This old friend and fellow-countryman took me to his house to introduce me to his wife and family.  I did not know that he had married a second time.  I found the so-called wife to be an Englishwoman, thin, but full of intelligence.  She had a daughter of eleven, who might easily have been taken for fifteen; she, too, was marvellously intelligent, and danced, sang, and played on the piano and gave such glances that shewed that nature had been swifter than her years.  She made a conquest of me, and her father congratulated me to my delight, but her mother offended her dreadfully by calling her baby.

I went for a walk with Campioni, who gave me a good deal of information, beginning with himself.

“I have lived for ten years,” he said, “with that woman.  Betty, whom you admired so much, is not my daughter, the others are my children by my Englishwoman.  I have left St. Petersburg for two years, and I live here well enough, and have pupils who do me credit.  I play with the prince, sometimes winning and sometimes losing, but I never win enough to enable me to satisfy a wretched creditor I left at St. Petersburg, who persecutes me on account of a bill of exchange.  He may put me in prison any day, and I am always expecting him to do so.”

“Is the bill for a large sum?”

“Five hundred roubles.”

“That is only two thousand francs.”

“Yes, but unfortunately I have not got it.”

“You ought to annul the debt by paying small sums on account.”

“The rascal won’t let me.”

“Then what do you propose doing?”

“Win a heavy sum, if I can, and escape into Poland.

“The Baron de St. Heleine will run away, too if he can, for he only lives on credit.  The prince is very useful to us, as we are able to play at his house; but if we get into difficulty he could not extricate us, as he is heavily in debt himself.  He always loses at play.  His mistress is expensive, and gives him a great deal of trouble by her ill-humour.”

“Why is she so sour?”

“She wants him to keep his word, for he promised to get her married at the end of two years; and on the strength of this promise she let him give her two children.  The two years have passed by and the children are there, and she will no longer allow him to have anything to do with her for fear of having a third child.”

“Can’t the prince find her a husband?”

“He did find her a lieutenant, but she won’t hear of anybody under the rank of major.”

The prince gave a state dinner to General Woyakoff (for whom I had a letter), Baroness Korf, Madame Ittinoff, and to a young lady who was going to marry Baron Budberg, whom I had known at Florence, Turin, and Augsburg, and whom I may possibly have forgotten to mention.

All these friends made me spend three weeks very pleasantly, and I was especially pleased with old General Woyakoff.  This worthy man had been at Venice fifty years before, when the Russians were still called Muscovites, and the founder of St. Petersburg was still alive.  He had grown old like an oak, without changing his horizons.  He thought the world was just the same as it had been when he was young, and was eloquent in his praise of the Venetian Government, imagining it to be still the same as he had left it.