The Emperor, however, would have felt inclined to let the whole matter pass, or at least to make as if he ignored it. But neither his mother nor his wife would hear of it. The former wished some kind of punishment to be inflicted on her rebellious son, and the latter decided that this punishment should be a most rigorous one. She prevailed upon the weak-minded Czar to put his brother under restraint and to make him what is called in England a ward in chancery, assuming himself his guardianship and depriving him of the management of the large fortune he had inherited from the Czar Alexander III. This made him of course ineligible as a Regent should the Emperor die, and that was what the Czarina was aiming at. Of course she was wrong, and respectful as I was towards her, I could not help one evening, when she had broached the subject of her own accord, telling her that I thought she had made a great mistake in taking such a decided part in the chastisement of her brother-in-law, and that it would have been more politic on her part to keep outside the matter and to allow it to be settled between the Czar and the Dowager Empress, who, after all, were the only persons concerned in it. My mistress listened in silence to my words, then suddenly exclaimed with unusual violence: “I had to do it; I had to do it; he wanted to part me from my son; he had to be put out of the way!” There was nothing to reply to this outburst, but I could not help regretting that the Empress had allowed herself to be influenced by false reports, and that her common sense had not prevailed and stopped her from compromising herself so openly in this matter. My forebodings, alas, turned out to have been true ones, because the first person who was furious with the Czarina for the part she had played in this whole story was the Empress Dowager, who had not wished things to go so far, and who guessed at once the real reasons which had actuated her daughter-in-law. The breach between the two ladies was in consequence considerably widened, and as my mistress grew more and more addicted to those superstitious practices which proved her bane, Marie Feodorovna found real grounds for criticising her, so that it became at last a recognised fact that the worst adversary of the Empress was her own mother-in-law.