He, however, took the whole responsibility of his execution upon himself. In his testament at St. Helena, he wrote, "I arrested the Duke d'Enghien because that measure was necessary to the security, the interest, and the honor of the French people, when the Count d'Artois maintained, on his own admission, sixty assassins. In similar circumstances I would do the same." The spirit is saddened in recording these terrible deeds of violence and of blood. It was a period of anarchy, of revolution, of conspiracies, of war. Fleets were bombarding cities, and tens of thousands were falling in a day upon a single field of battle. Human life was considered of but little value. Bloody retaliations and reprisals were sanctified by the laws of contending nations. Surrounded by those influences, nurtured from infancy in the minds of them, provoked beyond endurance by the aristocratic arrogance which regarded the elected sovereign of France as an usurper beyond the pale of law, it is only surprising that Napoleon could have passed through a career so wonderful and so full of temptations, with a character so seldom sullied by blemishes of despotic injustice. This execution of a prince of the blood royal sent a thrill of indignation through all the courts of Europe. The French embassadors were treated in many instances with coldness amounting to insult. The Emperor Alexander sent a remonstrance to the First Consul. He thus provoked a terrible reply from the man who could hurl a sentence like a bomb-shell. The young monarch of Russia was seated upon the blood-stained throne, from which the daggers of assassins had removed his father. And yet, not one of these assassins had been punished. With crushing irony, Napoleon remarked, "France has acted, as Russia under similar circumstances would have done; for had she been informed that the assassins of Paul were assembled at a day's march from her frontier, would she not, at all hazards, have seized upon them there?" This was not one of these soft answers which turn away wrath. It stung Alexander to the quick. Absorbed by these cares, Napoleon had but little time to think of the imprisoned conspirators awaiting their trial. Pichegru, hearing no further mention of the First Consul's proposal, and informed of the execution of the Duke d'Enghien, gave himself up for lost. His proud spirit could not endure the thought of a public trial and an ignominious punishment. One night, after having read a treatise of Seneca upon suicide, he laid aside his book, and by means of his silk-cravat, and a wooden-peg, which he used as a tourniquet, he strangled himself. His keepers found him in the morning dead upon his bed.