The habit went the farther since it was encouraged by the government, for the recent taking-over of the drink-traffic by the State was but a reversion to the state of affairs in 1600, though then it was an offence against the State to urge a man to leave one of the State-owned taverns, even though he was pledging the clothes off his back: a common custom. At every season of public rejoicing in winter two or three hundred died in the streets of Moscow as they lay there naked and dead-drunk, and the stranger might see the bodies brought home by tens and twelves, half-eaten by dogs. One traveller tells a tale of a Muscovite whom he saw come out of a tavern in shirt and breeches only, meet a friend, return, and come out again with no shirt. The traveller, who knew Russian, expressed sympathy with him as if he had been robbed, but was answered, "No, it's the man at the bar and his wine that have brought me to this, but as my shirt's there my breeches may as well keep it company." And accordingly, a few minutes afterwards, he came out once more with nothing to cover him but a handful of flowers picked at the tavern-door! There had been a Tsar who tried to repress drunkenness, but he became a dead failure in every sense of the phrase shortly before the above incident happened, and even during his lifetime achieved nothing more than preventing people going about the streets naked. Neither was it just the average man who could not endure life sober, but the priest frequently needed a lay-helper on either side of him in order to get through the marriage service, a result of the festivities preceding the wedding. And the women were no better than the men. When a Russian lady entertained her friends, it was etiquette to send round afterwards to know if they all got home safely. Yet one traveller unconsciously gives the Muscovite's own point of view: there was a quarter of Moscow known as the "drunken" quarter: that was where the foreign soldiers lodged. The excessive misuse of tobacco was also bound to be noticed, considering that smoking became general more quickly there than anywhere else outside England and Turkey. But the Tsar who failed to check drunkenness succeeded against smoking, which he prohibited, under penalty of slitting the nostrils, in 1634, on the ground of it being a frequent cause of fires among the houses, all wooden ones, and of the unholy state of the Muscovite's breath when he addressed the saints.