Out of this rivalry of interests and clash of intrigue, in which Alexander III acted with caution and shrewdness, there gradually emerged the set of alliances which would one day deluge Europe with blood. Germany and Austria made a common lot of their interests and drew together. Italy, jealous of the French support of the Papacy and won by the deceitful promises of Germany, joined them and formed the Triple Alliance. Russia could no longer remain isolated and Alexander III slowly and reluctantly overcame his imperial dislike of the French Republic. Little acts of mutual courtesy led up to the floating of a large loan in France in 1887. The financial link with Germany was almost severed. In the following year a Russian representative was appointed to the Vatican. In 1890 a large French fleet appeared at Cronstadt, and was boisterously welcomed. In 1893, the year before the death of Alexander, a commercial treaty with France was signed. Thus in both domestic and foreign policy the reign of Alexander III was one of preparation for the final chapter of the romance of the Romanoffs. It created at home a machinery of despotism which would prove so heavy that it roused the very people whom it was designed to suppress. Abroad it entered upon imperialistic ventures which would lead to wars that would expose the disgusting growth of corruption under the shelter of the universal censorship. Alexander III died in 1894 (November 1st), and left to the last of his line a country which he had apparently pacified. He was honest in his creed of orthodoxy and autocracy, though we will not suppose that he was insensible of its profit to himself and his family; but he had not the intelligence to see that such an anachronism as his mediæval suppression of a people’s sentiments could not live in the atmosphere of the end of the nineteenth century. CHAPTER XVI THE LAST OF THE ROMANOFFS THE crowning act of the drama of the Romanoffs has a peculiar irony. One could well imagine a Romanoff of the seventeenth or eighteenth century making a ferocious struggle against the democratic forces which now threatened the autocracy. For those older monarchs power had been a means of obtaining wealth, of enlarging their individual pleasures to royal or imperial proportions, and they would use all the machinery of despotism to maintain their splendid privileges. But in proportion as the democratic menace grew in the nineteenth century the voluptuous selfishness of the Russian monarchs diminished. The serious, almost ascetic, standard set up by Alexander I lingered in the imperial palaces, and it seemed that the less personal gratification the monarch received from his autocratic power the more resolutely he fought to retain it. The last of the Romanoffs was one of the most sober and industrious of his line; and his reign was disgraced by a more bloody and cruel coercion than had reddened the reign of any of his predecessors.