‘This,’ he said, when I got up to him, ‘is a chapter to add to the vicissitudes of courtly favour and disgrace in Russia. Razumowski may consider himself fortunate to be quits at the cost of a palace half burnt down. He also has known the ups and downs of favour and disgrace; he also has known the sweets of power and the bitterness of exile. The history of my country could indeed be made into a most philosophical novel; it would, above all, provide a series of excellent moral lectures on the danger of vainglory and the frequency of revolutions. The last century has offered any number of examples. There is Menschikoff, a pastry cook’s lad, who becomes a prince and a general, and is suddenly exiled, dying a couple of years after, without individually recovering his position. Biren, a servant, is raised to sovereign rank, and is practically master of the empire for nine years, until the day that Münnich, his rival, claps the fetters on him in the presence of his own guards, petrified with fear. Biren, however, regains favour, while Münnich himself expiates his sudden rise with twenty years’ banishment to Siberia. Surgeon Lestocq, after having overthrown the Regent Anne, practically puts the crown on Elizabeth’s head, and remains one of her principal advisers during her reign. He is, nevertheless, flung into prison, then set free, and finally almost entirely forgotten. The Princesse Daschkoff, the supposed soul of the plot that dragged Peter III. from his throne to place his wife there, is soon misjudged by her whose plans she imprudently boasted to have inspired, and to whose grandeur she professed to have contributed. Finally, the plotters who took Paul I.‘s life and crown are treated with the utmost harshness by him who owes his present power to them. ‘Well,’ he went on, after we had left the scene of the fire, ‘the elevations are often as strange in their causes as the catastrophes are terrible in their effects. Judge for yourself. In consequence of my relationship to Prince Kourakine, I began my career in the secretarial department of the great chancellor Romanzoff. One day the latter was dictating an important despatch to me. I do not know how I managed it, but in my hurry, instead of emptying the pounce over the document, I emptied the inkstand over the beautiful white kerseymeres of the chief. That inkpot, so indiscriminately emptied, decided my fate. Romanzoff, as you may imagine, did not care to keep near him a secretary with such a distinct tendency to spoil his clothes, so he gave him a position as a state-councillor, where there was a good deal to control, but little to write. But for this trifling circumstance, I’d probably be vegetating now among the subalterns.’