When Hardt had left, the saint opened another bottle of champagne and drank it all from a tumbler, afterwards consuming half a bottle of brandy. I was busy with three days' accumulation of letters, and did not notice it until, an hour later, I found him dead asleep on the floor of the dining-room--a pretty spectacle if presented to the millions of our patriotic Russians who believed in the Tsar as their "Father" and in the divinity of the "holy man" who directed the Empire's affairs. The saint filled me with increasing disgust, yet I confess I had become fascinated by the widespread and desperate conspiracies which he either engineered himself or of which he pulled the most important strings. In the plot against Stolypin, though none dreamed of it, he had been the most active agent. Stolypin, a purely honest and loyal Russian, who, on taking office as Prime Minister, was actuated by a firm determination to do his level best for the Empire, was an unwanted statesman. He was too honest, and, therefore, dangerous to the Court camarilla set up and paid by Potsdam. As the days passed the monk frequently referred to him as a thorn in the side of the Empress. "The fellow must be got rid of!" he declared to me more than once. "He suspects a lot, and he knows too much. He is dangerous to us, Feodor--very dangerous!" One night, when we were together in his room at Tsarskoe-Selo, after he had been dining _en famille_ with the Imperial family, he remarked: "Things are going well. I saw the lawyer Altschiller to-day. All is prepared for the coup against Stolypin, who is still ignorant that Vera Baltz is in Petrograd." I knew Altschiller, who often called at the Poltavskaya. He was a close friend of Monsieur Raeff, whom Rasputin, when all-powerful a little later on, actually appointed as Procurator of the Holy Synod, having placed the appointment upon the Emperor's desk to sign! The law case was, however, delayed. Hardt was on one of his frequent absences--in Germany, no doubt--and matters did not move so rapidly as to satisfy the Empress. The whole plot was to keep the Prime Minister in the dark until the moment when the skeleton of his past should be dragged from its cupboard. As announced by Rasputin, the Emperor and Empress had visited Denmark and Norway on board the _Standart_, and were back again at Peterhof, when one day Rasputin received his friend Boris Stuermer, the bureaucrat, at that time struggling strenuously for advancement. In the monk's den Stuermer, chatting about Stolypin and the vindictive woman who had come to Petrograd to destroy him--for he was one of the paid servants of Potsdam, and in consequence knew most of the secrets--said: "Have you, Father, ever met a Jew named Bagrov?" "Never to my knowledge. Why?"