Status Updates From Miguel Strogoff (Spanish Ed...

Croyait-il qu'un Russe, même un exilé politique, pût être assez misérable pour trahir son pays?

Never! No true Russian, etc etc...unless of course their chest hair has not grown in the shape of a double headed eagle, in which case...

Why did Ogareff decide to betray the Tsar?
- on dit que cet officier a été condamné par le grand-duc à une dégradation humiliante.
Indeed everybody in Russia lives the Tsar so much, that if the feeling is not reciprocated you turn into Don Jose and murder Carmen and do the full Evgeny Prigozhin.

Que demandent les exiles? Dit le grand-duc.
- Ils demandent à Votre Altesse, répondit le maître de police, l'autorisation de former un corps spécial et d'être placés en tête à la première sortie.

**vomit** apparently no one is a more devoted slave of the Tsar than the people he has exiled for political crimes

Dans quelques cabanes, Nadia trouva encore un peu de cette viande de mouton, si commune en ce pays qu'elle ne vaut pas plus de deux kopeks et demi la livre.

- what craziness is this? What is that going to mean to the original French reader, who I guess probably was not very familiar with the market prices of mutton in Russia? Besides it has been around in a hut in late summer for an unknown length of time!

The evil tatars led by the treacherous (for some reason or other) Ogareff, aided by his personal Roma spy Sangarre know that they have the heroic Michel Strogoff among their prisoners and decide to find him by threatening to torture his mother. However in addition to having a powerful nose we have also been told that Strogoff has a body of iron so surely they could use a magnet to identify him?

We were told way, way back on page 34 that the hero has a "nez puissant", but so far he has done nothing special with it. He has neither smashed through walls nor dug tunnels with that powerful nose, and there are less than 200 pages remaining for that nose to save the day!

This chapter is called "un dernier effort" , which seems premature as I am not even half way through the book yet!

So far so good. A key characteristic of Julio Verne is his ability to profoundly detail the context of the story, as well as providing deep and sufficient context.