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“If only I were not with child and could, without hindrance return to Germany, I would gladly agree to live there on dry bread and water. I am well nigh losing my reason. I pray God to give me strength, so that I may not be tempted to do something desperate!”

And after awhile she gently added, weeping in her wonted submissiveness, which frightens me more than all her despair:—

“I am the unhappy victim of my family. They have profited nothing from my sacrifice, while I myself am slowly dying of grief.”

We were both crying when they came to tell us it was time to go to the masquerade. Suppressing our tears we began to dress. Such is the custom here: willy nilly, be merry thou must.

The masquerade took place in the open air in the Troitsky Square, near the “hôtellerie.” The square is very low, marshy, and covered with mud, which never dries; part of it had been covered with beams, and wooden planks on the top of these. On the platform thus formed the masqueraders crowded. Happily the weather had again suddenly changed; it was a calm, warm evening. But towards night a thick mist, white as milk, rose from the river and enveloped the square. Many, and especially those ladies who had on extremely thin costumes, were catching cold from the damp, and began to sneeze and cough. Instead of medicine they were given brandy; grenadiers as usual carried it round in buckets. In the white shroud of mist, illumined by the greenish light of the slowly fading twilight—later on in July twilight lasts the whole night through—all these masqueraders, harlequins, pagliazzi, shepherdesses, nymphs, Chinese, Arabs, bears, cranes, and dragons, seemed grotesque and terrible phantoms.