The Tiger

The servants said that even the waters of the Orinoco obeyed Misia Schmutter, the white-haired old lady, so proud of her Prussian ancestry, who treated the world like her slave. She had seen a glint of her own ruthlessness in her grandson Lucien's eye. Worshipping and torturing him by turns she cultivated in him a terrible understanding of tyranny and the true nature of power. She passed on to him a love of beauty and science and of roulette. Even after her death 'the Empress of the Orinoco' wou