Read Complete Works of Wilkie Collins Online
Authors: Wilkie Collins
They left the house, laughing and chatting as carelessly as if they were a party going to the theater. Lestoc took the reins. “To the palace of the Duchess Regent, coachman!” said the Marquis, pleasantly. And to the palace they went.
They made no attempt to slip in by back doors, but boldly drove up to the grand entrance, inside of which the guard-house was situated.
“Who goes there?” cried the sentinel, as they left the sledge and passed in.
The Marquis took a pinch of snuff.
“Don’t you see, my good fellow?” he said. “A lady and two gentlemen.”
The slightest irregularity was serious enough to alarm the guard at the imperial palace in those critical times. The sentinel presented his musket at the Marquis, and a drummer-boy who was standing near, ran to his instrument and caught up his drum-sticks to beat the alarm.
Before the sentinel could fire he was surrounded by the thirty-three conspirators, and was disarmed in an instant. Before the drummer-boy could beat the alarm, the Princess Elizabeth had drawn out her knife, and had stabbed — not the boy, but — the drum! These slight preliminary obstacles being thus disposed of, Lestoc and the Marquis, having the Princess between them, and being followed by their thirty-three adherents, marched resolutely into the great hall of the palace, and there confronted the entire guard.
“Gentlemen,” said the Marquis, “I have the honour of presenting you to your future Empress, the daughter of Peter the Great.”
Half the guard had been bribed by the cunning Lestoc. The other half, seeing their comrades advance and pay homage to the Princess, followed the example of loyalty. Elizabeth was escorted into a room on the ground-floor by a military court formed in the course of five minutes. The Marquis and the faithful thirty-three went upstairs to the sleeping apartments of the palace. Lestoc ran out and ordered a carriage to be got ready — then joined the Marquis and the conspirators. The Duchess Regent and her child were just retiring for the night, when the German surgeon and the French ambassador politely informed them that they were prisoners. Entreaties were of no avail, resistance was out of the question. Both mother and son were led down to the carriage that Lestoc had ordered, and were driven off, under a strong guard, to the fortress of Riga.
The palace was secured, and the Duchess was imprisoned, but Lestoc and the Marquis had not done their night’s work yet. It was necessary to make sure of three powerful personages connected with the Government. Three more carriages were ordered out when the Duchess’s carriage had been driven off; and three noblemen — among them Count Osterman, the original cause of the troubles in Russia — were woke out of their first sleep with the information that they were State prisoners, and were started before daylight on their way to Siberia. At the same time, the thirty-three conspirators were scattered about in every barrack-room in St. Petersburg, proclaiming Elizabeth Empress, in right of her illustrious parentage, and in the name of the Russian people. Soon after daylight, the moment the working population was beginning to be astir, the churches were occupied by trusty men under Lestoc’s orders, and the oaths of fidelity to Elizabeth were administered to the willing populace as fast as they came in to morning prayers. By nine o’clock the work was done; the people were satisfied; the army was gained over; Elizabeth sat on her father’s throne, unopposed, unquestioned, unstained by the shedding of a drop of blood; and Lestoc and the Marquis could rest from their labours at last, and could say to each other with literal truth, “The Government of Russia has been changed in nine hours, and we two foreigners are the men who have worked the miracle!”
This was the Russian revolution of seventeen hundred and forty-one. It was not the less effectual because it had lasted but a few hours, and had been accomplished without the sacrifice of a single life. The imperial inheritance which it had placed in the hands of Elizabeth was not snatched from them again. The daughter of the great Czar lived and died Empress of Russia.
And what became of the two men who had won the throne for her? The story of the after-conduct of the Marquis and Lestoc must answer that question. The events of the revolution itself are hardly more strange than the events in the lives of the French ambassador and the German surgeon, when the brief struggle was over, and the change in the dynasty was accomplished.
To begin with the Marquis. He had laid the Princess Elizabeth under serious obligations to his courage and fidelity; and his services were repaid by such a reward as, in his vainest moments, he could never have dared to hope for. His fidelity had excited Elizabeth’s gratitude, but his personal qualities had done more — they had touched her heart. As soon as she was settled quietly on the throne, she proved her admiration of his merits, his services, and himself by offering to marry him.
This proposal, which conferred on the Marquis the highest distinction in Russia, fairly turned his brain. The imperturbable man, who had preserved his coolness in a situation of the deadliest danger, lost all control over himself the moment he rose to the climax of prosperity. Having obtained leave of absence from his imperial mistress, he returned to France to ask leave from his own sovereign to marry the Empress. This permission was readily granted. After receiving it, any man of ordinary discretion would have kept the fact of the Empress’s partiality for him as strictly secret as possible, until it could be openly avowed on the marriage-day. Far from this, the Marquis’s vanity led him to proclaim the brilliant destiny in store for him all over Paris. He commissioned the king’s genealogist to construct a pedigree which should be made to show that he was not unworthy to contract a royal alliance. When the pedigree was completed, he had the incredible folly to exhibit it publicly, along with the keepsakes which the Empress had given to him, and the rich presents which he intended to bestow as marks of his favor on the lords and ladies of the Russian court. Nor did his imprudence end even here. When he returned to St. Petersburg, he took back with him, among the other persons comprising his train, a woman of loose character, dressed in the disguise of a page. The persons about the Russian court, whose prejudices he had never attempted to conciliate — whose envy at his success waited only for the slightest opportunity to effect his ruin — suspected the sex of the pretended page, and took good care that the report of their suspicions should penetrate gradually to the foot of the throne. It seems barely credible, but it is, nevertheless, unquestionably the fact that the infatuated Marquis absolutely allowed the Empress an opportunity of seeing his page. Elizabeth’s eye, sharpened by jealousy, penetrated instantly to the truth. Any less disgraceful insult she would probably have forgiven, but such an outrage as this no woman — especially no woman in her position — could pardon. With one momentary glance of anger and disdain, she dismissed the Marquis from her presence, and never, from that moment, saw him again.
