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memory! Come, come! all this is most interesting. I
absolutely must hear more about it.” Upon which I made
my amiable visitor promise to come and dine and spend
the evening with us. Moreover, I already saw daylight
in this affair: it was in Berlin, and not in Vienna, that
the idea arose of sending Macha Vassiltchikoff to St.
Petersburg to her august patroness; she certainly must
have with her letters written to the Empress Alexandra
by her brother the Grand-Duke of Hesse and by her
sister Princess Henry of Prussia. Hence the anxiety
about the little bag.
At eight o’clock Macha Vassiltchikoff arrived. Besides
her, we had one or two intimate friends to dinner,
amongst others M. Alexander Volkoff, the famous
botanist expert and painter[1] in water-colours, and at
the present time owner of a fine estate in Russia, but
above all and always a brilliant and untiring talker, and
one of the cleverest men that I have ever met. The
conversation very soon and most naturally turned on the
events and the situation of the day. We talked about
the prisoners of war and of their sufferings in Germany.
“I do not know what is being said,” exclaimed
Mademoiselle Vassiltchikoff sharply, “but I know what I have
seen with my own eyes. I was shown a concentration
camp near Berlin” (giving the name); “everything there
was admirable: spacious, airy sheds, well-dressed men
who looked perfectly happy; I was taken into the
bakehouse; I saw a huge room full of loaves; I tasted one,
it was quite delicious!”... Mademoiselle Vassiltchikoff
was not quite so incorrect as we thought at the time;
we discovered later that there was a famous model
prisoners’ camp in Brandenburg (I have forgotten the
name), which was shown to distinguished neutrals and
to ingenuous persons; the number of prisoners was
limited; they were very well lodged, fairly well but
sometimes insufficiently fed; only the discipline was as
hard and sometimes as cruel as in the other camps. The
outburst of our charming guest on the subject of the
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