Well, that is the connection!...  But I did not observe that that wonderful lady wore any large SAPPHIRE that night ... nor when she changed her quarters from the Nouvel to the London did she need any such jewelry to have all the spendthrifts of Europe at her feet....  If she was a ‘Princess’ then I was completely fooled....  I never saw a real Princess, except Eulalia, who knew how to be democratic enough to select an American for a quiet exchange of ideas ... the rest, no matter how desperately they may want to be free from Court restraint and bodyguards, remind me of the poor little caged girls at the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Seville!...  Well, so my captors have some connection with the Countess C——­([Cszecheny] Chechany)—­with the Tolna Festetics of Hungary....  And this is strange, for I had surmised that SHE, at least, would be friendly to MY mission, if she knows anything at all about its origin.... She should aid me to reach Odessa instead of having me sandbagged and cooped up here in this Soviet cage....  I’m certain this Metropole lady is a TRAITOR to the Countess now, and will have me murdered if I don’t produce that sapphire of the princess.”

15.  This entry may serve to identify the author of the diary: 

“I am certain that the former occupant of this villa was some Russian of taste and means.  Today, while leaning against a wall that was paneled after the fashion of the walls in the Hermitage, one of the panels gave way and I found myself toppling backward into a very large room resembling a gallery.  There were a number of wall hangings of silk from which the pictures had been removed.  The candelabra was of malachite.  There were clumps of violet jasper, porphyry, lapis-lazuli, aventurine and syenite scattered around as though the place had been divested of its furnishings in a hurry.  I have seen the same things in the HERMITAGE when for architectural elegance, richness of ornamentation and lavishness of decoration it was unequaled by any art museum in the world....  While poking around among the piles of tables and vases that were moved over to one corner I came across a box of paintings that must have been STOLEN from St. Petersburg.[A] ...  Here is the Madonna del Latte of Corregio, or a mighty good imitation, that everyone remembers, from the Hermitage.  Here is Rembrandt’s ‘Girl with the Broom,’ the Portrait of Sobieski, and the ‘Farmyard’ of Paul Potter.  Here is the ‘Expulsion of Hagar’ by Rubens in which Sarah wears a white handkerchief and yellow veil around her head, with one of her hands resting on her hip and the other encased in a blue sleeve raised in a threatening gesture toward Hagar, and here is ‘Celestine and her Daughter in Prison,’ that one NEVER forgets because of the controversy between the partisans of Murillo and Velasquez over which of these two painters did the work.  And here is Lossenke’s ‘Sunrise