That afternoon Kropotkin attended the last performance of the Italian Opera. Baveri, the conductor of the band, raised his baton; the musicians began to play, but human voices drowned the notes, for the people were shouting for their czar--Redeemer!--Deliverer! Then Baveri stopped, but the hurrahs did not. Again Baveri waved his stick wildly in the air, the fiddlers grasped tightly their bows, the drummers beat with all their strength, the players inflated their lungs and blew the brazen instruments with might and main, but from that powerful band not a bar of music could be heard, for the people were shouting for their czar--Immanuel!--Illustrious! Strangers met in the streets, embraced, kissed each other thrice on the cheek, and shouted for their czar--Father!--Messiah! In front of the royal palace, peasants and professors mingled, and shouted for their czar--Emancipator!--Liberator! When he really appeared, crowds eager and immense, ran after the carriage and shouted for their czar--Tsar Osvoboditel! As a dream disappears at dawn, so died this enthusiasm. The brief moment of promise was followed by an eternal hour of despair; the short day was succeeded by the endless night. Hell may not be Hell, but a Romanoff is a Romanoff. Only one year later, the despot in Alexander awoke--mature and monstrous. If the dead could touch the living, Nicholas would have hugged his son. The steps of the scaffold became slippery with the blood of the best. The rope of the hangman was jerked day and night, and the key of the jailer creaked in a thousand locks. Reaction had won, and liberalism lay covered with a crimson shroud. The Valuev volcano vomited its smothering lava as far as Siberia, and General Kukel who with Kropotkin's help was preparing a long list of necessary reforms, was dismissed from his post because another place had been found for him--in prison. On the other hand there was a district chief who robbed the peasants and whipped their wives, and whose brutality and dishonesty were so unanswerably exposed by the energetic Kropotkin that this officer was also transfered--to a higher position in Kamchatka where he found more roubles for his purse and more women for his knout. When Kropotkin returned to St. Petersburg on an official commission, a high functionary said to him, "Do you know that Chernishevsky has been arrested? He is now in the fortress." "Chernishevsky? What has he done?" "Nothing in particular, nothing! But _mon cher_, you know--state considerations!... Such a clever man, awfully clever! And such an influence he has upon the youth. You understand that a government cannot tolerate that: that's impossible! intolerable _mon cher, dans un Etat bien ordonné_!"[8]