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When the Professor had given his guest a cigar and lit his pipe, he said quite abruptly: "It is about the Zastrow affair." If he had said it was about the last Grand Ducal plot in the Peterhof, M. Hendry could not have been inwardly more astonished. Outwardly the Professor might have mentioned the last commonplace murder. Only his eyelids lifted a little as he replied: "Ah, indeed?
"All right," answered Vronsky, smiling; and jumping into his carriage, he told the man to drive to Peterhof. Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour of rain. "What a pity!" thought Vronsky, putting up the roof of the carriage. "It was muddy before, now it will be a perfect swamp."
Well-informed men declared that the death of the previous "prime minister," who had been blown up before Varsovie station when he was on his way to the Tsar at Peterhof, was Gounsovski's work and that in this he was the instrument of the party at court which had sworn the death of the minister which inconvenienced it.* On the other hand, everyone regarded Koupriane as incapable of participating in any such horrors and that he contented himself with honest performance of his obvious duties, confining himself to ridding the streets of its troublesome elements, and sending to Siberia as many as he could of the hot-heads, without lowering himself to the compromises which, more than once, had given grounds for the enemies of the empire to maintain that it was difficult to say whether the chiefs of the Russian police played the part of the law or that of the revolutionary party, even that the police had been at the end of a certain time of such mixed procedure hardly able to decide themselves which they did.
Catherine writes: "I then sent the deposed Emperor in the care of Alexis Orlof and some gentle and reasonable men to a palace fifteen miles from Peterhof, a secluded spot, but very pleasant." In four days it was announced that the late Emperor had "suddenly died of a colic to which he was subject."
"Oh, yes!" answered Alexey Alexandrovitch. "And here's the glory of Peterhof, Princess Tverskaya," he added, looking out of the window at the elegant English carriage with the tiny seats placed extremely high. "What elegance! Charming! Well, let us be starting too, then."
It was the time when the youthful Speranski was at the zenith of his fame and his reforms were being pushed forward with the greatest energy. That same August the Emperor was thrown from his caleche, injured his leg, and remained three weeks at Peterhof, receiving Speranski every day and no one else.
We received a telephone communication from Pavlovsky that the government had called artillery from the Peterhof School of Ensigns. At the Winter Palace, Kerensky gathered the cadets and officers. We gave out orders over the telephone to place on all the roads leading to Petrograd reliable military defence and to send agitators to meet the military detachment called by the government.
My homesick heart follows its course with yearning thoughts; it was such charming clear weather and fresh winds when we escorted her Highness on board in Peterhof that I should have liked to leap on the ship, in uniform and without baggage, and go along with her.
The world, however, did not know that the rooms allotted to him in the monastery by the rascally bishop, whom he had himself appointed, were the acme of luxury, and that in them he held drunken orgies every night. After we had been there three weeks an Imperial courier brought him a letter from Peterhof.
Here our passports were examined, and the passengers along with their luggage were transferred to a smaller steamer to convey us up the Neva to St. Petersburg. Soon after leaving Cronstadt, on the right are seen the gilded towers of the palace of Peterhof, and a little further we discern a large golden ball, the dome of St. Isaac, with the glittering taper spire rising from the Admiralty.
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