He sent his Majesty 800 purses (a purse being worth 500 crowns), and advised him to return peaceably into his own country, through the territories of the Emperor of Germany, or in some French vessels that were then lying in the harbour at Constantinople, and which M. de Feriol, the French ambassador, offered to Charles to take him to Marseilles. Count Poniatowski continued negotiations with the minister, and gained in the negotiations an ascendancy of which Russian gold could no longer deprive him in dealing with an incorruptible minister. The Russian faction thought that the best plan was to poison such a dangerous diplomat. They bribed one of his servants, who was to give him poison in his coffee; the crime was discovered in time; they found the poison in a little vial which they took to the Grand Seignior; the poisoner was judged in full divan, and condemned to the galleys, because, by Turkish law, crimes that have failed of execution are never punished by death. Charles, still persuaded that sooner or later he would succeed in making the Turkish Empire declare against that of Russia, would agree to none of the proposals for his return in peace to his own dominions; he persisted in pointing out to the Turks as dangerous the very Czar whom he had long despised; his emissaries kept up their insinuations that Peter the Great was aiming at gaining control of shipping in the Black Sea; that, after having beaten the Cossacks, he had designs on the Crimea. Sometimes his representations roused the Porte, sometimes the Russian minister nullified their effect. While he was thus letting his fate depend on the caprice of a vizir, and was forced to put up with the affronts as well as accept the favours of a foreign power--while he was presenting petitions to the Sultan, and living on hospitality in a desert--his enemies roused themselves to attack his kingdom. The battle of Pultawa was at once the signal for a revolution in Poland. King Augustus returned thither, protesting against his abdication and the Peace of Altranstadt, and openly accusing Charles, whom he now no longer feared, of robbery and cruelty. He imprisoned Finsten and Imof, his plenipotentiaries, who had signed the abdication, as if in so doing they had exceeded their orders and betrayed their master. His Saxon troops, which had been the excuse for his dethronement, brought him back to Warsaw with most of the Polish counts who had formerly sworn fidelity to him, had afterwards done the same to Stanislas, and were about to renew their oath to Augustus. Siniawski himself joined his party, forgetting the idea he had had of making himself King, and was content as Grand General of the crown. Fleming, his first minister, who had been obliged to leave Saxony for a time, for fear of being given up as Patkul had been, managed matters at that time so as to bring over a great part of the Polish nobility to his master.