In fact, when one reviews all one has heard concerning this personage, one is tempted to ask the question whether his appearance in St. Petersburg had not brought along with it an epidemic of madness among all those who had come in contact with him. It hardly seems possible that bishops, priests, ministers, high dignitaries, statesmen, even, or at least men having the pretension to be considered as such, should have thought it necessary to go and seek the favour of this vulgar, ill-bred, dirty Russian mougik, devoid of honesty and of scruples, about whom the most disgraceful stories were being repeated everywhere, and whose presence in the houses where he was a daily visitor used to give rise to the worst kind of gossip. This gossip was of such a nature that decent persons hesitated before repeating it, let alone believing it. Like an insidious poison it defiled all whom it touched. One fails to realise by what kind of magic grave men like Mr. Sabler, for instance, who for some time had occupied the highly responsible and delicate function of Procurator of the Holy Synod, one of the most important posts in the whole Russian Empire, could be made so far to forget himself as to prostrate himself before Rasputin in his eagerness to become entitled to the latter’s good graces and protection. And that he did so is at least not a matter of doubt, if we are to believe the following letter which the monk Illiodore wrote from his exile on the fifth of May, 1914, to a personage very well known in the political circles of St. Petersburg. “I swear to you with the word of honour of an honest man that the letter in which I called Sabler and Damansky the instruments of ‘Gricha’ (Rasputin) contained nothing but the solemn truth, and I repeat it once more, that according to what Rasputin told to me on the twenty-eighth of June, 1911, at 3 o’clock in the afternoon in my little cell, Sabler really kissed the feet of ‘Gricha,’ who, in relating this story to me, showed me with an expressive pantomime in what way he had done so. I consider as utterly false and as a barefaced lie the declaration of Mr. Sabler that he had never prostrated himself before any one, except before the sacred images. Respectfully yours, S. M. TROUFANOFF, formerly the monk Illiodore.”