Gregory Rasputin very often used to visit Tobolsk, where he was always received with great ceremony and pomp, as if he had been really the important personage he believed himself. The policeman in the streets saluted him as he passed; the carriage in which he drove was escorted or preceded by a high police functionary, and the governor asked him to dinner. The same kind of thing used to take place in other Siberian cities. In one of them the staterooms reserved at the railway station for any high authority on a visit to the place were thrown open to him. In another triumphal arches were erected in his honour, while in a third he was met by deputations in the midst of which could be seen civil functionaries and religious dignitaries. How all this happened no one knew or could explain. In what consisted the fame of Rasputin and what he had done to deserve all these honours nobody could tell. But fame he had acquired, honours he had obtained, and where another person gifted with a smaller amount of impudence than he was possessed of, would have been put into prison or sent to a madhouse, Gricha had it all his own way, and defied governors and judges with an equal indifference, sure that none among them would be daring enough to try to put a stop to his progress or to his avidity. Most friendly, not to say intimate, relations were established between Rasputin and Bishop Warnava, especially after the latter’s elevation to the Episcopal See of Tobolsk. The first sermon which Warnava preached in that town he dedicated to the wife of Rasputin. One need not say that the whole clergy of the town and of the diocese trembled before Rasputin, who did not fail to exact from it large sums of money, which he extorted, thanks to the promises which he made but never meant in the least to keep. During the course of the year 1909 complaints about Rasputin’s behaviour increased to a considerable extent. He was once more called before an ecclesiastical court to give explanations in regard to his general conduct. Among his judges figured again Bishop Feofane. This time Rasputin could not clear himself of the charges preferred against him, and he was invited to retire for one year into a monastery by way of penance. But Rasputin refused to submit to this sentence and categorically declined to do as he had been told. He gave as a reason for his disobedience to the commands of his ecclesiastical superiors that his conscience obliged him to resist because it would be impossible for his “spiritual sisters and daughters” to accompany him in his retreat and live together with him in the monastery they wished him to enter.