“Whom do you want?” she cried.
“Caecelia K——.”
“I am Miss Zoe.”
“Oh! I know you,” the Inspector said
with a smile; “be kind enough to take off your
dark locks, and you will be Caecelia K——.
I arrest you in the name of the law.”
“Good heavens!” she stammered, “Lajos
has betrayed me.”
“You are mistaken, Madame,” the Inspector
replied; “he has merely done his duty.”
“What? Lajos . . . my lover?”
“No, Lajos, the detective.”
Caecelia got out of bed, and the next moment she sank
fainting onto the floor.
In the forthcoming reminiscences, a lady will frequently
be mentioned who played a great part in the annals
of the police from 1848 to 1866, and we will call
her Wanda von Chabert. Born in Galicia
of German parents, and carefully brought up in every
way, she married a rich and handsome officer of noble
birth, from love, when she was sixteen. The young
couple, however, lived beyond their means, and when
her husband died suddenly, two years after they were
married, she was left anything but well off.
As Wanda had grown accustomed to luxury and amusement,
the quiet life in her parents’ house did not
suit her any longer, and even while she was still
in mourning for her husband, she allowed a Hungarian
magnate to make love to her, and she went off with
him at a venture, and continued the same extravagant
life which she had led when her husband was alive,
at her own authority. At the end of two years,
however, her lover left her in a town in North Italy,
almost without means, and she was thinking of going
on the stage, when chance provided her with another
resource, which enabled her to reassure her position
in society. She became a secret police agent,
and soon was one of their most valuable members.
In addition to the proverbial charms and wit of a
Polish woman, she also possessed high linguistic attainments,
and she spoke Polish, Russian, French, German, English
and Italian, almost equally fluently and correctly;
then she had also that encyclopaedic polish, which
impresses most people much more than the most profound
learning of a specialist. She was very attractive
in appearance, and she knew how to set off her good
looks by all the arts of dress and coquetry.
In addition to this, she was a woman of the world
in the widest sense of the term; pleasure-loving,
faithless, unstable, and therefore never in any danger
of really losing her heart, and consequently her head.
She used to change the place of her abode, according
to what she had to do. Sometimes she lived in
Paris among the Polish emigrants, in order to find
out what they were doing, and maintained intimate relations
with the Tuileries and the Palais Royal at the same
time; then she went to London for a short time, or
hurried off to Italy, to watch the Hungarian exiles,
only to reappear suddenly in Switzerland, or at one
of the fashionable German watering-places.
