He has been asked several times to sell his large picture, "Lords of our Life and Death," but he will not.

I have never met him since our intercourse at Cannes, but I hear of him frequently through Heliobas, who has recently forwarded me a proof engraving of the picture "L'Improvisatrice," for which I sat as model.

It is a beautiful work of art, but that it is like ME I am not vain enough to admit.

I keep it, not as a portrait of myself, but as a souvenir of the man through whose introduction I gained the best friend I have.
News of Prince Ivan Petroffsky reaches me frequently.

He is possessor of the immense wealth foretold by Heliobas; the eyes of Society greedily follows his movements; his name figures conspicuously in the "Fashionable Intelligence;" and the magnificence of his recent marriage festivities was for some time the talk of the Continent.