In 1817 there was discovered in the very heart of St. Petersburg, holding its meetings in an imperial residence (the Michael Palace), a religious sect of most pronounced mystical tendencies, presided over by a lady belonging to the best circles of the capital--the widow of a colonel, Madame Tatarinoff. In her apartments used to gather officers, State functionaries, women and girls of good family and excellent education who, with slight variations, practised all the religious rites of the Khlystys. One of the Ministers of Alexander I., Prince Galitzyne, was suspected of having honoured these assemblies with his presence. Thanks to a letter which accidentally fell into the hands of the police, the Government became aware of what was going on, and Madame Tatarinoff, this Russian Madame Guyon, expiated in exile in a distant province of Siberia the ecstasies which she had practised and which she had allowed others to practise under her roof. Some of her disciples were prosecuted, but the greater number escaped scot free. The authorities did not care to increase the scandal which this affair had aroused in the capital. Much later, in 1878, after the Russo-Turkish war, which, like the Japanese affair, had been followed by a strong revolutionary movement in the country that culminated in the assassination of the Czar, Alexander II., another prophet, this time of foreign origin, appeared on the social horizon of St. Petersburg society, where he made a considerable number of converts. This was the famous Lord Radstock, whose doctrines were taken up by a gentleman who up to that time had been known as one of the gayest among the gay, a colonel in the Guards--Mr. Basil Paschkoff. He was enormously rich, and put all his vast fortune at the service of the religious craze which had seized him. He used his best efforts to convert to the doctrine of salvation through faith only not alone his friends and relatives, but also the poorer classes of the population of the capital, devoting in particular his attention to the cab drivers. All these people used to meet at his house, where they mingled with persons of the highest rank and standing, such as Count Korff, and a former Minister, Count Alexis Bobrinsky. Later on the whole Tchertkoff family, to which belonged the famous friend of Count Leo Tolstoy, associated itself with them, and, indeed, displayed the greatest fanaticism in regard to its participation in the doctrines of the new sect.