"Do you think that it was cowardly of me to wish to hide myself? Not, surely, after my warning and my experiences of the vast powers and the vindictive malice of that great and unscrupulous organisation which was endeavouring to hunt me down. Consider! Even kings have found it necessary to hide themselves sometimes; and if a king may hide himself without loss of dignity in an oak-tree, then surely it is no shame for a revolutionist to conceal himself, for a period, in a Swiss châlet. The king who hid in the oak-tree would doubtless have preferred the châlet if he could have got to it.
"'Reculer pour mieux sauter,' I said to myself, 'must be my motto. I have my idea for a new bomb, and I will work it out in the friendly solitude of the pine forests.'
"So I lost no time, but journeyed day and night until I reached one of those little villages that lie high up in the hills above Montreux, on the blue waters of Lake Leman.
"These villages—Chailly, Saint Légier, and the rest—are, I should tell you, the usual hiding-places of Russian refugees. I do not say, of course, that to have a 'usual hiding-place' is the wisest course that prudence could devise. The practice, as I now see clearly, must simplify the task of those who seek. But, at the time, I did not think of this. The shores of the Lake of Geneva seemed to me, as it were, an Alsatia where even the Third Section could not seize its victims.
"And oh! the life I lived there! It was a strange and welcome interlude of peace, to which I still sometimes look back with deep regret when I am tired.
"My châlet was high up, in a lonely place, on the very verge of a great pine forest. I used to rise early and wander for a mile among the meadows. Behind me towered the dark crags of the Rochers de Nave; below me gleamed the lake; before me were the black Savoy Hills, with the white dome of the Velan in the distance. The sight of these things, and of the deepening autumn tints upon the vineyards, stirred all the deep-seated poetry of my nature, until it was with difficulty that I pulled myself together, saying—
"'It is time that I was getting on with my bomb.'
"Nor was I absolutely bereft of company. In the châlet itself, indeed, there was no one but a deaf old woman—the widow of a woodcutter—who cooked my dinners. But, every now and again I met tourists from the Montreux hotels and entered into conversation with them. I was a mystery to them; they christened me the hermit of Saint Legier. But they invited me to refresh myself with them in the cafés, and I did so the more willingly that my own store of silver coin was scanty. And sometimes, when the white wine flowed, I told them stories of my revolutionary adventures, such stories as I now tell to you.
"'You do not know who I am,' I would say. 'What will you think when I tell you that I am here in hiding from the Russian secret police? Yes, so it is! I am no other than Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski.'
"And I would go on to tell them the story of my adventure in the streets of Warsaw, and other stories which I have told you, or may tell you later. It was the only return that I could make for the extensive hospitality of those knickerbockered youths.