But Alexander was not very clever. He did not know men and women as Talleyrand and Metternich knew them. He did not understand the strange game of diplomacy. He was vain (who would not be under the circumstances?) and loved to hear the applause of the multitude and soon he had become the main “attraction” of the Congress while Metternich and Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British representative) sat around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay and decided what was actually going to be done. They needed Russia and therefore they were very polite to Alexander, but the less he had personally to do with the actual work of the Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged his plans for a Holy Alliance that he might be fully occupied while they were engaged upon the work at hand. Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties and meet people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay but there was a very different element in his character. He tried to forget something which he could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801 he had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg, waiting for the news of his father’s abdication. But Paul had refused to sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck and had strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell Alexander that he was Emperor of all the Russian lands. The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar who was a very sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great French philosophers who did not believe in God but in Human Reason. But Reason alone could not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He began to hear voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which he could square himself with his conscience. He became very pious and began to take an interest in mysticism, that strange love of the mysterious and the unknown which is as old as the temples of Thebes and Babylon. The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced the character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women who had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite normal. They jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean the news of the “death on the field of honour” of an only son. The phrases about “brotherly love” and “liberty” of the Revolution were hollow words in the ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to anything that might give them a new hold on the terrible problems of life. In their grief and misery they were easily imposed upon by a large number of impostors who posed as prophets and preached a strange new doctrine which they dug out of the more obscure passages of the Book of Revelations.