Count Casimir had reached that stage where drunkenness takes on a kind
of gravity, of regretfulness.
He thought a little, then began his story. I regret that I cannot
reproduce more perfectly its archaic flavor.
"When the grapes begin to color in Antinea's garden, I shall be
sixty-eight. It is very sad, my dear boy, to have sowed all your wild
oats. It isn't true that life is always beginning over again. How
bitter, to have known the Tuileries in 1860, and to have reached the
point where I am now!
"One evening, just before the war (I remember that Victor Black was
still living), some charming women whose names I need not disclose (I
read the names of their sons from time to time in the society news of
the Gaulois) expressed to me their desire to rub elbows with some
real demi-mondaines of the artist quarter. I took them to a ball at
the Grande Chaumière. There was a crowd of young painters, models,
students. In the midst of the uproar, several couples danced the
cancan till the chandeliers shook with it. We noticed especially a
little, dark man, dressed in a miserable top-coat and checked trousers
which assuredly knew the support of no suspenders. He was cross-eyed,
with a wretched beard and hair as greasy as could be. He bounded and
kicked extravagantly. The ladies called him Léon Gambetta.
"What an annoyance, when I realize that I need only have felled this
wretched lawyer with one pistol shot to have guaranteed perfect
happiness to myself and to my adopted country, for, my dear fellow, I
am French at heart, if not by birth.
"I was born in 1829, at Warsaw, of a Polish father and a Russian
mother. It is from her that I hold my title of Hetman of Jitomir. It
was restored to me by Czar Alexander II on a request made to him on
his visit to Paris, by my august master, the Emperor Napoleon III.
"For political reasons, which I cannot describe without retelling the
history of unfortunate Poland, my father, Count Bielowsky, left Warsaw
in 1830, and went to live in London. After the death of my mother, he
began to squander his immense fortune--from sorrow, he said. When, in
his time, he died at the period of the Prichard affair, he left me
barely a thousand pounds sterling of income, plus two or three systems
of gaming, the impracticability of which I learned later.
"I will never be able to think of my nineteenth and twentieth years
without emotion, for I then completely liquidated this small
inheritance. London was indeed an adorable spot in those days. I had a
jolly bachelor's apartment in Piccadilly.