he
last squeeze to the windpipe of her unfortunate husband." He must have
been a nice man for a small party, and a peculiarly edifying spectacle
for young ladies. And then how fit to be ambassador at a court the first
woman of which was good Queen Charlotte! Many words have been wasted on
the question, whether Catharine II. and Alexander I. consented to the
murder, the one of her husband and the other of his father; but the
question is absurdly framed. They consented to the act of deposition in
each case, and that was the same as to sign the death-warrant. The old
saying, that short is the passage of a dethroned monarch from a prison
to a grave, applies with peculiar force to Russia: Catharine II. well
knew that there was no hope for her husband; and Alexander I. could not
have been deceived on such a point. While she was at the height of her
power, Catharine herself was in danger of being assassinated. Some of
the nobles suggested to her son, the Grand Duke Paul, that she should be
deposed and murdered, and offered to do the job, quite as a matter of
course, and with no more of shame than so many English Parliament-men
might have felt for proposing to vote a minister out of office. It was
_their_ mode of effecting a change of ministry, and they regarded the
proposition as showing that they were members of the constitutional
opposition. As Talleyrand told Bonaparte, when news of Paul's murder
reached Paris, "'Tis a way they have there!" Paul rejected the offer to
rid him of his mother with horror. His own son was not so moral, in
after days. Alexander was a haunted man, and remorse made him the crazy
wreck that he was in his last years, and shortened his life. He was
threatened with assassination by the Russian constitutional opposition,
when it was thought that he was giving up too much to Napoleon I.; and
the eventful war of 1812 was the result of his fears of that opposition.
When he was at Vienna, attending the memorable Congress, he frankly said
that he durst not go back to Russia without having added all of Poland
that he claimed to his dominions,--that it was as much as his life was
worth to comply with the demands of Austria, France, and England with
regard to the Poles. This was the real reason why the Polish question
was so clumsily disposed of, and left to make trouble for the future.
Alexander preferred quarrelling with his allies rather than with his
nobles, exactly as he had done when Napoleon I. was his for