Soon after this it was related that the Empress was in connivance with the numerous people who had made it their business to plunder the national exchequer, and that she looked with indulgence upon the malversations from which profited the partisans and the accomplices, for one could hardly call them by another name, of Rasputin. She began to be hated even more ferociously than had been the case before, and at last the police had to let Nicholas II. know that his Consort would do better not to show herself too often in public, because an attempt against her life might easily come to be made, under the influence of all the stories which one heard right and left concerning her private conduct and her affection for a being who was accused by the whole nation of being fatal to Russia’s prosperity at home and good renown abroad. The Czar listened to all this, as he was to listen later on to the remonstrances of his own family, but he did not act on all that he had been told. He continued to see Rasputin, partly because, according to the tales of those who were in the secret of what really went on in that strange Imperial household, the frank way of speaking of this uncouth peasant amused him and pleased him, being something so totally different from the language which he was accustomed to hear. But contrary to what was generally believed, he did not discuss with him matters of State, any more than did the Empress. It is to be hoped that this last assertion is correct, and that Rasputin in regard to Nicholas II. only played the part sustained by Chicot at the court of Henri III. of France, that of the King’s Jester, capable occasionally of telling some truths to his master. But during the last months which preceded the removal of this sinister figure from the horizon of Tsarskoie Selo, no one in Russia would believe in such a version, seeing that this Jester could dispose according to his pleasure of all the high places in the State, that he had created ministers, functionaries of paramount importance, church dignitaries, and that whoever addressed himself to him generally got what he wanted, whilst it was his friends who were controlling the government of the vast empire of the Czars. One did not realise that this had become possible only because all persons endowed with the slightest independence of character, had gradually become estranged from their Sovereign, and had come to the decision to abandon him to his fate, disgusted as they were by his weakness in regard to his wife, and being moreover unwilling to accept the responsibility of duties which they were not allowed to fulfil according to the dictates of their conscience. One after another the Ministers, who at the beginning of the reign of Nicholas II. had helped him to rule Russia, had been dismissed by him, or retired of their own accord, and their places had been taken by simple subaltern functionaries, preoccupied only with that one single thought of remaining as long as