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He was an enemy and a traitor, who deserved to be and should be impaled alive, roared the furious czar, not meaning a tithe of what he said, but saying enough to turn the high-spirited chief from a friend to a foe. Mazeppa left the czar's presence in deep offence, muttering the displeasure which it would have been death to speak openly, and bent on revenge.
It was the year '55 and the month of March, the spring following that first dreadful 'Crimean winter, and news had just come to England of the Czar's death, and every one was wondering and hoping and fearing what would be the results of it.
He thereupon showed a telegram which he had just received from Petrograd in which he was ordered to bring the czar's train direct to the city instead of to Tsarskoe Selo. "How dare they give such orders!" demanded Nicholas. "This order," replied General Tsabel, "is backed by sixty thousand officers and soldiers, who have gone over to the revolutionists."
In 1704 he was given the rank of general, and was the first to defeat the Swedes in a pitched battle. At the czar's request he was made a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. As Prince Mentchikof the new grandee loomed high. His house in Moscow was magnificent, his banquets were gorgeous with gold and silver plate, and the ambassadors of the powers of Europe figured among his guests.
On June 23rd Lord Hawkesbury wrote that it might be most damaging to British interests to place Malta "at the hazard of the Czar's arbitration"; and he informed the Russian ambassador, Count Vorontzoff, that the aim of the French had obviously been merely to gain time, that their explanations were loose and unsatisfactory, and their demands inadmissible, and that Great Britain could not acknowledge the present territories of the French Republic as permanent while Malta was placed in arbitration.
She uttered my name in a manner that thrilled me, too. Her companion, a man, responded: "Bah! A friend of Prince Michael's, and therefore a friend of the czar's. It would be a dangerous experiment to sound him, princess." "Perhaps; we will discuss it another time, Ivan. Shall we go in here?"
It is in Paris now, one may say, but a crumbling old cross in one portion of it reminds one that it was not always so. The cross marks the spot where a celebrated troubadour was waylaid and murdered in the fourteenth century. It was in this park that that fellow with an unpronounceable name made the attempt upon the Russian Czar's life last spring with a pistol. The bullet struck a tree.
With his eight thousand men, exhausted with their long march and their hard fight, he suddenly appeared before the czar's great force of sixty or eighty thousand men and one hundred and fifty cannon. Giving his weary men scarcely any time for rest, Charles advanced against the Russians with the impetuosity which had so far marked his career. A general warned him that the danger was very great.
The Duke of Vicenza reached the Czar's quarters at Pantin early in the morning of the 31st, while he was yet asleep; and recognised, amidst the crowd in the ante-chamber, a deputation from the municipality of Paris, who were waiting to present the keys of the city, and invoke the protection of the conqueror.
The secret memoranda that had passed between the Czar's ministers and French officials in 1916 covered the annexation of the Saar Valley and some sort of dismemberment of the Rhineland.
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