revolt was quelled; - then came the trial, the sentence, and the execution of the conspirators.

been wont to say that the crown would never suit him; that, as the nation had only allowed his father to live for three years, they would certainly not endure At the head of the list was the name of his rule for three months; and that, as Prince Serge Troubetzkoi, of the Preohe preferred to preserve his life, he meant brashensky regiment of Body-Guards; to abide by his resolution of never reign- but it included other officers of the ing in Russia. That he was now put for- Guards, privy councillors, secretaries, word by the Dekabrists was owing to his and members of nearly all the noblest peculiar incapacity only: it was such families of Russia and Lithuania. Now that they hoped to have him first as the comes the question, What knowledge, if tool and afterwards as the victim of their any, had Speransky of all this mischief? projects and moreover, his seniority was On the night of the 13th December, a powerful engine in their hands for pre- through what one of his biographers calls venting the accession of the too capable a "fatalité déplorable," several of the Nicholas. On the morning of the 14th conspirators were dining in his daughter's December, Madame Speransky-Bagréeff house. But it is still more remarkable drove out in her sledge, but on reaching that in the original plan drawn up by the the Admiralty Square, she found a great conspirators in Prince Obolensky's house, crowd assembled there; her horses' and on no more remote a day than the heads were turned by two friends; and 12th December, Speransky was named by the time that she reached her house by them as a member of the provisional a rattle of musketry was audible, and government which they intended to estabthe rebellion had become an unde-lish. Admiral Mordvinof was to have niable fact. The army had revolted. been associated with him. The ringleaders were leavened through with the liberal ideas of which we have spoken; but they had appealed to the soldiers in the name of legitimacy; and Now we may imagine, and it is possipersuaded as these were that Constantine ble to do so, that Speransky knew nothwas being robbed of his birthright, regi-ing of this flattering but highly dangerment after regiment had refused to take the oaths to Nicholas. While Elizabeth hurried home, her father had to gallop to the scene of action, where, confronting his revolted legions, stood their new, terrible, and Jove-like Tzar.

By three o'clock that short December day was drawing to its close the darkness was approaching; still in the great Square, and on the Isaac Bridge, the insurgents made good their stand. Not that they were undismayed. Prince Serge Troubetzkoi, who was to have beaded them, was absent; and Obolensky, who replaced him, was neither a warrior nor a strategist. Two Metropolitans in full canonicals had already implored them to lay down their arms; shots had been fired, and Miloradovich and Stürler had fallen on the one side and on the other. At this moment Count Toll galloped up to the Emperor, and said to him, "Sire, command that the place be swept by cannon, or resign your throne." The guns were fired; and when the day was done, Nicholas returned to his palace, and to a trembling wife, and to a boy of seven years old, whom he could now first greet as the Tzarévitch of all the Russias. The

This fact rests on the evidence of a military man present at the arrangement."

ous preference for himself, and that he was ignorant of the honour in store for him: still it inflicts a shock on the mind when one finds him taking up a high moral and political attitude, and sitting on the tribunal before which these Dek

abrist conspirators, young and old, were arraigned. Nicholas Tourgenieff, Confidential Secretary to the Imperial Council, and one of the first batch of thirtyone victims sentenced to be beheaded, thus comments on the fact: "One of the members of the supreme tribunal was Speransky, said to be the cleverest of them all. This is the same man of whom I have spoken in another place. He became, so to speak, the factotum of the trial; and he it was who presented the final report to the Emperor, in which his Majesty was begged not to pardon the condemned. . . . Speransky, to whom no one can deny many other qualities, did not possess that of courage in defending me he feared to seem to defend some Liberal principles; and what frightened him most was the fact that, in the eyes of many persons, he was already suspected of entertaining them."

*Russian Conspirators in Siberia. By Baron R. Translated by Evelyn St. John Mildmay.

162

once

The old Russian party was now flattered by a Tzar who desired his nobility to speak Russian, who patronized the national dress, and who encouraged a good deal of Philo-Sclavonic literature and fashion, provided always these were kept free of Neology and of Liberalism.

After reading the above, it is difficult, the new Tzar had said to the Polish not to say to one's self, that if Made- nobles whose heads Alexander had filled been with the semblance of a constitution, and moiselle Speransky had ready to act the pretty part of "Eliza- with visions of indulgence for their nabeth, the exile of Siberia." her father tional spirit. If the same words were not showed on this occasion his fitness for precisely addressed to the Russian Libthe less elevated rôle of the celebrated erals, the same idea was often conveyed "Vicar of Bray." The explanation of to them in very cogent methods; and the situation seems to be this: Speran- such dangerous topics as the emancipasky, the priest's son, had started in life tion of the serfs had to be dropped sine as a theoretical but ambitious Liberal. die. Between such theories, fostered by the philanthropy of a Tzar, and the secret practices of a conspiracy, whose ends were clearly revolutionary, he became aware of a great and judicious difference; and, moreover, the liberal Tzar, who was wont to say of himself that he "was a happy accident" in Russian history, was dead. The Dekabrists, on their side, had heard of the fame of Speransky's early theories, of his disgrace, and of his banishment. Nay, more they may have picked up in his daughter's salon some of his latest sentiments, such as "my real friends are the poor and lowly, prisoners and exiles;" and they may have been led to reckon on his help in opposing the reactionary rule of Nicholas.

