Spaniards; Cretes exiled by the Turks; great personages from
Constantinople, escaped from the Sultan's silken bowstring, and
displaying proudly their red fez in Paris, where the opera permitted them
to continue their habits of polygamy; Americans, whose gold-mines or
petroleum-wells made them billionaires for a winter, only to go to pieces
and make them paupers the following summer; politicians out of a place;
unknown authors; misunderstood poets; painters of the future-in short,
the greater part of the people who were invited by Prince Andras to his
water-party, Baroness Dinati having pleaded for her friends and obtained
for them cards of invitation. It was a sort of ragout of real and shady
celebrities, an amusing, bustling crowd, half Bohemian, half
aristocratic, entirely cosmopolitan. Prince Andras remembered once
having dined with a staff officer of Garibaldi's army on one side of him,
and the Pope's nuncio on the other.

On a certain evening the Baroness was very anxious that the Prince should
not refuse her latest invitation.

"I am arranging a surprise for you," she said. "I am going to have to
dinner"--

"Whom? The Mikado? The Shah of Persia?"

"Better than the Mikado. A charming young girl who admires you
profoundly, for she knows by heart the whole history of your battles of
1849. She has read Georgei, Klapka, and all the rest of them; and she is
so thoroughly Bohemian in heart, soul and race, that she is universally
called the Tzigana."

"The Tzigana?"