THE JOURNEY
389
dissolved in the cut glass walls of our tumblers. With the stars,
we ate horsemeat sausage, black and moist. The dense fine silk
of the curtains divided us from the world; the sun suspended
from the ceiling splintered and shone, waves of stifling heat came
from the radiators.
"Hell, we only live once," said Kalugin when we had fin–
ished off the horsemeat. He went out and returned with two
boxes-a present from Sultan Abdul-Hamid to the Russian
sovereign. One was made of zinc, the other was a cigar box
pasted over with ribbons and paper insignia.
({A sa majeste,
l'Empereur de toutes les Russies,"
was engraved on the zinc lid,
"from your loving cousin...."
The aroma which Maria Fyodorovna had known so well a
quarter of a century before drifted across the library. The cigar–
ettes, twenty centimeters long and as thick as fingers, were
wrapped in pink paper; I do not know whether anyone but the
Emperor of all the Russias ever smoked such cigarettes, but I
chose a cigar. Kalugin smiled, looking at me.
"We'll chance it," he said, "maybe they weren't counted.
. . . The servants told me Alexander the Third was a great
smoker: he loved tobacco,
kvas
and champagne.... Yet look
at those five-kopek earthenware ashtrays on his table, and the
patches on his trousers...."
Indeed, the dressing gown I wore was greasy, shiny and had
often been mended.
We spent the rest of the night sorting the toys of Nicholas
the Second, his drums and locomotives, his christening shirts .and
copybooks covered with childish scrawls. There were photo–
graphs of grand dukes who had died in infancy, locks of their
hair, diaries of the Danish Princess Dagmara, letters from her
sister, the Queen of England, breathing perfume and decay,
crumbling away in our fingers. On the fly-leaves of Bibles and
of a volume of Lamartine, friends and ladies in waiting–
daughters of burgomasters and state councillors-bid their fare–
wells in slanting, diligent lines to the princess who was departing
