In 1812 the Orloff and its magnificent companions had to fly from Moscow. In the beginning of September in that terrible year, finding that the mountains of slain on the bloody field of Borodino could not stop Napoleon, the Russians sullenly retired before him. On the third of the month the Regalia was carried out of Moscow and lodged in a place of safety in the interior. This flight was followed by that of everybody and everything that was portable. When Napoleon entered on the fourteenth it was to find an absolute desert in Moscow, only a few stragglers, prisoners and beggars having been left. Alexander I., strange to say, died peacefully in 1826, leaving the throne to his brother Nicholas. Nicholas has been aptly called "the Iron Czar." He was the third son of his father, but his elder brother, Constantine, having no taste for the perilous glory of a crown renounced his rights in favor of Nicholas. There was some delay in crowning the new Czar owing, says the Court Circular with decorous gravity, to the illness and death of the late Emperor's widow who survived her husband but five months. In reality, however, the delay was caused by events more serious to the peace of mind of the new sovereign. A revolution, which seems an indispensable accompaniment to a change of rulers in Russia, exploded after the accession of Nicholas and came near to costing him his life. This event seems to have further hardened a nature that was already sufficiently severe, and when Nicholas went to Moscow in August, 1826, his coronation progress was not meant to gladden the people but to make them quake. When the Czar left the Cathedral of the Assumption, his crown upon his head and his sceptre in his hand, "his face looked as hard as Siberian ice." So wrote of him an eye-witness, who further says the people were too frightened to cheer--they dropped on their knees with their faces in the dust. It was a gloomy coronation notwithstanding all the diamonds and glitter of the pageant. There was but one redeeming incident that spoke of human kindliness and affection. When the Czar had been crowned his mother, the widow of the murdered Paul, advanced to do homage to him as her sovereign, but the Czar knelt before his mother and implored her blessing. After the Empress Mother came Constantine, the elder brother, who had waived his rights to the crown, and he was in turn affectionately embraced by Nicholas. This exhibition of fraternal affection in Russia, where brothers had been known to strangle each other in order to grasp the much-coveted sceptre, was considered as something quite unprecedented. The Court Chronicler of the day speaks of it with emotion as a sight to move the hearts of gods and men.