Alexander has been accused of being privy to his father’s murder, but from all the evidence which I was able to gather, this was a calumny. There is no doubt that he was in touch with the conspirators, and that he was a consenting party to his father’s removal from the throne. Paul’s state was such that not even a son could wish to see his father remain vested with the terrible power of the autocrat of all the Russias. But murder, let alone parricide, was not in his nature. All the acts of his reign gave the lie to so hideous a charge. The man who set free the political exiles in Siberia, who abolished torture from the criminal code of his country, who made it illegal to hold sales of serfs, who helped to extend the blessings of education by founding universities, was a wise and humane ruler. Even the policy which made him countenance the conspiracy against his father was in the interests of humanity. Had he known the extremity to which that plot was to be pushed, we may be sure that he would have fought rather than not interpose his authority. At the outset of his reign the young Emperor was hypnotized by the glamour of the fame of Napoleon, who was then First Consul and seemed to be destined for the dictatorship of the world. But that crime, and worse than crime, that mistake, as Talleyrand put it—the murder of the Duc d’Enghien at Vincennes in March, 1804—aroused the greatest indignation in the mind of Alexander, and the Russian chargé d’affaires at Paris was instructed to express that feeling in no measured terms. The First Consul’s reply was, in effect, a request that the Emperor would mind his own business. A further note was sent, recapitulating the claims and remonstrances of Russia, and M. d’Oubril asked for his passports. The tragedy of Vincennes had provoked the anger of Alexander; the coronation of Napoleon as Emperor by the Pope summoned from Rome to do his bidding, on the 19th of November in the same year, called up a totally different but no less hostile feeling. That a Corsican adventurer should robe himself in the Imperial purple and pretend to equal rank with himself, was something which the proud Romanoff could not brook. The disgust and indignation engendered by Napoleon’s cruelty and pretensions were enhanced by his territorial encroachments. Alexander threw himself heart and soul into the combination against the French, and Europe was once more ablaze with war until the Peace of Tilsit in 1807, when on board a raft anchored in the river Niemen, the two Emperors fell into one another’s arms, kissed, and swore eternal friendship.