The same evening his papers were seized, all the presents that he had received from the Empress were taken from him, and he was ordered to leave the Russian dominions forever, within eight days’ time. He was not allowed to write, or take any other means of attempting to justify himself; and, on his way back to his native country, he was followed to the frontier by certain officers of the Russian army, and there stripped, with every mark of ignominy, of all the orders of nobility which he had received from the imperial court. He returned to Paris a disgraced man, lived there in solitude, obscurity, and neglect for some years, and died in a state of positive want — the unknown inhabitant of one of the meanest dwellings in the whole city.
The end of Lestoc is hardly less remarkable than, the end of the Marquis.
In their weak points, as in their strong, the characters of these two men seem to have been singularly alike. Making due allowance for the difference in station between the German surgeon and the French ambassador, it is undeniable that Elizabeth showed her sense of the services of Lestoc as gratefully and generously as she had shown her sense of the services of the Marquis. The ex-surgeon was raised at once to the position of the chief favorite and the most powerful man about the court. Besides the privileges which he shared equally with the highest nobles of the period, he was allowed access to the Empress on all private as well as on all public occasions. He had a perpetual right of entry into her domestic circle, which was conceded to no one else; and he held a place, on days of public reception, that placed him on an eminence to which no other man in Russia could hope to attain. Such was his position; and, strange to say, it had precisely the same maddening effect on his vanity which the prospect of an imperial alliance had exercised over the vanity of the Marquis. Lestoc’s audacity became ungovernable, his insolence knew no bounds. He abused the privileges conferred upon him by Elizabeth’s grateful regard, with such baseness and such indelicacy, that the Empress, after repeatedly cautioning him in the friendliest possible terms, found herself obliged, out of regard to her own reputation and to the remonstrances which assailed her from all the persons of her court, to deprive him of the privilege of entry into her private apartments.
This check, instead of operating as a timely warning to Lestoc, irritated him into the commission of fresh acts of insolence, so wanton in their nature that Elizabeth at last lost all patience, and angrily reproached him with the audacious ingratitude of his behavior. The reproach was retorted by Lestoc, who fiercely accused the Empress of forgetting the great services that he had rendered her, and declared that he would turn his back on her and her dominions, after first resenting the contumely with which he had been treated by an act of revenge that she would remember to the day of her death. The vengeance which he had threatened proved to be the vengeance of a forger and a cheat. The banker in St. Petersburg who was charged with the duty of disbursing the sums of State money which were set apart for the Empress’s use, received an order, one day, to pay four hundred thousand ducats to a certain person who was not mentioned by name, but who, it was stated, would call with the proper credentials, to receive the money. The banker was struck by this irregular method of performing the preliminaries of an important matter of business, and he considered it to be his duty to show the document which he had received to one of the ministers. Secret inquiries were immediately set on foot, and they ended in the discovery that the order was a false one, and that the man who had forged it was no other than Lestoc.
For a crime of this kind the punishment was death. But the Empress had declared on her accession that she would sign no warrant for the taking away of life during her reign, and, moreover, she still generously remembered what she had owed in former times to Lestoc. Accordingly, she changed his punishment to a sentence of exile to Siberia, with special orders that the life of the banished man should be made as easy to him as possible. He had not passed many years in the wildernesses of Siberia before Elizabeth’s strong sense of past obligation to him induced her still further to lighten his punishment by ordering that he should be brought back to St. Petersburg, and confined in the fortress there, where her own eyes might assure her that he was treated with mercy and consideration. It is probable that she only intended this change as a prelude to the restoration of his liberty; but the future occasion for pardoning him never came. Shortly after his return to St. Petersburg, Lestoc ended his days in the prison of the fortress.
So the two leaders of the Russian revolution lived, and so they died. It has been said, and said well, that the only sure proof of a man’s strength of mind is to be discovered by observing the manner in which he bears success. History shows few such remarkable examples of the truth of this axiom as are afforded by the lives of the Marquis De la Chetardie and the German surgeon, Lestoc. Two stronger men in the hour of peril, and two weaker men in the hour of security, have not often appeared in this world to vanquish adverse circumstances like heroes, and to be conquered like cowards afterward by nothing but success.
SOCIAL GRIEVANCES. — IV.
A FEW days ago, I was walking in a street at the western part of London, and I encountered a mendicant individual of an almost extinct species. Some years since, the oratorical beggar, who addressed himself to the public on each side of the way, in a neat speech spoken from the middle of the road, was almost as constant and regular in his appearances as the postman himself. Of late, however, this well-known figure — this cadger Cicero of modern days — has all but disappeared; the easy public ear having probably grown rather deaf, in course of time, to the persuasive power of orators with only two subjects to illustrate — their moral virtues and their physical destitution. With these thoughts in my mind, I stopped to look at the rare and wretched object for charity whom I had met by chance, and to listen to the address which he was delivering for the benefit of the street population and the street passengers on both sides of the pavement. He was a tall, sturdy, self-satisfied, healthy-looking vagabond, with a face which would have been almost handsome if it had not been disfigured by the expression which Nature sets, like a brand, on the countenance of a common impostor. As for his style of oratory, I will not do him the injustice of merely describing it. Here is a specimen, faithfully reported for the public, from the original speech: