IPER1 
 
 
 VVJ 
 

 
 THE IMPERIAL ORGY
 
 BY EDGAR SALTUS 
 
 HISTORIA AMORIS 
 
 IMPERIAL PURPLE 
 
 THE POMPS OF SATAN 
 
 MARY MAGDALEN 
 
 THE LORDS OF THE GHOSTLAND 
 
 THE PALISER CASE
 
 PETER AT THE MARRIAGE I
 
 ST OF If TS FAVORITE I)W\RF
 
 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 An Account of the Tsars from the 
 First to the Last ^* ^ J> j* 
 
 EDGAR SALTUS 
 
 New York j* jt jt J> 
 Boni & L i v e r i g h t 
 (Incorporated) & jt 1920
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 EDGAR SALTUS
 
 ura. 
 
 DK 
 
 5 m 
 
 To 
 O. S. C.
 
 THE IMPERIAL ORGY 
 
 I Ivan the Terrible I 
 
 II Dmitri the Sorcerer 25 
 
 7/7 Peter the Great 50 
 
 IV Imperial Sables 81 
 
 V The Northern Messalina 104 
 
 VI Venus Victrix 127 
 
 VII Paul iso 
 
 VIII The Last Despot 160 
 
 IX King Terror 103 
 
 X The Whirlwind 216 
 
 Vll
 
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 Peter at the Marriage Feast of His Favorite Dwarf 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Facing 
 Page 
 
 Tsars and Tsaritsas from Ivan to Catherine II i 
 
 Ivan the Terrible 
 
 
 12 
 
 Boris Godunov 
 
 
 28 
 
 Dmitri 
 
 
 44 
 
 Peter the Great 
 
 
 60 
 
 Peter II 
 
 
 go 
 
 Elizabeth 
 
 
 106 
 
 Catherine II 
 
 
 130 
 
 Paul I 
 
 
 J S4 
 
 Alexander I 
 
 
 I/O 
 
 Alexander III 
 
 • 
 
 210 
 
 Alix of 11 esse, Wij 
 
 V of Nil holds thi La.'t 
 
 226 
 
 IX
 
 THE IMPERIAL ORGY
 
 "Hell bows down before the tsar." 
 
 Swinburne
 
 TSARS W'l) TSARITSAS 
 
 I l"/-.! [VAN TO CATHERINE II
 
 THE IMPERIAL ORGY 
 
 IVAN THE TERRIBLE 
 
 TIMUR and Attila dwarf Ivan but not 
 very much. In the fury with which At- 
 tila pounced on civilisation there is the 
 impersonality of a cyclone. Timur was a homi- 
 cidal maniac with unlimited power and a limit- 
 less area in which to be homicidal. Where he 
 passed he left pyramids of human heads and 
 towers made of prisoners mixed with mortar. 
 Where Attila passed he left nothing. 
 
 Ivan turned cities into shambles and provinces 
 into cemeteries. A cholera, corpses mounted 
 about him. But death was the least of his gifts. 
 He discovered Siberia. That was for later 
 comers. For his immediate subjects he discov- 
 ered something acuter. To them he was not 
 cholera, he was providence.
 
 2 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 From some he had the epidermis removed, 
 after which they were flayed. Others he carved, 
 a leg or an arm at a time, which he fed to hounds 
 but seeing to it that the amputated were sus- 
 tained with drink, that their vital organs were 
 protected, seeing to it that they were tended, 
 nursed, upheld, enabled as long as possible to 
 look on at the feast of which their limbs were 
 the courses. Others, tied in sacks, were 
 trampled by maddened horses. But some 
 danced to his piping. Put in cages they were 
 burned alive. 
 
 The red quadrilles were invented not by him 
 but by the dancing masters whom history called 
 conquerors and who developed into kings. 
 These beings were divine. They had the right 
 to slay and crucify and they did crucify and slay 
 those that wished to be free and those also that 
 had disrespectful thoughts. To wish to be free 
 was sacrilege. To be disrespectful was contrary 
 to every law. In either case the penalty was 
 death preceded by torture and what could be 
 more reasonable? All men are mortal. To 
 them all a divine providence dispensed the 
 greatest possible variety of ills. Kings who 
 were themselves divine imitated it all they could. 
 It was in this manner that Ivan became a provi- 
 dence to his people.
 
 Ivan the Terrible 3 
 
 Born in the early part of the sixteenth cen- 
 tury and crowned when a lad, for nearly fifty 
 years his sceptre was an axe. He killed, as 
 haematomaniacs do kill, for the joy of it. Be- 
 fore killing he tortured. That also was a joy. 
 It was not only a joy, it was his right. He pos- 
 sessed, in fee-simple, a sovereign monoply of 
 evil. 
 
 To-day it seems incredible. There is some- 
 thing that exceeds it. To his quivering people 
 he was a god, a god to be feared as divinity 
 should be, but also to be adored. In life a 
 mythological monster and in death a satyr, he 
 was beloved. That is the incredible. It is also 
 irrefutable. Karamsin, the historian of the 
 early tsars, states it with pride. His statement 
 annalists of the day confirm. When Ivan died, 
 the nation in its entirety, not excepting the chil- 
 dren of his victims, put on sackcloth and ashes. 
 The horrors of his reign had fascinated Mus- 
 covy to the point of insanity. 
 
 In the history of Western Europe there is no 
 parallel for his atrocities, nor is there any for 
 the servility with which they were endured. In 
 considering that abjection one cannot but con- 
 jecture that his subjects were insane. Perhaps 
 they were. The acceptance of atrociousness is 
 as insane as its perpetration. None the less and
 
 4 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 assuming the insanity of all concerned, Ivan had 
 a purpose. That purpose he achieved. He put 
 a seal on Russia, the seal imperial which was 
 blood-red. 
 
 Russia then was Cimmerian. Ages earlier, 
 to poets who had not been there, it was a land 
 where gnomes fought for gold with griffons in 
 the dark. The poetry tempted adventure. 
 Triremes entered the Euxine, beyond whose 
 hither coast the gold was rumoured to be. It 
 must have gone, the goblins with it. Instead 
 were whelps of demons that clothed themselves 
 in human skins and who, through gaps of time, 
 vanished utterly. It was forgotten that they 
 had been. They were but brooding. In sep- 
 tentrional fens they lurked, separating and segre- 
 gating into clans affiliated and yet distinct. 
 
 Ultimately, from the White Sea to the Black, 
 a horde descended. They called themselves 
 Slav, a word that means glory. The territory 
 that they occupied was outside of Europe, out- 
 side of the world. Unknown, it had no name. 
 It was not until the ninth century that it got one. 
 The Slavs, meanwhile, might have been content 
 to continue to be, had not the scenario of events 
 prevented. Unknown, they were unmolested, 
 consequently they fought among themselves, 
 fought in fights internecine and therefore the
 
 Ivan the Terrible 5 
 
 fiercer, from which the victors emerged masters 
 and the vanquished slaves. Masters are not 
 necessarily amiable. These also fought and for 
 the very human reason that each wanted to lead. 
 
 Equality does not tolerate grades. Preced- 
 ence being impossible, from the roof of the 
 world they haled a Norse pirate and gave him 
 the pas. 
 
 The pirate was Rurik. He was chief of a 
 crew of rowers, that is to say, of russi. Russia 
 came then into being and with her a throne that 
 was to become the tallest bit of furniture on 
 earth, a throne so tall that when the last incum- 
 bent was tossed from it into Siberia, the trajec- 
 tory was wider and higher than any that history 
 has beheld. Vespasian, when his hour had 
 come, gestured finely: — "This is death and an 
 emperor should meet it standing." At death's 
 approach, it is said that the last of the Russian 
 emperors fainted. 
 
 Rurik was not emperor. He was the turnkey 
 of the enigmatic door that opened on a history 
 that was to be an uninterrupted crime and 
 which, already a sea of blood, mirrored then a 
 record of murders, sacks and massacres; a chron- 
 icle of nightmares tangled, obscure but always 
 atrocious, and yet merely preludes, the overture 
 to an empire's gestation or, more exactly, the
 
 6 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 preliminaries to the construction of the cage in 
 which, bent double, the empire was to live. 
 
 From the sea of blood, pictures mount; gleams 
 radiated from Byzantium, ascending cupolas, 
 glittering domes, the torches of civilisation, art 
 and beauty — submerged suddenly by an ava- 
 lanche of Asiatics shoved over the Urals by the 
 Khan of khans; the conquest of Russia by the 
 Mongols; the lording of her by a despot whom 
 it took years to reach. 
 
 More dimly are glimpses of peasants, heavy- 
 witted as cattle, feeding like cattle on straw. 
 Behind them rise the outlines of cities: of Nov- 
 gorod that styled herself My Lord Novgorod, 
 and of Moscow that from Mongol made Russia 
 Muscovite and where the Rurikovitch lifted 
 themselves into tsars. Additionally, there is a 
 Rembrandt touch that was due to the khans. 
 Sprung from hell they had sunk back there. 
 For souvenir they left night. 
 
 Russia then was pitch-black, and not black 
 merely but dumb, a desert of ignorance, a land 
 apart, the pasturage of cattle that a hyena ruled. 
 The cattle had one privilege, one only, but in 
 itself very great, the right to obey. Serfdom, 
 an invention of the operatic Boris Godounov, 
 came later. Designed, very liberally, to pre- 
 vent economic and military deficits, it turned
 
 Ivan the Terrible 7 
 
 cattle into fixtures, bound the peasant to the soil. 
 
 In the days and particularly the nights of 
 Ivan, cattle were free, at least to die. Apart 
 from that added privilege, they were use- 
 ful to the upper classes, one of which Ivan com- 
 posed uniquely. The remaining population was 
 made up of prelates, nobles, vassals, whose lives 
 and possessions were Ivan's absolutely, all in 
 all, in the same manner that Russia was. The 
 realm, his personal property, was a private 
 estate. It lacked a fence. About it he ran a 
 ring of forts. The estate became a park. In 
 that park the modern history of Russia begins. 
 In it germinated the seed of progress, the onward 
 policy and the martyrology of uninterrupted 
 crime. 
 
 The potential germ Ivan cultivated. Peter 
 forced it into a fruit rotten before it was ripe. 
 In a marvel of canning, Catherine brandied it. 
 The rottenness remained. But the policy, 
 which persisted, transformed a private park into 
 an empire wider than the moon. It extended 
 Russia from polar auroras to tropic blooms. It 
 led the Bear through the Chinashop to the fangs 
 of Japan. The rottenness, obvious there, threw 
 her into convulsions and the delirium that en- 
 sued. Then again night closed on her. 
 
 Prior to Ivan there had been night only. It
 
 8 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 was he who pronounced the Fiat lux. Day 
 dawned, a day blood-red which Torquemada 
 looking on, or rather up, from his scarlet seat at 
 Satan's left, must have envied, and which Domi- 
 tian, from his sombrer couch at Pluto's right, 
 may have regretted. Ivan, more sinister than 
 either, more fiendish than both, was unexceeded 
 in horror even by the khans. 
 
 During their dominion, Russia, shamming 
 death, lay prostrate. Ivan raised her, not very 
 much but still a little and left her on her knees. 
 For centuries that was her attitude. That she 
 might maintain it the more devoutly there were 
 tall gibbets and hot vats. These things insure 
 fealty. To heighten it, to make it instinctive, 
 Ivan instilled awe. 
 
 In the Golden Horde, when the Khan of 
 khans had dined, a herald announced that minor 
 khans could eat. It was very gracious. The 
 graciousness proceeded from a theory, which 
 Genghiz Khan made a fact, that there is one sun 
 — one — above, and one emperor — one — on earth. 
 The rest of the world was offal. With minor 
 variations, the Assyrian satraps, the pharaohs, 
 the Caesars, preluded Genghiz in that aria. It 
 caught Ivan's ear, suited his voice. Absolutism 
 with theocracy for leading motif and Tatar tom- 
 toms for accompaniment was the way he ren-
 
 Ivan the Terrible 9 
 
 dered it. The aria had echoes and, the tomtoms 
 aiding, so loud were they that yesterday, or the 
 day before, you could have heard them. 
 Through the centuries they reverberated from 
 the first tsar to the last. 
 
 Ivan who had taken everything else, took the 
 tomtoms and with them the tomtom players, the 
 trained musicians of the Golden Horde who, in 
 Slavonic, became opritchniki which, being 
 translated, means assassins. At a gesture from 
 Ivan, they cut your head off. Convenient for 
 him, they were quite as convenient for his suc- 
 cessors. In descending the centuries their name 
 changed, but not their functions. Yesterday or 
 the day before, they were known as the red 
 guards. Instituted by the first tsar, they elimin- 
 ated the last. They were certainly very service- 
 able. 
 
 The Descartian Cogito ergo sum had not then 
 been formulated. Before it could be, Ivan 
 reversed it. Cogitate and you no longer were. 
 The aria with its tomtom accompaniments regu- 
 lated not only actions but thoughts. To cogitate 
 was not permitted. Even if it had been, no one 
 dreamed of such a thing. Apart from that, re- 
 strictions were few. Obedience only was ex- 
 acted and everything else forbidden. These 
 measures, eminently considerate, were equally
 
 lo The Imperial Orgy 
 
 benevolent. Personal notions were sacrilegious 
 and sacrilege, as everybody knows, is punishable 
 not in this world merely, but in the next. Tor- 
 tured here while you lived, hereafter you were 
 tortured forever. 
 
 A very beautiful idea, it had perhaps its de- 
 fects. It put a premium on imbecility. On the 
 other hand, it created awe. Imbecility is suffi- 
 ciently common. Awe is more rare. Without 
 it absolutism could not have endured. Yet such 
 are the abysses of human stupidity that wretches 
 whom Ivan was torturing shrieked in their 
 agony, "God save the tsar!" 
 
 At tsaral command, millions have vacated the 
 planet. Why? They did not know. They 
 omitted even to ask. Batushka — the Little 
 Father — had so ordered. That sufficed. 
 These people were not very intelligent. Per- 
 haps Ivan was not either. 
 
 Karamsin says that he was intelligent. He 
 says also that he was best read man in the realm. 
 That may be true and mean nothing. Barring 
 the Bible and a few histories quite as reliable, 
 there was nothing to read. Ivan read the Bible. 
 The hyena was devout. Religion led him from 
 massacres to mass and back again. 
 
 Bluebeard and Caracalla combined, he had 
 seven wives of whom he only killed three. He
 
 Ivan the Terrible 1 1 
 
 tickled a child. The child laughed. He ran 
 a knife down its throat. A boiar, not seeing him 
 approach, omitted to grovel. To improve his 
 sight his legs were broken. Another noble — 
 But these are minor matters. Generally, the 
 lackeys of history ignore them. Perhaps they 
 were due to nervousness. Ivan was born in a 
 storm which, it may be, predisposes to neurosis. 
 But also he was born with a sceptre in his mouth. 
 He was fourteen before he knew how to use it. 
 At that age, a boiar displeased him. He had 
 him thrown to the wolves, eaten alive. He was 
 training then for the throne of Moscow. 
 
 In recent years, Moscow was a manufactur- 
 ing town. Its specialty was silk. In Ivan's 
 day its specialty was death. In the nineteenth 
 century, there were high hats, yellow gloves, 
 women's laughter, the tinkle of the balalaika and 
 gypsies singing in the streets. In the sixteenth 
 century, Moscow was dumb. Belfries tolled, 
 the tocsin sounded. Apart from that there was 
 silence. 
 
 From afar it enchanted. It seemed a city of 
 sylphs in a land of chimeras. Nearer, it fright- 
 ened. From afar it projected the glitter of 
 glass, the sheen of enamel, the glow of mother- 
 of-pearl, a crystallisation of spangles, ochre, 
 azure, pink. Fairylike from afar, within was
 
 12 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 a conjury of constructions without a name and 
 without example. The architecture was not 
 Tatar, it was not Lower Empire, it was not 
 Gothic. The renaissance had not come there. 
 Greece was absent. Neither oriental or classic, 
 it was tsaral. Around it circled rampants, white 
 and pale rose. Without was Moscow, Russia's 
 Mekka. Within was the Kreml, Moscow's 
 heart. 
 
 Ivan was the ideal tyrant. The Kreml was a 
 tyrant's ideal, a city of assassins that looked on 
 a city of victims. Fortress, abattoir, seraglio, 
 acropolis and necropolis in one, for a heart it 
 was infernal. 
 
 Ivan was born there, lived there, died there, 
 haunts it still. It was not his work, it was his 
 portrait. With curious foresight it was built 
 by Ivan's grandfather in Ivan's image. The 
 architects were Italian. There were Italian 
 architects everywhere. Nowhere, in no place, 
 at any time, has Italian art created anything in 
 any way similar. Like Ivan it was and remained 
 unique. A charnel house may be grandiose, it 
 cannot be sublime. The Kreml never allured. 
 It did better. It alarmed. At the time, Mos- 
 cow was the frontier of Europe, a barrier against 
 the East. The Kreml menaced both. In its
 
 IV \\ THE TERRIBLE
 
 Ivan the Terrible 13 
 
 turrets spectres watched, watch still perhaps. 
 Like Ivan, it was inhuman. 
 
 Without the Kreml, at a turning to the left, is 
 the Red Square. In the square is the Church 
 of Vassili Blagennoi. The name of the archi- 
 tect is forgotten, but not his fate. To prevent 
 him from elsewhere erecting a duplicate, Ivan 
 tore his eyes out. 
 
 To-day it suggests a corner of some universe 
 other than ours. But the immediate impression 
 is one of emancipation. You feel that the archi- 
 tect was freed from the pale camisoles of what 
 is correct. Critics have called him mad. Per- 
 haps he was. It is only the mad who are deliv- 
 ered from the commonplace. 
 
 Here the deliverance is expressed in a solidi- 
 fied mirage that resembles a dragon and a pea- 
 cock topped by flowers on fire, by painted icicles, 
 by strawberries gigantic and glowing, by roses 
 and rainbows that bewilder, delight, dismay. 
 The effect, vividly abnormal, is that of an hallu- 
 cination. It is a House of God perhaps, but of 
 God as men may have known Him in Atlantis, 
 when faith was nearer to nature than the divine. 
 Primarily an evocation, it remains a marvel. 
 Ivan's treatment of the architect has therefore 
 an excuse, or at least Gautier found one for
 
 14 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 him: — "In matters of art, ferocity is preferable 
 to indifference." 
 
 Behind the ferocity is a story that may be un- 
 true but which Karamsin recites. During the 
 siege of Kasan, Tatar sorcerers stood on the walls 
 and with lifted robes vomited spells and insults 
 at Ivan who, Cross in hand, outfaced them. In 
 commemoration of the strategy, and of the vic- 
 tory that ensued, the Church of Vassili the Beat- 
 ified was erected. 
 
 Ivan took Kasan from the Tatars as Ferdi- 
 nand took Granada from the Moors. That re- 
 covery enthralled Castille. The recovery of 
 Kasan enraptured Muscovy. It threw back the 
 Golden Horde. It started the debacle of the 
 khans. After Kasan, Astrakhan and, with the 
 latter, the Caspian. 
 
 These feats are notable. So, too, at the time, 
 was Ivan. He was devout. He was brave. 
 He was handsome. Terrible he was also, but 
 only on the field. Presently his character 
 changed, his appearance altered. Where the 
 Christian had been came the saurian. From 
 handsome he grew hideous. A hyena replaced 
 the hero. 
 
 Perhaps a man's courage is in proportion to 
 his humanity. Probably if the latter diminishes 
 so does the former. It may be that psychologi-
 
 Ivan the Terrible 15 
 
 cal variations alter the lines of the face. As a 
 lad, Nero was charming. The epileptically 
 obscene changed him into a cringing beast. 
 That and other influences affected Ivan. Best- 
 ial and remorseless at home, to foreign insults 
 he bowed. He did worse, if worse can be. 
 
 There was Kasan. He offered to return it. 
 There was Livonia. He gave it back. Livonia 
 was the gate to Europe. Muscovy had fought 
 for it with the Poles, with the Swedes, with the 
 Livonians themselves. Muscovy had won it. 
 Ivan owned it. It was his, with an insult for 
 crown. 
 
 He had asked the Polish king for his sister in 
 marriage. The answer he received was a white 
 mare tricked out like a woman. The envoi was 
 the king's expression of his supreme contempt. 
 Ivan swallowed it. Subsequently, with a rela- 
 tively innumerable army, with a relatively inex- 
 haustible treasure, he surrendered Livonia, not 
 at the point of the sword, but with a scratch of 
 the pen. The bloodiest of sovereigns, who 
 killed an elephant because it did not kneel at his 
 bidding, had grown afraid of a man. 
 
 The result is curious. Ivan had seven wives 
 whom he successively ignored, repudiated or 
 killed. By the seventh he had a son, Dmitri, 
 who lives in drama to-day. By the third he had
 
 i6 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 a son, Fedor, who has survived in an opera. By 
 the first there had been born to him the tsare- 
 vitch, a lad that he was training in crime and 
 debauchery to reign when he had gone. 
 
 After the surrender of Livonia, the tsarevitch 
 asked leave to go and fight the Poles. The re- 
 quest was innocently made; that is, if anything 
 could be innocent in a hyena's whelp. But 
 Ivan, construing the request as a criticism, raised 
 a cudgel and struck him dead. Then, crocodil- 
 ianly, the hyena wept. 
 
 Ivan exceeded Torquemada. He exceeded 
 Tartuffe. Without any intention to abdicate, he 
 announced that he would. It may be doubted 
 that the martyrs loved their Roman butchers or 
 that the Caesars were affectioned by the saints. 
 But Muscovy, to whom servility was a religion 
 and, psychologically, a very interesting religion, 
 beat her battered head against the throne. With 
 tears and lifted .hands she prayed that he would 
 deign to continue to rule. To him, to rule was 
 to kill and justified by the national genuflections, 
 murder became not merely a joy but a duty, one 
 that he so punctiliously fulfilled that, when he 
 died, the desolation experienced was curious and 
 even biblical. 
 
 Historically the desolation was profund, yet, 
 unless any present conjecture is hopeless, it must
 
 Ivan the Terrible 17 
 
 have been less pronounced than the desolation 
 which Ivan himself effected. In spite of his 
 ultimate attitude to Poland, previously he had 
 been terrific. 
 
 Poland at the time, predominant in the north, 
 had for emblem the sun. Other tsars attended 
 to that. They put it out. Ivan attended to 
 Novgorod who had been stretching a hand to 
 its rays. The attention involved, first the 
 destruction of the surrounding country. For 
 years it was bare. Famine stalked there and on 
 the heels of famine, plague. Already Ivan had 
 attended to the inhabitants. 
 
 Every day for a month, thousands were dis- 
 patched. Some were ordered to scaffolds, to 
 cauldrons, to the river, where they were thrown 
 wholesale. Some were hacked to pieces. 
 Others were first hacked and then boiled. In 
 the river, children were tied to their mothers. 
 Guards, armed with pikes rowed among them, 
 shoved them down. The guards and execution- 
 ers wearied; Ivan never. 
 
 Occasionally he prayed. This was his prayer: 
 "Remember, Lord, the souls of Thy servants, 
 inhabitants of this town, whose names Thou 
 knowest." 
 
 Incidentally he kept tally. One of the lists 
 gives three thousand four hundred and seventy
 
 18 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 "whose names Thou knowest." On other lists, 
 names that he had learned are itemised "with his 
 wife," "with his wife and children," "with his 
 sons and daughters." 
 
 The prayers at an end, the lists completed and 
 filed, Ivan returned to Moscow where, in the 
 Red Square, at the east wall of the Kreml, other 
 traitors "whose names Thou knowest" waited. 
 
 Here were more cauldrons, more gibbets; 
 saws that cut you in two; pincers that pulled your 
 tongue out; machines that slipped you, like an 
 eel, from your skin. Then as, leisurely, the first 
 tortures began, Ivan, foaming like a horse, 
 called at the tortured: — 
 
 "I am your god!" 
 
 Very consoling and equally true. To a 
 people dumb and driven, he was a god, jealous 
 perhaps, perhaps also severe, but so wholly 
 divine that after the Novgorod ceremonies, am- 
 bassadors who passed that way found the Volga 
 dammed by the corpses that the god had left. 
 
 For these envoys other, things were in store, 
 the surprise of discovering a new realm, a land 
 that stretched .between Europe and Asia, a mon- 
 archy whose sovereign was more formidable 
 than the khans. It amazed them, as the unim- 
 agined always does amaze. But a detail sur- 
 prised. In the faraway burgs and keeps from
 
 Ivan the Terrible 19 
 
 which they had come, they were clearly entitled 
 to whatever was not taken away from them. In 
 Russia, matters were ordered differently. There 
 the ruler, after taking everything else, put the 
 iron hand of absolutism on whatever his subjects 
 possessed. Privileges and property, all were 
 his, in fee-simple. Their right to breathe was 
 subject to the caprice of a despot who had taken 
 septentrional sables and bicephalous eagles for 
 device and who called himself tsar. 
 
 The sables were indigenous, the eagles Byzan- 
 tine, but the title tsar, a word that means power, 
 originated in Assyria where it became the ter- 
 minology of kings, notably of Nabonassar, 
 Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar. Muscovy, find- 
 ing the title in the Slavonian translation of the 
 Bible, gave it to the khans. It was from them 
 that Ivan took it. Antecedent rulers had been 
 grand princes, grand-dukes. In assuming the 
 higher title, Ivan glorified the realm. 
 
 In the Kreml, where he held court, it would 
 have been interesting to have seen him. On a 
 throne of gold, that was set with two thousand 
 diamonds — a present from a brother reptile, the 
 Shah — a diadem on his hideous head, in one 
 bloody hand he held the orb, symbol of sover- 
 eignty; in the other, the sceptre, symbol of 
 power.
 
 20 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Horsey, an English tourist, who visited him 
 and who was perhaps imaginative, says that the 
 sceptre, three feet long, was a whale's tooth 
 crusted with jewels, and that the robe he wore 
 was so laden with other jewels that he could not 
 move. 
 
 In that regalia, Ivan, hyena though he were, 
 must have resembled Arpocrates, god of silence. 
 About him, in kaftans of white satin, boiars 
 stood, armed with silver hatchets. They did not 
 speak. No one spoke. There was not a sound, 
 not a whisper, not a movement. One would have 
 thought the court bewitched. In the witchery 
 of it, in that silence, on that throne, Ivan pre- 
 sented the spectacle — by no means commonplace 
 — of absolute might. Presently he gestured, the 
 court awoke and ambassadors and tourists ap- 
 proached the monster, who already divine, had 
 taken on other aspects of divinity. 
 
 After the manner of Tlaloc, the lizard-faced 
 god of the Aztecs, he made the rain and the fine 
 weather. Those about him had nothing what- 
 ever, and very naturally since he had all. Con- 
 sequently, on state occasions, he rained sunshine 
 on them. Guards, nobles, the rest of the court, 
 were given silks, satin, velvet, gems. The func- 
 tion at an end, the lizard-hyena saw to it that 
 garments and jewels were returned.
 
 Ivan the Terrible 21 
 
 That custom, which he originated, was after- 
 ward abrogated, but the theory of it, the theory 
 that from the tsar everything emanated, that he 
 alone was, that no one else is anybody, persisted 
 and so sovereignly that patriotism became 
 treason. 
 
 Treason at this time was not in the code, it 
 was in the index. Patriotism was fealty and 
 fealty religion. To the Russian, in his Greek 
 Church, the tsar, the nation and the Almighty 
 were entities barely differentiable. That idea, 
 lunatic certainly, but an article of faith, endured 
 and in enduring inspired, as it was intended to 
 inspire, such awe that, until within relatively 
 recent years, Russians got from their convey- 
 ances and threw themselves in the mud, in the 
 snow, before a tsar as he passed. 
 
 Through a beautiful subversion of this idea, 
 prelates in announcing Ivan's death, proclaimed 
 that he had become an angel. At the death- 
 notice Muscovy really grieved. That in itself 
 partakes of the marvellous. What perhaps is 
 more marvellous still is that with the grief aston- 
 ishment mingled. An angel! It was unac- 
 countable and not at all because of his fiendish- 
 ness but because of local servility. An angel! 
 Could he not have done better? Without effort
 
 22 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 it had been assumed that when he deigned to die 
 he would be translated to the zenith ineffable. 
 
 Balzac said that it is not possible to conceive 
 of an ugly angel. Perhaps he forgot Ivan who, 
 just prior to his assumption, contrived to sully 
 even the Kreml. Between those lines there is 
 drama. Karamsin supplied the details. From 
 them Alexis Tolstoi wrote a play: — The Death 
 of Ivan the Terrible. 
 
 The mise en scene is a horrible room in the 
 palace of horrors. In that vomitory of crime, 
 Ivan, stretched on a bed of zibelines, was mo- 
 mentarily alone. Boris Godounov, a wolfman, 
 had just left him. 
 
 Without, guarded by keepers, were men in 
 peaked bonnets and the long, starred robes of 
 Babylon. 
 
 It was adjacently that Ivan lay, but not quite 
 alone. Death that tore tiaras from popes and 
 sceptres from kings, reducing them all to the 
 great proletariat of eternity, was there also. 
 The men in starred robes had foretold it. Un- 
 known to them, unknown, too, to Ivan, the 
 wolfman had invited it. 
 
 A little before, from the red stairway of the 
 red palace, Ivan had seen a comet. Was it a 
 presage of his passing, he wondered? That he 
 might know, he had summoned magicians, as-
 
 Ivan the Terrible 23 
 
 sembled astrologers, promising that if they lied 
 he would kill them. 
 
 At the moment, to minister to Ivan, timidly, 
 atiptoe, the wife of his son Fedor entered and 
 fled aghast at his instant and monstrous lubric- 
 ity. 
 
 Ivan laughed. Death? He had shamed it 
 from him. Laughing still, he clapped. A 
 page appeared. Ivan ordered. The soothsay- 
 ers and their guards filed in. 
 
 Ivan, indicating the wizards, told the guards 
 to take them out, take them away and burn them 
 alive. They had lied. They had said he was 
 to die that day. Make a bonfire of them! 
 
 Ivan turned, turned again. "Wait! The day 
 is not done. Hold them until night. Then, 
 the stake! 
 
 "Here!" he called at approaching pages. 
 "Lead me to my treasure-hall." 
 
 That hall was floored with agate, roofed with 
 gold. In it, jewels were heaped. There were 
 bags of emeralds, bags of rubies, bags of pearls. 
 There were crowns there, the crown of Muscovy, 
 the crown of Kasan, the crown of Kiptchak, the 
 crown of Siberia, the crown of Astrakhan, 
 crowns on crowns, diamonds on gold, dust on 
 blood. There were great silver bins piled one 
 on top of the other, each replete with coin, with
 
 24 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the sack of cities, with the spoil of provinces, 
 with the riches of realms, with spectres, with 
 tears. 
 
 With widening eyes, the miser-satyr stared. 
 The hall had faded, the crowns had vanished, 
 the glare had gone. There was nothing, blood 
 only and mists of murdered men. 
 
 He wavered, staggered, fell. From out the 
 mist death had leaped. 
 
 Ivan the Angel was winging his way on high. 
 
 A table remained. It was set. On it were 
 chalices of power, flagons of grandeur, cups of 
 mud and blood. The wine was there, the feast 
 prepared. The imperial orgy had begun.
 
 II 
 
 DMITRI THE SORCERER 
 
 GREECE had many shrines. There was 
 one to every divinity. There was one 
 to the unknown god. In Rome there 
 were altars to every sin, except the sins unknown. 
 Unknown sins were unimaginable. Two, that 
 have become known since then, are indescribable. 
 To-day, in words masked to the teeth, one is 
 called cloacism; the other, masochism. In- 
 vented by the Tatars for the relaxation of ba- 
 trachians and ghouls, afterward they were for- 
 gotten until, in Flanders and Champagne, they 
 were revived by the Huns. 
 
 Ivan adopted them, took to them naturally, 
 took to religion also. Ferocious felons are often 
 devout. In the cathedrals of contemporaneous 
 Spain, highwaymen sharpen their daggers while 
 saying their prayers. From saurian abysses 
 Ivan passed to the cloister. There he prostrated 
 himself, protested his abasement, after which he 
 returned to it. 
 
 During one of his religious crises, a son, 
 
 25
 
 26 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Fedor, was conceived. He had another son, the 
 lad whom he killed, and still another, Dmitri 
 who was also killed, killed twice, killed three 
 times, killed oftener perhaps, but who, in each 
 instance, came to life again. 
 
 Russian history is packed with drama. In 
 point of time, in point, too, of surprise, the 
 Dmitri drama leads. Schiller attempted it, 
 Goethe considered it, Soumarokov wrote it. It 
 will be told in a moment. The story of Fedor 
 comes first. Brief and unusual, it is like the tale 
 of the Persian king who, invisible to his subjects, 
 occupied himself with beautiful things. 
 
 Before Ivan became an angel, he instituted a 
 pentarchy, a council of five — five boiars — nom- 
 inally a ministry of affairs domestic and foreign, 
 but whose actual ministry was limited to varia- 
 tions on the Byzantine formula: — "May I speak 
 and live?" Among the five was Boris God- 
 ounov, whose sister Fedor had married. Ivan 
 gone, the pentarchy led Fedor to the feast, seated 
 him there, set the chalices before him. 
 
 A dilettante in delicate emotions, the food was 
 too rich, the wine too strong. Beyond were Per- 
 sian tapestries. Abandoning the orgy to Boris, 
 he retired behind them and thereafter occupied 
 himself in going to mass and avoiding his wife. 
 
 The charm of missals — missals that pictured
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 27 
 
 the twelve perils of hell — the ecstasy apprehen- 
 sible in devotion, the harmony of grave hymns, 
 the glow of ikons, these things appealed to him 
 in ways which blood and mud never could. 
 With fine levity, history has called him chaste. 
 At least he was neither sensual nor drunken, ab- 
 stentions very remarkable in those days and par- 
 ticularly in a son of Ivan. Fedor resembled his 
 father as a fawn resembles a boa-constrictor. 
 The table with its high festoons failed to detain 
 him. But, an artist, he embellished Moscow. 
 He gave it an avenue on which, in lieu of the 
 pine isbas of Ivan's day, there were palaces, un- 
 comfortable, unsanitary, but of stone, and more 
 churches — already there were five hundred — 
 and among them one in particular, a little gem, 
 that held just seven souls. 
 
 On the palace walls he hung paintings that 
 displayed the leading chapters of Russian his- 
 tory, the main events of the Bible. In the mid- 
 dle rotunda, from which a red stairway led, he 
 put mosaics of saints and seraphs and, behind a 
 screen of jewels, the Madonna. Above, in the 
 centre of the arched roof, he added a sculptured 
 lion holding in its teeth a twisted serpent from 
 which the tsaral eagles swung. Beneath was the 
 throne which he supplemented with the four 
 monsters of the Apocalypse. These were of
 
 28 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 gold, the throne was gold, the walls were gold 
 and about them he put gold and silver vases, 
 some in the form of licornes and stags, others in 
 the form of swans and peacocks and all so mas- 
 sive that, Karamsin says, it took a dozen men to 
 move one of them. 
 
 These decorations effected, Fedor became a 
 Persian king. It fatigued him to rule. From 
 despotism he shrank. No tsar has been more 
 the artist and less the autocrat than he. But no 
 tsar has been artist at all — except in the divine 
 business of ordering people off the earth. In 
 that, each of the litter was hors concours. 
 Fedor, with no criminal tendencies, with no 
 orgiac tastes, effaced himself, abandoning Mus- 
 covy to a wolf. 
 
 Beauvois de Chauvincourt wrote learnedly on 
 lycanthropy, concerning which it used to be 
 heretical to disbelieve. Boris Godounov pre- 
 sented a prefectly defined case. A magnificent 
 brute, Tatar on the distaff side, he looked the 
 wolf, lived the wolf and made others die of that 
 wolfishness. In the orgy that Ivan initiated, 
 raveningly he had assisted. Very close to Ivan 
 and always edging closer, finally he closed in on 
 him. Ivan's abrupt ascension was caused by a 
 poisoned brew which the wolf cooked and served 
 him. The brew brought him close to the
 
 BORIS GODUNOV
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 29 
 
 throne, to which he got closer, still closer, until 
 he hugged it. 
 
 To-day, in operatic circles, his basso howl 
 resounds. Moussorgski did reasonably well by 
 him, though less happily perhaps than Glinka 
 did with Mikhail Romanov, the insignificant 
 insect around whom he composed A Life for the 
 Tsar. One may regret that instead of that insect 
 he did not take Fedor. The regret is idle. It 
 was Fedor's destiny to live less in scores than in 
 sanctity, a sancity, parenthetically, which Dmi- 
 tri, his thoroughly demoniac brother, exceeded. 
 
