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At first there was a rivalry between him and General Trepoff in the Tsar's good graces, but Trepoff died, leaving Stolypin master of the situation. Though Rasputin behaved graciously towards him and often dined at his table, he was in secret his enemy.
Two hours later, when I returned home with Rasputin, he ordered me to sit down and write a note, which the scoundrel dictated as follows: "Please listen to N.N. Colonel Paul Dubassoff, of the Préobrajensky Regiment, has expressed in my presence to-night disloyalty to the Sovereign, and he is a serious danger to the State. He should be suppressed."
Their names were Baroness Térénine, whose husband had been Governor of Yaroslav; Countess Chidlovski, one of the acknowledged society beauties of Petrograd, who had of late had an "affair" with an Italian tenor named Baccelli; and Anna, the pretty young daughter of a woman named Friede, who was also a "disciple." There was a large attendance, and Rasputin exhibited more than the usual mock piety.
When he had finished his statement, fearing that he had gone too far, Nicholas said, 'Now call your Cossacks and have me killed and buried in your garden. Nikki merely smiled." "He would hear nothing against thee, I hope," said Rasputin anxiously. "Nothing. Nikki assured him that I had nothing to do with politics, and dismissed the allegations by declaring that he entirely disbelieved them."
You will point out that to the Minister Protopopoff. When the plague breaks out the censorship must be of the strictest." Rasputin nodded. He quite understood. He hated the British just as heartily as did the Tsaritza. A week later we were back at Tsarskoe-Selo, and the monk who pretended to have been on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Tver made to the Empress a full report of his journey to Potsdam.
He became the Tsar's favourite because of his cruel and harsh treatment of our poor people of Samara, and has climbed to office over the bodies of those shot down in the streets at his orders. Injustice! There is assuredly no injustice to drag the ghastly truth concerning him into the light of day." "Not at all! I quite agree," said Rasputin, rising and shaking her hand.
His one sin in the eyes of Alexandra Feodorovna was that he hated Germany. "He once lost money in a German financial concern," Rasputin declared to me one day with a laugh. "That is why he cannot bear the Germans."
All is prepared for the coup against Stolypin, who is still ignorant that Vera Baltz is in Petrograd." I knew Altschiller, who often called at the Poltavskaya. He was a close friend of Monsieur Raeff, whom Rasputin, when all-powerful a little later on, actually appointed as Procurator of the Holy Synod, having placed the appointment upon the Emperor's desk to sign!
While Rasputin, having thrown off his cloak of piety, was leading a dissolute life in far-off Pokrovsky, and refusing to obey the Empress's repeated invitations, the guns of Peter and Paul one day boomed forth salvo after salvo, announcing to the world that the prayer uttered by the Starets before our Lady of Kazan had been granted. An heir had been born to the Romanoffs!
That is why one was never sure that the stranger who denounced Rasputin and his friends was not an agent-provocateur. Every Russian subject of any note, and every foreign traveller, was watched, not because of his disloyalty, but because Rasputin and his camarilla, including the Empress, feared lest he should discover how they were daily betraying Russia and its Tsar.
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