Of course it is understood that the conspirators had cherished no abstract feeling of devotion to Constantine, but were simply determined to oppose the accession of the younger man, who would have but one remedy for Liberal sentiments, and who would set himself once and for But all above all laws ancient or recent. Speransky, whatever sympathy he might have had with exiles, had had too much personal experience of Siberia ever to put himself again dans cette galère. Accordingly he sat on the supreme tribunal, saw five young lives pay the penalty of rebellion, and a long train of political criminals, one hundred and sixteen in all, wend their way to the snowy prison which the knew only too well. Among them was his own secretary, a lad whom the Governor had brought from Siberia with him, and whom he had since treated almost as a son, Madame Speransky-Bagréeff petitioning in vain for his pardon.

no

Nicholas loved Russia: he believed in himself as her visible head, as the fountain of honour, and as the dispenser, not of justice, but of favour. He was the very embodiment of autocracy, for he had its majesty, its grace, its charms, and its caprices. There have been many more tyrannical sovereigns in Russia than Nicholas Pavlovitch, but there never has been a Tzar so perfectly arbitrary. Like his brother, the Grand Duke Michael, he had a passion for soldiering in all its details, and he was a martinet in discipline; but he sometimes showed mercy, and he took pleasure in doing so, because such clemency is but another kind of power. He acted and looked his part as crowned monarch ever has done before or since; and he did it consciously, en"Have you joying the effect which he produced on the mind of the spectator. no fear?" he once asked a very young maid of honour, whom he found, on the first morning after her introduction to her duties at the palace, perched upon a window-sill, and reading a novel of Mrs. Gaskell's aloud to a laughing companion, who seemed to enjoy the jokes in "Cranas much as herself. The great ford" Tzar expected to have made more impression even on two young girls! Some such jealous vanity made him very harsh even with women, when they had displeased him. For example, he abhorred Madame Swetchine, on account of her wandering tastes and generally Western habits of thought. A still more serious crime was her apostasy to the Church of Rome, when she became the leader of a faction which sent more than one RusMadame Speranskysian nobleman into the ranks of the

In the eyes of the new Tzar, M. Speransky at any rate happily contrived to appear perfectly innocent; and being a very valuable public servant, he con-one tinued in harness till his death asks one's self, at what sacrifice to selfrespect or to principle? since the policy of Nicholas was eminently antipathetic Order of Jesus. to the ideas he had once entertained. Bagréeff found him also eminently un"No dreams, gentlemen, no dreams," friendly through all the vicissitudes of

her career; and in all probability the fatalité déplorable of her ill-selected dinnerparty of the 13th December was never forgiven by him.

hold worries had told greatly upon her strength; and in 1833, and again in 1834, she had gone to the sea-baths of Skeveningen to recruit. The first of these trips had been, the first occasion on which Speransky's daughter crossed the boundaries of "Holy Russia," or trod the soil of one of those Western kingdoms with whose histories and institutions her father had made her acquainted. Did she, like Madame Swetchine, feel that she then breathed a freer air? She does not say so, but she became a great traveller.

With her as with many of her countrymen, travel grew at once into a habit and a passion. The already encumbered estate of Bowromka was left to the tender mercies of intendants, of whom Madame

Once that period of intrigue, disorder, and anxiety was outlived, the literary circle which surrounded the Minister's daughter was ready to become as brilliant as before; but Madame Speransky-Bagréeff's biography now becomes in great part that of a landowner and of a mother. Of a landowner, because her father had bought for her an estate called Bowromka; and because the welfare of Bowromka and its peasants, the rise and fall of prices, the sale of wood, and the erection of model farms, dispensaries, and schools, occupied her time and emptied her purse. M. Bagréeff was as un- Speransky-Bagréeff had six in seven fortunate as a landlord as he had been as a governor of the Bank; and in all these capacities he had the misfortune to sink more and more in his wife's esteem. But she had become the mother of three children. Of these the youngest, who What, under these adverse circumwas a boy, only lived two years; but stances, became of the schools, dispensaMichael, her first-born, fulfilled all the ries, sugar-factories, and model farms, promise of his youth; and the education the biographer of Madame Speranskyof her only daughter already caused her many hopes and fears, while it occupied her days. For them she wrote her first books, tales for children and short plays; while the farouche temper of Mademoiselle Bagréeff, afterwards Princess Cantacuzene, is probably reflected in "Irène," a novel on the benefits of education, which only saw the light in 1857, and which is perhaps the most Edgeworthian of all the mother's works.

