“Do you know her too? Ah! my friend, a pearl! a pretty little gray partridge!”
“Sonia Wassilief... It was she who killed with one shot of her revolver in the open that General Felianine, the president of the Council of War which condemned her brother to perpetual exile.”
Sonia an assassin? that child, that little blond fairy!.. Tartarin could not believe it. But Bompard gave precise particulars and details of the affair—which, indeed, is very well known. Sonia had lived for the last two years in Zurich, where her brother Boris, having escaped from Siberia, joined her, his lungs gone; and during the summers she took him for better air to the mountains. Bompard had often met them, attended by friends who were all exiles, conspirators. The Wassiliefs, very intelligent, very energetic, and still possessed of some fortune, were at the head of the Nihilist party, with Bolibine, the man who murdered the prefect of police, and this very Manilof, who blew up the Winter Palace last year.
“Boufre!” exclaimed Tartarin, “one meets with queer neighbours on the Rigi.”
But here’s another thing. Bompard took it into his head that Tartarin’s letter came from these young people; it was just like their Nihilist proceedings. The czar, every morning, found warnings in his study, under his napkin...
“But,” said Tartarin, turning pale, “why such threats? What have I done to them?”
Bompard thought they must have taken him for a spy.
“A spy! I!
“Be! yes.” In all the Nihilist centres, at Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva, Russia maintained at great cost, a numerous body of spies; in fact, for some time past she had had in her service the former chief of the French Imperial police, with a dozen Corsicans, who followed and watched all Russian exiles, and took countless disguises in order to detect them. The costume of the Alpinist, his spectacles, his accent, were quite enough to confound him in their minds with those agents.
“Coquin de sort! now I think of it,” said Tartarin, “they had at their heels the whole time a rascally Italian tenor... undoubtedly a spy... Différemment, what must I do?”