There, at Tiflís, he was arrested a few days after the 14th of December, 1825 (see Ch. I.), and taken in all speed to the St. Petersburg fortress, where his best friends were already imprisoned. It is said in the Memoirs of one of the Decembrists that even in the gloomy surroundings of the fortress the habitual brightness of Griboyédoff did not leave him. He used to tell his unfortunate friends such amusing stories by means of taps on the walls that they rolled on their beds, laughing like children. In June, 1826, he was set free, and sent back to Tiflís. But after the execution of some of his friends--Ryléeff was among them--and the harsh sentence to hard labour for life in Siberian mines, which was passed upon all the others, his old gaiety was gone forever. At Tiflís he worked harder than ever at spreading seeds of a better civilisation in the newly conquered territory; but next year he had to take part in the war of 1827-1828 against Persia, accompanying the army as a diplomatic agent, and after a crushing defeat of the Shah, Abbas-mirza, it was he who concluded the well-known Turkmanchái treaty, by which Russia obtained rich provinces from Persia and gained such an influence over her inner affairs. After a flying visit to St. Petersburg, Griboyédoff was sent once more to Teheran--this time as an ambassador. Before leaving, he married at Tiflís a Georgian princess of remarkable beauty, but he felt, as he left the Caucasus for Persia, that his chances of returning alive were few: “Abbas Miraz,” he wrote, “will never pardon me the Turkmanchái treaty”--and so it happened. A few months after his arrival at Teheran a crowd of Persians fell upon the Russian embassy, and Griboyédoff was killed. For the last few years of his life, Griboyédoff had not much time nor taste for literary work. He knew that nothing he desired to write could ever see the light. Even _Misfortune from Intelligence_ had been so mutilated by censorship that many of its best passages had lost all sense. He wrote, however, a tragedy in the romantic style, _A Georgian Night_, and those of his friends who had read it in full rated extremely high its poetic and dramatic qualities; but only two scenes from this tragedy and the outline of its contents have reached us. The manuscript was lost--perhaps at Teheran.