On the 1st of November, 1916, one of the cousins of the Czar, the Grand Duke Nicholas Michaylovitsch, who was perhaps the cleverest member of the Imperial family, a man wonderfully well learned, and who had acquired the reputation of an excellent historian, thanks to the remarkable studies which he had published on the life and times of Alexander I., and the Napoleonic wars, made another effort to shake the influence of Rasputin, Protopopoff and the Empress. He asked the Czar to receive him, and during a long and heated conversation which he had with the latter, he read to him a letter which he had prepared beforehand, in which were exposed not only the political, but also the private reasons, which made it an imperative necessity to remove Rasputin from Tsarskoie Selo. As the Grand Duke told his friends later on, there were in this letter some passages that might have wounded Nicholas II. in his feelings as a husband, not only as a sovereign. But the Czar did not reply one single word, only went to fetch the Empress, and in his turn read to her the incriminating epistle. When he reached the passage in which remarks were made concerning her, Alexandra Feodorovna rose up in a passion, and snatching the document out of her husband’s hands, she tore it up into a thousand small pieces. In the course of this memorable conversation, the Grand Duke asked the Emperor whether he knew that the appointment of Protopopoff was the work of Rasputin, with whom the former had become acquainted at the house of one of their common friends, a certain Badmaieff. “Yes,” replied the Czar, “I know it.” “And you find this a matter of course,” exclaimed his cousin. Nicholas II. replied nothing. In spite of the angry tone which the discussion had assumed, the Emperor remained perfectly civil to the Grand Duke. The latter afterwards remarked that he had been more than surprised to meet with such utter indifference, and at the same time such kindness, in appearance at least, from his cousin. It seemed as if nothing that he could say could move the Czar, who, during the most heated moments of this interview, handed the matches to his kinsman, when he noticed that the cigarette of the latter had gone out. At last the Grand Duke exclaimed: “You have got Cossacks here, and a great deal of room in your gardens. You can have me killed and buried without any one being the wiser for it. But I must tell you the truth, and say to you that you are going to your ruin.” The Czar continued to be silent, and his cousin had to take his leave, without having been able to obtain one single word from him by which he might have guessed whether he had been believed or not.