 Dmitri, then a boy of seven, was a little savage, 
 a trifle malformed. One of his arms was longer 
 than the other. With his mother, he lived ob- 
 scurely and afar at Ouglitch where he tortured 
 kittens and puppies and made models in snow of 
 the chief boiars whose heads he chopped off. 
 The story of these traits, very promising, 
 thoroughly Ivanesque, was probably invented. 
 But Fedor was childless ; also he was frail. The 
 little savage was next in line. Boris licked his 
 chops at both. One at a time. 
 
 Presently the little savage was murdered, or 
 so it was reported. In those days murder was 
 common and not at all criminal. But a tsare- 
 vitch was holy. His assassination was sacrilege. 
 rmmediately the obituary was corrected.
 
 30 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Dmitri had not been murdered. He had killed 
 himself, accidentally, while at play, during 
 which, knife in hand, he had a fit of epilepsy and 
 the knife had cut his throat. The story may not 
 be true, but at any rate he was dead, though how 
 he died witnesses differed. That was very in- 
 judicious of them. The official version must 
 prevail. Dmitri's mother was sent to a convent, 
 other witnesses to their graves. Ouglitch was 
 razed, the inhabitants exterminated. During the 
 massacre, a bell tolled. What business had it 
 to do that? Karamsin says that Boris exiled it, 
 shipped it to Siberia. Excellent measure. 
 
 Dmitri then was thoroughly dead. Years 
 later to make him deader, if that were possible, 
 he was beatified and made a saint. In the Greek 
 Church, to which orthodox Russia adhered, can- 
 onisation was less arduous than at Rome. The 
 proponent's tomb was opened. If the body had 
 not decomposed that miracle attested his sanct- 
 ity. But a bone is part of the body; at a pinch, 
 so, too, is a lock of hair. Given but these and 
 the miracle subsisted. They sufficed for the 
 young savage. Moreover, when his tomb was 
 opened, a perfume, rarely delicious, issued from 
 it. That in itself was enough, yet there was 
 more. His remains, a bone and a hank of hair 
 worked the usual wonders, effected the usual
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 31 
 
 cures. In the same measure that Dmitri's death 
 was beyond doubt, so also was his sanctity. 
 
 All this was years later. Fedor meanwhile 
 had joined his angelic father. Boris remained. 
 His sister blessed him; the boiars knelt to him. 
 A wolf was tsar. 
 
 In his lair was a daughter, Xenia. Her eye- 
 brows met, a mark of beauty then greatly ad- 
 mired and which when lacking was produced 
 with a crayon. Baer, a Lutheran clergyman 
 who was in Moscow at the time and who left a 
 little bloody history of it, said that she seemed 
 moulded in cream and spoke more elegantly 
 than a book. 
 
 The rumour of these charms allured the 
 Prince of Denmark to Moscow, where, although 
 he was a foreigner, consequently a heretic and 
 hated as such, Boris so feasted him that he died. 
 It was said that he had been poisoned. Prob- 
 ably that was untrue, but thereafter other princes 
 fought shy of this beauty for whom fate had in 
 store a role which, on another stage, Louise de 
 la Vallicre immortalised. 
 
 Incidentally there were tortures, decapita- 
 tions, butcheries, wars and sacks. Boris God- 
 ounov was becoming very terrible. There was 
 a famine more terrible still, during which
 
 3^ The Imperial Orgy 
 
 human flesh hung in the markets and a mother 
 was seen eating her child. 
 
 With these harmonies for overture, the cur- 
 tains parted, on one of the great dramas of Rus- 
 sian history. At the court of Sigismond, king 
 of Poland, abruptly, like a knight in a ballad, 
 the dead Dmitri appeared. Sardou never did 
 better. 
 
 Whether it were the real Dmitri, whether it 
 were an impostor, or, as was afterward said, a 
 sorcerer that then occupied the stage, no one now 
 can say and, it may be that, save the chief actors, 
 no one then could. The tale that was told was 
 that relatives at Ouglitch, fearful of Boris and 
 his wolfishness, had substituted a dead boy for 
 the tsarevitch who was then hidden in a monas- 
 tery which, years later, he abandoned and after- 
 ward joined the Cossacks. 
 
 The Cossacks, literally the Fighters, were 
 hordes on horseback that had republics that were 
 armies, but no chiefs, except in war, when they 
 elected a despot and called him hetman. Among 
 the cavalry republics was that of the Cossacks 
 of the Don. Dmitri joined them and declared 
 his rank, exhibiting, to prove it, various tokens; 
 in particular, a cross of diamonds. 
 
 Diamonds then were not the articles of com- 
 merce that they have since become. Inhibited
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 33 
 
 to the vulgar, they were reserved to the elect. 
 Generally, there were laws on the subject: what 
 is more potent, there were terrors. To anyone 
 not born to the purple, the possession of a dia- 
 mond was malefic. The evil repute of that hill 
 of light, the Koh-i-nor, has no other origin. A 
 belief in this malignancy, common among the 
 simple to-day, was potent then. Moreover the 
 pretender, young, virile, ugly — ugly with that 
 ugliness that attracts — had an air sovereign and 
 compelling. He looked the king. In addition 
 to the cross, his appearance may have been con- 
 firmatory. In any event it served as passport to 
 the court of Sigismond, who, perhaps, had issued 
 the passport himself. That is possible. It may 
 be that the claimant was really prince, but with 
 the bend sinister, a natural son of this king who, 
 for reasons of his own, wanted him on the throne 
 of Russia. 
 
 Russians and Poles were like first cousins that 
 loathe each other. Mutually antipathetic, they 
 came of the same stock. But while the Poles, in 
 their relative freedom, had developed the Slavic 
 grace and gallantry, the Russians, under the 
 Tatars, had degenerated into ignorant and super- 
 stitious brutes. Bathory, the antecedent king 
 of Poland, had proposed to reunite the two na- 
 tions. The proposition, advanced to Fedor, was
 
 34 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 rejected by Boris, fearful for his own regency 
 and the domination which the superior civilisa- 
 tion might exert. 
 
 Sigismond, in seconding Dmitri, may have 
 had the same idea. But that is conjectural, as is 
 almost everything else concerning Dmitri, except 
 that he was a demon and, what is far rarer, a 
 man. He may have been Sigismond's son. He 
 may have been Ivan's. He may have been 
 neither. Concerning his origin there are texts 
 by the ton, opinions all you like, but a certainty 
 never, unless a mother's recognition may be so 
 regarded. The mother of Dmitri Redux did 
 recognise him as her son, or pretended to, and 
 must have pretended, if pretend she did, because 
 she was terrorised into it. Between those horns 
 of the duenna, the reader may choose. The rest 
 is fairy-tale, very bloody, equally dramatic, with 
 a coup de theatre for finale. 
 
 At Sigismond's court, Dmitri Redivivus en- 
 countered Iouri Mniszech, lord palatin of Sen- 
 domir, a great noble as greatly in debt, who also 
 had a daughter, Maryna, another beauty, prima 
 donna in the lyric drama that ensued. At first 
 sight the two young people fell in love. Life be- 
 came fair as a dream. The impoverished father 
 sanctioned the engagement, the subtle king of- 
 fered an army. Both had the throne in view:
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 35 
 
 Sigismond perhaps for himself, Mniszech cer- 
 tainly for his daughter. But while it does not 
 appear that the king made any conditions, the 
 father demanded sacks of the Kreml gold. To 
 get the girl, Dmitri had to get the gold and to 
 get the gold he had first to get the throne. It 
 was the old Hesperidian story, told backward, 
 told in Slav. 
 
 The encounterable difficulties were formid- 
 able. Boris had an army to maintain him. But 
 here, as in every fairy-tale, the unbelievable 
 enters. Muscovy, enthralled by the story of the 
 resurrection of her lawful lord and weary of 
 a werewolf's teeth, rose to Dmitri. The troops 
 refused to fight against Ivan's son and heir. 
 Very sensibly, too. At Dmitri's heels were long 
 vistas of Poles and Cossacks; the former bril- 
 liant, glittering, yet frightful with the wings of 
 great vultures which they wore on their hel- 
 mets; the latter soberly and sombrely fierce. 
 
 Among the Muscovite troops, Boris, by way 
 of counter-irritant, circulated a quadrille of 
 monks who were, or who claimed to be, superiors 
 of the monastery where the pretender had been. 
 Violently they denounced him as an impious 
 impostor, a youth of base origin whom again 
 and again they had punished and for what? 
 For sorcery!
 
 36 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 The accusation, which afterward was shud- 
 deringly recalled, Dmitri traversed. He trapped 
 the monks, put them to the question. On the 
 peaks of torture three of them died. The 
 fourth recanted. Dragged before Dmitri he col- 
 lapsed, but he gasped: — "Behold the tsar!" In 
 an effort to get him to his feet, those that stood 
 about kicked him. He was dead. 
 
 The testimony lacked conclusiveness. To con- 
 firm it, something else was required. Dmitri's 
 mother was in a convent. He invited her to 
 join him. They met in a tent, very sumptuous, 
 it is said, that had been erected for the purpose 
 at the outskirts of Moscow. Within the tent, 
 concealed from all, for a few moments they 
 remained. Then, issuing from it, they em- 
 braced; the tsaritsa publicly acknowledging 
 Dmitri as her son. Afterward, she was said to 
 have said that, while in the tent, Dmitri threat- 
 ened to kill her if she refused. That may or 
 may not be true. But, at the time, who could 
 doubt that he were tsar? 
 
 No one perhaps, not even Boris, particularly 
 not Boris. The loupgarou may not have known 
 the truth about Dmitri, but he knew it then 
 about himself. In Beauvois de Chauvincourt's 
 learned and very reasonable work on lycan- 
 thropy, it is stated that when a werewolf is cor-
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 37 
 
 nered and cannot escape, he kills himself. Boris 
 Godounov drank poison and just in time. 
 Through the holy gate of holy Moscow, Dmi- 
 tri was riding. He rode a white charger whose 
 legs and tail had been dyed scarlet, a pic- 
 turesque conceit intended to suggest that the 
 horse had waded through blood. 
 
 At the entrance, dignitaries in gala dress 
 ■tendered him a gold plate on which were bread 
 and salt, the symbols of submission. Dmitri 
 flung himself from that horse — the detail is 
 typical — and strode — another typical detail — 
 into the palace where, perhaps after an old man- 
 ner of paying old debts, he made the fascinat- 
 ing Xenia his. The coronation followed and 
 for a while this lad, he was only twenty-one, 
 lived in state with a tsarevna for mistress. 
 
 In fairyland, kings and queens never appear 
 without their crown and to Dmitri, the Kreml, 
 vomitory of crime though it were, must have 
 been fairyland then. Whether prince or im- 
 postor, his life had been rude. Hunger had 
 been his bedfellow, peril his drink and sud- 
 denly, through one of the prodigious shuffles of 
 fate, he was tossed from nowhere into every- 
 thing. 
 
 Above him swung a gold bicephalous bird. 
 Heneath the eagle was a panoply of canary bro-
 
 38 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 cade festooned with pearls that silver griffons 
 upheld. Beneath the panoply, on a throne of 
 gold, in a golden robe, he sat. About him were 
 prelates in purple; princes in ermine. On his 
 head was the crown; in his hand the sceptre. 
 But at his feet, in the attitude of a slave, a man, 
 old, fat, dressed and bejewelled as now only 
 maharajahs are, held, with venomous and greedy 
 fingers, the imperial sword. 
 
 That man, that slave, whom Dmitri had first 
 disgraced and then raised to the position of valet, 
 was Vassili Chouiski. Watch him! He is the 
 villain in this drama of which all that has gone 
 before is prelude. 
 
 Years earlier, in the remote obscurity in which 
 the savage young tsarevitch lived, Vassili's had 
 been the arm chosen by Boris to eliminate him. 
 A Rurikovitch and as such with claims of his 
 own to the throne, he had done the work, not 
 for Boris, but for himself, a design which Boris 
 thwarted. Since then he had bided and brooded 
 and plotted and for what? At the very mo- 
 ment when he might have called Muscovy his, 
 the dead young savage had revived, not merely 
 to thwart him again but to disgrace him. Pub- 
 licly, in the Red Square, Dmitri had had him 
 knouted, as a preliminary to chopping his head 
 off. Then, just when the axe was raised, Dmi-
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 39 
 
 tri had laughed and pardoned, yet only to send 
 him to Siberia and, as the cart was starting, had 
 laughed anew, pardoned once more and made 
 him his valet. Such vengeance might have en- 
 venomed a saint. Vassili was not a saint. A 
 wretched, greedy old man, he bided and plotted. 
 
 With the careless temerity of youth, Dmitri 
 abetted him. At the very beginning, in flinging 
 himself from the crimson-legged charger and 
 in striding into the palace, he affronted Mos- 
 cow. A prince of Muscovy never strode. When 
 he deigned to walk, though it were from one 
 room to another, boiars supported him. When 
 he rode, they lifted him up, held him in the 
 saddle, lifted him down, treating him always 
 like an idol. Dmitri was grand-duke and tsar, 
 but primarily a man. He derided old customs 
 and with them the abysmal Muscovite ignorance, 
 which, like all else that was orthodox, Russia 
 revered. 
 
 Former grand-dukes amused themselves with 
 bear fights which they enjoyed from a balcony. 
 A fight was arranged for Dmitri. He aban- 
 doned the balcony and killed the bear. It was 
 a tsar's privilege to kill his subjects. But a 
 bear, no. Moscow drew the line at that. 
 
 A yet graver affront was Dmitri's entourage. 
 All Poles, they were all pagans, as all foreign-
 
 40 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 ers were. Other nations professed other creeds. 
 That was their damnation. Russia alone was 
 holy. Throughout the universe her lord was 
 the one Christian king, and all other kings his 
 slaves. But was Dmitri a Christian? Was 
 he even Muscovite? He allowed the Polish 
 hussars to enter the Church of the Mother of 
 God with clanking swords and to squat there, 
 leaning against the sacred ikons, to which he 
 never bowed. His priests, it was said, were 
 papists. But when it was said also that he was 
 to marry a heretic, it was suspected that he could 
 not be a Russian at all, rather, as Vassili Choui- 
 ski insinuated, a hireling employed by Sigis- 
 mond to deliver Muscovy to the Polish king. 
 
 As novelists express it, the ground was pre- 
 pared. 
 
 Into the gloom of the Kreml, Xenia mean- 
 while was fading. From a delight, she had be- 
 come an ennui ; from a vision, a shadow. Deeper 
 into the gloom she passed. A convent opened 
 and swallowed her. Dimitri nodded good-rid- 
 dance. He, too, was preparing. Maryna was 
 en route. 
 
 Already the treasure-chests had been opened. 
 The sacks of gold were paid. Then, at last, 
 came the bride. But to Moscow, how inde- 
 cently!
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 41. 
 
 In a chariot drawn by eight horses that were 
 tricked out and painted to resemble tigers, she 
 appeared, dressed after the manner of Marie de 
 Medici, with a ruff two feet in diameter, a bal- 
 looning skirt, a waist that would fit in a garter, 
 her hair done high and, like her waist, exposed. 
 
 In Muscovy, the hair of a Christian woman 
 was concealed by a headgear. Always her gown 
 was girdled above the breast. Never had Mos- 
 cow seen such an exhibition. The old ortho- 
 dox city was not placated by the presence of 
 the girl's father, nor by the presence of a chape- 
 ron, mistress of the robes. For behind the heret- 
 ics, trooped a retinue, three thousand strong, 
 and what Christian woman ever took an army 
 with her when she went to a husband's arms? 
 
 Of all of which Dmitri heard nothing and 
 cared less. Later he did hear. At the moment 
 he was supervising the welcome. The pomp of 
 that is said to have been prodigious. No doubt 
 it was. In the great hall of the palace, a hall 
 heaped to the rafters with bizarre vases and 
 fabulous beasts, there were concerts, masquer- 
 ades and a state dinner more lavish than any- 
 thing that anywhere had been known. 
 
 Among the courses which, after the oriental 
 fashion, succeeded each other interminably, 
 there were swan's knees, lamb's lungs, roast
 
 42 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 cygnets, storks cooked in ginger, deer's brains, 
 lemon soup, sweetmeats of honey and attar of 
 rose. Additionally were the wines of Hungary, 
 of Alicante and the Canaries, together with the 
 strong waters of Holland and of France. But 
 these, all of them, after another oriental cus- 
 tom, were served last. 
 
 Dmitri had a table to himself, a plate to him- 
 self and also a fork, then a great novelty. The 
 table was on a dais. Below and beyond the 
 guests feasted, forkless, from trenchers. Mary- 
 na was not present. It was not etiquette that 
 she should be. Nor did she appear until just 
 prior to the ceremony, when old men supported 
 her, as though she were an infant in arms, from 
 the cathedral's entrance to the altar. Dmitri was 
 similarly supported. Etiquette so required. To 
 the assembled Poles it was ridiculous. They 
 laughed indecently. 
 
 Afterward, in the Kreml, there was a ball, 
 during which Dmitri, in Polish costume, danced 
 with his bride and, for good measure, with her 
 father. Beyond, in the Red Square, Poles, very 
 drunk, drew their swords, pinked the Musco- 
 vites. The good measure was full. Concerts, 
 balls, masquerades, in particular the bride's ex- 
 hibition of her hair and waist, these things, every
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 43 
 
 one, were pagan abominations. The good meas- 
 ure, full already, overflowed. 
 
 To Dmitri and Maryna it was all very rap- 
 turous. Life at its apogee had begun. The 
 rapture lasted one week. At the stroke of 
 twelve on the seventh night, men-at-arms, en- 
 rolled by Chouiski, were clamouring and beat- 
 ing at the bridal door. 
 
 A naked man is never brave, but he may be 
 adroit. Dmitri disappeared through a win- 
 dow. Maryna shrieked, as perhaps only a 
 frightened girl can shriek. Nearby, in an ad- 
 joining apartment, were her women. They hur- 
 ried to her. One of them, the chaperon, was 
 vast and formidable. Under the immense far- 
 thingale which she wore, Maryna hid. Just in 
 time. The men had broken in. The other 
 women, who were not at all formidable and 
 who, being Polish, were pretty, were carried 
 away, treated as playthings. Maryna escaped, 
 in a shift, it is said, to her father. The house 
 in which lie lodged was besieged. The houses 
 where other Poles lodged were besieged also. 
 They gave as good as was sent. But a lot of 
 them, taken in taverns and the open, were killed 
 outright. To employ an archaic phrase, the 
 streets were dyed — like wool — with blood. 
 
 Dmitri, in vanishing through a window, dis-
 
 44 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 appeared. For a time, that is. Presently he 
 was found. When found, he had broken his 
 legs. He could not move. In that condition 
 he was shot, stabbed, hacked even in the face, 
 which was disgustingly disfigured. Incidentally 
 he was insulted. 
 
 "Dog of a bastard, tell us who you are?" 
 
 Dmitri made no reply. He was dead. A 
 wandering Jew had his gabardine torn off. It 
 was put about the naked body, which, carried 
 to the Red Square, was dumped on a table. On 
 that table for three days it remained. On the 
 third night, a thin blue flame hovered above it. 
 The phenomenon, caused probably by the 
 corpse's putrefaction, created a terror all the 
 more profound because superstitious. Who 
 knew what it might portend? 
 
 In an effort to ward any evil, the corpse was 
 carried to a cemetery. A grave was dug. The 
 body was lowered into it. Immediately other 
 phenomena occurred. Over the grave, eagles 
 were seen that flew away when approached and 
 then returned. Eagles! At least they were not 
 two-headed. The comfort was meagre. At 
 night, the flame was still visible. What is worse, 
 sounds were heard, oddly discordant, that came, 
 or seemed to come, from below. 
 
 The terror augmented. The grave was
 
 - - - ~~7 a TlL. .W.r, .-' — J 
 
 DEMETBJVS Ernpn- 
 ana 
 
 i \in .Comaunbey 
 i :'_hfort'. > . etc . 
 
 DMITRI
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 45 
 
 opened. It was empty! That body had moved. 
 It had moved of itself! It was at the other 
 end of the cemetery! 
 
 There could be no doubt about it then. The 
 monkish accusation was recalled. Dmitri was 
 a sorcerer who knew the infernal art of post- 
 mortem resuscitation. With a vampire one could 
 not be too careful. As supreme precaution, the 
 body was burned and the ashes, rammed in a 
 cannon, were fired from it. Then only did terror 
 pass. Dmitri, his ghost or its counterfeit, had 
 been definitely laid. 
 
 Maryna, meanwhile, minus her crown, and 
 her father, minus his sacks, were extracted from 
 the besiegers and invited to leave. The invita- 
 tion was not cordial, but the forms were there. 
 Polish reprisals, always possible, were, if pos- 
 sible, to be avoided. Hence the civility which 
 emanated from Chouiski who, in the riot, had 
 become tsar. 
 
 Maryna, calling herself tsaritsa still and in- 
 sisting on being treated as such, set forth with 
 the surviving Poles for Sendomir. She never 
 reached it. The great playwright that destiny 
 is, had for her an epilogue in reserve. One 
 may wonder whether, in insisting on her pre- 
 rogatives, she knew it. Logically, the drama 
 ended dramatically, as drama should end, on
 
 46 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the bloody night of the interrupted honeymoon. 
 Did she know that it was to be resumed. One 
 wonders. 
 
 Leo X., a very lettered pope, said and sensi- 
 bly enough, "Since God has given us the papacy, 
 let us enjoy it." Chouiski could also enjoy him- 
 self. An ignorant and very vile old man, he 
 was not lettered. But he was capable at least 
 of a butcher's pleasures and, other things being 
 equal, he might have supped on them. The 
 great playwright had planned differently. Be- 
 fore Maryna had gone more than half the way 
 to Sendomir, a coup de theatre occurred. That 
 devil of a Dmitri was alive again! 
 
 The news of it, filtering through the Kreml, 
 struck Chouiski dumb. Reaching the travel- 
 lers en route for Poland, it stupefied them as 
 well it might. They looked at the widowed 
 bride who perhaps was widowed no longer. 
 Perhaps! It was all highly phantasmagoric. 
 But in looking they saw that their stupefaction 
 was not shared by her. She appeared to know 
 all about it. It may be that she did. 
 
 Afterward it was reported that on the bloody 
 night, Turkish horses disappeared from the 
 tsaral stables. It was also reported that in the 
 early morning, a boatman on the Oka ferried 
 three men, one of whom, indicating another,
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 47 
 
 said that he was tsar; a statement which he re- 
 peated later that day to an innkeeper on the 
 road to Tuchino. In each instance he had 
 added: — "He will return with an army and re- 
 ward you." 
 
 That may or may not have been true. But 
 whether true or false, it was also reported that 
 letters stamped with Dmitri's seal were in cir- 
 culation. At any rate, a cavalry republic, the 
 Cossacks of the Don, were rising and rallying in 
 his name. 
 
 "In his name, yes, but in whose else? Who 
 is this impostor?" Chouiski, with recovered 
 speech, demanded. It was at this juncture, in 
 an effort to show that whoever the reincarnation 
 might be, it was not that of the original tsare- 
 vitch, it was then that the wretched old man 
 evolved a lovely expedient. He ordered the 
 young savage's tomb opened and commanded his 
 canonisation. The priests may have wept at 
 the altars, they obeyed. 
 
 Dmitri then was at Tuchino. Whether this 
 Dmitri were the prince twice dead, or another 
 being, the reader may take a moment to decide. 
 It had taken Maryna no longer. She hurried 
 to him, threw herself into his virile arms, one 
 of which was longer than the other. It is no- 
 where related that that malformation had been
 
 48 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 remarked in Moscow, but it was the peculiarity 
 of the murdered young tsarevitch. 
 
 In Tuchino, a bandit's lair, splendour was 
 absent. For balls there were riots; for concerts, 
 brawls. Cossacks drink nobly. The capacity 
 of Poles is proverbial. What is termed the 
 flower of the nobility joined Dmitri in this lair 
 which, camp, lupanar and fortress combined, 
 contained a hundred thousand men, every one 
 of them eager to reseat a tsar, eagerer still to 
 loot the tsaral treasure. Then, presently, off 
 they started. 
 
 Chouiski had thought of enjoying himself. 
 Instead he quaked. Sigismond, an army at his 
 heels, was marching on him. Chouiski quaked 
 at that, but far less than he quaked at the demon 
 Dmitri who was marching also. Let the sor- 
 cerer again get him and this time farewell to 
 his head. 
 
 Against a sorcerer, sorcery is indicated. At 
 Chouiski's orders, magicians worked their spells. 
 Infants unborn were torn from their mothers. 
 From gutted horses hearts were removed. With 
 both a horrible hash was made and strewn, full- 
 handed, as grain is strewn, before the walls. 
 The necromancy succeeded. Abruptly, though 
 through what normal connivance has never 
 clearly appeared, once more Dmitri was assas-
 
 Dmitri the Sorcerer 49 
 
 sinated, yet, as was customary with him, briefly 
 only. In the interval, Maryna, carried off by 
 a Tatar, vanished on horseback from history. 
 
 The sorcerer reappeared. More exactly, 
 there was another incarnation. Probably the 
 new Dmitri was not Dmitri at all. None the 
 less the avatars continued. The surprising crea- 
 ture never again entered the Kreml, but his 
 ghost was not definitely laid until Chouiski died. 
 That seemed to placate him. 
 
 Then leisurely the preludes to another and a 
 greater drama began. Transiently the stage 
 was occupied by Mikhail Romanov, an insig- 
 nificant insect who, every morning, beat his 
 empty head fifteen hundred times on the stones 
 before the altar. That insect was grandfather 
 of a gorilla.
 
 Ill 
 
 PETER THE GREAT 
 
 THE night in which Hercules was con- 
 ceived lasted forty-eight hours. So at 
 least it has been said. Assuming that 
 the story be true, the night in which Peter was 
 conceived must have lasted twenty-four. 
 
 Who the male collaborator may have been is 
 unimportant. But the problem perplexed him. 
 In a scene, tolerably dramatic, which Dolgorou- 
 kov recites, he shouted it. 
 
 "Whose son am I?" Glaring, he pointed. 
 "Yours, Tihon Streshnief ? Speak or I will have 
 you strangled." 
 
 Streshnief fell on his knees. "Batushka! 
 Mercy! How can I tell? I was not the only 
 one!" 
 
 In the chronicles of nations figures arise. 
 Time passes and they pass with it. They are 
 forgotten like spilt wine. Occasionally come 
 figures that persist. Usually they are brutes. 
 It is the Caesars that are remembered, not the 
 saints. Cyrillus, a bishop, contrived to be useful 
 
 50
 
 Peter the Great 51 
 
 and to be beautiful. To be both is to be sublime. 
 Sublimity is a dangerous occupation. It may 
 lead to oblivion and also to Golgotha. Cyrillus 
 gave Russia nothing less than a language. His 
 reward is the dustbin. With the alphabet that 
 he created the name of Petrus Maximus is writ- 
 ten. It is written on a page of granite. The 
 granite is red. Voltaire thumbed it and said: 
 "Half hero." Voltaire paused and added: 
 "Half tiger." 
 
 A tiger is a beautiful animal. There was 
 nothing beautiful about Peter, nor is there about 
 a gorilla. Peter was a gorilla with brains. 
 
 Like the great apes in a Borneo jungle, he 
 sprang and killed. He had the same indis- 
 putable instinct for destruction, the same elas- 
 ticity, the same quick subtlety of sense. In 
 Moor's portrait of him, the expression, vaguely 
 ruminant, is that of a beast that has fed. Back 
 of it is another, an impression of will, inflexi- 
 ble as an axe and of which you feel the chill and 
 the edge. The man is there, framed in wood, 
 like a bird of prey nailed on a panel. 
 
 Probably the reincarnation of a Tatar khan, 
 necessarily he was a nihilist. "Take earth and 
 heaven, take all laws human and divine and 
 spit on them and that," said a lucid exponent, 
 "is nihilism." Nihilism and bolshevism differ,
 
 52 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 but only in spelling. Peter was the original bol- 
 shevist. 
 
 His earliest bath was blood. At the death of 
 his mother's husband, surviving enthusiasts 
 formed opposing factions. Cheerfully, the 
 guardians of the peace participated in their mas- 
 sacre of each other. The spouting blood 
 drenched Peter; drenched Sophia, his sister; 
 drenched Ivan, his brother, with whom he had 
 ascended a two-seated throne. Back of the 
 throne was a chair. Before it hung a curtain, 
 behind which was the girl. A moment only. 
 Sophia was a phantom. So also was Ivan. Peter 
 alone was real. Watch himl 
 
 At his feet Russia sprawled, inert, chaotic; a 
 land still mediaeval, but without chivalry, ro- 
 mance, poetry, troubadours and cours d'amour. 
 It was a land across which beings moved, ig- 
 norant as carps. Of the mediaeval spirit they 
 possessed only the sure cognition of hell. Other- 
 wise, its night enveloped them. They loved it. 
 Except drink, it was the only thing they did love. 
 A protection, it made them obscure See what 
 he does to them and to it. 
 
 As yet he was a cub. Wait until he grows. 
 Wait until he becomes, what he did become, 
 seven feet tall — seven feet which to those be- 
 ings must have seemed seven hundred. When
 
 Peter the Great 53 
 
 the gorilla was grown, history beheld what the 
 tired old gossip had never beheld before and 
 never has witnessed since, the spectacle of a na- 
 tion, backward, obstinate, rigid, unwilling to de- 
 velop, tossed from Asia into Europe, knouted 
 into evolution, terrorised into modernity. 
 
 Terror was Peter's nurse. His toys were 
 weapons. His palace, haunted by nightmare, 
 was hung with horror. Before him the history 
 of his house uncoiled in shudders. He gasped, 
 but only for air. When he stretched his legs, 
 dwarfs in double rows surrounded him with 
 screens of violet and concealing silk. Even a 
 cub would balk at that. When he could, he 
 got to the sea. Through an atavism proceed- 
 ing perhaps from the pirates from whom he 
 presumptively descended, he had dreamed of 
 it. His predecessors had dreamed also, but they 
 had fought. There was the Baltic. It belonged 
 to the Xorse. There was the Euxine. It be- 
 longed to the Turks. The dream of one or both 
 was human to the sons of rowers. 
 
 In the Kreml, Sophia dreamed not of the sea 
 but of the sceptre. She wanted it one and in- 
 divisible in her hand. She wanted to be auto- 
 crat. She became a prisoner. Those who had 
 wanted for her what she wanted were put in 
 cages and burned alive. Shortly and silently
 
 54 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Ivan disappeared. Peter was sole monarch, 
 lord absolute of everybody, proprietor of Rus- 
 sia, despot of her denizens and destiny, alone on 
 the two-seated throne. 
 
 From it he stared at the sea which no other 
 tsar had seen. He determined to cross it, which 
 no other Russian had done. Gautier declared 
 it indecent for a young man to enter the draw- 
 ing-room of life without a book of verse for bou- 
 tonniere. Peter felt it unfitting to enter the 
 drawing-room of the world without a victory 
 in his buttonhole. At the time he lacked even 
 a yawl. From abroad he beckoned craftsmen, 
 made a fleet, sailed the Don, attacked Azov, 
 took it. 
 
 Then, to see the sights, there started forth a 
 savage, young, tall, dark, grimacing, neurotic, 
 always in a hurry; a lout whom a napkin em- 
 barrassed; an oaf whom corsets surprised; a 
 monarch who was a rustic; a potentate who was 
 a clown; a tsar crassly ignorant and aware of 
 it; a man vital, violent, elemental, bestial, 
 drunk every night of his life. 
 
 On the part of a Russian subject, travelling 
 was treason. A junketing prince was sac- 
 rilegious. Peter who was to kill men with his 
 bare hands, who, while he drank and looked on,
 
 Peter the Great 55 
 
 was to order heads off for his amusement, left 
 clandestinely, incognito t disguised. 
 
 Simianly inquisitive, seeing a thousand 
 things that amazed him, seeing civilisation 
 which amazed him most, learning in Saardam 
 how to handle a ship, in London how to handle 
 a scalpel, in Vienna how to use a fork, assimi- 
 lating every "idea and forgetting none, he learned 
 how to recruit an army, build a navy, create a 
 nation and supply it, off hand, by force of edicts, 
 with a veneer of civilisation that could crack 
 and did and with a report that startled the world. 
 
 The bolshevist was an ape, but ape-artificer. 
 In occult circles it is said that Victoria R. I. was 
 formerly Alfred the Great. If that be true, 
 Peter, prior to becoming a Tatar khan, may 
 have been Nero, though in that case he had de- 
 generated in the progression. 
 
 At Kcenigsburg he asked to see somebody — 
 anybody — broken on the wheel, a variety of tor- 
 ture which he thought might do for Moscow. 
 The authorities regretted that they had no avail- 
 able criminal. 
 
 "Here," said Peter, "take one of my suite." 
 
 Voltaire had it from Frederick, who had it 
 from a former envoy, that, one night in Moscow, 
 Peter amused himself by decapitating twenty 
 men, drinking flagons of brandy between each
 
 56 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 stroke, after which he invited the Prussian rep- 
 resentative to try his hand at it. Nero would 
 not have done that; he lacked the energy, lacked 
 the brandy. For the greater glory of Jupiter, 
 he lacked, too, the Prussian. 
 
 Subsequently, Peter acquired an interest, un- 
 platonic and brief, in Mary Hamilton, a young 
 woman of Scotch descent, related more or less 
 vaguely to the dukes of that name. Shortly he 
 threw her over. Afterward, as the result of an- 
 other interest, she had a child and killed it, a 
 very customary proceeding, but to which, in 
 this instance, Peter objected on the ground, per- 
 haps valid, that the child might have become a 
 man whom he could decapitate. 
 
 The theatre was prepared. That theatre, the 
 scaffold, was a stage, carpeted with red, hung 
 with black, about which an avid crowd col- 
 lected. 
 
 Mary Hamilton, in white, dressed like a bride, 
 but, in honour of the groom, with black rib- 
 bons, was brought there. She was fainting. 
 Peter carried her up the steps, forced her to 
 kneel, looked on at the operation, picked up the 
 bloody head that had rolled on the crimson car- 
 pet, gave a lecture on anatomy and the spinal 
 column, eyed the pallid lips which so often had
 
 Peter the Great 57 
 
 kissed his own, dropped the head, descended 
 the steps, strolled away. 
 
 A pleasant person. In the alcove he was 
 equally attractive. There Villebois etched him. 
 "II etait un vray monstre de luxure. II s'aban- 
 donnait a des acdes de iureur erotique dans 
 lesquels l'age et le sexe meme luy importait me- 
 diocrement." 
 
 That was Peter, afterward the Great. At the 
 time he was merely horrible. In the course of 
 the foreign junket, tiresome news reached him 
 from home. Sophia, weary of her prison, but 
 wearier of her demon brother, was urging Mos- 
 cow to rebel. The budding mutiny was hushed. 
 You might have thought the matter at an end. 
 It had not begun. On Sophia, on Moscow, the 
 gorilla pounced. Corridors of ardent chambers, 
 perfectly equipped with every form of fiendish- 
 ness, functioned night and day. After prelimi- 
 nary and very agonising delays, those who en- 
 tered there were burned alive. For others, 
 death was quicker. Ordinary persons were de- 
 capitated in coils, at the rate of fifty at a time. 
 Their bodies, carted in thousands beyond the 
 walls, were left to rot. From the balconies of 
 Sophia's prison two hundred hung, as grapes 
 hang, in bunches. 
 
 For the greater glory of God, Torquemada
 
 58 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 resurrected Moloch and set Castille on fire. For 
 the greater awe of Peter, Moscow was turned 
 into a gehenna. There were groves of gibbets, 
 blood in lakes, hills of dead, tortures vaster than 
 Carthage knew, than Castille beheld. Peter's 
 deputies sank outwearied. Peter was tireless. 
 Axe in hand, he stalked knee-deep in the hu- 
 man abattoir. That axe, dented each night, each 
 morning was resharpened. 
 
 Years later, his son confessed a mortal sin. 
 He had hoped his father would die. Com- 
 miserately the priest raised a hand. "We all 
 wish it." 
 
 Yet no sooner had he gone, than he became 
 Peter the Great, a nation's idol. In Greece, 
 Heraklitos died of laughing, literally of laugh- 
 ing, at the folly of his contemporaries. Herakli- 
 tos was then an old man. In Russia, he might 
 have died younger but he would have laughed 
 more. 
 
