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Updated: June 15, 2025
"You have this day exercised the pleasantest right of your imperial power the right of rewarding and making happy. But there remains another and not less important duty; your majesty must now think of punishing. The regent, and her husband and son, are prisoners; as, also are Munnich, Ostermann, Count Lowenwald, and Julia von Mengden. You must think of judging and punishing them."
Much as Ostermann importuned her, often as her own husband warned her, Anna nevertheless refused; she would not banish Field-Marshal Munnich to Siberia, but remained firm in her determination to leave him in possession of his liberty and his dignities.
"In fact, you are a skilful architect, Count Munnich," said Ostermann, laughing, while casting an interrogating glance at the paper which Anna was still thoughtfully examining. "How well you have arranged it all! How delightful these snug little chambers will be! There will be just space enough in them to turn around in. But these small chambers seem to be a little too low.
"The back doors are in all cases of the greatest importance," said Count Ostermann, earnestly. "Through back doors one often attains to the rooms of state, and had your palace here accidentally had no back door for the admission of us, your devoted servants, who knows, your highness Anna, whether you would on this very night become regent!" "On this night!" suddenly exclaimed Munnich.
"All is lost if we give the regent time and leisure to make his arrangements. If we do not annihilate him to-day, he may, perhaps, send us to Siberia to-morrow." The duchess turned pale; a trembling ran through her tall, noble form. "I so much dread the shedding of blood!" said she. "Oh, I am not at all vain," said Ostermann.
They accused him of having suppressed the testament of Catharine, and yet that testament had been published in all the official journals of the time! Ostermann laughed loud at all of these childish accusations.
If any one asks me who I am, I show him these creatures with whom I associate, and he immediately concludes that I am a Russian." Ostermann joined in the laugh that followed this explanation, but suddenly he uttered a piercing cry, and sank down upon a chair.
A Russian force of 14,000 men, led by the young Prince Eugène of Würtemberg and Count Ostermann, sought in vain to stop his progress: though roughly handled on the 28th by the French, the Muscovites disengaged themselves, fell back ever fighting to the Nollendorf pass, and took up a strong position behind the village of Kulm.
A decisive conversation was this day to be held with the duchess and her husband, Prince Ulrich of Brunswick, and therefore, an unheard-of case, had even Count Ostermann resolved to leave his dusty room for some hours and repair to the palace of the Duchess Anna Leopoldowna. "Slowly, slowly, ye knaves," groaned Ostermann, as he ascended the narrow winding stairs with the aid of his servants.
It gave them something to think about, she explained to Ostermann, and she "wanted elbow-room." The third Polish partition explains why she was so anxious for "elbow-room." Schemes of the kind were common enough in the eighteenth century, everybody was dismembered on paper by everybody else; it was but a delicate attention reserved for a neighbor in times of trouble and sickness.
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