But the rise to power was not so speedy as the fall from it, and both give us some measure of the ignorance and barbarism of the times. Otrepieff was a clever and accomplished man, but he either lacked, or disdained to use in so credulous a world, the art of tact. He brought a Polish wife whose suite laughed at the uncouth ways of the Russians. He himself too openly railed at the backwardness of the country, surrounded himself with foreigners, and acted with scandalous independence. He was plainly, as his adventures would indicate, a sceptic, and he snapped his fingers at the Pope and the Jesuits the moment they had secured the throne for him; but he was no more respectful to the clergy and religious forms of Russia. He disdained monks and ikons, asked no blessing on his table, and refused to follow any of the court-traditions. And within a month of his entrance into the Kreml the adventurer lay dead upon the stones of its courtyard. People, amazed at their own credulity, now exclaimed that he was a sorcerer, and the spell had to be broken by blowing the ashes of his burned corpse from the mouth of a cannon. The succession to the throne had now been interrupted, and a ruler had to be chosen. Vassili Chuiski, a military noble of distinguished family, a bald myopic man of little energy, secured the suffrages of Moscow and mounted the throne. But while the sluggishness of communication enabled Moscow thus to choose a sovereign for the entire country, it left the provinces in such a state of confusion and unsettlement that any rebel could find support there. Another Dmitri arose, and was accepted. People recollected that the real Dmitri had, like a true Russian, worn a beard, while Otrepieff had had none. The new claimant had a beard. A regiment of nobles in one province, an army of disaffected peasants and brigands in another, raised the standard of the new adventurer and united their forces within sight of Moscow. There the nobles quarrelled with and deserted their baser comrades, and the new claimant ended on a gallows.