 Peter was a butcher. Also he was tsar. The 
 terms are synonymous. In addition, he was den- 
 tist. If you so wished he pulled your teeth. 
 He was quite capable of pulling them any way. 
 He pulled a woman's who did not want him to 
 and who died of it. He attended her funeral. 
 Bon prince, he was practical. He gave Mos- 
 cow her first hospitals, her first pharmacies and
 
 Peter the Great 59 
 
 kept them busy. In his leisures, which occa- 
 sionally were spacious, he presided at the Bez- 
 pietchalnyi sobor — the council that knows no 
 sadness — an assembly of phallicists whose cere- 
 monies exceeded anything that even the lost 
 books of Elephantis may have told. 
 
 From the council that knew no sadness, Peter 
 passed to the council that knew nothing else. 
 Over that also he presided, as over all matters 
 he presided as well. He was the state. He was 
 the living law. Death was his servant. He 
 ordered. Death obeyed. 
 
 In the hideous night when Domitian ruled 
 old Rome, informers were at work. Any de- 
 nunciation, false or true, meant death. On the 
 burg of Peter that night descended. As in Rome, 
 informers were rewarded. For anything, for 
 nothing, the heedless were denounced. On a 
 cellar wall a woman saw, or said she saw, let- 
 ters traced by an unknown hand in an unknown 
 tongue. The knout! A student in his cups bab- 
 bled fretfully. The rack! Before the tsar as 
 he passed a drunken peasant lurched. The axel 
 The arrest of one usually involved the arrest 
 of a dozen. The original culprit, put to the 
 question, shrieked whatever names he could 
 think of. When he could think of no more he 
 was masked, led through the streets, made to
 
 fio The Imperial Orgy 
 
 point out this one, that one, any one. At sight 
 of him, a cry went up :— 'The mask! The mask!" 
 Instantly the streets were empty. In Rome an 
 accused accused his accuser. The latter went 
 mad. That breath of madness blew through 
 the burg that Peter built. "Near the tsar, near 
 death," a Russian proverb runs, and the reign, 
 which was a reign of terror, taught many things, 
 but chiefly how to die — with your nostrils torn 
 out, your eyes extracted, your ears severed, your 
 body beaten into a bag of pulp, or, in the ardent 
 chambers, cremated while yet you lived. God 
 save the tsar! 
 
 Resembling no one, intellectually blind and 
 yet intelligent; archroyal and very low, this 
 brute whom fate made despot, destiny made seer. 
 In the nation a force dumb, obscure, but latent, 
 was to elevate it from an insignificant satrapy 
 into an empire wider than the moon at its full. 
 That force recognised itself first in Peter. In 
 the chaos about him, he foresaw the imperial- 
 ism to be. 
 
 The future imperialism is not obvious in the 
 butcher. But it appears in the ogre who dragged 
 from Europe long tatters of her civilisation and 
 forced them down Russia's throat. The ogre 
 will enter in a moment. A soldier comes first. 
 
 In Sweden, at that time, stood Charles XII.,
 
 PET] R I III < IRE \f
 
 Peter the Great 6l 
 
 a man of bronze, a monarch whose kingdom was 
 not of this world, whose palace was the battle- 
 field and who dressed in war's rich livery of 
 blood. He had overturned the throne of Po- 
 land. He proposed to demolish Peter's, dictate 
 terms in the Kreml and, from there, take on the 
 sanguinary and gorgeous East. 
 
 He started for Moscow, moving via the 
 Ukraine and Byron's Mazeppa— Hugo's Ma- 
 zeppa also, Pushkin's as well. It is from a 
 paragraph in Voltaire's Hlstoire de Russte that 
 Byron and Hugo evolved their hero who was 
 a hero, to credulous women, and also to a man 
 who was not credulous at all. 
 
 Peter believed in Mazeppa. He trusted him, 
 counted on his Cossacks and believed, trusted 
 and counted in vain. When Charles appeared, 
 Mazeppa joined him, a treachery that history 
 damned and poetry absolved. Together they 
 marched on Peter, beating him on the way so 
 thoroughly that Peter laughed. It was a les- 
 son. He enjoyed it. "The devils will teach 
 me to beat them," he shouted and laughed 
 again. The laugh rang true. 
 
 Presently Charles was at Pultowa, the siege 
 of which a grave historian has stated — and stated 
 too in that language which only grave historians 
 employ — "he hotly pressed. " The description
 
 62 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 is pleasant. The cold was such that crows fell 
 dead. Charles wounded there and delirious 
 from the wound, called to Turks who never 
 heard, to Poles who never came. 
 
 Peter did both and so effectively that Charles, 
 delirious still, was carted away, carted afar, 
 carted into obscurity where he died as he had 
 lived, as Roland lived and died, clasping his 
 sole mistress, his sword. 
 
 Peter, who had learned his lesson and who 
 had routed what he had not destroyed, sent for 
 the officers taken prisoner. 
 
 "Where is your viking?" he asked them. 
 "Where is my brother Charles? 
 
 "Keep your swords," he added, "and let me 
 see if you can keep your heads." 
 
 That night he got drunk with them, but, more 
 potent than brandy, was the fact that triumph- 
 antly he had entered the drama of the world. 
 
 Pultowa has its date. That date marks an 
 era. Muscovy, hitherto held down by Swedes, 
 by Poles, by Tatars and Turks, was ready for 
 them all. Heretofore her history had been one 
 long humiliation. At Pultowa she came of age. 
 To celebrate it, Petersburg leaped into being. 
 
 A moment before Peter had asked: — "Where 
 are my legions?" 
 
 Moscow answered. Moscow pointed to a
 
 Peter the Great 63 
 
 long, double hedge of skulls gibbeted there to 
 remind Russia of the disadvantages of conspir- 
 ing against him. In Moscow he had massacred 
 an armyi 
 
 The troops since recruited were untrained, 
 unfit. They were sheep. He turned away. In 
 turning he scattered invitations afar. Tacticians, 
 drill-sergeants, professors of the art of war, the 
 surgeons of her clinic, became his guests. Pres- 
 ently, turning back to the sheep, he operated a 
 transfusion. He put blood in them, mettle, his 
 own instinct for destruction. Pultowa was the 
 result and with it a tripled realm, balconies that 
 overlooked the seas, a proscenium box on Eu- 
 rope, the dominion of the north. 
 
 Waliszewski, who has written very passion- 
 ately about him, says that he had an idea a day. 
 For a genius that is meagre; for a monarch it 
 is magnificent; for a Muscovite a miracle. Per- 
 haps Waliszewski exaggerated. Besides, opin- 
 ions vary as to what constitutes an idea. But 
 the gorilla had brains. With them he substi- 
 tuted himself for time. The labour of centuries 
 he effected in years. He tossed the state up, as 
 skyscrapers arc tossed, one storey quick on the 
 other. From the jimcrack Russia has suffered 
 ever since. Yet his business was not with the 
 future. It was with the past which was then
 
 64 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the present, which stuck its tongue at him and 
 which he pulled as he pulled teeth. 
 
 It was singular and easy. The creature was 
 a crowned anarchist. More technically, he was 
 an autocrat, which means the same thing. An 
 anarchist wants to do as he likes. An autocrat 
 can — or could. Peter could. 'He had merely to 
 w T ill and his will was law. He willed that what 
 he thought, all must think: that what he did, 
 all must do. He willed that Russia should 
 dance to his piping, dress to his taste, play the 
 clown, abolish her customs, assassinate her ideals, 
 abjure her gods. He so willed because such 
 was his pleasure. When that pleasure was not 
 gratified instantly, were there misunderstand- 
 ing, weakness, fatigue, the axe! 
 
 The Russian year began September 1st. It 
 began then because on that day, 5508 B.C., God 
 created the world. Nothing could be more au- 
 thentic. To celebrate the event, everybody fud- 
 dled and fought. But nobody smoked. To- 
 bacco was heathen. Nobody danced. In the as- 
 cetic orthodoxy of the Russian Church, gaiety 
 was sinful, instrumental music forbidden, learn- 
 ing was damned and ignorance blessed. 
 
 Men still wore the long, flowing robes of the 
 East. What women wore is immaterial. When 
 serfs, they were soulless. They did not exist.
 
 Peter the Great 65 
 
 Women of the upper class did not appear. Shut 
 away in oriental seclusion, they were invisible. 
 But all men were longly robed and all were 
 bearded. They had to be. In the sacred icon- 
 ography, Father and Son were bearded and 
 robed. Man, made after the image of God, 
 must be like unto Him. Any dissimilarity was 
 sacrilege. 
 
 That sacrilege Peter commanded. In a ukase 
 written with the knout, beards and robes were 
 ordered off, the women were ordered out. Mod- 
 els of what all were to wear and which those 
 who did not wear got the knout until they did, 
 hung in the Red Square. Prior to the knout, 
 robes were torn off at the waist; beards were 
 torn out by the roots. Incidentally men were 
 ordered to smoke. They were ordered to revise 
 their calendar. The year no longer began in the 
 autumn, as it had begun, or in the spring, as it 
 should begin, but after the absurd Roman fash : 
 ion which Europe had adopted. 
 
 With edicts and the lash, the year was re- 
 vised. Men were shaved, redressed, a pipe was 
 stuck in their mouth, and the beauties of their 
 household were ordered into society in a land 
 in which there was none, had been none rather, 
 for Peter created ballrooms with a ukase. The 
 boiars were pronunciamentoed into entertain-
 
 66 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 ing. They were told what to do, what not to 
 do, the days and the hours for it. 
 
 No gambling, but dancing was rigorously re- 
 quired. As nobody knew how to dance, Peter 
 personally gave lessons, instructing the sullen 
 beauties that, for the go of it, they must kiss 
 their partners. To encourage them, he ladled 
 brandy in wooden spoons, not forgetting to help 
 himself, becoming in the process as drunk as 
 the ladies, if possible drunker, teaching them 
 not merely the pas de quoi, but the elegancies 
 of deportment and the pomps of etiquette. 
 
 Rudiments followed. The bear, taught to 
 dance, was taught to read. He was given an 
 alphabet, partly Greek, partly Bulgarian, which 
 Cyrillus had supplied, which Peter refashioned 
 and which seven-tenths of Russia have not yet 
 acquired. Subsequent autocrats objected to its 
 dissemination. A little learning is a dangerous 
 thing and a lot of it may be revolutionary. Cath- 
 erine the Greater said that if the inmates of her 
 little household — Russia was her little house- 
 hold — knew how to read, they would write her 
 ofT. Sensible woman. But she had seen the 
 French Revolution, which to Peter was unim- 
 agined. It becomes therefore rather instructive 
 to watch him reaching down into mediaeval 
 dungeons, pulling the prisoners into a modern
 
 Peter the Great 67 
 
 reformatory, bundling them out of their ideals 
 into his, kicking over the past with one seven- 
 leagued boot, projecting them into the future 
 with the other, tossing them into the mould 
 from which contemporaneous Russia with her 
 colossal corruption and volcanic anarchy pro- 
 ceeded. 
 
 For university, Russia had the scaffold; for 
 curriculum, the knout. These things instruct. 
 They teach the aesthetics of servility, hypocrisy, 
 smothered hatred and bursting bombs. But not 
 morals. Peter, devoid of any as an orang- 
 outang, saw no reason for them. He may have 
 been right. Mathematics know nothing of 
 morals. Political economy is not interested in 
 them. Art ignores them. They are not a prin- 
 ciple of civilisation. It was not for lack of them 
 that Rome fell. What sapped her was malaria. 
 Morals are a luxury and Peter in his catarrhine 
 ignorance was unaware that the luxuries of life 
 are its necessities. He wanted the superficial 
 and the veneered. The tears he sowed to get 
 them, tsardom reaped. 
 
 To Waliszewski, he was the noblest Roman 
 of them all. He may readily have been that 
 and remain the perfectly ignoble brute that he 
 was to his pigmies, for whom, very thanklessly,
 
 68 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 he strung balconies from which they could look 
 at Europe and Europe could look at them. 
 
 To enhance the view, abruptly, on the Neva 
 — a Tatar word that means mud — there was 
 built, at the cost of two hundred thousand lives, 
 the lives of serfs converted into masons and har- 
 ried there to death, the town of Petersburg, vast 
 and boreal, where art congealed into tasteless 
 edifices, dreary palaces, empty streets; a city 
 with a heart of stone, a plaster body and ex- 
 tremities of rotten wood. 
 
 In Petersburg, Peter made himself emperor, 
 made himself pontifex maximus. Asiatic abso- 
 lutism, crowned long since, then was mitred. 
 The patriarch had died. Assembled prelates 
 asked him to appoint a successor. "I have," 
 he told them. "I have appointed myself." Lord 
 temporal, lord spiritual, the Antichrist was pope. 
 Besides, why not? The Russias, all of them, 
 everything and everybody in them, were as thor- 
 oughly his as the coat on his back. "I will give 
 Russia to whom I see fit," the grandfather of 
 the terrible Ivan unselfishly said. Peter would 
 not merely have said it, he would have done it. 
 He lacked the time. A laundress, handed by a 
 pastrycook, stepped into his shoes. 
 
 Louis Napoleon married the granddaughter of 
 a publican. Petrus Maximus married the
 
 Peter the Great 69 
 
 daughter of a serf. After the manner of an 
 emperor who is above the law, he married her 
 without becoming divorced from a princess, 
 Eudoxia Lapoukhin, already his wife. In the 
 story of the princess there is drama. In the 
 story of the empress there is myth. 
 
 The property of a trooper, she passed side- 
 wise and upward to Peter who, for her imme- 
 diate favours, gave her a ducat. A ducat to 
 the trull to whom he afterward gave a crown! 
 At the time, she had no name. Peter, in addi- 
 tion to the ducat, gave her one. He called her 
 Katinka, also Katierinouchka, a tender diminu- 
 tive which history severely revised. Histori- 
 cally, she became Catherine I. 
 
 In her spiral ascent she reached Menchikov, 
 an ex-pastrycook whom Peter had picked up in 
 the street. Peter made him his mignon, then 
 his minister. When Peter was afar, Menchikov 
 ruled for him. When he was farther, Menchi- 
 kov ruled alone. Tt was he who gratified Peter 
 with the lady of the ducat and the crown. 
 
 The Margravine of Baireuth, who saw her, 
 said she was short, huddled, tanned, completely 
 lacking in looks, dignity, grace; dressed in a 
 gown covered with dirt and embroidery, and 
 so tricked out with medals, necklaces, gewgaws, 
 that she jingled like a mule.
 
 ;o The Imperial Orgy 
 
 She had her charms though, a trooper's thirst, 
 the ability to carry her liquor like a boiar and 
 a skill, which no trainer has acquired, the art of 
 taming a gorilla. In her hands a madman was 
 putty. Peter in a rage was a fiend in a fury. 
 Katinka cajoled, commanded and calmed the 
 brute. She lulled him to sleep. When he awoke 
 the access had passed. So are beasts and despots 
 won. 
 
 But not detained. Peter had a nostalgia for 
 mud, a homesickness which Katinka shared. 
 Any woman, provided she were ugly and a slat- 
 tern, could win him and Katinka, empress and 
 entremetteuse, saw to it that he was supplied, 
 not neglecting to provide for her own amuse- 
 ments, gaieties at which Peter did not even shrug 
 his shoulders, except once. 
 
 The man, a good-looking young fellow, 
 brother of one of Peter's light o' loves, was 
 chamberlain in Katinka's suite. The position 
 involved duties, among others that of listening 
 to her. In listening, he replied. The conver- 
 sation was overheard and Peter informed. Ordi- 
 narily, the information would not have interested 
 him, but the anonymous letter which conveyed 
 it, stated that the two were conspiring against 
 his life. 
 
 The gorilla sprang at the chamberlain who,
 
 Peter the Great 71 
 
 at sight of him, fainted. When he recovered, 
 Peter had also. Considerately, sympathetically, 
 with a show of deep affection, Peter assured him 
 that he was sorry, very sorry, but he would have 
 to have him killed. 
 
 The theatre was prepared. The avid crowd 
 assembled. Peter took Katinka to see the show. 
 They went there in a sleigh. The day was polar 
 but clear. Katinka remarked about it. That 
 was all. But on her console that night, she 
 found her lover's head. 
 
 What turpitudinous, or merely horrible re- 
 prisals he meditated for her, one may surmise 
 and never know. Death, whom he had so con- 
 tinuously beckoned for others, took him by the 
 ear. Et ainsi finit l'histoire de Barbe-Bleue. 
 
 That was when Katinka was empress. An- 
 teriorly she had children, two in particular, Ann 
 and Elisabeth, one of whom reigned over happy 
 and holy Russia. But Eudoxia the Forsaken, 
 also had a child, Alexis the tsarevitch. 
 
 Peter hated them both. They represented the 
 past. By way of contrast, Katinka was the New 
 Woman whom Peter, without going far but low, 
 had found and finding made empress. The 
 paradox of the performance was its inducement. 
 In its vulgarity was its charm. Peter had an-
 
 72 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 other in reserve that was to eclipse it, but only 
 in horror. 
 
 To approach the latter adequately requires a 
 nearer understanding of Katinka's primitive 
 soul. The slatterns with whom Peter amused 
 himself meant nothing to her. But Eudoxia 
 was very offensive. Eudoxia was noble, she was 
 tsaritsa, she was a saint, or, if not a saint, in the 
 convent where Peter had put her, she resembled 
 one. The insolence of it! A bucket of mud! 
 The bucket was raised, the mud was thrown. 
 Katinka fastened a lover and a conspiracy on her. 
 
 The conspiracy was a plot to seize the throne, 
 put the tsarevitch there and abolish the reforms. 
 It was highly imaginative. None the less Eu- 
 doxia admitted it, admitted the lover, admitted 
 everything. Beforehand she was knouted. Un- 
 der the knout even a saint may admit no mat- 
 ter what. Glebov, the lover, an officer and a 
 gentleman, denied everything. The rack could 
 extract nothing from him. On the other hand, 
 a dozen convent nuns said whatever the lash told 
 them to say. The evidence was complete. 
 
 Eudoxia was sent to another convent and Gle- 
 bov to the theatre. At the four corners of the 
 stage were amputated heads. About it were fifty 
 corpses. There Glebov was impaled. On that 
 day the cold was extreme. In order that he
 
 Peter the Great 73 
 
 might endure the torture as long as possible, 
 he was bundled in furs. During it, Peter gloat- 
 ingly approached. Glebov spat in his face. 
 
 Previously a drama occurred that has never 
 been properly told and now never can be. The 
 proper telling would require the collaboration 
 of iEschylus and Michelet. Here, in cobweb, 
 is the outline. 
 
 From the circles of terror that Peter radiated, 
 Alexis shrank. Otherwise, brains and energy 
 deducted, he was Peter's son. His tastes were 
 low. He liked drink and common women. 
 Apart from that, he was inoffensive and, after 
 the manner of the inoffensive, he was ineffective. 
 
 Peter always effective and equally offensive, 
 eyed him. What would become of the throne 
 and Russia when both were his? To sit on a 
 throne cannot be difficult. To remain there pre- 
 supposes strength. Alexis had none. To sup- 
 ply it, Peter bullied him as he bullied every- 
 body, frightened him as he frightened all. He 
 draped the boy from palace to shambles, from 
 a honeymoon to war. In the same manner that 
 he had put mettle into sheep, he tried to put 
 force into dough. Failing, he exhorted. Fail- 
 ing in that, he threatened. Again he failed. The 
 hoy had gone. 
 
 The year before he had married a German
 
 74 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 girl. The marriage was a precedent. Every 
 Russian sovereign, except the third Alexander, 
 who married a Dane, followed that lamentable 
 example. The girl whom Alexis married was 
 Charlotte of Wolfenbuttel. Her sister, wife 
 of the Austrian emperor, was the mother of a 
 girl, afterward Maria Theresa. Charlotte be- 
 came the mother of a son, afterward Peter II. 
 It is said that just before the latter's birth, Alexis 
 kicked her. It may be true. Peter's court was 
 a morgue. The amenities were not observed 
 there. But the classics were taught. One 
 learned how to suffer and how, too, to disappear. 
 Charlotte died and was buried. Or so at least 
 it was announced. 
 
 Charlotte lacked beauty. Instead she had the 
 sentimental form of German sentiment which 
 was later known as schwarmerei. An officer 
 tapped at her heart. The green savannahs of 
 the south, the bayous of Louisiana, called and 
 beckoned. They got away, went there, loved 
 there, lived there, left there to go their separate 
 paths, one of which led Charlotte to Paris, where 
 she lived on an allowance served to her by her 
 niece, Maria Theresa. 
 
 After Charlotte's death, the Varietes pro- 
 duced a play of which she was the heroine. It 
 was called Madame Peterhof. The play an-
 
 Peter the Great 75 
 
 noyed Catherine the Greater. Severely she re- 
 marked: — "Everybody knows that the princess 
 died here of consumption." 
 
 A French wit took it up. "Everybody knows 
 that your husband died of apoplexy." 
 
 Before Charlotte's fantasia began, Alexis had 
 left her. He fled from the morgue in disguise. 
 Years earlier, Peter had also fled in disguise. 
 He fled to escape his ignorance. Alexis fled to 
 escape that ignorance which still persisting made 
 Peter blind to the fact that, potent though he 
 were, for the power he misused he would render 
 account, not to a recording angel perhaps, but 
 to himself. In Avitchi, the plane that the very 
 vile enter when they have passed from here, the 
 penalty of the damned consists in beholding 
 what they have done. Here they may have 
 lacked a conscience, they acquire one there; ac- 
 qui re, it may be, two of them. If there is a word 
 of truth in what occultism tells of that plane, 
 Peter must have acquired three consciences, six, 
 a dozen. He needed them all. 
 
 At the time he had none whatever. Katinka 
 had none either, but she had just had a child. 
 Maternity prompting, she prompted Peter. 
 Alexis was invited to become a monk. Alexis 
 agreed. He had to agree. He had no choice. 
 But then the cowl is not nailed to the head.
 
 76 The Imperial Or^ r y 
 
 Peter gone, he could discard it, ascend the throne 
 and abolish the reforms. The reforms meant 
 little to Katinka, but the throne meant all. It 
 was in these circumstances that she fastened on 
 Eudoxia a conspiracy which involved Alexis. 
 Peter would have killed him. Before he could, 
 Alexis had gone. 
 
 At once the magic circles of terror expanded. 
 Peter was seeking him, willing him back. 
 
 Furtively the boy crouched and scurried. 
 With him, crouching and scurrying also, was an- 
 other boy whom he called his page. The de- 
 scription shows imagination. The boy was a 
 girl and a serf wtiom he had garnered, as Peter 
 gathered Katinka, on the backstairs of life. Her 
 name was Euphrosine. She was a Finn and 
 looked it. She had the expression, slightly best- 
 ial, that Finns display. Alexis loved her. The 
 little animal enraptured this lad in whose life 
 raptures had been scant. Together they got 
 down to Vienna where they hid and dreamed. 
 But that is an exaggeration. Alexis dreamed 
 dreams which Euphrosine dreamed for him — 
 Peter dead, the abolition of the reforms, Alexis 
 tsar, Euphrosine empress! 
 
 As for that final touch, why not? What had 
 Katinka been? Longly the boy discussed the 
 dreams which, ambrosia to her, were nectar to
 
 Peter the Great 77 
 
 him, but on her account only. Left to himself, 
 his dream would have been a country boiar's ex- 
 istence, quiet, sensual, drunken. 
 
 But the flaming circles were contracting and 
 they fled again, this time to Naples where Peter's 
 huntsmen, who for a year and a day had been 
 stalking, quarried them. The shudder that 
 shook Alexis then was iEschylean. Yet how 
 needlessly! There was a letter, very reassuring, 
 from' Peter. Alexis had only to return ; every- 
 thing would be forgiven, his father's tenderness 
 restored. 
 
 Peter added: — "If you refuse, I, as your 
 father, will curse you and, as your sovereign, 
 condemn." 
 
 On reaching Vienna, Alexis had gone to the 
 emperor. Charles VI. was his brother-in-law. 
 The tenuous bond appealed. Charles promised 
 to look after him and, when Alexis fled to Na- 
 ples, he told the viceroy there to have an eye on 
 him also. But Peter, who knew what he wanted 
 and knew, too, how to get it, was massing troops. 
 The viceroy did not want war, 'nor did Charles. 
 When Alexis in his terror invoked the one, then 
 the other, they threw him to the dogs. Alexis 
 might still have escaped. But Euphrosine who 
 expected to be another Katinka and to replace
 
 78 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 her, persuaded him to bargain that Peter should 
 consent to their marriage. 
 
 Tenderly Peter yielded. Only, in view of 
 tsaral customs and Alexis' rank, the marriage 
 must be solemnised in Moscow. 
 
 Off then they went under guard of that tender 
 father's huntsmen, a guard that, for Alexis at 
 least, was never relaxed until that tender father's 
 will was done. 
 
 In Moscow, in the great hall where the terri- 
 ble Ivan throned, the terrific Peter questioned. 
 Alexis, shaken and swooning, had nothing'to say 
 except that he was a devoted son. It was a lie, 
 one which, no doubt, the Lords of Karma remit- 
 ted. 
 
 Then came the turn of Euphrosine, a chance 
 for the antique virtues, the display of Cornelian 
 traits. Not a bit of it. The little trull, whose 
 ambitions had been privately disabused, un- 
 wound the thread of her lover's dreams — tsar- 
 dom and the reforms abolished! 
 
 Face to face with Alexis, eye to eye as it is 
 expressed in the Muscovite code, she was sen- 
 tencing him to death. He knew it, yet more pro- 
 foundly afflicted by the treachery of the creature 
 whom he still adored than by any torture that 
 his father could inflict, he collapsed. 
 
 Peter was most gracious to the skirted Judas.
 
 Peter the Great 79 
 
 He gave her a dowry and married her to an offi- 
 cer with whom, it is said, she lived very happily. 
 
 In the eyes of gods that see and foresee, Alexis 
 fared better. He was murdered. 
 
 On that day the stage was bare. The usual 
 properties, the red carpet, the black draperies, 
 the knout, the rack, the knife, the block, the axe, 
 these things w r ere absent. The theatre was clos- 
 ed. The blood of kings is sacred. A tsarevitch 
 could not be butchered to 'make a Russian holi- 
 day. 
 
 In a cellar beneath a cellar, a pillared vault 
 lit by torches that were sometimes human, Alexis 
 was beaten into insensibility, drenched with 
 salted water, revived, beaten again, longly torn, 
 considerably burned, killed thoroughly. 
 
 Peter, twitching neurotically, biting and 
 moistening his lips, heard his son's shrieks, 
 watched him die. Whether he delivered the 
 usual post-mortem lecture, history does not say. 
 What she does say is that on the morrow, which 
 was the anniversary of Pultowa, he laughed, 
 danced and made merry. 
 
 Nero killed his mother. Her crime was in 
 giving him birth. But, monster though he were, 
 the monstrosity of his own crime haunted him. 
 Ivan who, in monstrosity, was his equal, killed 
 his son and wept. Alessandro Borgia, their peer,
 
 80 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 assembled the consistory, beat his breast, vomited 
 his incests, purged, or tried to purge, his hide- 
 ous soul. Peter, more monstrous than those 
 three monsters, killed his son and made merry. 
 But that is not his epitaph. 
 
 In his contempt of every decency, in the edicts 
 with which he changed the status of things, in his 
 obliteration of national customs, he assassinated 
 the ideal. That is his epitaph. 
 
 In constructing, he undermined. In correct- 
 ing, he corrupted. Russia's rottenness proceed- 
 ed from his knout; her anarchy, from his auto- 
 cracy. 
 
 Peter garroted the past; already Ivan had 
 strangled the future — dual felonies that put Rus- 
 sia in a sociological fourth dimension, a plane 
 abnormal, apart, where lurked and brooded the 
 forces elemental that were to scatter the eagles, 
 destroy the state, startle the world. 
 
 Peter and Ivan were the obstetricians of anar- 
 chy's posthumous accouchement, though proba- 
 bly long before, on spheres beyond our ken, it 
 was pre-ordered that they should be. After 
 the manner of geological transformations that 
 seem cataclysmic but which are beneficent, prob- 
 ably they were the gestators of a Russia yet to 
 be.
 
 IV 
 
 IMPERIAL SABLES 
 
 PETER knouted his wife, killed his son, be- 
 headed his mistress. He was a great man. 
 After the funeral, opera bouffe. On the 
 throne sat a laundress, put there by a pastrycook. 
 
 At no time, anywhere, except in Haiti, has 
 there been anything as impudent. From a Hai- 
 tian revolution a slave emerged emperor. The 
 slave was Soulouque. He could not read, he 
 could not write. But he could make his mark 
 and he did and a very dirty one. The laundress 
 was quite as scholarly. Balzac planned a play 
 about her and gave it up. It was too much for 
 him. Previously, Gretry presented her in an 
 opera. The colouring of the score was as suited 
 to her as a piano is to a kitchen. Perhaps only 
 Offenbach, who turned melody into a strumpet, 
 could have succeeded with her. In that case 
 and by comparison, the Grande Duchesse de 
 Gerolstein would be opera seria. 
 
 Peter's reign was a perpetual martyrology. 
 The reign of his widow was an uninterrupted de- 
 
 8l
 
 82 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 bauch. The one modern parallel is Rabelais' 
 vastes lippees. Miraculously the empire per- 
 sisted, its might increased. In conditions prac- 
 tically identical the same phenomenon occurred 
 in Rome. But the circumstances of the Latin 
 miracle are clearer than the Slav. Russia lack- 
 ed what Rome possessed, a Suetonius to describe, 
 a Tacitus to judge. To fill the picture there is 
 little else than the dispatches of foreign legates. 
 In one of these dispatches the government is 
 called a chaos and the court a bordel. 
 
 Death in taking Peter by the ear, took him so 
 abruptly that he had no time to appoint a suc- 
 cessor. Legally, if the term had any meaning 
 and it had none, the indicated heir was his grand- 
 child, the son of the murdered Alexis, or, in de- 
 fault of the latter, an illegitimate daughter, or 
 else a more legitimate niece. The complica- 
 tions that these people subsequently effected 
 would be farcical were it not for the tragedies 
 that ensued. But after the good old Roman 
 fashion, in prevention of any complications and 
 while Peter was still rattling at death, Katinka 
 subventioned the pretorians. With the guards 
 behind her, the rest was easy and Menchikov, 
 who had superintended the subventioning, at- 
 tended to that. 
 
 Menchikov entered history from the gutter,
 
 Imperial Sables 83 
 
 Katinka from a wash-tub. The daughter of Li- 
 vonian serfs, she was fat, coarse and a laundress. 
 During the siege of a tottering town, where she 
 practised her genteel vocation, she got (from 
 under the crashing walls and crawled in among 
 Peter's troopers. One of them took her, beat 
 her, turned her over to a sergeant, who passed 
 her up to a lieutenant, from whom she passed to 
 a captain. From him, on the escalator of fate, 
 she reached Menchikov, who gave her to Peter, 
 who gave her a ducat and added a crown. 
 
 Inconvenient preludes deducted, there, retold, 
 would be the tale of the darky beggar-maid and 
 the African king Cophetua, were it not that the 
 negress did not live to reign and the laundress 
 did. 
 
 Katinka, Peter called her, for he had to call 
 her something and she had no name of her own. 
 In spite of which and with no other imaginable 
 attraction than the manner in which she washed 
 soiled linen, this wench who had sprung from 
 the mud and who fell back there, became Cath- 
 erine I., Autocrat of All the Russias. There is 
 no parallel for that, even in mythology. 
 
 In an old print, Peter is shown, looking up 
 from a table covered with dishes and bottles, 
 while Menchikov leads the lady in. The pic- 
 ture is suggestive and probably exact. But Men-
 
 84 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 chikov after leading her in did not back himself 
 out. For a year and a day she remained the 
 property of both. 
 
 There is no immaculate history. If there 
 were it would relate to a better world. The 
 maculacy of these people exceeds the powers of 
 decent prose. None the less it has been a sub- 
 ject of wonder that an emperor could have gone 
 the extravagant length of marrying a laundress. 
 Perhaps the extravagance was the incentive. In 
 Peter's mind, and he had one, the marriage may 
 have served to convey the expression of his su- 
 preme contempt for everybody and everything. 
 It is difficult to imagine how he could have made 
 it more emphatic. But apart from that snap of 
 the finger, there was another reason, one already 
 indicated and perhaps more profound. The de- 
 mon that he was she could transform into a 
 child. On his horrible soul she poured balm. 
 
 Behind the balm was a gold mine. In the 
 perpetual funeral that Peter conducted, she in- 
 terceded. At her prayers, penalties were remit- 
 ted. Those prayers she sold. For the interces- 
 sion she was paid. Boiars sentenced for a yes 
 or a no to the scaffold, sent her bags of coin. 
 Their pardon followed. The bags were many 
 and in time very useful. It was with them that
 
 Imperial Sables 85 
 
 she subventioned the pretorians who, Peter gone, 
 secured for her the throne. 
 
 In these enterprises she was prompted and 
 aided by Menchikov who, like her, could neither 
 read nor write. He was otherwise educated. In 
 the hard school of a harsh court, and previously 
 in the training camp that the gutter is, he had 
 learned how to want and, what is superior, how 
 to get what he wanted. Originally apprentice 
 in a sweetshop, Peter picked him up in the 
 street, debauched him and, afterward, made him 
 prince of the empire, a Slav grandee with titles 
 by the yard, lord of domains of which the enum- 
 eration would fill a page. 
 
 The meal was insufficient. His appetite grew 
 as he ate. A rapacious brute with a strapping 
 figure and a bold and fumbling eye, he wanted 
 the throne and got it; nearly, that is, for Peter 
 gone he was practically tsar and, when Katinka 
 had followed her gorilla, he was regent. Nor 
 was that enough and reasonably perhaps since 
 regency is not heritable or even permanent. 
 Katinka's successor was Peter's grandson, then a 
 boy, and that boy he determined should marry 
 his daughter. Meanwhile he filled his pockets, 
 already replete, stuffing them with gigantic con- 
 fiscations, becoming in the process despotic as 
 Peter, greedy as Ivan, with — what unfortunately
 
 86 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 both of them missed — destitution for climax and 
 Siberia for finale. But no, that was not the end. 
 After being prince, generalissimo, regent, the 
 scoundrel became sublime. Despoiled, de- 
 graded and in chains, he grew fatl 
 
 Prior to that astounding coup de maitre, and 
 immediately after he had placed his chattel on 
 the throne, it was his custom to go to her, before 
 she was up, and ceremoniously salute her. 
 
 "Ouray, Katinka! What shall we drink?" 
 
 The question decided, he fuddled with her 
 and whomever she had at her side. Generally, 
 the third party was some one whom he had never 
 seen, or she either, until the day before. The 
 high and puissant lady held reviews that she 
 might make her choice. Always exclusive, 
 usually she was drunk. Her reign, in conse- 
 quence, while not brilliant historically, socially 
 was delightful. It established a precedent 
 which her immediate successors scrupulously 
 observed. 
 
 Among these was her daughter, Elisabeth. 
 Waliszewski said that, in following her mother's 
 example, she used her own bed as spring-board 
 to the throne. Apparently that is true. A regi- 
 ment of her lovers put her there. But that was 
 after she had already refused it and for a reason 
 delicate, perhaps, but commendable. At the
 
 Imperial Sables 87 
 
 time, a poet compared her to a goddess on a 
 cloud. The comparison will be presently ex- 
 amined. The only comparison that could fit 
 her mother would be one that likened her to a 
 scullion on a dais. The woman was nothing else 
 and to her credit did not pretend to be. With 
 no fear of another severed head confronting her, 
 gluttonously she reassembled and wallowed in 
 the mud from which she had sprung. 
 
 At fifty, her health ruined by the cups of dirt 
 and vodka of which avidly she drank the deeper 
 as her strength decreased, it became obvious that 
 she would soon rejoin her gorilla and it was in 
 these circumstances that the succession was of- 
 fered to Elisabeth who, for a reason that will be 
 recited, refused. 
 
 There remained her sister, who had married 
 a Holsteiner that nobody wanted and whom 
 everyone got, later on that is, in the shape of his 
 whelp, an ignoble poodle, husband of Catherine 
 the Greater. But meanwhile and additionally 
 there was the son of the murdered Alexis, an 
 agreeable lad with an agreeable minority ahead 
 of him. Katinka appointed him tsar, with Men- 
 chikov for regent. 
 
 The lad's style and title was Peter II. Apart 
 from the title, his style was good. He said, or 
 was said to have said, that Vespasian would be
 
 88 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 his model, that no one should leave his presence 
 depressed. 
 
