Chapter 2 - Page 2

flowing like
a river when Rouletabille was brought in by Matrena Petrovna. The
general, whose eyes had been on the door for some time, cried at
once, as though responding to a cue:

"Ah, my dear Rouletabille! I have been looking for you. Our
friends wrote me you were coming to St. Petersburg."

Rouletabille hurried over to him and they shook hands like friends
who meet after a long separation. The reporter was presented to
the company as a close young friend from Paris whom they had enjoyed
so much during their latest visit to the City of Light. Everybody
inquired for the latest word of Paris as of a dear acquaintance.

"How is everybody at Maxim's?" urged the excellent Athanase
Georgevitch.

Thaddeus, too, had been once in Paris and he returned with an
enthusiastic liking for the French demoiselles.

"Vos gogottes, monsieur," he said, appearing very amiable and
leaning on each word, with a guttural emphasis such as is common
in the western provinces, "ah, vos gogottes!"

Matrena Perovna tried to silence him, but Thaddeus insisted on his
right to appreciate the fair sex away from home. He had a turgid,
sentimental wife, always weeping and cramming her religious notions
down his throat.

Of course someone asked Rouletabille what he thought of Russia, but
he had no more than opened his mouth to reply than Athanase
Georgevitch closed it by interrupting:

"Permettez! Permettez! You others, of the young generation, what
do you know of it? You need to have lived a long time and in all
its districts to appreciate Russia at its true value. Russia,
my young sir, is as yet a closed book to you."

"Naturally," Rouletabille answered, smiling.

"Well, well, here's your health! What I would point out to you
first of all is that it is a good buyer of champagne, eh?" - and
he gave a huge grin. "But the hardest drinker I ever knew was born
on the banks of the Seine. Did you know him, Feodor Feodorovitch?
Poor Charles Dufour, who died two years ago at fete of the officers
of the Guard. He wagered at the end of the banquet that he could
drink a glassful of champagne to the health of each man there.
There were sixty when you came to count them. He commenced the
round of the table and the affair went splendidly up to the
fifty-eighth man. But at the fifty-ninth - think of the
misfortune! - the champagne ran out! That poor, that charming,
that excellent Charles took up a glass of vin dore which was in the
glass of this fifty-ninth, wished him long life, drained the glass
at one draught, had just time to murmur, 'Tokay, 1807,' and fell
back dead! Ah, he knew the brands, my word! and he proved it to
his last breath! Peace to his ashes! They asked what he died of.