While these events were passing in Germany, the Poles carried on a contest against the whole power of Russia as glorious and as unfortunate as their former one under their leader, Kosciuszko. Louis Philippe, king of the French, in the hope of gaining favor with the northern powers by the abandonment of the Polish cause, dealt not a stroke in their aid. Austria, notwithstanding her natural rivalry to Russia, beheld the Polish revolution merely through the veil of legitimacy and refused her aid to rebels. A Hungarian address in favor of Poland produced no result. Prussia was closely united by family ties to Russia. The Poles were consequently left without external aid, and their spirit was internally damped by diplomatic arts. Aid was promised by France, if they would wait. They accordingly waited: and in the interim, after the failure of Diebitsch's attempt upon Warsaw and his sudden death, Paskewitch, the Russian general, unexpectedly crossed the Vistula close to the Prussian fortress of Thorn and seized the city of Warsaw while each party was still in a state of indecision. Immense masses of fugitive Polish soldiery sought shelter in Austria and Prussia. The officers and a few thousand private soldiers were permitted to pass onward to France: they found a warm welcome in Southern Germany, whence they had during the campaign been supplied with surgeons and every necessary for the supply of the hospitals. The rest were compelled to return to Russia. The Russian troops drawn from the distant provinces, the same that had been employed in the war with Persia, overran Poland as far as the Prussian frontier, bringing with them a fearful pestilence, Asiatic cholera. This dire malady, which had, since 1817, crept steadily onward from the banks of the Ganges, reached Russia in 1830, and, in the autumn of 1831, spread across the frontiers of Germany. It chiefly visited populous cities and generally spared districts less densely populated, passing from one great city to another whither infection could not have been communicated. _Cordons de santé_ and quarantine regulations were of no avail. The pestilence appeared to spread like miasma through the air and to kindle like gas wherever the assemblage of numbers disposed the atmosphere to its reception. The patients were seized with vomiting and diarrhoea, accompanied with violent convulsions, and often expired instantaneously or after an agony of a few hours' duration. Medicinal art was powerless against this disease, and, as in the 14th century, the ignorant populace ascribed its prevalence to poison. Suspicion fell this time upon the physicians and the public authorities and spread in the most incredible manner from St. Petersburg to Paris. The idea that the physicians had been charged to poison the people _en masse_ occasioned dreadful tumults, in which numbers of physicians fell victims and every drug used in medicine was destroyed as poisonous. Similar scenes occurred in Russia and in Hungary.