 Wide-eyed, Petersburg commented and mar- 
 velled. Centuries earlier, the astonishment of 
 Rome had been as vast. Behind Vespasian 
 stretched a line of imperators that dispensed 
 death as readily as Ivan and Peter. But they 
 dispensed it with an urbanity which Muscovy 
 never knew. Greece humanised the Caesars, 
 Tartary brutalised the tsars. The Caesars in- 
 vited men to die. The invitation was civil. It 
 put the recipient at his ease. It left him free 
 to choose whatever death displeased him least. 
 Occasionally, to fatten fish, a slave was tossed in 
 a pond. To flatter the plebs, occasionally a sen- 
 ator was thrown in the arena. Now and then a 
 seer might be punished as Epictetus was, by hav- 
 ing a leg broken. But to a Roman citizen, tor- 
 ture was never applied. Rome assimilated 
 many an orientalism but not that, and it was in 
 that that the tsars exceeded the Caesars. 
 
 Petersburg marvelled consequently at the 
 young emperor's benignity which, however, did 
 not extend to Menchikov. 
 
 Menchikov was his master, his task-master, 
 his ruler, his regent, his autocrat, precisely as he 
 was despot of all the Russias. The tyranny of 
 it irked the young tsar, already embarrassed by
 
 Imperial Sables 89 
 
 Menchikov's daughter, a young woman with the 
 cold eyes of a ghoul. At the time, Menchikov 
 was decorating the streets with columns topped 
 with spikes. On the spikes were heads. From 
 the columns rotting corpses hung. 
 
 Peter II. ordered them removed. With that 
 gesture he asserted himself. With the columns, 
 Menchikov fell. Convicted of counterfeiting 
 and embezzlement, petty felonies on a grand 
 scale that he must have committed for practise 
 merely, from the apex of power, from the sum- 
 mit of wealth, without one thing to his name, 
 except the clothes on his back and the chains 
 on his feet, he went to the great white house of 
 the dead that Siberia was and where, superior 
 to destiny, his girth increased. That was su- 
 perb. He was otherwise magnificent. Already 
 he had founded a line, unique in history, a race 
 of male Pompadours. 
 
 Petersburg, savage but timorous, relished the 
 tyrant's vast degringolage and savoured the 
 young emperor's promise. 
 
 The first to remind him of it was his aunt, 
 Elisabeth. Waliszewski says that she marred 
 the lad's ingenuousness. Another Cherubino 
 one might think. But the melodious problem, 
 Che cosa e amor? he had already investigated. 
 More Valois than Romanov, he was a Muscovite
 
 QO The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Henri III. He had all the feminisms of that 
 king who contrived to be queen. From his aunt 
 he learned nothing, except that love is a patholo- 
 gical condition, from which a tsarevna's con- 
 valescence may be immediate. Elisabeth, too 
 distrait to prolong the lesson, abandoned the lad, 
 who became engaged to a Dolgorouki girl, with 
 whose brother, Alexis, he had entered the her- 
 maphroditisms of Valois nights. 
 
 The Dolgoroukis were highly noble, so noble 
 that when, long later, Alexander II. married one 
 of the house, it was said, and very correctly, that 
 the princess was marrying beneath her. The 
 second Alexander was not a Romanov. The 
 tribe was then extinct. The last of the litter 
 was Elisabeth's daughter. But the Dolgoroukis 
 of this epoch were perhaps less fastidious than 
 they afterward became. 
 
 At the ceremonies of the betrothal, and very 
 gorgeous they are said to have been, a ghost ma- 
 terialised. The ghost was Eudoxia Lapoukhin, 
 Peter's first wife, whom he had knouted and 
 whose lover he impaled. From a convent where 
 ceaselessly she prayed, she came in the anti- 
 quated, barbaric and radiant robes of a Muscovy 
 tsaritsa. Psychic from long vigils and very 
 pale, this phantom of the past who, during the 
 reign of a trull, had been too lofty to descend,
 
 I'l TER II
 
 Imperial Sables 91 
 
 vacated the cloister, reappeared on earth, blessed 
 her grandson and silently, sadly, royally, her 
 glowing robes about her, drew back from before 
 a drama which, it may be, her psychic eyes fore- 
 saw. 
 
 The fiancee's immediate family consisted of 
 her father, her uncle, and her brother Alexis, 
 with whom she lived in a great palace and in 
 equal pomp. The girl had red hair, red lips, 
 a cameo profile, passionate and proud, but not 
 too proud. Those lips had met other lips and so 
 lingeringly that the result became apparent. 
 
 The inconvenience of the situation was com- 
 plicated by the boy tsar. At the time he was 
 living in the Dolgorouki residence. There he 
 developed typhoid. It was thought that he 
 would die and, what is worse, too soon. 
 
 An effort was made to hasten the marriage. 
 The boy was delirious. An attempt was made 
 to have him sign a ukase appointing the girl his 
 heir. The boy was unconscious. An expedient 
 which then suggested itself was to put the girl 
 in his bed and announce that he had honoured 
 her with his permission to be there, after having, 
 in his quality of pontifex maximus, performed 
 the marriage himself. There was still another 
 way, perhaps superior: since the lad could not 
 sign the ukase, why not sign it for him?
 
 92 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 In the vast palace, in the dead of night, fever- 
 ishly these people turned from one plan to an- 
 other, uncertain how to act, certain only that if 
 they did not act and act immediately, the throne 
 was gone. In the jeopardy of that, the ukase 
 was signed and not a moment too soon. A min- 
 ute later the boy emperor was dead. It was the 
 girl's brother who signed the ukase. Dropping 
 the pen, he drew his sword and rushed out with 
 the cry, "Live the empress!" 
 
 The cry found no echo. The forgery was 
 never employed, though, through what conniv- 
 ance is uncertain, it was discovered. The dead 
 boy's betrothed went to Siberia. En route, a de- 
 mand was made for the engagement-ring. 
 Haughtily she extended her hand: — "Cut it off 
 and the finger with it." 
 
 Her brother went to the scaffold. There, 
 while his arms and legs were being broken, he 
 is represented as reciting a prayer, scanning each 
 word from beginning to end. The story is not 
 improbable. The same thing occurred in Lon- 
 don, at Smithfield, which Mary Tudor turned 
 into a Plaza Mayor and where she exceeded the 
 Inquisition. 
 
 Meanwhile, the nightmare throne was vacant. 
 Official caretakers dusted it and wondered about 
 the next occupant. In wondering, they thought
 
 Imperial Sables 93 
 
 of Peter's nieces, the daughters of his brother 
 Ivan. 
 
 Ivan had no daughters. Always less than half 
 a man and never more than half a sovereign, 
 when Peter shoved him aside, he wandered, a 
 lost soul, into the country where he lived dis- 
 mally, in shabby state and where his wife had 
 two children, both girls, neither of whom was 
 his, yet who, none the less, were born in wedlock, 
 a formality which Peter, in regard to his own 
 daughters, had imperially omitted. The more 
 legitimate nieces remained. One had married 
 the duke of Courland; the other a Mecklenburg 
 prince. This other will appear in a moment. 
 The Courlander comes first. 
 
 Pink, fat, large and greasy, she was familiarly 
 known as Big Nan, except to Carlyle who, with 
 easy humour, called her a Westphalia ham. Her 
 husband died the day after the wedding, not of 
 delight, but of the nuptial feast, during which 
 he gorged and gulped gargantually. For after- 
 course there were pastries, from which nude pig- 
 mies sprang and danced, an entertainment that 
 may have excited his further and fatal efforts. 
 
 Big Nan survived and became empress, a role 
 which the world has generously forgotten. But 
 also she became a figure in a romance which the 
 stage recalls.
 
 94 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Nan's minor part occurred at Mittau, the cap- 
 ital of Courland where, as duchess, she held 
 court. It is said that she never bathed. In her 
 day, Russian women of position washed in de- 
 coctions of roots mixed with brandy which after- 
 ward they drank. It is said of this lady that she 
 preferred melted butter. It is also said that 
 she had a negligent cook hanged where she could 
 watch his last wriggles. At table, her women 
 were beaten before her. Their screams gave 
 her an appetite. 
 
 At Mittau, she had other distractions. She 
 liked gossip and tales of brigands. These at an 
 end, she turned to her chamberlain, whose wife 
 discreetly retired. 
 
 The chamberlain, Biihren, who afterward var- 
 iously mutilated, exiled and killed over a hun- 
 dred thousand people, was a German. Previ- 
 ously there had been another German and it was 
 intermediately that a romance occurred on 
 which Scribe built a play in which Rachel ap- 
 peared, not as Big Nan, but as Adrienne de Le- 
 couvreur, actress and chere amie of Maurice de 
 Saxe. 
 
 Men do not dream any more as that man lived. 
 The son of Augustus of Poland and of Aurore 
 of Koenigsmarck, he became marshal of France, 
 fought on every battlefield and posthumously in
 
 Imperial Sables 95 
 
 that of letters. George Sand was his descend- 
 ant. He had fought at Pultowa. He had 
 fought before, he fought again, in a series of 
 conflicts which amours and revels distended. 
 When he was dead, men sharpened their swords 
 on his tomb. When he lived, women contended 
 for him. Among these were the Duchesse de 
 Bouillon and Adrienne de Lecouvreur. In a 
 duel that they fought for him, the duchess pois- 
 oned the actress. 
 
 Mozart had not then appeared. Moliere had 
 and with him Don Juan. The latter pre-existed 
 the playwright. Protean, indefinite, eternal, the 
 oldest and the youngest man on earth, Maurice 
 de Saxe was one of his many avatars, perhaps 
 also an avatar of the Cid. Reprobate and pal- 
 adin, the story of his conquests, carried from one 
 metropolis of pleasure to another, reached 
 Petersburg and passed thence to Mittau, where, 
 a troop of henchmen at his heels, but always gal- 
 lant, he came to claim the duchy. 
 
 The sinews of the enterprise had been fur- 
 nished by Adrienne. It used to be said that a 
 gentleman may receive gifts only from his mis- 
 tress and his king. Adrienne, all in all for her 
 lover, sold her jewels, melted her plate. It was 
 on the proceeds that the beau sabreur appeared 
 at Mittau.
 
 96 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Immediately Big Nan was his. In addition, 
 he could have had the duchy. In addition to 
 the duchy he could have had an empire. Nan 
 wanted him to marry her. The duchy was in 
 his hand, the duchess in his arms, the empire in 
 her pocket. But not every one can sup on West- 
 phalia ham. A slice or two sufficed. Maurice 
 took to reading Don Quixote, a pastime in which 
 he was surprised by one of Nan's ladies. 
 
 At the time, the palace was dark. It was 
 darker when the surprise ended. Maurice un- 
 dertook to carry the lady to her own apartment. 
 On the way, a watchman saw them, saw rather 
 what he imagined was a two-headed ghost, 
 shrieked with fright and dropped his lantern. 
 Maurice kicked at the lantern, tried to extin- 
 guish it, slipped in the effort and fell with the 
 lady on the watchman who shrieked the louder. 
 A door opened. It was Nan's. She threw a 
 glance out, followed it and raised the lantern. 
 A page of history turned. It was in turning it 
 that Nan consoled herself with Biihren. 
 
 Biihren was the son of an ostler, a circum- 
 stance which elucidates a contemporary remark 
 that he talked to horses like a man and to men 
 like a horse. Otherwise he was of the Pompa- 
 dour lineage which, founded by Menchikov, 
 was to continue on to Potemkin. Casanova, who
 
 Imperial Sables 97 
 
 met him, as he met everybody, says that he was 
 flnelooking. So is a vulture. Nan made him 
 duke, changed his name from Buhren to Biron 
 and, with enviable imagination, evolved a gene- 
 alogy that interrelated him with one of the first 
 families of France. When the head of that 
 family heard of it he laughed and asked: — 
 "What better name could the canaille have 
 chosen?" But all that was insufficient for this 
 German who could not speak Russian and still 
 less French. 
 
 Nan, at the time, was empress. Ignorant, in- 
 dolent and cruel, she resembled the serpent 
 painted by Raphael that had a woman's head. 
 Buhren had the head of a bird of prey. Other- 
 wise they were admirably mated. Both pos- 
 sessed that dangerous characteristic which stu- 
 pidity is. Nan, in creating him duke of Cour- 
 land, made him premier of Russia. But the 
 Menchikov lesson taught him nothing except 
 the impermanence of delegated power. By way 
 of insurance against the hazards of the morrow, 
 he conceived the easy expedient of marrying his 
 daughter to the Holstein whelp whom Catherine 
 the Greater afterward married and murdered. 
 But in his wheels there were spokes, put there 
 by Ostermann and Munnich, generals who had 
 come down from Peter, and who had plans of
 
 98 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 their own concerning him and that daughter of 
 his, pleasant plans with Siberia among them. 
 Buhren, meanwhile, a Pompadour tsar, was 
 peopling that land, sending citizens there in 
 droves or, more expeditiously, to the scaffold. 
 The orgy appealed to him vastly. 
 
 The court then was charming. Under Peter 
 it had been a morgue. Under Katinka, an as- 
 signation house. Nan, with Buhren and his dis- 
 creet wife for managers, elevated it to the dig- 
 nity of a tap-room. "Here!" a chamberlain 
 called at an officer who neglected to get drunk. 
 "Don't you know that your conduct is insolent? 
 You are her majesty's guest." 
 
 In Peter's day the court was bare. In Katin- 
 ka's it was filthy. Under the Buhren manage- 
 ment it became an oriental cabaret, glittering 
 and tawdry. 
 
 On a throne in a great gaudy room, lolled 
 Frau Buhren, duchess of Courland. Hump- 
 backed and hideous, she was royal. The robe 
 she wore a couturier valued at a hundred thous- 
 and roubles. Her jewels were worth two mil- 
 lion. In lolling, she smiled and very fondly at 
 her children who, in their romps, threw ink 
 about. Let the darlings play! With whips they 
 lashed the boiars. Who ever saw such dears? 
 
 Adjacently were jesters, dwarfs, crippled
 
 Imperial Sables 99 
 
 princes that played the clown, swarms of at- 
 tendants in all the costumes of all the Russias 
 and a greater swarm of Germans. The court 
 was German. The government was German. 
 The orgy was Teuton. Only the boiars con- 
 verted into clowns and cripples were Slav. But 
 clowns can think, cripples can hate. At the mo- 
 ment, with heads that shook, uncertain how long 
 they would own them, they knelt. Along the 
 walls, in gilded cages, were nightingales, larks, 
 canaries, thousands of them. From the door- 
 way, two generals peered and muttered. 
 
 In another room lay Big Nan. The tales of 
 brigands that she used to like, pleasured her no 
 longer. Biihren had made her live them. Be- 
 side her, the vulture perched. Nearby were 
 three other Germans, the prince and princess of 
 Brunswick and their child, a boy. 
 
 The princess, daughter of the duchess of 
 Mecklenburg, was Nan's niece. The boy was 
 next in line. In the drama of Russian history, 
 his history is unique. It must wait on the ro- 
 mance of his father and mother, an admirably 
 assorted couple who never spoke. A grave his- 
 torian remarked of Louis XV., qu'il fit a sa 
 fcmme sept enfants sans lui dire un mot. The 
 Brunswick pair, equally reserved, were less pro- 
 lific. The boy sufficed.
 
 ioo The Imperial Orgy 
 
 The girlhood of the princess had been var- 
 iegated by a duo with a man named Lynar. 
 Why he consented to sing with her seems mys- 
 terious. An equivocal young person with classic 
 inclinations, she was plain, vain and stupid. 
 Presently, as a result of the duo's lilt, she was 
 married to an imbecile. Subsequently this boy 
 was born. Big Nan being childless, the happy 
 family was invited to the annex of Berlin that 
 Petersburg had become and where the mystery 
 of Lynar's civility was dissolved. About the 
 otherwise avoidable madchen he had foreseen 
 the sables. What Biihren was to the aunt, he 
 might become to the niece and, as it happened, 
 he did. 
 
 A few years later, the greater Catherine 
 etched him: — "A fine looking fellow, with the 
 dress and the airs of a fop, I hear he sleeps in a 
 complexion mask and boasts of eighteen chil- 
 dren." Catherine added details, graphic cer- 
 tainly, but not in conformity with present taste. 
 That is hardly to her discredit. Formerly, pre- 
 lates employed in the pulpit expressions which 
 to-day a coster would avoid. 
 
 In the interim, affairs of state occurred. Big 
 Nan, overcome by drink, took to her bed. The 
 extreme unction was suggested. "Don't fright- 
 en me," she irritably retorted. But death was
 
 Imperial Sables 101 
 
 eyeing her. It may be she did not know it. 
 Biihren did. So also did the Brunswickers 
 whose complete nullity appealed to him. Since 
 their boy was to be tsar, he saw no reason why 
 the curtains of Nan's alcove should not be mod- 
 elled for him into a robe of sables. He pre- 
 pared a ukase to that effect. 
 
 "Do you want to be regent?" Nan asked. 
 Those were her last words. She signed the 
 ukase. That was her final gesture. 
 
 The gesture was a signal. The clowns and 
 cripples who could think and hate prepared to 
 act. But already two generals, long since pre- 
 pared, were acting. 
 
 It had been Buhren's ambition to be regent. 
 He gratified it for twenty-two days and expiated 
 it for twenty-two years. On the twenty-second 
 night of his regency, his daughter, a lass quite 
 as lovely as her discreet mamma, woke to sudden 
 cries. In an adjoining room, her father, half 
 naked, was struggling with grenadiers whom the 
 two generals, Ostermann and Munnich, com- 
 manded. Biihren, knocked on the head, was 
 carried senseless to the street, where his wife 
 and daughter, both in chemise, were carried with 
 him. 
 
 The next day, charged with having attempted 
 the life of the late empress by taking her to
 
 102 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 drive in the rain, he and his started for a prison 
 which Munnich had personally designed and 
 which later, the designer occupied with him. 
 
 It was Elisabeth who put him there and Oster- 
 mann also. Meanwhile the little palace revolu- 
 tiori had succeeded. Nominally, the Brunswick 
 woman ruled. 
 
 Ann of Mecklenburg and of Brunswick was 
 as vacuous as Big Nan, in addition to being more 
 indolent. With weak gestures she trailed the 
 sables that Nan had bedrabbled. Perhaps less 
 Mecklenburg than Mytilene, her tastes, such as 
 they were, were exotic. Apart from Lynar, she 
 had companions of a category that Brantome 
 ignored and Kraft-Ebbing described. Through 
 her brief paragraph in history, she moved lan- 
 guidly to Lesbian airs. 
 
 To Petersburg that mattered little. The 
 woman's regency was objectionable but not at 
 all on that account. The reigns that preceded 
 hers had inured to anything, no matter what. It 
 was the deepening German atmosphere that an- 
 noyed. The woman was half German and her 
 child, Ivan VI., Mecklenburg on her side and 
 Brunswick on his father's, was German to the 
 core. There was some one else who was not 
 German, some one who was Russian through 
 and through. But also there was the scaffold.
 
 Imperial Sables 103 
 
 Subterraneanly a conspiracy was formed that, 
 silent at first, confined to a few, presently showed 
 its teeth. One night, to the clatter of arms, the 
 Brunswick woman awoke. Elisabeth stood 
 before her.
 
 Q 
 
 THE NORTHERN MESSALINA 
 
 UINTILLIAN said that history and 
 poetry are sisters. He was dreaming. 
 Yet that dream of his Elisabeth exem- 
 plified. To-day her face, her figure, her reign 
 are vague. In the great penumbra she has 
 greatly faded. Vers libre remain. They 
 tell of a woman who beat the fat Frederick 
 to his knees, nearly crushed the tgg from 
 which Bismarck hatched a Kaiser, and whose 
 many loves were briefer and more burning than 
 the wick of her alabaster lamp. They tell of a 
 war-woman who was a lady of pleasure. 
 
 The housemaids of history have tidied her 
 alcove, burnished her morals and locked the 
 door. Excellent method. Elisabeth, who had 
 a grain of humour, would have enjoyed it. It is 
 quite in accordance with her own ideas which 
 she entirely neglected to observe. If she had a 
 broom, she did not use it and she left her door 
 wide open. To look in on her is not good man- 
 ners. Real history never had any. 
 
 104
 
 The Northern Messalina 105 
 
 Nor had she. Ignorant, irascible, cruel and, 
 in her later years, always drunk, autocratically 
 she did as she liked. A great privilege, it was 
 part of the orgy, the best part. Without it the 
 feast would have had no savour, the wine no 
 taste. It enabled her and the rest of the lot to do 
 things for which there are no words in any dic- 
 tionary and no penalty in any code. 
 
 Lomonosov, a poet of her day, compared her 
 to a goddess on a cloud. Well, yes, perhaps. 
 But she was a trifle heavy for it. The earth ap- 
 pealed to her more than the sky, more even than 
 the throne which was offered to her and which, 
 for a delicate reason, she refused. Engaged at 
 the time in a fervent amour, she feared the cere- 
 monial would interrupt it. A young woman so 
 retiring was bound to win hearts and she did by 
 the regimentful. Besides, her mind was as 
 changeable as her affections. In addition she 
 was Peter's daughter. Over and above all she 
 was Russian. 
 
 One night, a corps of grenadiers, laughing 
 mightily at the adventure, carried her, laughing 
 also, to the palace, where she pulled the regent 
 out of bed, sent her and hers to the devil and, in 
 the same lively manner, ran up the steps of her 
 father's throne. 
 
 The fashion in which her reign began must
 
 io6 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 have interested Sardou. During the Brunswick 
 management, during that also of Big Nan, many 
 people, but two in particular, had been thought- 
 less enough to annoy her. The two she ordered 
 broken on the wheel. The stage with its red 
 carpet and black draperies was prepared. Avidly 
 the crowd assembled. Munnich, in full uni- 
 form, a scarlet cloak about him, a smile for every 
 one, a nod to those he knew, gallantly ascended 
 the steps, threw off his cloak, partially un- 
 dressed and, still with that smile, listened while 
 he was told that torture had been commuted to 
 decapitation. Then, just as the axe was raised, 
 more theatricals. Instead of decapitation, exile. 
 
 To the crowd's immense disgust, Ostermann 
 was treated similarly. Both went to Siberia. 
 Hundreds followed them. The hundreds 
 became thousands. The thousands multiplied. 
 Before Elisabeth died she recalled them all, all 
 that still lived that is, except two. These were 
 women. How and why they went will be told 
 in a minute. 
 
 Elisabeth was very beautiful. She knew it 
 and it delighted her. She loved life, loved 
 pleasure, loved her beauty best. Time had the 
 impertinence to touch her. Her beauty de- 
 parted. At that, this sovereign whom admira- 
 tion had lifted, like a divinity, to the skies, could
 
 Illl I MPRESS ELISAB1 III
 
 The Northern Messalina 107 
 
 not, as a mortal might, fall from them. A god- 
 dess still, she disappeared. 
 
 When a girl and a beauty, there was question 
 of her becoming queen of France. The idea, 
 originally Peter's, Versailles considered and, 
 other things being equal, a Russian instead of a 
 Pole might have been the thrice-blessed wife of 
 Louis XV. But Elisabeth had not been born 
 in the pomps of matrimony. It was afterward 
 that Peter married her mother. In the eyes of 
 legitimate France, Elisabeth was illegitimate. 
 That was sufficient. There was more. Elisa- 
 beth, who even as a lass loved life, dressed like a 
 man and hunted hyenas and lovers. 
 
 Her first affair, a Slav eclogue, was with a 
 shepherd whom she pursued and overtook. Very 
 presuming of him, none the less. To teach him 
 the respect due to a tsarevna, his tongue was cut 
 out. Along the tundras of the Siberian coast, 
 thereafter he meditated on that lesson. 
 
 The shepherd was succeeded by a tenor, the 
 tenor by a regiment. Highly temperamental, 
 Elisabeth changed her chosen only less fre- 
 quently than her costumes, of which, in the 
 course of her volatilely voluptuous reign, she 
 accumulated nineteen thousand, together with 
 a few less than five thousand pair of shoes. In- 
 cidentally there was a child. About Elisabeth
 
 108 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 romance clung. About the child there is trag- 
 edy. That also will be told in a moment. 
 
 In the long illness that Russian history is, the 
 romance of the woman and of her reign relaxes. 
 Set between the hysteria that had gone and the 
 relapses to come, the pages of the imperial an- 
 nals turn to airs that are almost blythe, to a gaiety 
 sickly but convalescent. From windows that 
 gave to the south and west, the patient beheld 
 defeats and massacres. The defeats were those 
 of Frederick the Pseudo-Great; the massacres, 
 those of Prussians. Medicaments like these in- 
 vigourate. Accompanying them were gusts of 
 culture, a trifle uncertain, the hesitant preludes 
 of freer life. Heads were still shaky. They 
 were no longer cut off for a yes or a no. 
 
 These restoratives were apprehensible from 
 the upper storeys only. Beneath them, the soul 
 of the nation, narcotised at birth, slept restlessly. 
 Sleep was Russia's normal condition. No Euro- 
 pean nation slept longer. Peter shook her, 
 kicked her to her feet, put her at work. Russia 
 laboured at his bidding, toiled beneath his lash, 
 writhed on his rack and, he gone, fell asleep 
 again. Conscious she was but conscious of night- 
 mare. She knew that she agonised but how or 
 why she could no more tell than a child with the 
 croup. The subsequent shrieks of the Terror,
 
 The Northern Messalina 109 
 
 the amputations of the austere guillotine, the 
 festivals and convulsions of France, passed her 
 unheeded. Somnambulistic, automaton, hyp- 
 notised by absolutism's basilisk stare, night held 
 her and continued to hold her until the Crimean 
 war. 
 
 The shock of that ignoble scramble stirred 
 her. From her cot that was at once a cage and 
 a coffin, she showed a few poisoned fangs, but 
 only to have them drawn. They have grown 
 afresh since then. Since then, from being af- 
 frighted, she frightened the world. But mean- 
 while her brain was still heavy, her pulse was 
 slow. She suffered without knowing why. 
 Time, the great pathologist, was occupied else- 
 where. Even otherwise, it is not until a nation 
 can diagnose her own maladies that the indicated 
 remedies are applied. 
 
 They were not applied then. On the upper 
 storeys of the hospital, a pale daylight fell. Else- 
 where, darkness persisted. In the isbas, where 
 even vermin starved, serfs cried for bread and 
 died. In the schools, problems on the nature of 
 angels' thoughts were anxiously discussed. In 
 the streets, sudden cutthroats did for you and 
 vanished. Yet one of them, Vanka Ka'fn, the 
 tsar of cutthroats, managed to be quite as sur- 
 prising and infinitely more poetic than the
 
 no The Imperial Orgy 
 
 anointed bandits with whom these pages deal. 
 That is the grave inconvenience of history. In 
 writing it, the historian may not sing the kings of 
 the highroad. He must harp of the great car- 
 nivora. The bestiarium will reopen imme- 
 diately. 
 
 For the people, in those days, existence was 
 tragic. For the boiars it was gay. Shackled 
 by Peter, they were halt. Under Elisabeth they 
 could move. Provided they did not affront the 
 imperial stare, they could live. In this epoch 
 they began to. About them, from the toil of 
 serfs, wealth had been accumulating. Splen- 
 didly they squandered it. In France, red-heeled 
 seigneurs were similarly engaged. There, pres- 
 ently, the poor, bled to death to defray the follies 
 of the rich, sent in their bill. History calls that 
 bill the Terror. In Russia, the addition took 
 longer. But when finally it was presented, the 
 terror that resulted reduced that of France to the 
 proportions of a farandole. It assembled all the 
 terrors of tsardom and turned them upside down. 
 
 Muscovite follies began in the reign of this 
 good Queen Bess. To encourage them, a great 
 novelty had been introduced. The novelty was 
 champagne. Other novelties followed: pine- 
 apples, Irish hunters, French literature, Italian 
 music and the parage of princely display. When
 
 The Northern Messalina in 
 
 a gentleman drove, two heiduques and ten lack- 
 eys accompanied him. If he took snuff, he had 
 three hundred and sixty-five jewelled snuff-boxes 
 to choose from. His coats were gorgeous and, 
 in the court of Elisabeth, his existence was Paph- 
 ian. 
 
 For the court, Elisabeth built the Winter Pal- 
 ace, the largest in Europe, precisely as Bucking- 
 ham is the ugliest and Versailles the least com- 
 fortable. 
 
 Versailles had other attributes. In that El 
 Dorado of gallantry, vice was ennobled. Created 
 a marquis, it acquired a dignity ceremonial and 
 amusingly pompous. Gallantry, which is the 
 parody of love, became its style and title. Legit- 
 imate and royalist as the king, there was no 
 hypocrisy about it. It was cynical but not per- 
 verse. The perverse was there also, but hidden, 
 veiled by gold brocade, buried under fleurs-de- 
 lys. 
 
 The Winter Palace parodied Versailles as gal- 
 lantry parodies love. Lampsacene hymns, Les- 
 bian songs, the rites of the gods of the cities that 
 mirrored their lunar towers in the Bitter Sea, 
 these, the ritual of halls that a league of candles 
 lit, made up in fervourwhat they lacked in grace. 
 The fault was Peter's who, without considering
 
 112 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the preliminary and very imperative educational 
 steps, had ukased a social world into being. 
 
 The fault was not regarded as such. It was a 
 sesame to the cave of forbidden fruit and re- 
 sulted in a sans-gene that no modern court has 
 known, even behind the arras. As a conse- 
 quence, the advent, elevation and passing of 
 Elisabeth's grenadiers — lads of the moment they 
 were called — young men lifted from the bar- 
 racks to the couch of imperial amours, consti- 
 tuted a parade that was viewed with understand- 
 ing, not with censure, except once. Two women 
 presumed to sit in judgment. That was a serious 
 matter. The beauty of one of the women ex- 
 ceeded Elisabeth's. That was more serious 
 still. What followed is horrible. 
 
 The women were taken to the theatre. On 
 the stage, one of them, the Countess Bestoujev, 
 gave the executioner a handful of diamonds. 
 The lash fell lightly on her back. The knife bare- 
 ly scratched her tongue. The other, the beauty, 
 Countess Lapoukhin, screamed and fought with 
 the man, bit his hand, resisted him as best she 
 might. He tore her clothes off and, before ap- 
 plying the lash, cut her tongue out. Then, jeer- 
 ing at her nakedness, he offered the bloody mor- 
 sel for a rouble. He turned to beat the beauty. 
 She had fainted. The lash revived her. Pres-
 
 The Northern Messalina 113 
 
 ently for her and the other woman, the journey- 
 to Siberia began. Of all whom Elisabeth sent 
 there, these two only she neglected to recall. 
 
 In the private life of the nobles there were 
 incidents equally abominable. A woman of rank, 
 angered by a serf, got her fingers in his mouth 
 and tore it back to the ears. In the bedroom of 
 another woman, a serf lived in a cage. The 
 serf was a barber and the woman did not wish it 
 known that, when loosened, he dyed her hair. 
 Another woman, personally and unaided, killed 
 a hundred of her human chattels. Another 
 woman — but here the pen balks. Gautier said 
 that the inexpressible does not exist. Gautier 
 did not live in eighteenth-century Russia. 
 
 In sending the Brunswickers to the devil, 
 Elisabeth directed them to the north, from 
 which, years later, they reached Denmark, minus 
 the boy tsar. Ivan VI. was taken from them, 
 brought back, put in one prison, then in another, 
 though where and in what prison he never knew. 
 No one was allowed to tell him. It was for- 
 bidden to speak to him. To look at him was for- 
 bidden. The Iron Mask of Russia, for twenty 
 years he reigned in an oubliette. For crown, he 
 had cobwebs; for subjects, spiders; for kingdom, 
 a cell. 
 
 That grandeur was excessive. It menaced
 
 114 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Elisabeth's. To annoy her, Frederick threat- 
 ened to put him on the throne. "I'll chop his 
 head off first," Elisabeth retorted. More finely, 
 she nearly chopped Prussia's. In the interim 
 she forgot Ivan. What she forgot, Catherine 
 II. recalled. The Star of the North could not 
 endure the rivalry even of a phantom. An at- 
 tempt was made to rescue him. The keepers 
 had their orders. The shadow tsar was killed. 
 That was Catherine's doing. Elisabeth ob- 
 jected to rivals also but not to shadows, only to 
 women. With these she was merciless. Other- 
 wise she enjoyed herself hugely. She hunted 
 all day and danced all night. At some of the 
 dances she appeared as a man. On such occa- 
 sions it was etiquette for all court young women 
 to appear as men and for all young men to ap- 
 pear as women. Elisabeth liked that. She liked 
 young men in women's clothes. Moreover, that 
 they might be properly sent out, she acted as 
 dresser, selecting in the process those that 
 pleased her most. In regard to her own mas- 
 querade she had a reason quite as interesting. 
 Her leg was well turned, she knew she looked 
 well as a man, kne*vv, too, that women generally 
 look the reverse. To be merely empress was 
 insufficient. After the manner of a chatelaine 
 in the days and in the lands of chivalry, she
 
 The Northern Messalina 115 
 
 wanted to be Queen of Beauty and of Love. 
 
 In these diversions, age had the insolence to 
 approach her. Illness dared to touch her. On 
 her beauty they laid a smearing hand. That 
 was crime, a crime long since codified — crimen 
 lessee majestatis divince. 
 
 The woman loved life, loved love, but she 
 loved her beauty best. To it, to her gowns, her 
 coiffure, her mirror, she gave contented hours. 
 She never wore the same frock twice. No one 
 was permitted to copy her coiffure until she had 
 adopted another arrangement. One night she 
 put a rose in her hair. The Countess Lapouk- 
 hin did the same. She got her face slapped for 
 it, with the knout and Siberia to follow. As 
 Elisabeth dealt it to that woman, the high fates 
 dealt it to her. The knout was her mirror, her 
 prison a darkened room. There, the goddess 
 passed from sight, the sovereign disappeared. 
 Like the countess, she was in the house of the 
 dead. 
 
 There were hours when she meditated escape. 
 The lustres were lighted and in a fresh Paris- 
 ianism, her hair redressed, her face rerouged, 
 her neck circled with emeralds as big and as 
 naked as eggs, the illusion of lost beauty re- 
 turned. But who was that rancid horror that 
 stood and stared? From the mirror she turned,
 
 Ii6 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the illusion had gone and, weeping, she drank. 
 
 Her sins were scarlet. They might have been 
 remitted if she had lived long enough. With 
 longer life she would have washed them in the 
 paler crimson of Frederick's blood. Her troops 
 entered Berlin. East Prussia was theirs. Pom- 
 merania was theirs. Elisabeth directed them. 
 More exactly, a thousand miles from the front, 
 she shook her pen at her generals. "If any man 
 wavers," that pen told Saltykov, "send him to 
 me in chains." 
 
 They might have sent her the incompetent 
 parvenu whom the lackeys of history call the 
 Great, and who, serving as model for Wilhelm 
 II., fled in fright from the battlefield as that fel- 
 low fled; bombarded cathedrals as he did under 
 pretext that they served as conning towers; re- 
 garded treaties as the same scraps of paper; or- 
 dered the same frightfulness and pretended he 
 had not; pretended also, precisely as that scrof- 
 ulous dwarf pretended, that he did not want 
 war and warred only because Europe was jeal- 
 ous. England, credulous as her lackeys, believed 
 him. Just prior to Rossbach, he told d'Argens 
 that, if he lost it, he would practise medicine. 
 D'Argens nodded: — "Toujours assassin." 
 
 Elisabeth lacked the time to snuff him out but, 
 for the remainder of the century, she snuffed
 
 The Northern Messalina 117 
 
 Prussia. That was the war-woman. The lady 
 of pleasure had other ideals. There was her 
 namesake, the first good Queen Bess. She 
 wanted to reserrtble her. She, too, wanted to par- 
 ade as a. Virgin Queen. The task was difficult, 
 but that made it all the more commendable. 
 Consequently, when she took it into*- her head to 
 marry, the ceremony was performed sub rosa. 
 The rose was not very tenebrous. The court, 
 Petersburg, everybody, even the dvorniks, looked 
 through it at the ceremony, which she had so 
 often omitted that it was thought highly original 
 of her to observe it at all. 
 
 The happy man was Russian. It is said that 
 she induced herself to accept him out of patriot- 
 ism, in order that she and the throne might not 
 become the prey of some foreign prince. Every- 
 thing is possible and it may be true. But the 
 compatriot whom she selected for her country's 
 sake, she had already selected for her own. He 
 was the tenor who preceded the regiment and, 
 though a tenor, not in the least ferocious, on the 
 contrary, an amiable, heavy-witted peasant in 
 Sunday clothes. 
 
 His name was Razoumovski. His father 
 kept a pothouse where his mother was waitress. 
 Good, plain, natural people, their son was the 
 proper mate for a servant-girl's daughter.
 
