumely of a look has
stirred me to a revenge which has in it, I do not need to be
told, the darkest elements of murder.
“My early history is of no importance, yet I may tell you it
was such as to expose to every wind this lacerated nerve. In a
foreign land, and holding an official rank, it was seldom breathed
upon. I wore, mostly, a gay heart at Paris. In my late exile at
Venice I had time to brood upon my dark remembrance, and it
was revived and fed by the melancholy of my solitude. The obscurity
in which I lived, and the occasional comparison between
myself and some passing noble in the Piazza, served to remind me,
could I have forgotten it. I never dreamed of love in this humble
disguise, and so never felt the contempt that had most power
to wound me. On receiving the letters of my new appointment,
however, this cautious humility did not wait to be put off with my
sombrero. I started for Florence, clad in the habiliments of poverty,
burst of my newly-released feelings was admiration for a woman
of singular beauty, who stood near me on one of the most love-awakening
and delicious eves that I ever remember. My heart
was overflowing, and she permitted me to breathe my passionate
adoration in her ear. The Marchesa del Marmore, but for the
scorn of the succeeding day, would, I think, have been the mistress
of my soul. Strangely enough, I had seen you without
loving you.
“I have told you, as a bagatelle that might amuse you, my
rencontre with del Marmore and his dame in the cathedral of
Bologna. The look she gave me, there, sealed her doom. It was
witnessed by the companions of my poverty, and the concentrated
resentment of years sprang up at the insult. Had it been a man,
I must have struck him dead where he stood: she was a woman,
and I swore the downfall of her pride.”
Thus briefly dismissing the chief topic of his letter, Count Basil
returned to the pleading of his love. It was dwelt on more eloquently
than his revenge; but as the Lady Geraldine scarce read
it to the end, it need not retard the procession of events in our
story. The fair Englishwoman sat down beneath the Etruscan
lamp, whose soft light illumined a brow cleared, as if by a sweep
from the wing of her good angel, of the troubled dream which
had overhung it, and, in brief and decided, but kind and warning
words, replied to the letter of Count Basil.
5. V.
It was noon on the following day, and the Contadini from the
hills were settling to their siesta on the steps of the churches, and
alone, in the cool gallery, and in the tempered halls of the Pitti,
shook off the drowsiness of the hour, and strained sight and thought
upon the immortal canvas from which they drew; while the
sculptor, in his brightening studio, weary of the mallet, yet excited
by the bolder light, leaned on the rough block behind him,
and, with listless body but wakeful and fervent eye, studied the
last touches upon his marble.
Prancing hoofs, and the sharp quick roll peculiar to the wheels
of carriages of pleasure, awakened the aristocratic sleepers of
the Via del Servi, and with a lash and jerk of violence, the
coachman of the Marchesa del Marmore, enraged at the loss of
his noonday repose, brought up her showy caléche at the door of
Count Basil Spirifort. The fair occupant of that luxurious vehicle
was pale, but the brightness of joy and hope burned almost
fiercely in her eye.
The doors flew open as the Marchesa descended, and, following
a servant in the Count's livery, of whom she asked no question,
she found herself in a small saloon, furnished with the peculiar
luxury which marks the apartment of a bachelor, and darkened
like a painter's room. The light came in from a single tall window,
curtained below, and under it stood an easel, at which, on
her first entrance, a young man stood sketching the outline of a
female head. As she advanced, looking eagerly around for another
face, the artist laid down his palette, and, with a low reverence,
presented her with a note from Count Basil. It informed her
that political news of the highest importance had called him suddenly
to the cabinet of his chef, but that he hoped to be with her
soon; and, meantime, he begged of her, as a first favor in his
portrait, done by the incomparable artist who would receive her.
Disappointment and vexation overwhelmed the heart of the
Marchesa, and she burst into tears. She read the letter again,
and grew calmer; for it was laden with epithets of endearment,
and seemed to her written in the most sudden haste. Never
doubting for an instant the truth of his apology, she removed her
hat, and, with a look at the deeply-shaded mirror, while she
shook out from their confinement the masses of her luxuriant
hair, she approached the painter's easel, and, with a forced cheerfulness,
inquired in what attitude she should sit to him.
“If the Signora will amuse herself,” he replied, with a bow,
“it will be easy to compose the picture, and seize the expression
without annoying her with a pose.”
Relieved thus of any imperative occupation, the unhappy
Marchesa seated herself by a table of intaglios and prints, and,
while she apparently occupied herself in the examination of these
specimens of art, she was delivered, as her tormentor had well
anticipated, to the alternate tortures of impatience and remorse.
And while the hours wore on, and her face paled, and her eyes
grew bloodshot with doubt and fear, the skilful painter, forgetting
everything in the enthusiasm of his art, and forgotten utterly by
his unconscious subject, transferred too faithfully to the canvas
that picture of agonized expectation.
The afternoon, meantime, had worn away, and the gay world
of Florence, from the side toward Fiesole, rolled past the Via
dei Servi on their circuitous way to the Cascine, and saw, with
dumb astonishment, the carriage and liveries of the Marchesa del
Marmore at the door of Count Basil Spirifort. On they swept
by the Via Mercata Nova to the Lung' Arno, and there their
Nobili, playing with a billiard-cue, and laughing with a group of
lounging exquisites, stood Count Basil himself, the most unoccupied
and listless of sunset idlers. There was but one deduction
to be drawn from this sequence of events; and, when they remembered
the demonstration of passionate jealousy on the previous
evening in the Cascine, Count Basil, evidently innocent of
participation in her passion, was deemed a persecuted man,
and the Marchesa del Marmore was lost to herself and the
world!
Three days after this well-remembered circumstance in the
history of Florence, an order was received from the Grand-Duke
to admit into the exhibition of modern artists a picture by a
young Venetion painter, an elève of Count Basil Spirifort. It
was called “The Lady expecting an Inconstant,” and had been
pronounced by a virtuoso, who had seen it on private view, to be
a masterpiece of expression and color. It was instantly and
indignantly recognised as the portrait of the unfortunate
Marchesa, whose late abandonment of her husband was fresh
on the lips of common rumor; but, ere it could be officially
removed, the circumstance had been noised abroad, and the
picture had been seen by all the curious in Florence. The order
for its removal was given; but the purpose of Count Basil had
been effected, and the name of the unhappy Marchesa had become
a jest on the vulgar tongue.
This tale had not been told, had there not been more than a
common justice in its sequel. The worse passions of men, in
common life, are sometimes inserutably prospered. The revenge
of Count Basil, however, was betrayed by the last act which com
peaceful asylum in England under the roof of the compassionate
Lady Geraldine, the once gay and admired Russian wanders from
city to city, followed by an evil reputation, and stamped unaccountably
as a jattatore.[1]
| People I have met, or, Pictures of society and people of mark, drawn under a thin veil of fiction | |