 1 1 8 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 Known after the ceremony as the nocturnal em- 
 peror, his mother came to call. Suitably, or at 
 all events ornamentally attired beforehand, she 
 saw herself in a mirror, mistook what she saw 
 for her daughter-in-law and fell on her knees. 
 
 The picture is Arcadian. To embellish it 
 Razoumovski's behaviour was Boetian. He had 
 none of Menchikov's pretensions, no Biihren 
 ambitions, no Lynar airs. Years later, when 
 Elisabeth was dead, he said that he had never 
 been other than the most humble of her majesty's 
 subjects. It was quite true. No jealousy of any 
 kind. No interference of any sort. No views. 
 The art of loving people as though you hated 
 them was too complicated for this peasant who 
 presented, in its perfection, a picture, life-size, 
 of the mari sage, or rather would have, were it 
 not that, like Amanda, he had one defect. He 
 drank. But then the regiment that single file 
 marched through the boudoir of his lady, any 
 husband, however discreet, might wish to for- 
 get. 
 
 Drink aiding, he so thoroughly succeeded 
 that, though made count, prince, field-marshal, 
 his native simplicity remained unimpaired. Al- 
 ways and everywhere, in public, in private, in 
 life and in death, he was the most humble of her 
 majesty's subjects, except once, when, excited
 
 The Northern Messalina ng 
 
 by liquor, he hit Saltykov over the head. What 
 made the incident particularly awkward was 
 Saltykov's inability to hit back. A nocturnal 
 emperor was sacred. But that incident, the 
 marriage itself, Razoumovski included, would 
 not merit a footnote, were it not for a drama 
 that ensued. 
 
 Paris, years later, became interested in a visi- 
 tor of whom nothing was known and everything 
 could be imagined. Young, fair, rich and mys- 
 terious, about her was the atmosphere of the far- 
 away, a flavour that was heightened by her eyes 
 which, like Ann Boleyn's, were of different col- 
 ours. One was dark amber, the other deep blue. 
 Her name, equally strange and oddly undulant, 
 was Aly Emettee de Vlodomir, Princess Tara- 
 kanov. 
 
 What and where was Vlodomir? Who and 
 what were the Tarakanovs? There was then 
 no Almanach de Gotha to reply. But in the 
 young woman's household there were those who 
 did as well. Vlodomir and Tarakanov were 
 domains of which their lady was lord. She may 
 have been, but servants sometimes embroider. 
 
 Yet she had that air, remote, gracious, triste, 
 which, in fairyland, poets and royals display. 
 Estates, domains, patents of nobility, robes et 
 manteaux, these things may be had. But that
 
 i2o The Imperial Orgy 
 
 air, never 1 It is nowhere on sale. This girl 
 exhaled it and, with it, the gift of the strange 
 gods which innate charm is. 
 
 Whether she were or were not what she after- 
 ward claimed to be, is one of the minor enigma? 
 of history. But her belief in a secret that en- 
 veloped her, became the tragedy of her tragic 
 life. On the sheer red peaks of torture, peaks 
 that are the summits of human agony, she clung 
 to it, refusing to retract, asking only that there 
 be said over her a prayer for the dead. 
 
 In Paris, years ago, Flavinski, a Russian 
 artist, exhibited a painting of which the horror 
 and the execution detained. It showed this girl 
 standing on a cot in a vault into which water 
 poured through a grating. Her back against 
 the wall, her head bent by the low roof, her 
 hands clasped in terror, it was obvious that in a 
 moment the water would reach and claim her. 
 
 The vault w r as a subterranean cell of a Peters- 
 burg prison which the Neva, rising, had flooded. 
 Before Petersburg became Petrograd the cell 
 was shown. Given the money and the guide 
 and one can be shown anything. What the pic- 
 ture represented never occurred. The Princess 
 Tarakanov was not drowned, she was murdered. 
 
 The story of the girl is brief, simple, bizarre 
 and horrible. Her first memories were of a Rus-
 
 The Northern Messalina 121 
 
 sian convent from which, while still a child, she 
 was taken endlessly to Baghdad, thence on to 
 Isfahan, where she grew up in the palace of a 
 prince who treated her with a respect invariable 
 and profound. Later she went with him to Lon- 
 don. There he left her, supplying her before- 
 hand with money and an entourage and reveal- 
 ing to her a secret, of which long since whispers 
 had reached her, and concerning which docu- 
 mentary evidence would in time, he said, be pro- 
 duced. 
 
 It was in these circumstances that, vacating 
 London, she went to Paris, afterward to Vienna, 
 then to Venice, where the polite world was in- 
 trigued by this exotic princess who looked like a 
 houri and who lived like a vestal. 
 
 In that she reversed the order of things. To 
 look like a vestal is always permissible, but to 
 live like one was not fashionable then. At the 
 time, the fervours of Cyprus were forgotten. 
 The altars to Eros and Aphrodite were dust. 
 From the crystal parapets where they leaned 
 and laughed, the immortals had gone. But not 
 very high, nor yet very far. Over the eighteenth- 
 century metropoles of pleasure, they leaned and 
 laughed as before. Their shrines had crumbled, 
 their temples had fallen, but their worship en- 
 dured. They were the immortals. Modernity
 
 122 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 could not touch them, time could not reach them, 
 only their names had changed. Instead of Eros 
 was Temptation; in place of Aphrodite, De- 
 light. In the current literature were their rit- 
 uals; in paintings and statues, their images; in 
 opera, their hymns. The contagion of their rites 
 fevered and depraved. 
 
 In the amorality of the neo-pagan atmosphere, 
 the princess really loved. She loved in an epoch 
 when no one loved at all. It was very eccentric 
 of her. To be eccentric is always hazardous. 
 The danger was there. She mistook it for bliss. 
 In that disguise it caught and killed her. 
 
 A prince asked her hand. The prince was 
 Radziwill, a Polish refugee, who travelled about 
 with the twelve apostles, life-size, in massivei 
 gold, which, in accordance with his needs, he 
 melted. 
 
 In considering the proposal, which she pres- 
 ently rejected, she told him the secret. It was 
 so inspiring that with it he planned to have the 
 Sultan put them both on the throne of the Jagel- 
 lons. Whether he were suited for it is unim- 
 portant. But she looked the queen which she 
 might have been, though not perhaps in Po- 
 land. Apparently, too, the time had come. 
 From Isfahan the other prince, the Persian, sent 
 her the promised papers.
 
 The Northern Messalina 123 
 
 Among them was Elisabeth's will. Elisabeth 
 then was dead. Catherine II. had succeeded her. 
 According to the documents, the accession was 
 illegal. In the will, Elisabeth appointed her 
 daughter to succeed her and that daughter, issue 
 of her marriage with Razoumovski, was Aly 
 Emettee de Vlodomir. 
 
 At the time, she was in the ideal city of the 
 material world. Venice should have detained 
 this girl who embodied its charm. But the 
 dream that always had been with her and which, 
 it may be, had given her the look, enigmatically 
 triste, which they alone display whom destiny 
 has marked for some fate, supreme or tragic, 
 that dream, or that destiny, held her and led 
 her and hid her away. 
 
 Then, too, a rumour of the will, the report 
 that she was granddaughter of Peter the Great, 
 the evocation of power absolute, these things 
 and her presence, sovereign, gracious, sad, 
 stirred Venice. Along the liquid streets ran 
 the ripple of the cry, "Viva I'imperatrice!" 
 
 That also may have been coercive. Presently, 
 in addition, there was love. 
 
 Radziwill, meanwhile, more enthusiastic, 
 more enamoured and more absurd than ever, 
 melted his last apostle. Clearly the Sultan, Per- 
 fume of Paradise, Shadow of God on Earth,
 
 124 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 could refuse nothing to a descendant of the 
 Porte's arch-foe. The plan was magnificent, it 
 was also insane. The princess, disassociating 
 herself from him and from it, went to Ragusa, 
 where she sent the admiral of a Russian squad- 
 ron, then at Leghorn, a copy of her mother's 
 will. 
 
 The admiral, Alexis Orlov, had been Cath- 
 erine's lover. He referred the matter to her. 
 In reply he was commanded to seize the claim- 
 ant at any cost, even though he had to bombard 
 the coast to get her. 
 
 That order, if executed, meant war. It is per- 
 haps obvious that Catherine, in giving it, knew 
 the facts and preferred war to their recognition. 
 
 Historians generally have ignored that point. 
 Generally they have ignored the princess. Other- 
 wise they have derided her. To some, her Per- 
 sian was a fabulous being. To others, her purity 
 was as mythical. Challemel-Lacour described 
 her as an adventuress. She may have been. But 
 some time later, de Verac, the French minister 
 at Petersburg, received a bill which he was 
 asked to collect. The bill was from a Paris 
 merchant who claimed that the Princess Tara- 
 kanov owed him fifty thousand francs. De Verac 
 had never heard of the lady. At headquarters 
 he asked about her. He was requested not to
 
 The Northern Messalina 125 
 
 ask again, but he was told that the bill would be 
 paid, which it was, although bills incurred by 
 the Russian squadron in French waters were 
 protested and payment refused. Privately, his 
 enquiries continued. From the secret service 
 he learned that the princess was Elisabeth II. 
 
 In those days communication was very lei- 
 surely. When Orlov received Catherine's com- 
 mands, the course he adopted was characteristic- 
 ally that of the average Russian of whom it 
 is characteristic not to have any character at all. 
 He prostrated himself before the girl whom he 
 called his empress and to whom he swore the 
 fealty of a knight. The sad girl listened, lis- 
 tened longer, listened as she had listened to no 
 man before. Orlov was a giant and an athlete. 
 Because of a fight in which he had sunk the 
 Turkish fleet, he was called a hero. He looked 
 it. He was superiorly handsome. Though a 
 ruffian, he, too, could charm. That charm en- 
 circled her. Italy and youth and love! Love 
 in the land where, said Owen Meredith, "love 
 most lovely seems!" 
 
 In the girl's entourage there were those who 
 doubted, who warned, who perhaps foresaw. 
 But the girl who had never yet loved, then loved 
 wholly. The man, his splendid vigour, his 
 knightly allegiance, enthralled. Then too there
 
 126 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 was the dream into which he entered with her. 
 He told her, what was true, that he and his 
 brothers had put Catherine on the throne. He 
 added, what was false, that he and his brothers 
 would take it from her. Then, if his lady but 
 deigned, she and he could share it. 
 
 In the passionate wooing the impassioned girl 
 was won. She became his wife and, amid the 
 boom of guns and acclaiming cries, went with 
 him to the flagship, where instantly he disap- 
 peared. About her were marines. She was a 
 prisoner. A prisoner she remained until she 
 reached Petersburg where Catherine had her 
 put to the question, tortured to death. 
 
 The throne then was secure. From it Cath- 
 erine had torn an emperor whom she murdered. 
 From it she had held another emperor whom 
 she killed. There were no more claimants. The 
 last of the Romanovs was dead, and at her latest 
 lover the empress leered.
 
 VII 
 
 VENUS VICTRIX 
 
 FROM the cupboard of yawns that history 
 is, Catherine the Greater emerges in 
 spangles. Her life was an opera com- 
 posed by Chance. Musicians do not know him; 
 mythographers do not mention him, mathema- 
 ticians deny that he is. Yet, drawn in a chariot 
 of jewels by horses of flame, those whom he 
 favours are raised to the sky. Chance carried 
 her portrait from a tinpot principality to the 
 great Peter's grandson and herself to the throne. 
 
 That grandson, a poodle-faced boy, pock- 
 marked, witless, neurotically unable to be still, 
 and whose tongue, when not wagging with in- 
 anities, hung like a hound's from his mouth, 
 was the son of the Duchess of Holstein-Gottorp, 
 Elisabeth's sister. Appointed tsarevitch, he was 
 given for bride the Princess Sophia Augusta of 
 Anhalt-Zerbst, whom the Church christened 
 Catherine; and Voltaire, Semiramis. 
 
 The name rolls; it is empty as sound. Semi- 
 ramis never existed. But the name subsists. It 
 
 127
 
 128 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 means the One who Loves. As such it fitted this 
 girl who was to become the grande amou reuse 
 and whose dramatic entrance into history was 
 effected with a swoon. At sight of the whelp 
 she fainted. 
 
 A virgin and — in appearance — very ethereal, 
 she had two ambitions. She wanted the mantle 
 of glory. She wanted the perfume of Eros. She 
 wanted to be Venus Victrix. 
 
 At the time, a Psyche on a fan, slight and 
 very fair, her mouth was red as sealing-wax, 
 her hair an auburn turban. Her eyes, sometimes 
 heliotrope, were sometimes green, sometimes 
 grey. In later years, dignity replaced the de- 
 liciousness that had been. In lieu of Psyche, 
 there was Juno. With age came the sibyl, a 
 sybil obese, dropsical, sinister. But when she 
 left Stettin, where she had played with raga- 
 muffins in the sullen streets, and journeyed to 
 Russia and the throne, it was endearing to see 
 the blushes, the ingenuousness, the modesty that 
 she displayed. She looked precisely what she 
 was, fresh from school, pretty enough to eat — 
 while preparing to devour an empire. 
 
 In her memoirs she says that already she had 
 determined to have it and have it alone. By 
 way of preparation for the meal, she sharpened 
 her teeth on Machiavelli, taught herself Rus-
 
 Venus Victrix 129 
 
 sian and meditated the mosaics of the Greek 
 faith. In marrying the whelp that faith would 
 have to be hers. But she had no inconvenient 
 scruples. She would have become Mormon if 
 necessary and though it was not, she did. That, 
 though, was later. Meanwhile, from the swoon 
 into which the prospective delights of marriage 
 with the poodle-faced boy had thrown her, she 
 got herself together, got the whelp and, when 
 the throne was his, put him from it as a child 
 is put to sleep. For soothing syrup he had 
 poison; for lullaby, contempt; for cradle, a 
 grave. 
 
 The whelp — historically Peter III. — was a 
 German. He was born a German, died a Ger- 
 man. Frederick, at the time, was on his knees. 
 This imbecile first raised him up, then knelt 
 before him. From that day, Prussia began an 
 ascent that culminated at the Marne. The origi- 
 nal Romanov was a Prussian. Peter III. was 
 a Hun. 
 
 Among other children of Catherine was Paul, 
 who succeeded her. In her memoirs she says 
 that Peter the Little was not Paul's father. His- 
 torians who know more about it than she did, 
 insist that he was. In listening to them, one 
 might mistake the lady for an austere matron. 
 The error would have annoyed her. She had
 
 130 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 no false pride. On the other hand, she did have 
 a few lovers. Among them was Saltykov, who 
 may have been Paul's father. But, as Voltaire 
 said, and said too very reasonably: — "These are 
 family matters." 
 
 All that was later. At the start, Catherine, 
 who had determined to be first, began by being 
 last. Before commanding, she obeyed; before 
 usurping, she effaced herself. To Elisabeth, she 
 was adorably subservient; to Peter, unutterably 
 considerate; to the court — amazed at such guile- 
 lessness — she was delightfully ingenue. To no 
 one, however obscure, was she negligent. She 
 importuned no one, however great. She gave 
 everything and asked nothing. The rose was 
 her model. She charmed and was silent. Yet, 
 without seeming to listen, she heard everything. 
 Apparently ethereal, she was preparing to gob- 
 ble a throne. 
 
 Hunger appeased, Cinderbritch vanished. 
 The swooning virgin had gone. To the court's 
 astonishment, an ingenue became a general; a 
 girl, a despot. Peter the Great made Russia 
 recognise Europe. Catherine the Greater made 
 Russia recognised by the world. That is his- 
 tory. When enemies were arming, concerning 
 their number she never enquired. What she 
 asked was: — ''Where are they?" That is Ro-
 
 CATHERIN] II
 
 Venus Victrix 131 
 
 man. When she learned that Diderot was poor, 
 she bought his library, made him its custodian 
 and paid him a salary for fifteen years in ad- 
 vance. That is delightful. When her purse 
 was empty she evoked the ghost of gold that 
 paper money is and saddled her country with 
 debt. Had she wished she could have manufac- 
 tured money out of leather, out of blades of 
 grass and given it any value she liked. She 
 could do anything and did almost everything. 
 She cowered but once. That was at the sight 
 of the French revolution. Immediately she 
 straightened. Her little household, as she called 
 Russia, was not France. Moreover, she com- 
 manded an army that fought without pay, with- 
 out rest, often without food and always with- 
 out complaint. Against that army no revolu- 
 tion could prevail. No, nor Asia either. Had 
 she lived, she would have owned it. 
 
 Beside her, Peter, her lord, looked exactly 
 what he was and nothing worse can be said of 
 him — an imbecile who drilled tin soldiers, 
 dressed wax dolls, trained terriers in his bed- 
 room, occupied his absence of mind with gro- 
 tesque puerilities, worshipped Frederick, made 
 peace with Prussia, prussianised the army, got 
 drunk with his lackeys and foisted on the court 
 a band of Holsteiners as ignoble — if that be pos-
 
 132 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 sible — as himself. Catherine, meanwhile, belle 
 comme le jour, to employ her own description 
 of herself, was dreaming of grandeur absolute. 
 By way of practise, she managed the idiot's 
 duchy. Later, when the dream came true, she 
 found it quite as easy to manage his empire. 
 She was a born administrator and yet a woman. 
 But what a woman! Caesar and Faustine com- 
 bined. 
 
 Faustine had many lovers. Catherine had 
 more. But before she was empress only a few, 
 just enough to hand her up on the throne from 
 which they pulled her husband off. In tsaral 
 annals, the modus of the elimination, then 
 unique, was to become common. Peter III. was 
 murdered. He was given arsenic in vodka. The 
 poison being ineffective, Alexis Orlov knocked 
 him down, held him down and strangled him 
 with a napkin. Orlov's punishment, highly dra- 
 matic, and equally delayed, will be told later 
 on. For the murder itself, Catherine has been 
 rebuked. Perhaps it had its excuse. Prior to 
 Elisabeth's death, Peter the Small had made it 
 clear to Semiramis that once tsar he would di- 
 vorce and replace her, as Peter the Great's wife 
 had been replaced, by a scullion. Catherine had 
 therefore the choice between immolating and
 
 Venus Victrix 133 
 
 being immolated. It was at dinner that she de- 
 cided. 
 
 Tacitus tells of a supper, given by Nero to 
 Britannicus, who died of it. "After a moment 
 of silence," the historian noted, "gaiety re- 
 turned." Post breve silentium, repetitia convivit 
 Icetltia. The dinner resembled that supper. 
 
 The dinner was held in a high hall, hung 
 with Asiatic splendour, flooded with European 
 light. The foreign ministers were there, the 
 great nobles, the ladies of honour, a swarm of 
 princes and peris perfumed with lies, starred 
 with diamonds, radiant as rainbows. 
 
 Peter, rising, proposed the health of the im- 
 perial family. Catherine remained seated. Why 
 not? The imperial family consisted of herself; 
 of Paul, who was a child; of Peter, who was 
 her husband. 
 
 "Doura!" Peter the Small bawled at her. 
 "Fool!" 
 
 Everybody heard, except Catherine. With a 
 smile she turned to one of her gentlemen. With 
 a fresher smile she turned to another. A mo- 
 ment merely. But in that moment a grave had 
 been dug. Then she looked at Peter. So must 
 Nero have looked at Britannicus. 
 
 Peter counted for little. What he did count 
 for was German. Petersburg had an indiges-
 
 134 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 tion of Teuton customs, Teuton manners, Teu- 
 ton touts. Catherine was not Teuton. She had 
 begun by being German but the taint had been 
 drained. She had become wholly Russian prior 
 to becoming entirely French. The versatility 
 of her universality enthralled prelates and pre- 
 torians, the boiars and the army. When the 
 time came, she but lifted her finger. They rose 
 to her. 
 
 The dinner was in celebration of peace with 
 Prussia whom Elisabeth, had she lived, would 
 have knifed. A few days later, Peter celebrated 
 the peace again, but on this occasion at Oranien- 
 baum, a plaisance where Catherine omitted to 
 accompany him. 
 
 Incidentally the Orlovs were at work, five of 
 them, five brothers, five men with one head, 
 each of whom commanded a regiment, in one of 
 which Potemkin was lieutenant. Gregori Or- 
 lov, the eldest of the brothers, but though the 
 eldest still very young, had so charmed Cath- 
 erine that familiarly she was called Madame 
 Gregori. He was one of the men to whom she 
 had turned and smiled on the night of the din- 
 ner. The other man was Alexis Orlov, who 
 had charmed her also. 
 
 Early one morning, shortly after, Alexis Or- 
 lov brought her, dressed as a general, to the bar-
 
 Venus Victrix 135 
 
 racks. There, a priest, raising a cross, recited 
 an oath. The soldiers repeated it. A cry went 
 up, "Live the empress!" In that cry Peters- 
 burg joined. 
 
 To the blare of brass, the regiments started, 
 Catherine on horseback leading. Peter got 
 wind of it. He fled to a fortress. The wind 
 had preceded him. 
 
 From a rampart a sentry called: — "Who goes 
 there?" 
 
 "The emperor." 
 
 "There is no emperor. Move on!" 
 
 Peter turned and, whimpering like a beaten 
 cur, offered to share the sceptre. Catherine 
 declined. He begged for mercy. Officially, his 
 death was ascribed to apoplexy. Cretinism were 
 more exact. 
 
 Peter had many defects. The gravest was an 
 inability to appreciate a Tiberius in skirts. That 
 fault official Russia did not share. It rose to 
 her and it knelt. Then, presently, about the 
 throne, the perfume of Eros mounted. 
 
 In the ballroom of her heart, the Orlovs were 
 not her first partners, nor were they the last. 
 Their predecessors were not numerous, but their 
 successors were without number. Moralists 
 have blamed her for that and no doubt very 
 justly. None the less, her cotillon favours repre-
 
 136 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 sented something else than the caprices of an 
 empress autocratically privileged to do as she 
 liked. Catherine elevated her men Pompadours 
 to the dignity of a state institution. They had 
 appointments, prerogatives, and a position that 
 was exceeded only by her own and which fre- 
 quently was on an equality with it. Several of- 
 fended her greatly, successively she wearied of 
 each, yet to all she was decent, none incurred 
 her dislike. One, whom she surprised with her 
 nearest friend, she dismissed, but not to Siberia. 
 Another she relinquished to a rival, without 
 chopping his head off first. Christine of Swe- 
 den had a faithless du Barry killed in her pres- 
 ence. Queen Elisabeth was as bloody. Lovers 
 of whom Catherine wearied or who wearied of 
 her, preserved her friendship, enjoyed her pro- 
 tection. When their intimacy with her ended, 
 their service to the state began. Or, if they 
 lacked the ability, they lived semi-royally on 
 her royal largesse. 
 
 The first to gather her handkerchief was Sal- 
 tykov, a young assembly of brilliant vices whose 
 assiduities, favoured for reasons dynastic, were 
 interrupted. He was given an honorific exile 
 and sent as minister to Sweden. Catherine, who 
 was not then Semiramis, but grand-duchess 
 merely, shed no tears. The lustre of his bril-
 
 Venus Victrix 137 
 
 liance had been already dimmed. Into her ken 
 another partner had swum. The new planet 
 was Poniatowski, a tourist from Poland who 
 returned there as king. 
 
 The kingship had been predicted. When but 
 a child an astrologer drew his horoscope. In 
 it was a throne. What throne? Nobody knew, 
 but he was trained for it as a colt is trained for 
 a race. In the training he acquired the atti- 
 tude and strut of a king on the stage. That was 
 mere facade. Back of it was the ingenuousness 
 of a young lady, and fronting it was a smile in 
 which there was Chateau Yquem. Such a smile 
 is heady. It captivated Catherine. But though 
 he had a languorous eye on her, he had another 
 and a very timorous one on Siberia. In Russia, 
 one never knew! Besides, he barely escaped it. 
 
 Late one night he reached the grand-ducal 
 residence where Catherine awaited him. While 
 effecting a surreptitious entrance, he was sur- 
 prised by the guard and taken to Peter. At 
 the moment, the future monarch was guzzling 
 with his lady, a very elegant young person, 
 squint-eyed, stupid, malodorous, who, Masson 
 says, spat when she talked. 
 
 Peter grinned. "Come to assassinate me?" 
 
 Poniatowski, his facade crumbling, stam- 
 mered a protest.
 
 138 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Peter giggled. "He, he! You're after the 
 grand-duchess. Well, run along. I, too, have a 
 girl." 
 
 Subsequently, Catherine gave him a crown. 
 That bit of jewellry was his walking-stick. She 
 made him king to be rid of him. Poland, the 
 mad nation, a nation chivalrous, heroic, insane, 
 removed it. Poland that had withstood the Ta- 
 tars and was to withstand everything, could not 
 stand a young lady, though recently she listened 
 to a pianist. From the Slav Valhalla, with what 
 fierce surprise, the Jagellons, her warrior kings, 
 must have looked down at that! 
 
 Catherine's handkerchief passed from Ponia- 
 towski to the Orlovs, from them to Potemkin, 
 from him to Zubov. Saltykov and Poniatowski 
 were her maitres de danse. In the great cotillon 
 that followed, the Orlovs mark the beginning, 
 Potemkin the height, Zubov the end. Interme- 
 diately were other partners, though how many, 
 history, her hostess, fatigued by the task of enu- 
 merating them, neglected to count. But in the 
 long bacchanal, Gregori Orlov detained her 
 most. 
 
 Vigorous, violent, fearless, a giant in stat- 
 ure, Gregori Orlov was the handsomest man of 
 his day. After the manner of giants he was 
 dull. But he looked every inch the sultan that
 
 Venus Victrix 139 
 
 he became. He not only looked the sultan, he 
 filled the role. To him, Semiramis was but an- 
 other odalisque in the seraglio which he main- 
 tained. Catherine tolerated his impertinences, 
 ignored his infidelities, forgave whatever he did. 
 Catherine loved him. More exactly, like every 
 grande amoureuse, and of them all she was the 
 greatest, when she said je t'aime she meant je 
 m'aime and failed to see the difference. Nor 
 did Orlov see it. He thought of marrying her. 
 It seemed the simplest thing in the world. She 
 had given him honours, titles, palaces, serfs by 
 the thousand, domains by the league. She shared 
 the treasury with him. But the throne, no. 
 There pride interfered, the consciousness that 
 however she might condescend, the sceptre must 
 remain indivisibly hers. Then also, while Orlov 
 had practically put the sceptre in her hand, 
 while, too, he was a sort of Greek god, yet the 
 coup d'etat had been to him merely an adven- 
 ture, and his divinity was of the early and very 
 primitive type. The god was null. Presently 
 the nullity was revealed. To have an empress 
 at his feet was insufficient. He ran off with a 
 chit of a girl, who died, and the pulp behind 
 his forehead deglutinised. He went mad, cov- 
 ering his face with offal which, like Ezechiel, 
 he ate.
 
 140 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 At the time, the madness was said to have 
 been caused not at all by grief, but by an herb 
 with which Potemkin poisoned him. 
 
 Potemkin too was mad, not from an herb, but 
 with genius. One of the many who handed 
 Catherine up on the throne, he began, on the 
 morning of the coup d'etat, by offering her a 
 silver feather for her uniform and might have 
 ended by putting the Byzantine crown on her 
 head. On the morning of the revolution, he 
 was an ensign. Orlov gone, he was vice-em- 
 peror. Between those sentences there are years. 
 There is also an ascent from nowhere to every- 
 thing. Catherine made him prince, premier, 
 plutocrat, generalissimo. With the Crimea and 
 the Black Sea, royally he repaid her. 
 
 Women admire the brave but they prefer the 
 audacious. Saltykov was a ladies' man. Pon- 
 iatowski was a lady. Orlov was a devil, Po- 
 temkin was a demon. The cotillon which Cath- 
 erine danced with these and with other men and 
 in which she displayed a temperamental intem- 
 perance more extravagant than any that the mod- 
 ern world has beheld, represents the spacious- 
 ness of her heart, which many entered and none 
 could fill. Saltykov surprised her. Poniatow- 
 ski charmed her. Orlov carried her off her feet. 
 Potemkin held her in the air. Her interest in
 
 Venus Victrix 141 
 
 Saltykov and in Poniatowski was that of the ama- 
 teur in experimental physiology. But it was 
 Orlov who taught her to love and Potemkin 
 who taught her to reign. If neither became her 
 master, it was because no man could be that. 
 
 Potemkin was also a giant, a giant with one 
 eye. In a tavern brawl he had lost the other. 
 Alexis Orlov knocked it out. Gregori Orlov 
 was gigantic and violent. Alexis Orlov was gi- 
 gantic and brutal. Potemkin was gigantic and 
 terrible. A dark cyclops with the air of a jackal 
 and the negligences of a pasha, he was the only 
 one of Catherine's partners whom she had not 
 selected for his looks, but also he was the only 
 one who spared her the advances which she 
 was always obliged to make, the only one who 
 dared. That won her to this man, who loved her 
 with the tenderness of an amant and the poetry 
 of a troubadour. She was his mistress and his 
 glory. When satiety came, ambition linked them 
 still. 
 
 Incidentally, she was pushing the frontiers 
 back, extending her little household, at the 
 north, to the aurora; at the east to the dawn; 
 at the south, nearly to the gates of Stamboul. 
 
 In the extension, Potemkin greatly aided. To 
 her menage he added the Crimea and then took 
 her to see it.
 
 142 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 It would have been interesting to have ac- 
 companied her in the Arabian Night entertain- 
 ment that he devised and through which in a 
 sleigh — Cleopatra's barge on runners and for 
 which, and for her suite that followed, there 
 were five hundred horses at each relay — she 
 passed down from polar ice to a tropical sun, 
 from Petersburg to the Euxine, from surprise 
 to enchantment, from the emptied thrones of Ta- 
 tar khans to the abandoned divans of Ottoman 
 viceroys, from fallen palaces of kings of the 
 Bosphorus to the crumbled temples of Hercules 
 and Diana, from memories of Mithridates to 
 the myths of Greece, from illusion to illusion, 
 through scenery painted on canvas, through pan- 
 oramas that vanished as she passed, through 
 trained ballets of acclaiming crowds, through 
 cascading fireworks, through uninterrupted 
 fetes, down into glowing gardens where Walla- 
 chian hospodars, Circassian princes, dispossessed 
 Georgian lords genuflected to the Star of the 
 North, who, at the end of the route, saw a tri- 
 umphal arch on which blazed an inscription — 
 "The Way to Stamboul." 
 
 At one halt, Catherine was greeted by the 
 Austrian emperor, disguised as a gentleman; at 
 another by Poniatowski, disguised as a king. 
 Segur — French minister to the court of Semi-
 
 Venus Victrix 143 
 
 ramis — who went with her, said that the meet- 
 ing between the ex-amants was formal. What 
 did he expect? But presently the two retired 
 into privacy where they probably talked of old 
 times as old people do. On emerging, Ponia- 
 towski had mislaid his hat. Catherine found and 
 restored it. 
 
 "Ah!" said Poniatowski with his Chateau 
 Yquem smile. "You gave me once a far finer 
 
 one." 
 
 Segur said that Catherine's conversation was 
 very banal. Poniatowski may have copied it. 
 
 Near Moscow, on the return flight, an opera 
 was given in the private theatre of a resident 
 count. The composer, the librettist, the singers, 
 the musicians, the corps de ballet, everybody 
 connected with the representation — except the 
 count's guests — were his serfs. Earlier that day 
 the tenor, who took the part of a king, had been 
 flogged. At a supper which followed, Segur 
 noted that the goblets, enough for a hundred, 
 were incrusted with jewels. 
 
 Potcmkin surpassed the count. In magnifi- 
 cence, he exceeded Catherine. His entertain- 
 ments bewilder the pen. The paragraphs that 
 tell of them dazzle. The Crimean junket, the 
 unequalled journey through the antique Tau- 
 rida, was but one of the many flowers that he
 
 144 The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 put at his sovereign's feet. At a ball which he 
 gave for her, lackeys handed about goblets filled 
 with diamonds to the brim. 
 
 Hero and lover, doubly triumphant, he too 
 thought of marrying his queen. It seemed to 
 him, as it had seemed to Orlov, the simplest 
 thing in the world. Catherine regarded the mat- 
 ter as before. He threatened to become a monk. 
 For a cyclops and a jackal, the threat was ridicu- 
 lous. Catherine laughed. The charm was 
 broken. Friendship remained. Potemkin, fan- 
 tastic in all things, demonstrated his in a man- 
 ner that was perhaps original. He made lists 
 of eligible young men and, with the lists, sub- 
 mitted their portraits. It was for Catherine to 
 choose. For a while, she did. But Zubov, who 
 succeeded them all, she selected unassisted. 
 
 Saltykov entered her life when she was young, 
 Zubov when she was old. Young she was de- 
 licious. Age moldered her. Seen across a 
 room she was still imperial. Close to, was a 
 toothless woman with furtive eyes, a quavering 
 voice and passions still unappeased. Yet, far 
 or near, her power was predominant. The 
 splendour of her court, the pomp of her princes, 
 the extent of her dominions, created an admi- 
 ration that was stupefying. Her prestige sur- 
 passed the forgotten glories of Louis XIV. But
 
 Venus Victrix 145 
 
 in the same manner that her fame transcended 
 his, her bacchanals exceeded Faustine's. There 
 are planes beneath which there is perhaps noth- 
 ing deeper. Tiberius devised vices for which 
 names had to be coined. The Winter Palace 
 became a Tiberian villa. Zubov, young enough 
 to be her grandson, had companions in arms, 
 and in his and in their company, while her troops 
 beat the Turks, fought the Swedes, devastated 
 Poland, the sinister and prodigious woman 
 achieved the ultimate descent. 
 
 Zubov's portrait was not submitted by Po- 
 temkin, it was self-presented. He put himself 
 where Catherine could see him. Any officer 
 who had, or who thought he had, a well-turned 
 leg did the same. The state apartments were 
 lined with fetching young men. They formed 
 a hedge along which the sovereign passed, 
 looked, smiled, passed on. Zubov followed the 
 smile. It led him far and high. Another sub- 
 altern was a fille entretenue. With none of Or- 
 lov's dash, without a spark of Potemkin's abil- 
 ity, he obtained from her more power than 
 either, more wealth than both. In the last years 
 of her reign, Zubov was automatically and au- 
 tocratically tsar. 
 
 His portrait, which Potemkin neglected, Mas- 
 son displayed. It shows a youth in a dressing-
 
 146 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 gown and not a very decent one, waited on by 
 his valets, the lords and princes of the realm. 
 His back is turned. But in a mirror before 
 him, his face appears, cold, vain, empty. In 
 his hand is a book; on his shoulder a monkey. 
 Meanwhile his valets stand and wait, wait and 
 stand until he deigns to turn, deigns to look. 
 At that condescension, instantly they prostrated 
 themselves before the Pompadour who had been 
 emptying the treasury, filling the prisons and 
 whom no one, unpermitted, dared to address. 
 There were those who were there on matters 
 of state. Day in, day out, month after month 
 they came before the permission was accorded. 
 Then negligently, in that negligee, the tsar dis- 
 missed them. 
 
 Slight of body and slimmer of soul, he may 
 have possessed, Masson, for finishing touch, con- 
 cludes, occult qualities which only Catherine 
 could appreciate. No doubt. Besides, to the 
 old woman that she was, he was spring, fair 
 skies, youth's return and she a girl again, loved 
 as Poniatowski had loved her, for her charm 
 alone. There is sorcery in that and in the first 
 enthrallment of it she regarded him as a genius. 
 Afterward she saw him more after the manner 
 of a sultana on whose neck is a eunuch's heel. 
 
 Potemkin, at the time, was at Jassy. He
 
 Venus Victrix 147 
 
 started for Petersburg. On a highway he died. 
 It was reported that Zubov had had him 
 poisoned. Perhaps he had. But an annalist 
 says that during a fever that overtook him en 
 route, he ate a whole ham, a smoked goose, three 
 chickens, drank liquor by the quart, drenching 
 himself alternately with ice-water and cologne. 
 Gigantic and fantastic in life, fantastically and 
 gigantically he died. At the news of it, the sul- 
 tana leered at the eunuch. 
 
 Zubov is the smear on the chronicles of a 
 woman sovereignly enabled to do as she liked 
 and who was very polite about it. One after an- 
 other she killed the last three Romanovs and ran 
 Poland through the heart. To-day, these things 
 are forgotten. The blood has dried, only dust 
 remains and the fading memory of an empress 
 whose life was a decameron to be read with 
 pursed lips. But in her were Alexandrine am- 
 bitions. The route which Potemkin blazed the 
 way, she would have followed to St. Sophia and 
 beyond it to Delhi and the peacock throne. She 
 had the will, the ability, the power. What she 
 lacked was time. Apoplexy battened on her as 
 she had on Warsaw. It is said that she gave 
 up the ghost with a shriek. Was it Poland that 
 she saw? 
 
 Indulgent and cruel, prodigal and mean, a
 
 148 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 woman in whom every contradiction was re- 
 sumed, Catherine was an empress who made 
 enormous an empire already vast; a tsaritsa who 
 enumerated her victories and could not count 
 her amours; a conqueror who had Adonis for 
 secretary of the treasury and Apollo for min- 
 ister of war; a cynic who slaughtered Poland 
 and called herself a pupil of Voltaire; a sov- 
 ereign before whom the entire pageant of pas- 
 sion and glory unrolled; a tyrant and a lesbian 
 who passed through history dripping with blood 
 and exhaling the perfume of Eros. 
 
 Succinctly, a great temperament; concisely, a 
 great man; summarily, the least detestable des- 
 pot of the lot, and yet, primarily, a German 
 girl who had come to Russia without a penny 
 and without a friend. 
 
 Shortly after she reached Petersburg her 
 father died. He died on his barren farm, which 
 was called a principality. 
 
 "It is ridiculous of you to cry," Elisabeth 
 told her. "You ought to know better. Your 
 father was nobody." 
 
 Elisabeth was too civil to add "and a pauper." 
 Besides, as she perhaps divined, the girl was 
 superiorly endowed. Catherine had assets. The 
 assets were appetites. She gorged them. Dur- 
 ing a reign that lasted from the middle of the
 
 Venus Victrix 149 
 
 eighteenth century to the beginning of the nine- 
 teenth, an empty-handed nobody gave her lovers 
 the equivalent of half a billion and ruled fifty 
 different races with a despotism that was iden- 
 tical for each. 
 
 Previously Psyche, she was Venus Victrix 
 then. At her feet lay all the Russias. To her 
 the whole of Europe bowed. At her left was 
 a son whom she hated ; at her right a lover whom 
 she paid. Seated between them on the tallest 
 of earthly thrones, covered and crowned with 
 diamonds and with gold, she knew, as no other 
 woman has known, how love and glory taste. 
 The bitterness of them filled her toothless mouth.
 
 VII 
 
 PAUL 
 
 CATHERINE, who entered history with 
 a swoon, departed with a shriek. At 
 the shriek, Night unfurled her great 
 black fan. Another reign of terror had begun. 
 
 The shriek proclaimed Paul emperor. The 
 proclamation was involuntary. Catherine did 
 not want Paul to rule. She had arranged other- 
 wise. He ruled, none the less, and in such a 
 manner that at his own exit he also shrieked. 
 With that shriek for motif, Bovery composed 
 an opera, and Petersburg a Te Deum. 
 
 Paul's coronation robe should have been a 
 straitjacket. Ivan was mad. Peter was mad. 
 Their madness appals, but it fascinates. In hor- 
 ror raised to the ultimate degree there is gran- 
 deur. Paul's insanity took the form of micro- 
 philia. Domitian was a microphile. He spe- 
 cialised in flies. Heliogabalus was a microphile. 
 He collected cobwebs. Microphilia is the in- 
 sanity of the petty. 
 
 The maladies and particularly the deaths of 
 
 150
 
 Paul 151 
 
 those emperors should have instructed Paul. 
 Besides, since their day, times had changed. 
 They had changed, too, since the days of Ivan 
 and of Peter. Catherine's reign had been a lib- 
 eral education. She scandalised Europe, mur- 
 dered her husband, killed Peter's nephew, cru- 
 cified Elisabeth's daughter, slaughtered Prague, 
 assassinated Warsaw, destroyed Poland and 
 hated her son. She was a well-bred woman. But 
 men no longer had their heads chopped off for 
 a yes or a no. Women's tongues might w T ag, 
 they were not torn out for that reason. Cath- 
 erine was indulgent. Paul was modest. 
 
 "I will thank you to understand," he told an 
 envoy who had spoken of some boiar as an im- 
 portant person, "that there is but one important 
 person in Russia. That is the person whom I 
 happen to address and his importance lasts only 
 while I am addressing him." 
 
 The microphile was a megalomaniac. That 
 was not his mother's fault. Catherine dwarfed 
 and hated him, as she hated and dwarfed her 
 husband. The hatred that she had for her son 
 is the sole evidence that he was legitimate. 
 Psychologically, the evidence had its weight. 
 
 Paul examined it and turned to Poniatowski. 
 "Are you my father? 1 ' 
 
 The problem was delicate, the solution ob-
 
 152 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 scure. Poniatovvski, who was then old, fat, rheu- 
 matic and a king no longer, shook his head and 
 sat down. 
 
 With imperial brevity, Paul again addressed 
 him. "Standi" 
 
 He turned anew to the evidence. It seemed con- 
 clusive. He gave orders accordingly. The or- 
 ders, spectacular in their theatrical effect, will 
 be recited in a moment. 
 
 When Catherine shrieked, Paul was married, 
 middle-aged, the father of three sons," two of 
 whom successively succeeded him. The shriek 
 reached him at Gatchina, a country fortress near 
 Petersburg, where he lived with a Wtirtemburg 
 woman, who was his wife; with an embittered 
 young Russian, who was the dearer one yet, and 
 with a regiment which he dressed and drilled, 
 Prussian fashion, whip in hand. The fashion 
 was otherwise observed. The uniform was Prus- 
 sian, But one that Prussia had long since aban- 
 doned. Paul loved it. He loved the past. Ex- 
 cept such torture as he could inflict, it was the 
 only thing that he did love. 
 
 The atmosphere of Gatchina was grand-ducal, 
 pestilential and penitentiary. Travellers avoided 
 it. Above, in a turret, was a telescope. There 
 Paul sat. Any one whom he could spy afar 
 making a detour to keep out of his way, he sent
 
 Paul 1 53 
 
 cavalry to overtake and imprison. "Let me be 
 hated," said Caligula. "But let me be feared." 
 
 Paul was Caligula in miniature. Like him, 
 he was hideous but, excessive in every form of 
 hideousnesss, he was more hideous. He had 
 the face of a cat, a dead cat, a dead Kalmuck 
 skunk, and with that death's-head on a short 
 pudgy body, he strutted. After Catherine's exit, 
 he strutted crowned. In his palaces, he was 
 the monarch that the old pictures show. On pa- 
 rade, he was the drill-sergeant, but everywhere 
 the bully. In behalf of some one, Alexander, his 
 son, at the time but a boy, fell at his feet, begged 
 him to be merciful. Paul kicked him in the 
 face. 
 
 "Sacha, was it you who killed him?" that 
 boy's mother afterward asked. 
 
 At Gatchina, he spied a giant on horseback 
 racing toward the fortress. The giant was Niko- 
 lai Zubov, brother of the Pompadour en titre. 
 The shock of the sight of him gave Paul the 
 colic. He thought he had come to arrest him. 
 Zubov had been hastening to announce that 
 Catherine was in extremis. The colic passed, 
 but another fear gripped him. To allay it, off 
 he rode. 
 
 At the Winter Palace, Catherine was uncon- 
 scious. Up the great stairway, through a double
 
 154 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 hedge of Circassians, and on through high halls 
 rilled with courtiers and lackeys, Paul passed to 
 her apartments. Before he reached them, the 
 death-rattle had begun. 
 
 In one room was an escritoire and near it 
 an open fire. Paul opened the desk. Among 
 the papers was an order for his arrest. He gave 
 it to the flames. Another paper was a will in 
 which his mother appointed his son, Alexander, 
 her successor. That also he destroyed. 
 
 He turned. Before him was the Pompadour. 
 Behind Zubov was a throng of nobles. Paul 
 lifted his dead-cat face. With a pudgy hand 
 he gestured. 
 
 "I am your emperorl" 
 
 Instantly Zubov, to w r hom all Russia cringed, 
 was cringing. Instantly the nobles were on their 
 knees. 
 
 It was then that Night unfurled her great 
 black fan. A reign of terror had begun. 
 
 The old courtesan that history is, had her at- 
 tenuations for Paul, as she had her myopia for 
 Ivan, her cecity for Peter. An age-long supper 
 on abominations made her indulgent. Youth 
 is always intolerant. Tacitus branded, Juvenal 
 flayed. History then was a debutante. To-day 
 she candies her tales, throws orange blossoms 
 on the tomb of Lucrezia Borgia and immortelles
 
 Paul 155 
 
 on Paul's. Beneath the weeds, Paul has the 
 faded air of a noble character thwarted and mis- 
 understood. But pulled down a chimney by his 
 bandy legs and run through for his crimes? No- 
 where in Russian history is that recorded. His- 
 tory is the one book that has no end. 
 
 Sixty years later, a boy, afterward Alexander 
 III., told a comrade that he had discovered a 
 state secret — the Emperor Paul was assassi- 
 nated! 
 
 Among the attenuations put on Paul's tomb 
 was his grand-ducal existence. Catherine made 
 it a long humiliation. A man who is a man 
 rises from an insult refreshed. It is perhaps a 
 tonic. In a microphile it secretes venom, of 
 which the chemical precipitate is spite. When 
 Catherine's crown passed to Paul he spat on it 
 and ordered another. 
 
 Masson, an idler in Petersburg, says that in 
 the processions of peoples, the ark of the cove- 
 nant was not surrounded by greater pomp than 
 was that new crown during its journey from the 
 jeweller's to the palace. At the palace, the jew- 
 eller-Pygmalion was compelled to kneel in wor- 
 ship to it. 
 
 It was in that crown that the misunderstood 
 lunatic strutted. Always a comic figure — at a 
 safe distance — his mother made him ridiculous.
 
 156 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 While lovers of hers, who were younger than 
 his sons, governed Russia and waded in gold, he 
 was put on an allowance, put in a corner, treated 
 as nobody. Night after night, he and his sons 
 with him, had seen her dismiss the court and 
 march off with some Pompadour who always 
 ignored them. For less than that, Catherine 
 had put her husband in the grave. Paul could 
 have put her in the street. It was not natural 
 affection or filial respect that restrained him. 
 He loathed her as completely as she abominated 
 him. But Catherine, with all her faults, with 
 all her sins, and all her crimes, was brave. Paul, 
 a born bully and, for that reason, a born coward, 
 was afraid of her. With her husband, with Ivan 
 VI. and Elisabeth's daughter for examples, he 
 had cause. He was not a match for her. 
 
 He was not a match for anyone. Since Pul- 
 towa, everywhere the Russian arms were vic- 
 torious. During Paul's reign, generally they 
 were defeated. 
 
 Immortelles, however plentiful, cannot alter 
 that. None the less the circumstances of his 
 pre-monarchal career may have prepared him to 
 be what he became, a tyrant, conceited, fantastic, 
 implacable, mad as a hatter, his pockets stuffed 
 with ukases about nothing at all. To say as 
 much, or rather as little, was impossible. In holy
 
 Paul 157 
 
 Russia, a tsar was sacrosanct, an abyss of knowl- 
 edge, a star of truth. It was quite in that light 
 that Paul regarded himself. All lunatics are 
 imaginative. With power added, sometimes 
 they are spectacular. It is then that they be- 
 come interesting. 
 
 Catherine's body was embalmed and put on a 
 great bed in the throne-room. The embalming, 
 very artistically effected, made her black and 
 orange. People who had beheld her in her 
 splendour, marvelled then at her hideousness. 
 They did not realise that for the first time they 
 saw her as she really was. 
 
 Beside her, on that bed, Paul put another 
 corpse. The watchman whom he selected to 
 stand guard at night was Alexis Orlov. Cath- 
 erine's bedfellow was her husband's skeleton. It 
 was Alexis Orlov who had killed him. In the 
 vast room, which candles feebly lit, Orlov's vigil 
 must have been Dantesque. But the ghosts of 
 that couple, surprised enough to find themselves 
 again together, what spectral secrets they must 
 have muttered, not only to each other, but at 
 him! 
 
 The scene, thoroughly TEschylean, was suc- 
 ceeded by another that did not surpass it, per- 
 haps nothing could, but which Hugo should 
 have painted. During the funeral that followed,
 
 158 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Orlov was compelled to walk, carrying the 
 crown he had wrenched from Peter the Little, 
 and to walk directly behind the coffin into which 
 he had strangled him. Such stagecraft deserves 
 applause. 
 
 From the funeral, Paul turned to affairs of 
 state. Catherine's reign had been a golden age. 
 The massacres committed by her indemnified 
 those who had missed the butcheries of anterior 
 tsars. But the beautiful custom of throwing 
 yourself from your conveyance and grovelling 
 in the snow, in the mud, to the sovereign that 
 passed, Semiramis abolished. With a ukase, 
 Paul revived it. 
 
 Presently, a woman drove by. She had not 
 heard of the ukase. She had never seen Paul. 
 She lived in the country. There, her husband 
 was dying. She was hurrying for a physician. 
 She did not notice a madman on horseback. She 
 was thinking of her husband, of the physician 
 who might save him. On she drove. 
 
 Paul, twisting in the saddle, motioned. "Ar- 
 rest her!" 
 
 Explanations, excuses, prayers, tears, these 
 things availed her nothing. Afar her husband 
 waited, wondered, hoped, despaired, agonised 
 and died. In the stone sack where she was
 
 Paul 159 
 
 thrown, mercifully a fever came in which she 
 joined him. 
 
 Paul dealt with the army as he dealt with 
 that woman. For the slightest inadvertence, ar- 
 rest. Generals came to the daily drill with trav- 
 elling bags. They never knew at what moment 
 or for what reason Paul would order them seized 
 and carted away. On one occasion a line wav- 
 ered. "Halt!" Paul ordered. "March!" he con- 
 tinued and added: — "To Siberia!" 
 
 Discipline first, accoutrements next. Since 
 Peter's day, the uniform of the Russian soldier 
 had been warm without being heavy, easy with- 
 out being loose. Paul trussed the troops in a 
 uniform so tight that if a soldier fell he could 
 barely rise unassisted. On one occasion a horse 
 stumbled. Paul had the animal starved to death. 
 On another occasion a horse threw an officer. 
 "Get up, you scoundrel!" Paul shouted. The 
 officer's leg was broken. Paul spat on him. 
 
 Discipline at any cost. The cost was perhaps 
 excessive. In trussing the troops and exiling 
 the generals, there was an invitation to defeat. 
 The thrashings that ensued made Paul morose. 
 But mobile as madmen are, his humour veered 
 and he shook a fist at Europe. 
 
 "I will fight any sovereign in single combat. 
 I will fight all of them."
 
 160 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Incidentally, he had become grand-master of 
 the Knights of Malta. The office was useful. 
 When visiting his harem where, with the punc- 
 tuality of kings, he went every afternoon at four 
 precisely, the office enabled him to wear the 
 Holy Order of St. John of Jerusalem. It was 
 otherwise serviceable. It prompted. With it, 
 he planned to be pope, successor of Pius VI. and 
 the twelve apostles. A decent, unassuming tsar. 
 
 A busy one also. The form of a hat, the size 
 of a neckcloth, the colour of a feather, the cut 
 of a coat, one's boots, one's gaiters, a coachman's 
 livery, a horse's harness, became affairs of state, 
 the subjects of ukase. The only printing-press 
 that he permitted to function was one that pub- 
 lished his edicts. For a disregard of anyone of 
 them, Siberia! 
 
 The droves he sent there, for no reason what- 
 ever, except the pleasure of it, perplexed the for- 
 eign legates. One of them wrote that, barring 
 the prisons, which were full, Petersburg was be- 
 coming a desert, everybody was being exiled. 
 Some were sent to the mines for calling a yacht 
 a schooner. The yacht was a schooner, but it 
 was Paul's and, by imperial ukase, a frigate. 
 Others went for saying that they had the liberty 
 to do this or that. The use of the word lib- 
 erty was forbidden. It was forbidden to speak
 
 Paul 161 
 
 of any revolution, even and including that of 
 the earth. 
 
 That is an exaggeration. Nothing was for- 
 bidden. Tsaral Russia had no synonym for the 
 Hun Verboten. The imperial formula was 
 either Prikazeno — It is ordered, or Ne prika- 
 zeno — It is not ordered. Simple formulae and 
 yet so magical that it was inconceivable that 
 they should not be observed and logically incon- 
 ceivable. At any infraction, the knout. But 
 an infraction was not a prerequisite. Anything 
 sufficed. Paul thought he would take a walk 
 and said so to a general who remarked that it 
 might rain. What an unpleasant person! The 
 knout! 
 
 The knout for him, for everybody, for any- 
 thing, for nothing at all. After the knout, Si- 
 beria, the pilgrimage undertaken in chains. The 
 chains irked. So much the better! The chains 
 made sores. Better yet! For any dog of a Sa- 
 maritan that attempted to comfort the sufferer, 
 to anoint his sores, to bandage his wounds, the 
 knout! 
 
 The writhings under that knout were joys to 
 Paul. "Flog," he ordered. "Flog without 
 mercy." Then gloatingly he would ask: — "Did 
 they howl? Tell me about it." The details sup-
 
 162 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 plied, he patted his stomach. "Now send them 
 where they won't find their bones." 
 
 A Frenchman was asked what he did during 
 the Terror. "I lived," he replied. During the 
 Pauline terror, Petersburg shammed death as 
 Muscovy had under the khans. When it passed, 
 delight was as insane as Paul. In the frozen 
 streets, beneath the frigid sky, people kissed and 
 romped and danced and sang. An officer ran his 
 horse up on the sidewalk. "Now," he exclaimed, 
 "we can do what we like!" In the first year of 
 the nineteenth century, that was a Russian offi- 
 cer's idea of liberty. 
 
 Kant, in defining liberty, said that it consists 
 in obeying those laws only to which we have 
 given our assent. In any autocracy, particularly 
 in the United States, where one has all the forms 
 of liberty and none of the substance, assent is im- 
 plied. Under the tsars and under the Ca?sars, 
 even the forms were lacking. "Your god and 
 master orders it," Domitian, in addressing the 
 servile senate, negligently remarked. Paul's atti- 
 tude was identical. To heighten it was his dead- 
 cat face. Medievally, death was a grinning 
 skull topping a nightmare frame of bones, to 
 which philosophy added a scythe and poetry 
 wings. From its eyries it swooped, spectral and 
 sinister. Deduct the rictus and replace the
 
 Paul 163 
 
 scythe with a knout and that is the manner in 
 which Paul appeared. High and low quaked 
 if he but looked. The sullen streets were empty. 
 
 Those who had to be in them, made them- 
 selves small, fled at a footstep, dematerialised 
 into shadows. Whatever they did, however they 
 hid, terror stalked them. It stalked all the Rus- 
 sians of all the Russias. It spread as disease 
 spreads, from cities to hamlets, from the prov- 
 inces to the steppes, from the septentrion to the 
 sea. Ashen-faced, along the roads it ran, call- 
 ing, "I am Fear!" 
 
 Throughout Russia, life, then, was a panic and 
 panic is contagious. Breathe it and even auto- 
 crats are infected. It infected Nero. To escape 
 it, he killed himself. It infected Paul. The 
 terror he exuded returning back to its spring, 
 terrorised him. To escape it, he who made 
 others hide, hid from them. 
 
 Nero also hid, but he could not hide from 
 himself. Paul fancied that where that monster 
 failed, he could succeed. By day, he did. He 
 got behind ukases, screened himself with them. 
 But at night, the furies were waiting. The crea- 
 ture needed a disguise and he invented one. He 
 discovered, or said he had, how to look seven- 
 teen years younger. 
 
 One disguise is always inadequate. Another
 
 164 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 occurred to him, a domino of granite. He put 
 it on, as soon, that is, as it could be made for him. 
 In the tailoring, an army of masons was em- 
 ployed. The result, the Michel Palace, was a 
 threat in stone, a dungeon surrounded by moats, 
 a fortress so vast that it discouraged adventure 
 and so sombre that even the furies might lose 
 their way. Once a day only and then at high 
 noon, the drawbridges were lowered. To the 
 yodel of horns and the crack of postilions' whips, 
 the mail was brought. That service completed, 
 the drawbridges were raised, the mask was re- 
 sumed, a threat in stone confronted you. 
 
 The threat was effective. Terror could not 
 scale it. Paul was safe. Yet was he? From 
 without, certainly. But from within? There 
 was his wife. There were his sons. Who knew 
 what they might be plotting? Well, he too could 
 plot. At the slightest sign, the axe! The axe 
 for all of them. Meanwhile, a hint. 
 
 The hint resumed itself in a History of Peter 
 the Great, which he placed on a table in a room 
 occupied by his son Alexander. Paul left the 
 book open at a page which told of the death of 
 a tsarevitch, executed for treason, killed at his 
 father's command. 
 
 In spite of the hint, in spite of the threat, in 
 spite of the disguise, in spite of moats, guards, 

 
 Paul 165 
 
 sentinels, in spite of all, the furies found him. 
 Paul's nights were terrible. Clearly something 
 else was needed; the iron hand, perhaps. At 
 once, every avenue that led to the palace was 
 barricaded. Martial law was proclaimed. Pe- 
 tersburg became a city abandoned by God, a 
 polar hell, peopled with phantoms but peopled, 
 too, by terror. 
 
 Terror, intangible, fluidic, hung in shadows, 
 crept in darkness, lived in silence, sprang from 
 nowhere, vaulted the barriers, leaped at Paul, 
 tore his mask off. Paul, sidling and crouching, 
 screamed. The scream brought Pahlen. 
 
 Pahlen, military governor of Petersburg, had 
 a fabulous nose, a cheerful air, nerves of bronze. 
 At the moment he needed them. 
 
 "There are conspirators here," the crouching 
 thug spat at him. 
 
 How does he know? Pahlen must have won- 
 dered. 
 
 How he did know is explicable only by the 
 unfathomable acumen which madmen some- 
 times possess. Yet, there was no secret about 
 it. Everybody, even to the man in the Nevski, 
 knew that a drama was being staged, though 
 not the lines. Those terror wrote and badly as 
 terror always does write. Alexander had 
 adapted them. Pahlen was stage-manager. In
 
 166 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 the cast were Plato Zubov, ex-Pompadour; 
 Bennigsen, former page of Elisabeth, and a 
 dozen officers, with a regiment for scene-shift- 
 ers. 
 
 With sudden suspicion, Paul pointed. "And 
 you are one of them." 
 
 Pahlen saluted. "For your better protection, 
 sir." He fumbled and produced a paper. "Here 
 is the list." 
 
 Without looking at the names, Paul straight- 
 ened. "The axe!" 
 
 Pahlen bowed. "They would have had it al- 
 ready, sir, but two of them are your sons." 
 
 "Arrest them." 
 
 Pahlen wheeled. It was time to act. Before- 
 hand there was supper. 
 
 It would have been interesting to have been 
 there. In addition to Paul and his wife, there 
 were a dozen people at table, none of whom was 
 permitted to speak. Elsewhere, in other palaces, 
 there was that rarity, laughter. With it was 
 champagne, lifted glasses, toasts to the actors in 
 the drama staged for that night. 
 
 In the supper-room at the Michel Palace 
 there was silence. Presently Paul related a 
 dream he had had and in which he thought he 
 was suffocating. He looked at his wife. Was 
 she on that list? No matter, the scaffold was
 
 Paul 167 
 
 neighbourly. Comforted by the reflection, he 
 began throwing creams and pastries on the floor. 
 The pages could eat them. 
 
 Lampridius, or, more exactly, the brute who 
 abridged him, gave the story of an emperor's 
 death. The lines ring with yells. There is the 
 sudden pretorian rush, the clatter through the 
 Roman palace, the gleam of quick knives. 
 
 After supper, Paul went to his apartment, 
 which was on the floor below. Composed of a 
 vestibule, an antechamber, a library and a bed- 
 room, the one entrance was through the vesti- 
 bule. The bedroom, which was beyond the li- 
 brary, had an exit but that, as additional pre- 
 caution, had been barricaded. Nearby was a 
 fireplace and before it a screen. At the right 
 was a bed. Above the bed was a picture of a 
 knight of St. John. Opposite was a bust, badly 
 executed, of Frederick II. The room was large, 
 high-ceiled, panelled in white. On the walls 
 were landscapes by Vernet and Van der Meer. 
 In the library there was nothing literary. In 
 the antechamber, two servants, both armed. 
 
 On leaving the supper-table, Paul went to bed, 
 to sleep, to dream, to wake, to shriek, to die. 
 
 "My God!" said Zubov, "how that man does 
 shriek." 
 
 Zubov and the others, all of them, except
 
 168 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Paul's sons, Alexander and Constantine, who 
 were under arrest, had, through interior con- 
 nivance, crossed the moat, entered the- palace, 
 seized and disarmed the guards; after which, 
 rushing up a stairway, they broke into the ante- 
 chamber and cut down the servants. 
 
 Most of them were drunk. The noise they 
 made wakened Paul. When they reached the 
 bedroom they could not find him. They thought 
 he had escaped. But in the rush the screen was 
 overturned. Back of it, up the chimney, Paul's 
 bare feet protruded. They pulled him down. 
 One of them struck him with a gold snuff-box. 
 He shrieked. They ran him through, cutting 
 off three of his fingers while they were at it, 
 he shrieking all the time. In a moment he fell. 
 Another of them, taking him by the head, dashed 
 it against the fireplace, dashed it again and again 
 and then once more. 
 
 Afar, a Te Deum mounted. Night refurled 
 her great black fan.
 
 VIII 
 
 THE LAST DESPOT 
 
 IN Greece, death was a girl. The child of 
 Night, the sister of Sleep, less funereal than 
 narcotic, she beckoned and consoled. In 
 epicurean Rome, death was a marionette that in- 
 vited you to wreathe yourself with roses before 
 they could fade. In the Muslim east, death was 
 Azrael, who was an angel. In Vedic India it 
 was Yama, who was a god. In Iran it was 
 Mairya, who was a fiend. 
 
 That last, and long since forgotten conception, 
 the tsars revived and adopted for others. Else- 
 where death had been gracious. In Russia it 
 was horrible. 
 
 Alexander altered that. Already Elisabeth 
 had abolished the axe. It was not clemency that 
 actuated her. It was the selfish commonsense 
 which political economy is. Hands without 
 heads cannot work, but heads with hands can 
 and did. They worked for Elisabeth. Instead 
 of a swift decapitation on the scaffold, prison- 
 ers were given the slow guillotine of the mines. 
 
 [69
 
 170 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 The axe which Elisabeth buried there, Nicholas 
 replaced with the gallows. But under Alex- 
 ander torture ceased. 
 
 One may applaud him and very greatly for 
 that, particularly as there is nothing else to his 
 credit. Nothing whatever, except that he was 
 less Asiatic than Paul and more European than 
 Nicholas. Suavity was his note. It is the note 
 of every hypocrite. 
 
 Nominally under arrest while Paul was being 
 killed, he pretended to be asleep when the news 
 of it, which he was awaiting, was brought to 
 him. Afterward he pretended that he had noth- 
 ing to do with it. The pretence served as hot- 
 house for the usual immortelles. Among other 
 garlands is one to the effect that Paul was not 
 his father. However false or true that may be, 
 he did not resemble him. Paul had the sour look 
 of a skunk with a stomach-ache. Alexander 
 looked like a cherub in an overcoat. His 
 brothers, Constantine and Nicholas, did not re- 
 semble Paul either, physically, that is, though 
 otherwise they were quite as Tatar, which is 
 not remarkable if their reported geneology be 
 correct. Alexander's father is said to have been 
 an Alsatian grenadier. Their father was a Prus- 
 sian. 
 
 Catherine, who generally knew what she was
 
 \l EXANDER I
 
 The Last Despot 171 
 
 about, brought Alexander up to succeed her. 
 Constantine, she brought up to occupy Constan- 
 tinople. Nicholas, the youngest of the breed, 
 she left to his own devices and very unoriginal 
 they were. At the time of Paul's death he was 
 a brat, the despot in embryo, ruling tin sol- 
 diers as he was to rule Russia. 
 
 At that time, the earth was oscillating beneath 
 the tread of a human volcano beside whom no 
 nation could live. Hugo, with his usual so- 
 briety, said that Napoleon inconvenienced God. 
 Napoleon would have taken the remark very 
 seriously. Humour, which is Satan's saving 
 grace, he contrived to lack. Napoleon did not 
 inconvenience God, but he disturbed the equi- 
 librium of Europe. 
 
 A little before he had run literally from school 
 into a riot, leaped on a horse and made him- 
 self general. After which he conquered Italy, 
 conquered Egypt, attacked everybody and van- 
 quished everywhere. A simple tale, it still 
 astounds. In the echoes of his passage come the 
 crash of falling cities, the cries of the conquered, 
 the death-rattle of nations, the surge and roar 
 of seas of blood. Through their reverberations, 
 Napoleon looms, dragging destruction after him, 
 hurling it like a bomb in the face of kings that 
 were cowering still from the spectacle of the
 
 172 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Revolution and of which he was the appalling 
 issue. 
 
 At the time of Paul's death, he was planning 
 a bout with England. Turning suddenly on 
 Austria, he sent the old Germanic empire 
 sprawling. Prussia came next. Then it was 
 Russia's turn. On a raft in the muddy Nieman, 
 Alexander pledged him eternal friendship. 
 
 Friendship may cover a multitude of rob- 
 beries. Over the usual question of booty, the 
 two fell out. Napoleon, meanwhile, had be- 
 come impersonal. In lieu of the volcanic there 
 was virulence. He was spreading, as cholera 
 spreads, from one end of the continent to the 
 other. In the contagion, was the totter of dynas- 
 ties, the reversal of thrones. There too was the 
 victor, pale, impassible as destiny, confronting 
 fate like an equal, provoking it almost with dis- 
 dain, peering through magic casements at the 
 universal monarchy which he dreamed was to 
 be his. 
 
 Into that dream another entered, a minor 
 dream, the dream of a parvenu. There was 
 barely a royal residence on the continent which 
 he had not occupied. There was hardly a sov- 
 ereign in whose bed he had not slept. For the 
 vulgar satisfaction of sleeping in one other, he
 
 The Last Despot 173 
 
 entered the Kreml. There, beneath a mattress, 
 he left his crown. 
 
 In his northern progress, it had been imag- 
 ined that he would not advance beyond Lithua- 
 nia, but when he had taken Smolensk, the key 
 to the empire, the eldest town in Russia, Alex- 
 ander's generals realised that another conver- 
 sation was inevitable and any resistance vain. 
 Instead of contending, they circumvented. The 
 outlying lands were laid bare. The result is 
 epic. Famine began what ice completed. Na- 
 poleon found himself in an empty refrigerator. 
 That refrigerator Alexander burned. 
 
 Then began the conversation that continued 
 all along the road to Paris. For climax it had 
 Elba, with Waterloo for finale. 
 
 The conversation was not a tete-a-tete. The 
 flames had been a signal. All Europe took part. 
 But in the great debacle, Alexander greatly rose. 
 He acquired the palms of a hero, the nimbus of 
 a god, a dignity quite Roman, before which the 
 flunkeys of history have solemnly salaamed. 
 
 A Greek of the Lower Empire, Napoleon 
 called him, which being translated means a 
 swindler. Good-looking, though, a middle-aged 
 Cupid in whiskers, the burglar tastes of his 
 problematic house fused in him with a sancti- 
 moniousness that was all his own. After the
 
 174 . The Imperial Orgy- 
 
 proper tsaral fashion, he had married a Ger- 
 man, Betty of Baden. The Comtesse de Choi- 
 seul-Gouffier, who wrote of both with a maid- 
 servant's ecstasy, described her as a pathetic an- 
 gel, tear-stained by the handkerchiefs which, in 
 the exercise of his droit du seigneur, he tossed 
 here and there, yet always' so discreetly! Turpi- 
 tudes in the dark, but never a scandal. Tartuf- 
 fianism above all. 
 
 An oleaginous mummer, Uriah Heep and the 
 Artful Dodger combined, indulgently he agreed 
 to rule in accordance with the law — which he 
 made. With the same benevolence he built 
 schools and universities — on paper, not omitting 
 to stuff his pockets with everything he could lay 
 his hands on, with Finland, of which he robbed 
 Sweden; with the plunder of further burglaries 
 to the south and east; promising a lift to Aus- 
 tria and leaving her in the lurch; doing quite 
 as well by Prussia, who deserved it; hoodwink- 
 ing everybody, including history, the world and 
 the devil; hoodwinking Napoleon and it was 
 an archcrook who could do that; deceiving per- 
 haps even himself and ending his robber rule 
 in mystic projects and Swedenborgian beliefs. 
 
 He might have done worse. Swedenborg 
 lifted fringes of the curtain which recent oc- 
 cultism has partially raised. Alexander's in-
 
 The Last Despot 175 
 
 troduction to the Arcana Celestia was due to a 
 woman, the Baroness Krudner, whose forte, to 
 put it delicately, had been her weakness. Apo- 
 plexy battened on her husband when he learned 
 its extent. The passing of the man brought her 
 the light. The amoureuse became a voyante. 
 She saw. In seeing she foretold the return from 
 Elba, the hundred days, the restoration. Time 
 verified the clairvoyance, which interested Alex- 
 ander, as well it might, yet particularly per- 
 haps because, in an interview that ensued, the 
 baroness told the emperor — what he already sus- 
 pected — that he was predestined to accomplish 
 God's will on earth. So are autocrats and mum- 
 mers won. Alexander took her to Paris, where 
 it is history that she inspired the Holy Alliance, 
 a chimerical imbecility on which, over a cen- 
 tury later, the outlines of the League of Nations 
 were ignorantly framed. 
 
 Alexander was the silver lining between Paul, 
 who was mad and Nicholas, who was insane. 
 Every silver lining has a cloud. Alexander had 
 brains, a will of his own, the power to use it, the 
 ability to make Russia as preponderant in Eu- 
 rope as Peter had made her preponderant in 
 the north. During the better part of his reign, 
 he drove the empire straight on with the ease 
 of a whip tooling a drag. Personally he had
 
 176 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 his graces. In spite of a mediaeval idea of his 
 own dignity, he could unbend, and, when he 
 did, he charmed. Though a robber, he was a big 
 one. Though a crook, he was great. Even in 
 hypocrisy he contrived to be large. He inspired 
 confidence, and very naturally, he was a confi- 
 dence man. There is the silver lining. 
 
 Here is the cloud. Bossuet defined a heretic 
 as a person who has ideas of his own. Alex- 
 ander adopted that very advanced view. Al- 
 ready, in connection with the course of the stars, 
 Paul had forbidden the use of the word revo- 
 lution. Alexander ukased the Copernican sys- 
 tem out of the realm. He made it a felony to 
 think. Like Paul, he was mad. The army was 
 sane. In tramping after Napoleon the officers 
 had seen strange things — liberty, which they did 
 not know could be; freedom, which had been 
 unimagined. 
 
 These things astounded. Constitutional gov- 
 ernment amazed. Amazement is the beginning 
 of truth. For the first time, perhaps, officers re- 
 alised the iniquity of a despotism that made pa- 
 triotism treason, the folly of having but the right 
 to obey, the nonsense of rescuing Europe from 
 one tyranny while Russia endured another. 
 Such views disorganise. 
 
 When they got back, their easy ways and care-
 
 The Last Despot 177 
 
 less talk bewildered. The astounding sans-gene 
 was incomprehensible. As understanding came, 
 the regeneration which foreign marvels effect 
 was whispered, talked about, talked always a 
 bit louder. 
 
 Tsardom had never known a revolution. The 
 hydra waiting for it then was to be killed. Like 
 Dmitri, it had more lives than one. 
 
 In the barracks, a plot was hatched. Alex- 
 ander was to be offered honey on the point of 
 a sword — either a constitution or the fate of 
 Paul. He could take his choice. In sharpening 
 the sword and ladling the* honey, the plotters 
 may have been too amateur to appreciate that 
 an autocrat, however autocratic, cannot grant a 
 constitution. An autocrat who is not absolute 
 is a contradiction of terms. Nicholas the Last 
 tried it. He granted a constitution which was 
 so liberal that at any time any Russian could 
 be shot. Among the unconsidered Russians was 
 himself. With him tsardom ceased to be. 
 But though an autocrat must be absolute, he 
 can die. Alexander pretended to. The pomp 
 and pageantry of imperial rites were given to 
 a bogus corpse. Meanwhile, hidden in a mon- 
 astery at Tomsk, where neither honey-ladlers 
 or history could follow, he cheated amateurs as 
 he had swindled experts.
 
 178 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Night again unfurled her great black fan. 
 
 The next in line was Constantine. He re- 
 fused to move up. He said he lacked the talent. 
 Certainly he did, but he lacked, 'too, the courage. 
 He was afraid of being assassinated. The fear 
 was not unreasonable. At a review, to show a 
 foreign prince how agreeable it is to be a Rus- 
 sian grand-duke, he drew his sword, marched up 
 to a general and, without a word, ran him 
 through. 
 
 Nicholas was next. Like Alexander, he was 
 unlike Paul. But there was nothing cherubic 
 in his appearance. He had the face of the fallen, 
 the scowl of a fiend, a despot's sinister de- 
 meanour. History used to regard him as a 
 great man. History saw but the facade. His 
 mind, a rendezvous of zeros, functioned, he be- 
 lieved, altitudinously and only. He had other 
 beliefs, equally inoffensive, yet principally that 
 he was the direct and incarnated emanation of 
 God, the source from which everything pro- 
 ceeded and to which all returned. He believed 
 himself not merely autocrat but omnipotent. 
 Anywhere else, except where he happened to 
 be, he would have been clapped in an asylum. 
 
 At this distance, you see the lunatic. On the 
 day he became tsar, he was a hero, to himself 
 that is, yet also to de Custine, a looker-on in
 
 The Last Despot 179 
 
 Verona, to whom he related the incidents of the 
 accession, though not all of them, and a few 
 of those which he did relate, he dreamed. 
 
 The streets of Petersburg used to be the dreari- 
 est and the emptiest in the world. In winter 
 the cold is paralysing. More crippling than 
 cold was dread. The cold came from the pole. 
 It was from the palace that fear's icier fingers 
 stretched. 
 
 On that day the Neva was frozen. Flakes 
 of snow were falling, little petals of white roses 
 that were to change to red. But momentarily 
 the sleet of fear had lifted. In addition to 
 roses there was rebellion in the air. Before the 
 palace, suddenly the great square filled. The 
 conspirators that had been eyeing Alexander 
 brought their bayonets there. Beyond, in the 
 converging streets, was that rarity, a crowd. Not 
 one of the crowd, and none of the troopers knew 
 that Constantine had refused to be tsar. In such 
 minds as they had, Nicholas was not next in 
 line, he was out of place. Their leaders had 
 told them that, told them other things also, 
 which, without understanding much of it, they 
 believed. 
 
 In front of the palace, on a high pedestal, was 
 a bronze chariot, drawn by winged horses which 
 an enigmatic figure, perhaps that of destiny, led.
 
 180 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 On that day its gilded face seemed gay. Per- 
 haps it was. Perhaps, with eyes that saw and 
 foresaw, it was considering, not the pigmy rebels 
 massed below, but a giant that was approaching. 
 
 Hoarsely, meanwhile, the prompted pigmies 
 shouted: — "Konstitusia! Konstitusia! Live the 
 Constitution!" 
 
 From a window opposite, Nicholas stared. He 
 did not understand. How could he? Coups 
 d'etat and palace revolutions there may have 
 been, but soldiers and civilians mutinying in the 
 open streets, that was impossible. It was a mo- 
 ment before his dull brain could grasp it. Dur- 
 ing that moment, the imperial lupercalia might 
 have ended forever. God save the tsar! About 
 the palace, a sapper regiment was summoned 
 and aligned. Then, from the cavernous porte 
 cochere, out the hero rode. Fancy a shepherd 
 contemplating bleating sheep. That was his 
 attitude. That was the attitude that he dreamed 
 for de Custine's pen. 
 
 "On your knees!" he commanded. 
 
 In the dream he was obeyed. What followed 
 was not dream, it was in the order of things. 
 Instantly the little white roses changed to red. 
 Mitrailleuses were mowing criminals whose 
 crime was not that they were sheep but that they 
 were parrots. They had been crying for a con-
 
 The Last Despot 181 
 
 stitution and at the same time and very sensibly 
 they had been nudging and asking: — "Who is 
 this Konstitusia? Is she Constantine's wife?" 
 
 Even otherwise what business was it of theirs? 
 Those that did not die in the streets, died in 
 the Neva, shoved through holes cut in the ice, 
 though some were beaten to death, others peo- 
 pled Asia and a few were hanged. Among the 
 latter, three fell from the gallows and broke their 
 legs. They were hanged again. Afterward they 
 were decently buried. On their graves, in lieu 
 of the usual cross, Nicholas put little gibbets. 
 "Under Tiberius there was quiet," Tacitus, with 
 dramatic brevity, noted. There was quiet then. 
 
 Thereafter the lupercalia became a drama at 
 which you were permitted to assist, but given 
 any disturbance on your part, any remarks, any 
 criticism, any whispering, anything whatever ex- 
 cept applause, and out you went, tossed into a 
 sudden grave, or, less fortunately, into a living 
 one. Russia soon discovered that. So did Po- 
 land. 
 
 Poland still lived, still prayed, murmured 
 occasionally; occasionally, too, fevered with 
 hope, she bandaged her wounds in national rags 
 and sang. The song was of her past. In earlier 
 days, Muscovy had been her vassal. As Russia 
 rose, Poland fell. Three butchers tripped her.
 
 182 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Sharpening their knives, Catherine, the Aus- 
 trian ruler, the Prussian king, agreed that her 
 body and blood should be a sacrament of com- 
 munion. Mutilated, dismembered, but not 
 dead, Poland crawled through time to the feet 
 of Nicholas. He stamped on her. 
 
 In the atrocities of Caligula there was a rea- 
 son. He wanted to leave a name that history 
 would preserve. In the atrocities of Nicholas 
 there was also a reason. From history he wanted 
 a name erased. He wanted to exterminate a 
 nation. He deigned to decree — the term is 
 official — that millions should change their lan- 
 guage for his, abjure their religion for him. He 
 deigned further to provide a ritual of the wor- 
 ship due to himself. At any objection, the knout, 
 exile, the gallows. Poles were driven in hordes 
 to Tartary, or, more expeditiously, to death. Ten 
 thousand children were taken from their parents, 
 engulfed in Russia, lost there. Rather than have 
 them go, other children were killed by their 
 parents. Like Caligula, Herod also left a name. 
 That of Nicholas exceeds it. 
 
 The crime of the revolutionists was that they 
 had tried to think. Poland's crime was that she 
 had succeeded. Nicholas was determined that 
 there should be no thought ir Russia save such
 
 The Last Despot 183 
 
 as issued from the zeros in his head. Any other 
 variety he regarded as atheism. 
 
 To prevent the entrance of foes, Ivan ringed 
 the realm with forts. To prevent the entrance 
 of light, Nicholas quarantined it. Within, Ivan 
 made a cemetery; Nicholas, a camp. Immense 
 improvement. Petersburg became a parade- 
 ground of soldiery constantly defiling, a bivouac 
 in which everything was exacted, nothing per- 
 mitted and before which, gun in hand, Nicholas 
 paced like a sentry, guarding the past, challeng- 
 ing enlightenment, bidding progress begone, 
 calling at the world: — "Qui vive?" 
 
 A German from head to foot, without a drop 
 of Russian blood, he had married a Prussian, 
 Charlotte of Hohenzollern, who acquired a mor- 
 ibund air, the result of being a mother too often. 
 
 "S'epuiser en grand-dues, quelle destined" 
 said de Custine after scrutinising her at a court 
 ball, which he described as not splendour mere- 
 ly, but poetry. 
 
 The high walls were mirrors banked with 
 flowers, framed with gold, heightened with 
 lustres, and their effect, which was that of dia- 
 mond curtains in a shadowless fairyland, turned 
 the vast hall into a spaciousness where there was 
 but light and illusion and where the dancers
 
 184 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 multiplied themselves indefinitely. It was magi- 
 cal, de Custine added. 
 
 Magic is not gaiety. No one laughed, no one 
 talked, people conversed about nothing in whis- 
 pers. There was constraint there, there was 
 fear, that fear that brooded over Russia and 
 which lurked in the palace of the Caesars. In 
 the assembly, were kingdomless kings, queens 
 discrowned, slave sovereigns — revivals of the 
 pomps of Rome — and a heat that was Senegam- 
 bian. 
 
 Polar zephyrs annoyed the presiding Teutons. 
 The independence of nature shocked them. 
 De Custine said that the surest way to please 
 Nicholas was to treat Petersburg as though it 
 were Nice and to go about without furs in win- 
 ter. Flatter the climate and you flattered the 
 tsar, whose intelligence even Victoria regarded 
 as limited. 
 
 It would have been pleasant to have seen those 
 two at Windsor. It would have been pleasanter 
 yet to have seen him afterward, when she sent 
 him the ultimatum which was the fanfare to the 
 Crimean war. The ultimatum was delivered 
 to Nesselrode, who was his foreign minister. 
 Nesselrode — to-day a pudding — said that his 
 august lord would not deign to notice it, which 
 was tantamount to telling her to go to hell. It
 
 The Last Despot 185 
 
 was she who sent him there, more exactly, it was 
 Russia's subsequent allies, England and France. 
 
 A very ignorant, a very brutal and — at this 
 distance — a very amusing person, Nicholas none 
 the less was a real figure, not a lay one, an iron 
 man, liberty's exterminating angel, a being who 
 annihilated the goddess whenever she appeared. 
 In that was his glory, such as it is, and, such as 
 it was, for thirty years he sustained it over Rus- 
 sia awed and Europe coerced. For thirty 
 years, Ivan to his people, he was Agamemnon 
 among kings. 
 
 Europe, though coerced, could think. It oc- 
 curred to her that the iron man might be a scare- 
 crow. With Russia it was different. Submis- 
 sive she lay at the feet of her paradomaniac, 
 who knew but one joy, the sight of troops con- 
 stantly parading, and but one consolation, the 
 conviction that he was the great I Am. The con- 
 viction was an illusion which Europe presently 
 proceeded to ablate. The shock of the loss of 
 it killed him. The story of it all is called the 
 Crimean War. 
 
 That inglorious scramble into which England 
 entered with the stern spirit of a policeman and 
 France with the vendetta views of a bandit, be- 
 gan over a question of therapeutics. Nicholas 
 declared that the Sultan was a Sick Man. The
 
 186 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 diagnosis was his own. By way of regimen, he 
 proposed to break into the patient's room, first 
 finish, then rob him. But though the diagnosis 
 was novel, the second-storey treatment was not. 
 
 Constantinople, the old imperial city, Tsar- 
 grad as Muscovy called her, had been the secular 
 goal of Slav ambition. Sophia Palaelogus, 
 Ivan's grandmother, was a descendant of the 
 final Byzantine emperor. Later tsars regarded 
 themselves as that Caesar's heir. Russia's his- 
 toric pretensions to Stamboul had no other or- 
 igin. In the initial stages of the subsequent 
 world war, it was therefore highly diplomatic 
 of England to think of offering it to her, parti- 
 cularly as she thereby succeeded — and to Ger- 
 many's glee — in alienating both Bulgaria and 
 Greece. The Coburg adventurer expected to 
 sit there. So also did Constantine and his Hun 
 Klytemnestra. 
 
 But, at this time, England could not counten- 
 ance the Slav ambition. The Dardanelles Rus- 
 sian, the Mediterranean would be a Muscovite 
 lake and Turkey a carpet to the Indus. Eng- 
 land could not permit that, nor France either. 
 
 France, formerly the most militant of nations, 
 yet then very bourgeois, had her hand forced. 
 The bait of revenge was dangled at her. The 
 dangling was done by Louis Napoleon, who al-
 
 The Last Despot 187 
 
 ready had deceived everybody twice — first in 
 pretending that he was a fool; afterward, in pre- 
 tending he wasn't. Revenge was not his object. 
 He wanted to get into society and take his wife 
 there. More exactly, it was the lady who 
 wanted him to do both. So much for Helen. 
 Now for Agamemnon. 
 
 Asiatically, with Tatar contempt, the Ger- 
 man bastard eyed the Frenchman and asked if 
 he remembered what Russia had done to the 
 other fellow. Then the allies went at him. 
 Sevastopol was their objective. Their object 
 was less certain. The troops did not know 
 whether they were for or against the Sick Man, 
 who was quite as real to them as the Pierrot in 
 the moon. The high command, better informed 
 perhaps, was not for that reason overburdened 
 with intelligence. They thought the serfs 
 would rise and Sevastopol topple. 
 
 Official Russia had an equivalent understand- 
 ing of the allies. "We have only to shy our hats 
 at the imbeciles," she carelessly remarked. Half 
 a century later, her opinion of the Japanese was 
 as cheerful. "Monkeys with the brains of par- 
 rots," they were grand-ducally described. But 
 though she was not happy in her views of the 
 coalition, she was happier with it than with
 
 l88 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Nippon. The sum total of the allied achieve- 
 ments was the reduction of a single citadel. 
 
 That citadel, Sevastopol, the arsenal of the 
 empire, held, behind a veil of forts, a fleet that 
 was to make the Sick Man sicker. Once the 
 arsenal taken and the fleet destroyed, the patient 
 was safe. So argued the allies. Into the 
 Euxine they sailed, on the sacred Chersonese 
 they landed. From heights above the Alma, a 
 river to the north of Sevastopol, the Russians 
 blazed at them. The allies crossed the river, 
 climbed the heights, said, "How are you?" and 
 let them run, which they did, to Sevastopol, be- 
 wildered by such civility. To show perhaps 
 that they had not come for mere amenities, the 
 allies went around to Balaklava, on the other 
 side of the arsenal, tried to pound it from there, 
 pounded it, or tried to pound it, from the sea, 
 failing in each effort, finding that instead of a 
 naval excursion, they were confronted by an 
 army then eager to get at them. 
 
 That army, at which the Light Brigade made 
 a dash so magnificent that Bosquet exclaimed, 
 "Ce n'est pas la guerre!" and Tennyson, very 
 originally and unobviously added, "Some one 
 had blundered," that army drew the allies at 
 Inkerman into a sublimated Donnybrook Fair, 
 a rough and tumble, in the dark, in the rain, in
 
 The Last Despot i8g 
 
 which it was beaten but only because the allies 
 were the bigger gluttons. Of generalship there 
 was none. English tactics were simple. It was 
 "Up boys and at 'em." French strategy was 
 not more complicated, nor was the Russian finer. 
 But the accounts make very agreeable reading, 
 so agreeable that, in considering them now, any- 
 one who did not know better might mistake the 
 Russians for titans and the allies for gods. 
 
 Ultimately, the gods muddled through, but 
 not until they had out-manceuvred the titans' 
 chief of staff, General February, General Chol- 
 era and the usual traitor in the allies camp, Gen- 
 eral Stupidity. These interfered. So did an- 
 other strategist, the Weather. Allied ships, 
 bearing supplies, were overtaken and sunk by 
 storms marshalled by General February. Gen- 
 eral Stupidity saw to it that provisions that 
 eluded the gales either rotted obscurely or else 
 landed safely in Russian mouths. General 
 Stupidity, reinforced by General Cholera, ar- 
 ranged that the sick had no succour, the maimed 
 no aid. Yet, presently, there were correspond- 
 ents to tell of these things — inkbeasts as Bis- 
 marck subsequently called them. Presently, 
 also, there were angels to relieve — English 
 women from whose work the Red Cross re- 
 sulted.
 
 190 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Meanwhile the siege progressed and very cur- 
 iously. It was a siege that involuted, doubled 
 on itself, presenting an oddity, the spectacle of 
 beleaguers as beset as the beleagued, of forces 
 contending with other foes than each other, of 
 incompetence pitted against corruption. Fin- 
 ally, after routs and heroics, ramparts were 
 scaled, redoubts were taken, Sevastopol fell. It 
 fell as Moscow fell. Like Moscow it was 
 burned. Its sables were shrivelled, its fortresses 
 dumb, the wings of the eagles were clipped. 
 
 For the time being that is. Twenty years 
 later Russia was again at the Sick Man. She 
 was at his door. But for the police she would 
 have had him. As it was she got away with a 
 lot of his goods. Said Salisbury admiringly: 
 "We put our money on the wrong horse." 
 
 At this time matters were very different. At 
 the crash of the fall of the arsenal, Russia awoke. 
 Humiliated by the presence of hostile legions on 
 her sacred peninsula, dismayed in the Crimea 
 as she was to be in the East, startled by the totter 
 of bastions which official corruption had under- 
 mined, aghast at the cries of soldiers to whom 
 that corruption had been the bitterest foe, bereft 
 of her belief in imperial might, Russia rose from 
 her secular slumber and arraigned autocracy at 
 the bar of God.
 
 The Last Despot 191 
 
 Nicholas, the iron man, sank back. A car- 
 toonist pictured General February also turning 
 traitor and poking a frigid ringer at the emper- 
 or's heart. Nicholas had no heart. What he 
 did have was a thoroughly mistaken idea of his 
 own importance. That gone, fright replaced it. 
 
 Fright plucked at his sleeve, shoved him to 
 bed, then to his grave, nodded good-riddance, 
 turned to his heirs and destroyed them. Over, 
 beneath, around and about them, it set a tyranny 
 more tyrannic than their own. 
 
 Tsars, hitherto, had the freedom that waves 
 possess. Thereafter, behind their own high 
 throne, a higher one stood. In it sat the giant 
 whom the gilded eyes of destiny perhaps fore- 
 saw on that day when the white roses changed 
 to red and Nicholas hushed the parrots. The 
 giant was King Terror. 
 
 Perhaps Nicholas also foresaw him. He had 
 no imagination, but life is a book that man reads 
 when he dies. In its pages that vanish as you 
 touch them, myopia may become clairvoyance 
 and obtuseness understanding. It may be that 
 from before the flickering eyes of the dying 
 tyrant a veil was lifted. It may be that he saw 
 red hosts trampling tsardom into the things that 
 were, tossing the last of the breed to the bats of 
 a Siberian Avcrnus. It is said that he did not
 
 192 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 die of pneumonia, as was officially announced, 
 but of a drug of his choosing. Like books, 
 drugs, too, have their sorceries and his may have 
 shown him that the fate of autocracy is the hell 
 from which it came. But probably it did noth- 
 ing of the kind. Probably he remained to the 
 end, heavy-witted, unenlightened. Yet if it be 
 true that the dead turn in the grave at what they 
 see, long since he must have been in perpetual 
 motion.
 
 IX 
 
 KING TERROR 
 
 ROME had other gods than the Caesars, 
 herds of them, so many that they out- 
 numbered the population. Except a 
 few little gods and one very great divinity, they 
 were all foreigners. Most of them were known 
 to everybody. But not the great god. His 
 name, a secret, only the hierophants knew. A 
 senator was put to death for having uttered it. 
 Engendered perhaps by Pan who engendered 
 Panic, the great god was Pavor — Terror. With 
 him, Rome conquered the world. Then he 
 turned and tore her. 
 
 The history of Russia is an expurgated edition 
 of that of Rome. There are blanks in it. One 
 blank is nine hundred years long. The rest is 
 the chronicle of an orgy at which autocrats 
 feasted longly. After Sevastopol, history turn- 
 ed, reversing the orgy, putting the table on top 
 and despots beneath, revealing to their cowering 
 eyes one greater than they, the old god who then 
 
 193
 
 194 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 was king. He, too, could feast and from their 
 cups of mud and blood he tore them. 
 
 The first Nicholas escaped him only by dying. 
 Yet such was the shock of the sight of his face, 
 that that hangman, who was Liberty's execu- 
 tioner, gibbered, "Emancipation!" 
 
 Here enters his son, Alexander II. History 
 shows how the great monarch dogged him; how 
 he shadowed his successor; how he annihilated 
 the last of the lot; how disinterring the forgot- 
 ten, he instituted a despotism more destructive 
 than theirs and became an evocation of Gen- 
 ghiz. Attila wanted to destroy civilisation. 
 Genghiz wanted to destroy humanity. Terror 
 can be quite as gentle. 
 
 There is an odd tale of a wizard who kept in 
 a bottle an imp that he worshipped. One day 
 the imp got out and slew him. Terror resem- 
 bles that imp. Terror used to be a fetish of the 
 tsars. The day came when the fetish was heads- 
 man. In history as it is written, the second 
 Alexander was killed by a bomb. That is a 
 superficial view. An autocrat was killed by his 
 ikon. 
 
 A tall German, with a heavy jowl, a receding 
 forehead, a cavalry moustache and mutton-chop 
 whiskers, Alexander II. was the portrait, in 
 blood, of Nietzsche's blonde beast. Like Nietz-
 
 King Terror 195 
 
 sche, he had frequented the antique sages. 
 When anything annoying confronted them, they 
 confronted it, waved it away, denied its exist- 
 ence. Excellent tactics. Alexander employed 
 them on Poland. Drugged with the poppies of 
 her eternal hopes, Poland rose up before him. 
 With a stare, he blighted her. 
 
 After Poland, nihilism. In between — and 
 the margin has the width of years — stood the 
 Porte. The tsar stared at the sultan who stared 
 back. Abdul the Damned was quite as vulper- 
 ine as any other autocrat and considerably more 
 astute. "Time and I against all comers," was 
 the motto that hung in the Yildiz Kiosk. He 
 was ill though, sick with the same malady that 
 Dr. Nicholas had diagnosed. Yet, invalid 
 though he were, he liked to bundle Christians 
 off the earth. It distracted ,him. Gladstone 
 could not stand that nor, to Gladstone's disgust, 
 could Alexander. 
 
 Alexander cared nothing about Abdul's 
 amusements. Former tsars had dispatched too 
 many Christians for additional dispatches to vex 
 him. But the tsaral heritage, the antique Greek 
 throne, the immemorial desire to slake an im- 
 perial thirst in the waters of the Golden Horn, 
 that was another aria, highly melodious, yet held 
 profane in the European Sunday-school con-
 
 196 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 cert. The familiar and altruistic hymn con- 
 cerning the purification of St. Sophia was much 
 more decorous and entoning it he marched Sko- 
 beleff against Abdul, who countermarched, 
 nearly marched over him and then marched 
 back, farther, farther still, from the Shipka Pass 
 and Plevna to San Stephano and the slim gilt 
 gates of Stamboul. 
 
 Skobeleff had him. Byzantium, the imperial 
 houri, Roman in body but Greek in soul, whose 
 fair beauty even the ferocious apostolicism of 
 the Turks could not wholly mar, was in his 
 grasp. At that moment British ironclads en- 
 tered the Dardanelles. Skobeleff snapped his 
 fingers. Alexander commanded him to glove 
 them and salute. Skobeleff's anger was Hom- 
 eric. It shook the legions. They adored him. 
 With them he would have taken Alexander and 
 hanged him. The Caesars had their brews. So 
 had the tsars. Skobeleff, hero of Plevna, a na- 
 tional idol, was poisoned. History can only 
 record it. History is an endless book. Nihil- 
 ism was writing a page in it then. 
 
 Nihilism, mother of bolshevism, came, as her 
 daughter came, from Germany. A simple 
 creed, it held that the happiness of mankind 
 requires the abolition of everything. Assuming 
 that to be true, happiness remains to be defined,
 
 King Terror 197 
 
 which it never has been, except by Voltaire, who 
 called it a myth invented by Satan for man's 
 despair. Utopia is perhaps as mythical and gen- 
 eral happiness a chimera. General content- 
 ment seems less illusory. Its main factor, per- 
 haps, is non-interference and that may come 
 when man shall have learned that nothing is 
 important. 
 
 Nihilism is a term that a saint invented. In 
 the De civitate Dei, Augustin said: — "Nihilisti 
 appelantur quia nihil credunt et nihil docent." 
 Nihilists believe in nothing and teach it. 
 
 Russian nihilism first took shape after the 
 Crimea. After San Stephano, it took substance. 
 Weening, trundling, training it, was old King 
 Terror. 
 
 Nihilism, originally a theory, afterward a 
 doctrine, became a force. The theory interested, 
 the doctrine impressed. The force developed 
 a generation new to Russia, a generation that 
 thought. To think was always forbidden and 
 very unnecessarily. No one dreamed of such 
 a thing. Besides, it was a depraved occupation. 
 It induced disease. It induced it then. It 
 caused a form of neurosis of which poverty of 
 the blood and empty pockets were contributory. 
 The new generation lacked food. In the open,
 
 198 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 before the palace, it cried for reform. Alex- 
 ander stared. The cries redoubled. 
 
 Alexander deigned to admonish. Solemnly, 
 he stated that reforms come not from below but 
 from above. 
 
 He might have added that revolutions dis- 
 play the same phenomena. He might have ex- 
 plained that the Convention was the work not 
 of plebeians but of philosophers. He might 
 have shown that in France, after everything had' 
 been demolished, everything was rebuilt. He 
 might have demonstrated that in the upheaval 
 only names were changed, that instead of a king 
 by right divine, there was a dictator by might 
 infernal. 
 
 These platitudes he could have adorned with 
 anecdote. But, son of an iron man and father 
 of another in an iron mask, he was not other- 
 wise ironic. He lacked the wit to deduce the 
 paradox that Russia could be worse off than 
 she was and the humour to declare that he would 
 facilitate it. In circumstances such as con- 
 fronted him, it was the fashion of his house to 
 turn everybody into mincemeat. Instead of 
 decimating, he vacillated; instead of jesting, he 
 promised. To his subsequent regret that prom- 
 ise he kept. Freedom was tossed to the people 
 like a bone to a dog. Forty million human
 
 King Terror 199 
 
 chattels had an in perpetuum mortgage on them 
 lifted. 
 
 Former tsars gave them away by the thousand 
 and as readily as a snuff-box. They were won 
 and lost at cards, auctioned with furniture and 
 cows, sold with lands designated as "inhabited 
 estates." Actually chattels, descriptively serfs, 
 technically they were souls — when male. A 
 woman had no soul. With Alexander's permis- 
 sion she acquired one. It was very considerate 
 of him. But to the owners, robbed of their 
 goods, the whole thing was a despotic caprice. 
 To the manumitted it was confusing. The bone 
 they got was bare as your hand. Was it even a 
 bone? They had their doubts. To their lords 
 they had been accustomed to say: — "We are 
 yours, but the land is ours!" 
 
 Abruptly, through some legerdemain, they 
 ceased to be anybody's, the land ceased to be 
 theirs, apparently free to come and go, they had 
 nowhere to go to. The earth had opened. All 
 that remained was their hovels, where they 
 could continue to starve — on paying for the priv- 
 ilege. If that was liberty, they preferred slav- 
 ery. More exactly, they preferred to believe 
 that somewhere, very far no doubt, but some- 
 where, the little father on a high throne sat wait- 
 ing and willing to give them such land as they
 
 200 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 needed. Otherwise, what did this word emanci- 
 pation mean? 
 
 Nihilism explained. Emancipation meant 
 that for land to be free it must first be manured 
 with the blood of mythical Romanovs. There 
 are explanations that do not explain. There are 
 also natures that are not receptive. To the peo- 
 ple, the Romanovs, however mythical, were 
 sacrosanct, quasi if not wholly divine. The idea 
 is absurd, but the absurder an idea the more fan- 
 atics it can claim. The certainties of mathe- 
 matics are not exciting, but for chimeras nations 
 have fought and died. What is more remark- 
 able, they have drudged. Russia had drudged 
 too long for the tsars to turn on Alexander. Even 
 otherwise the manumitted were dull. Ages of 
 despotism had not soured their minds. They 
 had none. They had only a few wants reduced 
 to a minimum, a few instincts knavish and primi- 
 tive. They liked to get drunk. They liked to 
 rob. But for the knout they had a pathetic re- 
 spect; they had an inherited hatred of novelty, 
 and an ingrained awe of the tsar. To such as 
 they, the explanations of nihilism were as wind 
 on the steppes. Ideas could not be planted on 
 wastes that so long had been bare. What ty- 
 ranny had not stirred, theory could not affect. 
 Nihilism, outfaced by stolidity, wheeled.
 
 King Terror 201 
 
 From the peasant, it turned to the palace. Islam 
 had converted with the sword, the Inquisition 
 with the stake, the Convention with the guillo- 
 tine. Demonstrations being futile, nihilism 
 took to dynamite. Murder clubs mushroomed 
 in Petersburg. Autocracy became a despotism 
 tempered by bombs. 
 
 Between the foregoing sentences there are 
 years. There are concessions, too — of the kind 
 that put Louis XVI. in the tumbril. Like that 
 imbecile, Alexander II. had inherited a situation 
 which he had not created. He differed from 
 him in every other respect. America called him 
 Lincolnoffski. Europe was salaaming to him 
 for his treatment of the Turk. He had a gov- 
 ernment of iron, a people absolutely subservient. 
 In between was but*a thin red line. 
 
 To efface that line Alexander did his best, and 
 also his worst. He used all means to conciliate; 
 those failing, all means to suppress. Nihilism 
 already outfaced by stupidty, indifference might 
 have squelched. Indifference is highly coer- 
 cive. But though Alexander had frequented 
 the antique sages, he had also loitered over the 
 annals of his house. When philosophy deserted 
 him, ferocity stepped in. Moreover, the cour- 
 age which previously he had lacked, Plevna 
 supplied. Young men who had just left the uni-
 
 202 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 versities were given post-graduate courses in 
 Siberia. Young women, less advanced per- 
 haps, were taught that of all brutes, pliocene, 
 miocene, lampsacene, the most ignoble is man. 
 These lessons, instead of correcting, corroded. 
 After each deportation to Siberia, when it did 
 not happen to be Shame, the places of the exiles 
 were filled, and so fully that you would have 
 thought that terrorists covered the land. Gen- 
 erated spontaneously, multiplying with the rap- 
 idity of insects, swarming everywhere, they pre- 
 sented a curious spectacle, the infinitely little 
 contending with the infinitely great. 
 
 To Petersburg, then, came larger prisons. To 
 the mines were longer lanes. In the mines was 
 the dry guillotine; in the prisons there was tor- 
 ture, the rack re-established, applied for nothing, 
 for a look, for a word, for holding a pamphlet, 
 for throwing it way. Very properly, too, and 
 with the finest sense of law and order. Defend- 
 ants were tried in public. What more could 
 they ask? It is true they were always convicted. 
 But what did they mean by looking, by talking, 
 by having or not having things in their hands? 
 To teach them better, torture followed. The 
 torture was private. To make it more private 
 the condemned were never seen again. If they
 
 King Terror 203 
 
 had been, perhaps only their mothers could have 
 recognised them. 
 
 Then, face to face, were two terrors ; the white 
 terror radiated by the tsar; the black terror rad- 
 iated at him. 
 
 One does not choose between tears, or per- 
 haps between terrors. Yet of those two terrors, 
 the more terrifying was the black. The white 
 terror terrified the little. The great, being 
 large, are more receptive. The mighty were 
 terrified most. 
 
 Black terror is nihilism in its acute form. 
 Usually maniacal, sometimes in its delirium it 
 has expressed that which was "inarticulate in a 
 nation. Always hideous, sometimes it is sub- 
 lime. In France, it had been grandiose. But 
 Russia lacked a Mirabeau; the terrorists, a Dan- 
 ton; the people, a Voltaire, who, even if they 
 had had him, they could not have read. They 
 were otherwise blessed. With them, to a man, 
 was the imperial clan. 
 
 The latter, violently opposed to Alexander's 
 concessions, saw in reform a diminution of them- 
 selves. Peter would have devoured the lot. 
 Alexander lacked the stomach. By policy a 
 philanthropist, though by instinct a thug, physi- 
 cally scrofulous and mentally unsound, congen- 
 ially aphasiac and consequently incoherent,
 
 204 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 freeing Russia and regretting the act, history, 
 with her gallery taste for shams, saw what she 
 could mistake for the righteous liberator and 
 applauds him still. No one need begrudge him 
 that. For the first time since tsars were in- 
 vented, the orgy palled. In what otherwise 
 would have been his normal enjoyments, terror- 
 ism interfered, absolutism as well. 
 
 Whether the two combined in uncertain. In 
 the tenebrous chronicles of the great carnivora 
 there is always much that is obscure. But in his 
 court, which of all courts was the most regal, 
 he became afraid to stir. One evening, it was 
 fortunate for him that he omitted to. 
 
 Long before he had married a Hessian. On 
 that evening she was ill. Another lady pre- 
 sided. This other, the Favorita, was the Prin- 
 cess Dolgorouki, whom presently, when the Hes- 
 sian was dead, he married and who, at the time, 
 had a court of her own. 
 
 Without, in the hollow square that fronted the 
 palace, cavalry was stationed. Within, on a 
 wide stair, ran a hedge of rose-tunicked Cos- 
 sacks, a line of Circassians in silver and pale 
 blue. Beyond that rainbow, in a red-gold hall, 
 which a thousand candles lit, was this man, his 
 mistress and their court. Where the cavalry 
 were was ice, a wind that had knives. Within,
 
 King Terror 205 
 
 in the glowing hall, was the atmosphere of a 
 seraglio perfumed with turpentine and Russia 
 leather — an odour which this palace always ex- 
 haled. From above, in a gallery, fell a tinkle 
 of balalaikas, accompanying the conversation 
 which must have been dull. Adjacently, or 
 more exactly, less than a quarter of a mile away, 
 was another hall, equally pleasant, where these 
 people were to dine. 
 
 Like the conversation, the minutes dragged. 
 The tsar, the princess, the court, were waiting 
 for a German, a boor, one of the Hesse tribe, 
 who was guest that night. Finally, a breath, a 
 rumour, an announcement. The royal brute 
 strode in. The usual brilliancies. The forma- 
 tion of the usual procession, which, just as it 
 started, shook. 
 
 Lights flared, the hall oscillated, mirrors fell. 
 Into the scented atmosphere came another 
 odour, a trifle acrid, the smell of smoke which a 
 concussion had preceded. From a guard-room, 
 directly beneath the dining-hall, terrorists had 
 blown up the table, blown off the ceiling, killed 
 the guard below, the pages above, sixty in all. 
 An unpunctual Hun had saved the tsar that 
 night. 
 
 The night was in February, 1880. A year 
 passed during which other attempts were made,
 
 2o6 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 but not without the police knowing beforehand 
 that they would be. In the subsequent reign, 
 the third Alexander saw an officer of his house- 
 hold approaching and, not recognising him, shot 
 him dead. The second Alexander also saw a 
 man approaching and also fired. It was at him- 
 self that he shot, at his figure reflected from a 
 mirror. Enviable existence. 
 
 Presently it was learned that he was to inspect 
 the troops. As he might go one way and return 
 another, or vice versa, at both ways two men, 
 each with a bomb, were stationed. Afterward 
 it was said that the explosive employed looked 
 and smelt like honey. If that be true, a new and 
 fragrant death was hurled at him in two bombs, 
 both of which, wrapped in cotton, looked like 
 snowballs. The second bomb killed the terror- 
 ist and the tsar. What remained of Alexander 
 II. was removed on a carpet. 
 
 In a very human effort to avoid that bomb, 
 Alexander, a few days before, had arranged to 
 placate terrorism with a constitution. To pla- 
 cate is to disarm — but not everybody. That 
 which may pacify one, can infuriate another. 
 It may be that, in planning a sop to Cerberus, he 
 aroused another dog. Yet, in any event, pre- 
 viously, there had been minor precautions. 
 
 To prevent the entrance of foes, Ivan ringed
 
 King Terror 207 
 
 the realm with forts. To prevent the entrance 
 of ideas, Nicholas established a quarantine. To 
 prevent the entrance of death, Alexander put 
 police. Incoming ships were searched, incom- 
 ing travellers stripped. Bales of tea, brought 
 on camels from China, were turned inside out. 
 For an incautious word, the mines! On the 
 vaguest suspicion, the gallows! 
 
 To death, what were these precautions? It 
 had not quite got him yet, but terror had and so 
 potently that this man who was potent also, 
 signed a ukase convoking a national assembly. 
 
 It is said that Alexander's son protested. He 
 was put under arrest. It is said that Alexan- 
 der's brother also protested but, more adroitly, 
 to others than the tsar. It may be a coincidence 
 but promptly the honeyed death was served. 
 Similarly, it may be another coincidence that 
 the ukase, already in type, disappeared. But 
 it is a fact that absolutism remained. 
 
 After one Alexander, another. After a scrof- 
 ulous father, a scrofulous son, a composite being 
 at once Torquemada and Jack the Slipstring, a 
 sceptred prisoner projecting death from his cell 
 and feeding on fear, a hulking giant strong 
 enough to fell an ox and afraid of his shadow, 
 an obese butcher with the brains of a mujik and 
 the virulence of a plague.
 
 208 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 A younger son, he had not been awaited or 
 desired on the throne. The death of a brother, 
 then his father's, put him there. He did not 
 want it. Reigning over Russia, once the grand- 
 est of mundane vocations, terrorism had di- 
 vested of any charm. The savour of the orgy 
 had gone. As grand-duke, if he knew little else 
 he knew at least that. But into dull brains 
 dreams will creep. He fancied that he had 
 been miraculously chosen to incarnate the theo- 
 cratic power which his father said, and not only 
 said but believed, was a gift personally bestowed 
 on him by the Almighty. He fancied that the 
 sacrament of coronation induced regeneration 
 and that in the attending hypostasis he would be 
 transformed into a god. 
 
 It is unbelievable, but everything is unbeliev- 
 able in this creature who managed to be both a 
 nigger king and a state prisoner and who, how- 
 ever he may be regarded, supped terror with a 
 long spoon. That terror he felt it his divine 
 mission to disperse. Dissent was, he imagined, 
 the cause, and dissent meant to him everything 
 that was not orthodox and illiterate. Terror- 
 ists, nihilists, Jews and Gentiles, he jumbled con- 
 fusedly in what little mind he had. They were 
 all abominable in the sight of Heaven, vermin 
 that it was for him, as Heaven's emanation, to
 
 King Terror 209 
 
 destroy. Piously and austerely he began, for 
 pious and austere he was. 
 
 Pobiedenostsev, procurator of the holy synod, 
 a thin-lipped hyena with a vulture's beak, cat- 
 ered diabolically to that piety. In submitting 
 measures, diabolic in themselves, he always cited 
 a text from the Bible. Vichnegradski, minis- 
 ter of finance, a clever rogue, heard of it and 
 cited two texts. He impressed the tsar greatly. 
 Dagmar of Denmark, Alexander's wife, a gentle 
 soul, gentle at least by comparison with him, 
 cited texts also and cited them but once. Char- 
 ity is the New Testament told in a word. In 
 connection with his Judenhetze she reminded 
 him of it. 
 
 "Ah, yes, my dear," the sanctimonious Ne- 
 buchadnezzar replied. "But we must never 
 forget that it was the Jews who crucified our 
 Lord." 
 
 The Jews did nothing of the kind, but that 
 is another page from the arcana celestia, in ad- 
 dition to being beside the issue, which this man 
 made very poignant. His father had estab- 
 lished courts where defendants were at least 
 tried in public. The son abolished them. 
 Then the Jew baiting began. 
 
 At the time there were five million Jews in 
 Russia, exactly five million too many, almost
 
 210 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 every one of whom was more intelligent than the 
 emperor. They were evicted, despoiled, plun- 
 dered, hounded and hunted into pariah com- 
 munities, piled in on top of one another like 
 grasshoppers in a ditch. Here and there were 
 priests' hunts. The Judenhetze was every- 
 where. It would have been joy to him could he 
 have destroyed them all. Nor was Israel alone 
 afflicted. The attitude of the fourteenth Louis 
 to the Huguenots was courteous by comparison 
 to the third Alexander's treatment of the Luth- 
 erans. In Nero, Christianity had a foe less 
 malign than he. He issued edicts that would 
 have penalised the Apostles, ukases that would 
 have outlawed the Christ. At any criticism in 
 the Times, which Dagmar read, he foamed at 
 the mouth. Had the editors been in Russia 
 their shrift would have been short. 
 
 "They are a set of hogs," he wittily remarked. 
 
 Yet it was this man that kept Europe at peace. 
 The dishwashers of history have said that his 
 motive was religious. The motive, less spiritual 
 than physical, was due to the fact that a fat tyr- 
 ant, afraid of nothing but danger, did not care 
 to incur the risk and discomfort of mounting a 
 horse. He had other risks to consider. Bar- 
 ring his father, no modern monarch had more. 
 Barring his son, no autocrat led a life such as he.
 
 A I I X WDI-R III
 
 King Terror 211 
 
 In Petersburg, when he drove, a cloud of 
 Cossacks enveloped him;. The empty streets 
 were swept. No one was permitted there. 
 When he journeyed, it was over rails uninter- 
 ruptedly guarded, minutely patroled. The route 
 was a lane of troops. The train, divided into 
 four sections, made it difficult to conjecture in 
 which of them he hid. But not impossible. 
 The right one was dynamited. From the wreck 
 he disentangled his wife, his daughter and him- 
 self. About them were guards dead and dying. 
 The girl, flinging herself at him, cried: — "Oh, 
 papa, now they will come and murder us all!" 
 
 At that cry, the charwomen of history have 
 wept. But at the cries of countless children 
 whom this Nebuchadnezzar devoured, not a 
 word. Perhaps it was a negligible detail. But 
 though terrorists did not again alarm the girl, 
 they had not done with him. Terror, more con- 
 stant than they, had not either. 
 
 Thereafter, his residence became a secret. On 
 his palaces flags flaunted, but, among them all, 
 where he was, Russia did not know. In town, 
 his home was a fortress; in the country, a bas- 
 tille. Approach to either was impossible. 
 Every avenue was guarded. Every hour the 
 guard was changed. Princes, who happened to 
 be stopping at one or the* other of them, were
 
 212 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 forbidden at any time, night or day, to lock their 
 door. However becoroneted their belongings, 
 they were searched. 
 
 Visits were not encouraged. The man fought 
 shy even of his relatives. He knew them. On 
 an Easter egg he found a terrorist threat; in a 
 family album a terrorist face. In spite of pa- 
 tient precautions, death's-heads fluttered in the 
 dreary halls through which he slunk, a hang- 
 man shaking at shadows, an emperor who con- 
 tinued to be executioner but who had ceased to 
 be tsar, a monarch turned mole, burying him- 
 self behind walls which could not shelter him 
 from fright, invoking saints and signing the 
 death-warrants of officers of his household, leav- 
 ing to take care of itself an empire which he was 
 no more fitted to rule than a sea-serpent is com- 
 petent to be an apothecary, going mad before go- 
 ing to his Maker, driven mad by one who had 
 come unawares as thieves and angels do. 
 
 The visit, a little drama in itself will be told 
 in a moment. 
 
 Meanwhile, Israel agonised. In a district 
 where other game was scant, a prince hunted 
 Jews. One appeal remained, it was to God. 
 In secret synagogues, the candles were reversed 
 and in the name that contains forty-two letters; 
 in the name of the Tetragrammaton; in the
 
 King Terror 2 13 
 
 name of the Globes and the Wheels ; in the name 
 of Him who said, "I am that I am and who shall 
 be," the great ban, Schammatha, was pro- 
 nounced. Ofanim were implored to repeat the 
 malediction. Jehovah was supplicated to rain 
 on the tsar every curse in the Roll of the Law. 
 The Lord of Hosts was adjured to blot him out 
 from under the sky. 
 
 In the Orient, mantras are believed to be ef- 
 fective. Russia was always Asiatic. The in- 
 cantations of the secret synagogues vibrated, as- 
 cended and perhaps were heard. 
 
 At Livadia, the emperor fell ill. The ail- 
 ment was slight, an attack of coryza, which nor- 
 mally lasts a week, unless the patient is carefully 
 tended, in which event it may persist. The im- 
 perial coryza persisted and pleurisy developed. 
 
 Tn Moscow, at the time, was a specialist, ec- 
 centric and successful. His name was Zak- 
 karin. Summoned to the Crimea, he came and 
 diagnosed. It would have been interesting to 
 have seen him at it. If he had been a terrorist 
 he could have killed the tsar and been torn to 
 bits the next minute. Zakkarin was not a ter- 
 rorist. He was a physician. As physician he 
 prescribed a remedy which, precautionally, he 
 had brought. Uncomplainingly, the august pa-
 
 214 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 tient deigned to take it. Zakkarin was looking 
 at him. 
 
 It would have been still more interesting to 
 have seen that look. Shakespearian, disquieting 
 and yet serene, it was a look that said, "At last!" 
 
 There was not much room in the camp-cot 
 which the third Alexander habitually used, but 
 in it, from before that look, he shrank. 
 
 Beside him, stood the physician. The room, 
 vast, high-ceiled, furnished in the large Victor- 
 ian manner, was covered with wall-paper manu- 
 factured in Manchester to frighten children. 
 Behind Zakkarin, was Dagmar. Behind her 
 was the procurator of the holy synod, together 
 with an officer of the household. In the hall 
 were servants. Beyond were guards. With- 
 out, enveloping the palace, was a sotnia of Cos- 
 sacks. Yet, unperceived, unheralded, unan- 
 nounced, with no show of royal honours, a great 
 king had come. 
 
 The emperor, unaware as yet of that, but sub- 
 consciously stirred, poked his head at the physi- 
 cian. 
 
 "What are you?" 
 
 Zakkarin, leaning forward, whispered it. "A 
 Jew." 
 
 "A Jew!" the obese butcher shrieked.
 
 King Terror 215 
 
 Zakkarin turned and explained. "His ma- 
 jesty is delirious." 
 
 He turned anew to his patient and whispered 
 again. "You are doomed." 
 
 Alexander, to shriek his fright, had raised 
 himself. But the whispers were potent. More 
 potent still was the drug. He fell back. The 
 ban, too, had fallen. Israel had triumphed 
 where terrorism failed. 
 
 "Weep, Russia!" ran the official notice in the 
 next issue of the Novoye Vremya. "The em- 
 peror is dead!" 
 
 Zakkarin was given the Nevski decoration and 
 the usual diamonds. In derision, he accepted 
 them. 
 
 Another Te Deum mounted. But the orgy, 
 long since embittered, was drawing to a close.
 
 X 
 
 THE WHIRLWIND 
 
 IT has been said that England conquered half 
 the world in a fit of absent-mindedness. A 
 fit of abstraction, let us say. While Eng- 
 land abstracted, Russia absorbed. She absorbed 
 steadily, stealthily, civilly, avoiding noise and 
 offence. Her policy, the most unscrupulous 
 and successful in history, was one which there 
 was no change of administration to alter, no in- 
 coming government to reverse. Technically 
 what the tsar willed, it consisted in considering 
 the end, never the means, in turning treaties into 
 memoranda of agreements that were not to be 
 kept, in retreating the better to advance, in 
 avoiding haste but ever forward, in transform- 
 ing an obscure principality into an empire that 
 covered one-seventh of the land surface of the 
 globe. 
 
 Relatively untrammelled and very gay, until 
 latterly it was a round of festivities, soirees in 
 the fairyland of Scheherazade that were fol- 
 lowed by a frog dance through Manchuria. 
 
 216
 
 The Whirlwind 217 
 
 Not so long ago either. One can still hear the 
 admirable orchestra of a nation, apparently in- 
 vincible, executing Slav airs in Cathay, seren- 
 ading the dowager, singing to her that they were 
 natural affinities, that, under the khans, Mus- 
 covy and Mongolia were one. En sourdine, 
 were roulades not intended for her ear, blythe 
 airs that told of a state dinner in the Forbidden 
 City, with after revels in Delhi and Stamboul. 
 
 Quelle reve! Too fair though, at any rate for 
 Russia, thought the Wilhelmstrasse, where also 
 hung that opium dream. 
 
 Obliquely, China eyed them both. The 
 dowager of nations, the eldest of realms, anterior 
 to every monarchy and indifferent to all, she has 
 sat in history aloof, her robes of silk about her, 
 in an attitude of supreme disdain. Beside her 
 arts and wiles, those of dead Greece and buried 
 Rome were modern creations. Before Nineveh, 
 before Eridu and Ur, China was. She has had 
 all time, as these have had their day. The rise 
 of kingdoms, the fall of empires, left her un- 
 moved. Russian cajolements and Prussian 
 snares might disgust, her repose remained un- 
 altered. 
 
 At the time, the Shah of Persia, the Shah-an- 
 Shah, King of kings, Regent of (he Prophet, was 
 a spider in Russian jelly. The winged bulls
 
 2l8 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 that guarded the palaces of Xerxes and of Da- 
 rius were dead Turn as he might from them 
 to Mekka, he was doomed. Doomed, too, was 
 that other venomous insect, the Shadow of God 
 on Earth, who throned in Stamboul. 
 
 Already, in Afghan passes, Cossacks were 
 peering at the gates of Herat. At a signal, they 
 would have occupied Kabul and fought on and 
 down perhaps, or tried to fight, to the monkey- 
 haunted temples of Benares and the blue gulf 
 of Bengal. It is improbable that they could 
 have got there. Yet, given that signal and the 
 history of the world might have changed. The 
 powers invisible willed otherwise. What they 
 willed, Napoleon perhaps foresaw. 
 
 "Prussia," said Napoleon, "will develop into 
 a Germany reconstituted, but that phase will be 
 brief. Anarchy will throw her back where she 
 began. Austria will crumble, Italy become 
 united, and the role of France be intellectual." 
 
 Napoleon added: — "The supremacy of the 
 world will be divided between England, mis- 
 tress of Africa, and Russia, established at the 
 Golden Horn." 
 
 In Russia, everything goes wrong. That is 
 her history. Her history is an uncompleted 
 book. In some future chapter Napoleon's pre- 
 diction may come true. "Watch Russia," an
 
 The Whirlwind 219 
 
 adept admonished when the war of the world 
 began. "Great things are gestating there. 1 ' 
 
 Meanwhile, in the gaieties of the Muscovite 
 revel, Germany urged Japan to interpose. Ja- 
 pan needed no urging. A dozen years or so 
 before, she sprang at China, threw the old lady 
 down, and would have pulled her clothes off, 
 had not the police interfered. What Japan had 
 then in view she subsequently acquired, with 
 Wilson's blessing. But at the time, Russia got 
 in the way, not omitting while she was at it, to 
 subtilise a few odds and ends from the dowager's 
 handbag. 
 
 To Japan that was highly unjust. The view 
 is amusing. Russia and Japan were like two 
 dogs over the same bone, only, of the two, Rus- 
 sia had the bigger teeth. The teeth were false, 
 but so perfectly adjusted that perhaps Russia 
 herself did not suspect it, though certainly Ja- 
 pan did. 
 
 Japan, affecting her usual naivete, backed 
 away, yet inwardly ravening, nursing her sus- 
 picions, her grudge, her arsenals, her warships, 
 lie r Togo, until — Banzai! — the guns popping at 
 Port Arthur disclosed to a bewildered world the 
 gigantic humbug of Russian might. 
 
 Nikolai the Last was then at Tsarskoie Selo, 
 occupied with the puerilities of his empty mind.
 
 220 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 The war did not matter. Word was brought 
 him that his fleet was destroyed. At the mo- 
 ment he was playing tennis. Without interrupt- 
 ing the game, he remarked that it was a fine day. 
 
 The attitude, curious in itself, was charac- 
 teristic. In any crisis, he displayed it. When 
 told that he must abdicate, his composure was 
 identical. When arrested he was equally un- 
 moved. A prisoner in his own gardens, his 
 equanimity endured. 
 
 Such an attitude is beautiful. But in his case 
 it proceeded not at all from the impassibility 
 of the sage, nor yet from the serenity of the 
 philosopher, but from the indifference of the 
 witless, unless it were the apathy of the drugged. 
 
 In an interview that appeared — shortly after 
 the fall of the empire — in the Novoye Vremya, 
 Prince Youssoupov, a young man related to the 
 imperial clan, said that Nikolai Alexandrovitch 
 was usually under the influence of a drug which 
 a Thibetan lama had supplied and which was 
 administered by his wife. 
 
 None the less he could be witty. Relatives 
 of his wrote, begging him to be merciful to a 
 kinsman. Admirably he replied that their au- 
 dacity in addressing him was amazing. Admir- 
 able, too, was his retort to petitioners humbly
 
 The Whirlwind 221 
 
 praying for a less rigorous regime: — "Don't in- 
 dulge in senseless fancies." 
 
 These epigrams and that attitude serve in a 
 measure to delineate the messiah of the Hague 
 Convention, which Dr. Dillon called an ignoble 
 farce, and which was designed to jockey Europe 
 into peacefully disarming while peacefully Rus- 
 sia armed. 
 
 Shifty and shallow, physically and mentally 
 incapacitated even for military duty, his incom- 
 petence was so adequately estimated that, before 
 the great ban was pronounced on his father, he 
 was sent on a junket through the Orient, where, 
 in some tiger-hunt, perhaps, he might decently 
 succumb. In Japan he nearly did. An assault 
 was made on him there, though whether it were 
 prearranged or not, one may surmise and never 
 know. Then indolently the gorgeous East dis- 
 gorged the offered prey. Clearly he was des- 
 tined to renew the orgy, to drink and make 
 merry, though not to his fill. In view of the 
 fashion in which the cup was torn from him, 
 there is little in history more curious than an 
 incident that occurred at his coronation and 
 which exactly paralleled an incident that hap- 
 pened at the coronation of Louis XVI. On each 
 occasion the blood of thousands cascaded. 
 
 Otherwise it were interesting to have been at
 
 222 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Moscow when the tsar appeared. In a dark 
 uniform, on a pale horse and pale himself from 
 the fast that preceded any coronation, the last 
 and least of the great carnivora rode in. Behind 
 him, in a gilded coach which an imperial crown 
 surmounted, his mother came, bowing to the 
 right, to the left, with a grace mechanical but 
 sovereign. Already she had recovered from the 
 loss of her Nebuchadnezzar. Behind her, in 
 another gilt coach, but minus the crown which 
 as yet was withheld, the tsaritsa sat, rigid, dis- 
 dainful, her mouth contracted by lines that were 
 to change her face, then singularly beautiful, 
 into a tragic and wasted mask. Along the route, 
 rigid also, but very gorgeous, glittered the im- 
 perial guard. Back of these swarmed the stage- 
 managed unwashed. Above was the turquoise of 
 the mid-May sky. 
 
 In the Kreml, on the morrow, the archaic, 
 fastidious and highly poetic ceremonial was 
 ministered to a weak young man, for whom the 
 crown was too heavy — in the same manner that, 
 at Rheims, the sixteenth Louis found his crown 
 too big — and who, bent beneath its weight and 
 that of the bullion on his cloak, dropped the 
 sceptre, which any gypsy could have foretold 
 he was destined to drop again. Beside him his 
 bride, born Alix of Hesse, but then Alexandra
 
 The Whirlwind 223 
 
 Feodorovna of All the Russias, stood erect, her 
 triply tiara'd head unbowed. 
 
 Afterward, in the glowing and legendary 
 pomp of long ago, the couple emerged on a ter- 
 race, draped with imperial purple and cloth of 
 gold, where they looked on the trained and 
 kneeling crowd beneath, and where an eye-wit- 
 ness, Marie of Rumania, likened them, in their 
 youth and splendour, to the young divinities of 
 old Greece. 
 
 The comparison, trite perhaps, is not inapt. 
 On that day, at that moment, both leaned from 
 a parapet of the ideal. The parapet was very 
 fragile. On that day, throngs of the lowly that 
 had come to acclaim, remained to die. Herded 
 together, they were trampled to death. The 
 reign which that day began in blood, ended as 
 bloodily. In it were whole scenes re-enacted 
 from the history of Louis XVI. 
 
 Only the interludes differ. Yet, even there, 
 there are similarities. From the old memoirs 
 of the old French court, magicians peer. 
 Through them passes the enigmatic figure of 
 Cagliostro whom, in the court of Nicholas II., 
 Rasputin aped. 
 
 In the Winter Palace and afterward when, for 
 a reason that will be recited, that palace was 
 abandoned, crystal-gazers, astrologers, soothsay-
 
 224 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 ers were ceaselessly employed, until, Rasputin 
 supervening, they were thanked and dismissed. 
 
 In the interim, minor events occurred. The 
 tsaritsa who had snubbed everybody, including 
 Victoria R. I., contrived to present the curious 
 spectacle of an empress boycotted in her court. 
 Perhaps there is no debt more faithfully ac- 
 quitted than that of contempt, and the disdain 
 which this woman dispensed was such that, bar- 
 ring officials and other people too servile to be 
 affronted, those commanded to court-functions 
 neglected to appear. Had these negligences 
 been confined to a few, the manners of the negli- 
 gent might have been corrected in the finishing 
 school that Siberia was. But the penalising of 
 all the aristocracy being, not impossible cer- 
 tainly, but perhaps injudicious, the Winter 
 Palace which, the Vatican alone excepted, was 
 the largest and most regal residence extant, be- 
 came a haunt of caretakers, a haunt, too, of 
 ghosts. 
 
 The domestic life of the sovereigns was, mean- 
 while, eminently correct. Nikolai Alexandro- 
 vitch, a model husband, maintained and very 
 sumptuously a lady of the ballet. Therewith, a 
 devoted father, he had but one regret. He 
 lacked an heir. To comfort him, the birth of 
 the tsarevitch was mediumistically foretold,
 
 The Whirlwind 225 
 
 though, it may be that in the child's advent, 
 Prince Orlov collaborated. So at least it has 
 been said. It has been also said that the boy's 
 potential ability to have children of his own an 
 anarchist eliminated. 
 
 These tales may be untrue. What exceeds 
 them is the spectacle of an empress owned by 
 a peasant. Rasputin dominated that woman 
 who, domineering herself, dominated her hus- 
 band. Yet that could not have been difficult. 
 Without any will of his own, without any ideas 
 except such as concerned his prerogatives and, 
 like the Emperor Claudius — Messalina's hus- 
 band — always of the opinion of the one who 
 spoke last, which, in this instance, was the tsar- 
 itsa, Nikolai Alexandrovitch presented a per- 
 fectly defined case of aboulia. It was not he 
 who ruled, it was his wife, whom Rasputin gov- 
 erned. At a gesture from the latter, policies 
 were altered, measures reversed. At a gesture, 
 anyone, no matter what the rank and the higher 
 the better, was dismissed. At any remonstrance, 
 exile. 
 
 In the gardens of Tsarskoie Sclo, there was a 
 chapel and, under it, a crypt beautified with 
 Byzantine art, with jewelled marvels, with bro- 
 cades which the centuries had faded; a crypt 
 mystically embellished and of which the peace
 
 226 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 was stirred only by the choir in the chapel above. 
 There, the haughtiest woman on earth consorted 
 with an ignoble and sinister satyr. 
 
 Rasputin entered history, dramatically, in a 
 murder and, quite as dramatically, vacated it, 
 murdered in turn. Originally a vermin-eaten 
 peasant and always a venomous brute, the mur- 
 der with which he was associated singularly re- 
 sembled the one related by Erckmann-Chatrian 
 in the Polish Jew. The details are nearly iden- 
 tical, except that while, in the novel, the crimi- 
 nal went mad, Rasputin went free — to become a 
 prophet, a saint, possessed, as he pleasantly de- 
 scribed himself, by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 In spite of which, in spite too of practises 
 that only reticences can convey, he rose, as Pe- 
 ter's laundress rose, on the escalator of fate, from 
 the soil to the throne. There he was waited 
 on by the dignitaries of the empire, as Zubov 
 was valeted by the princes of the realm. In him 
 the Pompadour lineage revived. For the first 
 time in history, a mujik was tsar. 
 
 A swarthy blackguard, thaumaturge and 
 comedian, his power over the empress was due 
 to two factors, perhaps to three. The third 
 may have been the woman's dementia. Apart 
 from that, Rasputin possessed the coercive spells 
 of magnetism and clairvoyance. The other fac-
 
 MIX OF HESSE 
 
 Wll i 01 sn HOI IS mi i \sr
 
 The Whirlwind 227 
 
 tor, and probably the most potent, was a doctrine 
 that he advanced as his own but which, a cen- 
 tury earlier, Boileau summarised as the enjoy- 
 ment in paradise of the pleasures of hell. 
 
 The doctrine, known as quietism, originated 
 with Molinos, a Madrilene monk. Morbid as 
 was everything that came from Spain, it held 
 that temptations are the means employed by God 
 to purge the soul of passion; that to mortify the 
 flesh it should be gratified; that in the omni- 
 sapience of the divine, man is saved not merely 
 by righteousness but by evil, by crapulence as 
 well as continence. 
 
 These tenets which Rasputin imposed, were 
 accepted by the empress in that crypt, where she 
 was followed by her daughters, whose governess, 
 Mademoiselle Toutschev, complained to their 
 father that Rasputin visited them at night. 
 Whether actual relations occurred is obscure and 
 unimportant. It has been more or less au- 
 thoritatively stated that they did occur and 
 whether the statement be true or false, it was 
 one of the causes that led to the mujik's death. 
 
 At the time, as in Rome before the fall, every- 
 thing was for sale. Before the fall of the Rus- 
 sian empire, place, power, army contracts, min- 
 isterial portfolios, everything, the virtue of 
 women, the honour of men, the defense of the
 
 228 The Imperial Orgv 
 
 realm, everything was up for auction, except the 
 throne and that only because in it sat the auc- 
 tioneer, who had to sit somewhere pending its 
 projected sale to curio-collectors in the Wil- 
 helmstrasse. 
 
 Before that could occur, in the streets, thea- 
 tres and basilicas of the capital, the national an- 
 them was sung. The anthem was a thanksgiv- 
 ing for Rasputin's death. Rasputin, invited to 
 supper at the residence of Prince Youssoupov, 
 went there flanked by the prefect of police whom 
 the prince ejected. Then he was killed and his 
 body, thrown in the Neva, from which it was 
 fished, was buried in the crypt beneath the chapel 
 at Tsarskoie Selo. After the fall of the em- 
 pire, the body was exhumed, spat on, destroyed. 
 
 Sic semper, perhaps. A blackmailing tyrant 
 in Germany's pay, Rasputin was hated as thor- 
 oughly as Nikolai was despised. Other sov- 
 ereigns had been feared, loathed, revered, ig- 
 nored and forgot. For Nikolai Alexandrovitch 
 there was only contempt, in which his wife 
 joined. She regarded him as Catherine the 
 Greater regarded Peter the Small and, through a 
 myopia which the glare of regalia may have in- 
 duced, regarded herself as another Star of the 
 North. 
 
 An ungracious woman, tactless, acrimonious
 
 The Whirlwind 229 
 
 and stupid, a woman who never unbent and 
 never smiled, she was highly imaginative. Ma- 
 rie of Rumania, a kinswoman who was as close 
 to her as anyone could get, said that she be- 
 lieved herself infallible, supreme, unique, lifted 
 immeasurably above all mankind. It was a be- 
 lief that some of the Caesars entertained and 
 from which their madness resulted. In shar- 
 ing it, this woman may have become insane, 
 though quite as readily her dementia — if de- 
 mented she were — may have been congenital. 
 Insanity is hereditary in the Hessian house of 
 Brabant. Her brother's favourite recreation 
 was tatting. But the woman's opinion of her- 
 self was otherwise and quite as agreeably ex- 
 emplified. Fancying herself supernormal, she 
 believed in spiritist mysticism, believed too that 
 her station required that she should appear in 
 gala robes at breakfast. The robes themselves 
 were those of a parvenu. Yet always perhaps 
 a false conception of religion is inseparable 
 from bad taste in dress, and her taste was such 
 that even after the gala vulgarity was aban- 
 doned, the smart women of Petersburg took 
 her costumes as models of what was not to be 
 worn. Later still, she affected a simplicity of 
 attire that would have been ostentatious were it 
 not for the ribbons of jewels that she wore even
 
 230 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 in the privacy of her own apartments, where 
 she sat by the hour, without moving, without 
 speaking, lost in some dream, perhaps of Or- 
 lov, who had killed himself and whose grave 
 she covered with flowers and tears. 
 
 It was years later that the mujik appeared 
 and departed. Yet when this woman also de- 
 parted, and on a journey that took her farther 
 and deeper than any empress ever went, the 
 guards at Tsarskoie Selo shouted their derision: 
 
 "Goodbye, Madame Rasputin!" 
 
 Her husband has been described as a shadow. 
 A shadow, yes, but a shadow that crushed. 
 Long before, on what is known as Bloody Sun- 
 day, a body of workmen set out to present a 
 petition to him, their little father. Before they 
 could reach the Winter Palace, their little father 
 had them mowed. A few, that were wounded 
 merely, survived. It was forbidden to collect 
 a kopeck for them. 
 
 At that time the orgy had been resumed. Yet 
 for the fair chalices of crime, the jewelled cups 
 of mud and blood, and that table set with the 
 epergnes of felony, the tuberoses of torture and 
 imperial behests, another reveller, a noceur 
 gayer than all the autocrats of all the Russias, 
 stood by, laughing and jesting, waiting with gal- 
 lant unconcern until the clock should strike.
 
 The Whirlwind 231 
 
 When the clock did strike, when Nikolai 
 Alexandrovitch after being deported was shot, 
 the alien and perhaps unconsidered verdict was 
 that he had been murdered. On another plane 
 that ruling may have been reversed. Long 
 since, a court of last resort may have decided 
 that the rifle that killed him was charged only 
 — and yet how amply! — with the tears, the 
 groans, the cries of the helpless, sent to typhus, 
 to insanity, to death, massacred at his command. 
 
 Commonsense might have preserved him. 
 But in his case, in view of the indigent men- 
 tality of his presumptive ancestors', common- 
 sense would have been abnormal. Instead was a 
 derangement, clinically known as uranomania. 
 A dwarf fancied himself divine. It was a fam- 
 ily illusion which, other things being equal, he 
 might have retained. His wife interfered. She 
 also had illusions. She fancied that she looked 
 like Marie Antoinette. It was Bazaine whom 
 she resembled. Anything is possible. The day 
 may come when she will be canonised. 
 
 In Hungary, Attila is a saint. In Russia, Alix 
 of Hesse may be beatified. Even otherwise, 
 when history is more intelligently viewed, it 
 may be realised that the powers unseen guided 
 this woman to open the prison in which Ivan
 
 232 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 caged a nation and for that, it may be, men will 
 rise and call her blessed. 
 
 Previously, during a revolution that succeeded 
 the Japanese war, this woman and that shadow 
 hid in a palace that even from afar one was for- 
 bidden to stop and look at. Guarded by sot- 
 nias of Cossacks, there they crouched. Not 
 alone. Terror crouched there also. Through 
 grated casements the kramola peered. From 
 that mysterious tribunal of the revolutionists, 
 fluttered the death-heads that the previous in- 
 cumbent knew and from which he, too, had 
 shrunk. 
 
 In proportion as graves multiplied and the 
 population of Siberia increased, the revolution 
 waned. With a rictus, Terror passed, waving 
 a hand, calling, "Au plaisir!" When he re- 
 turned, he came riding a whirlwind that startled 
 a world already inured to the startling and in 
 which the seven times twisted coil of state 
 snapped like a withered twig. 
 
 The cell, the knout, torture, exile, insanity, 
 death, what could be more instructive? For 
 centuries Russia had had a university training 
 in all that was meant and done by the tsar's 
 command. There is no shape of demonism, no 
 form of horror that she did not know by heart. 
 That poor heart of hers was a doctor of philos-
 
 The Whirlwind 233 
 
 ophy in imperial crime. When, therefore, the 
 tsar ceased to instruct and it was Russia that 
 taught, the benefits of her liberal education 
 leaped. 
 
 Hunland, long since, had launched her holy 
 crusade. Russia, then, was needy as a knife- 
 grinder. Internally disorganised, bureaucrati- 
 cally corrupt, she lacked every equipment, brains 
 included. Otherwise she was admirably pre- 
 pared. There were Huns in the army, in the 
 navy, in the ministry of war, at the tsar's elbow, 
 in his bed. It was from these batrachian in- 
 fluences that bolshevism afterward developed. 
 Germany paralysed Russia with that ankylosis 
 which was to make her wolfishly hideous and 
 rid her of religion, commerce, money and sense. 
 But the situation, highly problematic, has an- 
 other aspect which, shortly, will be considered. 
 Meanwhile, gangrened already, Russia fought. 
 
 Presently the Wilhelmstrasse, confronted by 
 collapse, floated offers of ambiguous peace. The 
 allies rejected them. Privately the Kaiser ap- 
 plied to his kinswoman, Alix of Hesse, grand- 
 daughter of Victoria, of whom he was grand- 
 son. In the service of a cousin and of Ger- 
 many, tlie Russian empress ordered a mas- 
 querade. The mask was famine. Russia beheld 
 that spectre, conjured, a jack-in-the-box, by a
 
 234 1 ^ e Irnperial Orgy 
 
 woman. There was food in plenty, only it was 
 hidden. The famine was bogus, hence the dis- 
 guise. 
 
 The Duma lifted it. Behind, was the tsaritsa. 
 Behind her were the court reactionaries. Be- 
 hind them was the prefect of police. All were 
 evoking the spectre, inciting riots, serving Ger- 
 many, engineering a separate peace. 
 
 The Duma informed the tsar. For reply, 
 the tsar ukased the Duma out. The Duma ig- 
 nored the ukase. Ignored it! Any former tsar 
 would have had every canaille in the assembly 
 first knouted, then dispatched. But formerly 
 there were two Russias; one above, the other 
 below; one, the tsar; the other, the nation. With 
 a sleight-of-hand unparalleled and incompara- 
 ble, the Duma transposed them. 
 
 Nikolai Alexandrovitch was then at military 
 headquarters. He started for Petrograd. On 
 the train he was the autocrat from whom every- 
 thing emanated, emperor of All the Russias, 
 viceroy of the Divine, sovereign of a hundred 
 races, lord of myriad hosts, an anthropomorphic 
 god. When he alighted, he was the perception 
 of a perceiver, a bundle of nothing who ceased 
 shortly to be even that. 
 
 "Omnia fui, nihil prod est," said an expiring 
 Caesar, whom this final Caesar might have mim-
 
 The Whirlwind 235 
 
 micked. Might have, yes. He lacked the wit. 
 
 Over Russia, then, night still hung. Beyond 
 was a dawn that was to send that night reeling 
 back into the enigma of history from which 
 Russia had come. The night was basaltic. The 
 dawn was livid. In search of one like it, as- 
 tronomers will have to look in the astral. It 
 was the 4 awn of primitive man. From the 
 night of an ended orgy, Russia, livid as that 
 dawn, lapsed back to the stone age. 
 
 History has no parallel for the relapse. But 
 the benefits of a very liberal education had made 
 Russia a saint and a savage, a millionaire in rags, 
 a genius without culture, an entity to whom 
 meum and tuum were transposable abstractions, 
 and which produced a type that fused idealism 
 and knavery, the spiritual and the brute, super- 
 stition and intelligence, a type that craving an- 
 archy endured absolutism and which resulted in 
 what the world had never seen, a nation attacked 
 by hydrophobia. 
 
 Hydrophobia is excessive, yet, when a shadow 
 alighted from a train, a page of history turned, 
 the great book of autocracy closed, and with a 
 crash so loud that the noise shook down a prison's 
 walls. A hundred and eighty million ignorant, 
 helpless, hungry, angry, innocent prisoners 
 found that they were free.
 
 236 The Imperial Orgy 
 
 Dumbly, as prisoners will, they had dreamed 
 of freedom. Impotently, as prisoners do, they 
 had struggled for it. But in the dream, they 
 had no belief; in the struggle, no conviction. It 
 was all too Utopian. When, suddenly, over- 
 night, without conscious effort, Utopia stretched 
 before them, it set them mad. What had seemed 
 Utopian became bedlam. 
 
 Madmen have a point of view which, when 
 considered, is always interesting. The idea of 
 these insane children, of some of them at least, 
 was to destroy everything, destroy the world, 
 build it anew. The idea seems insane, but seen 
 from an angle higher than our own, may not the 
 world need refurbishing? In occult sanctuaries 
 where causes appear and criticism vanishes, so- 
 vietism is viewed as a supernormal phenomenon, 
 propelled from planes where events are mar- 
 shalled, and designed to be the obstetricy of uni- 
 versal palingenesis. If the view is correct noth- 
 ing can prevail against it. But it may not be 
 correct. In convulsive accouchements Greece 
 tried to save her soul and lost her independence. 
 Similarly, Rome dissolved from a republic into 
 an empire and France saw the royal lilies change 
 into imperial bees. Scepticism is history's bed- 
 fellow. History doubts that Russia's travail will 
 be less abortive, though philosophy believes that
 
 The Whirlwind 237 
 
 it may be a boon. For assuming that bolshevism 
 proceeds from a supermundane impulsion, the 
 design may be to provide the world in general 
 and communism in particular with an object 
 lesson in the slavery and rationed misery that 
 constitute the triumph of soviet ideals. Unfor- 
 tunately, an age of enlightenment has never 
 dawned for the proletariat and from philosophy 
 clairvoyance has been withheld. 
 
 Yet when Germany launched her holy cru- 
 sade, a chela admonished: — "Watch Russia! 
 Great things will come from there." 
 
 What are these things? The Lords of Karma 
 alone can tell. But Muhammad is suggestive. 
 The Prophet said that paradise lies in the 
 shadow of swords. Muhammad was pleasantly 
 figurative and so are the swords. But, to reach 
 paradise, always there is a desert to cross, a 
 desert swept by simooms, peopled with djinns. 
 The Lords of Karma alone can tell what si- 
 mooms await humanity. 
 
 New York, June, JQ20.