Of M. Bagréeff all this time she saw but little very possibly this arrangement may have been one which had met with the consent of both parties: but none the less it probably had its share in intensifying the peculiarities of Mademoiselle Bagréeff's character. Whether caused by quarrels about money, by incompatibility of tastes and tempers, or by still graver wrongs, the mother's estrangement from the father of her children was now complete so complete that when M. Bagréeff for the last time announced a visit to her, that visit was not accepted; and when he died rather suddenly, their daughter only was with him- no reconciliation between her parents having been procured or attempted.

years; and like most of the landowners of her day, she soon found herself deeply in debt to the Government, which is always happy to assist a Russian noble to mortgage his lands and villages.

Bagréeff, M. Victor Duret, does not say. What it is impossible to conceal is, that her daughter, and her daughter's Greek husband took her financial measures in quite as bad part as she had ever done the meddling and muddling of her late husband, and that something very like quarrel was the consequence. None the less, and perhaps all the more for this very reason, she travelled to Egypt, to the Holy Land

whither she had vowed to make a pilgrimage to England, to Vienna, to Paris, to Brussels, and to Hungary.

66

These travels form the ground-plan of many of her novels, and supply much of the local colouring of her works. Take, for example, "Les Pélerins Russes, à Jerusalem," published at Brussels in 1854. Here Speransky's daughter puts out a great deal of her strength, and in her sketch of the deacon, in Une nuit au Golgotha," she has left a touching portrait of the priest's son, Michael Gramatine, who, in the seminary of Vladimir, had once formed ambitious hopes, and who had lived to realize many of them for, and with, and in herself. The book is written in French. Prosper Mérimée One of the causes which in the begin- writes to her to congratulate her, and to ning may have helped to disunite the praise its careful and vigorous idioms. It couple, and to keep them separate, had has added, he says, to his wish to know been Madame Elizabeth's health. Al-Russia and the Russians; but he has ways delicate, child-bearing and house-one reproach to make to her, one fault to

her sense of pain into other channels than the purely filial one. He had died full of years, with his "Swod" or code a completed monument for his renown; full, we may say, too, of honour- that is, of such honour as despotism has to bestow on a man who has been, through two reigns, at once its good angel and its tool, its favourite, its adviser, and its victim. Full, certainly, of experience and of labour. Both health and strength for some months gave signs of distress;

But Madame Elizabeth was sad; and she had good cause to be so. Something not quite unlike fame was now coming to her from her writings; but then fame is, as Madame de Staël, who was a good judge, averred, "a royal mourning, in purple, for happiness." Furthermore, the authoress was poor, and she had a thou-but his august master would not allow sand troubles at home which, had she been on the spot, would have been vexatious enough to arrange, and which at a distance were hopeless. She was on bad erms with her daughter, as she had been with her husband; she had frequent attacks of rheumatic gout, an enemy which is apt to hang upon the flanks of all brain-workers; she was in no favour at Court, and that in a country where Court favour is the all in all she might, if she liked, change her skies, but she could not change her mind; publishers worried her, and editors occasionally mangled and dismembered her pieces; and by her fireside, in two empty chairs those of her father and of her son - there sat the shadow feared by man.

him to interpret these as a warning to cease from all literary and responsible work. And so the Minister died in harness, after an apoplectic stroke, on the 23d of February 1839. The Tzar, who grieved for him, or who at least missed him, would not, however, befriend his daughter. Elizabeth was poor, but the Emperor Nicholas gave her no pension; and M. Bagréeff, who had accumulated some capital, and who had built expectations upon the position of his father-inlaw, now took arbitrary possession of any fortune which could be said to belong to his wife. He was dissatisfied with its amount, and Elizabeth was displeased with the uses to which he appropriated it. High words ensued, and the separation which we know of followed as a consequence. Thus it had happened that in its first years Elizabeth's filial sorrow was greatly turned to bitterness, and deformed by anger both against her husband and against the Government of the Tzar, which had possessed itself of all her father's papers and literary remains. It was only in later years and when this soreness had ceased to be felt, that her filial feelings were able to reassert themselves in all their simplicity. Certainly Madame Speransky-Bagréeff is never so much a woman, and never more truly attractive, than in those passages where her grief as a daughter and as a mother finds vent. Many of the pages of the "Livre d'une Femme" are devoted to these themes, and many more to meditations on the Scriptures study which she had always shared, as a girl, with M. Speransky, and which now occupied many of the saddened years of her declining life.

Count Michael Speransky's death, in 1839, had been at least a natural one; but young Michael Bagréeff had been killed in the Caucasus by a comrade who was maddened with drink, and who, in the dark, drew his sword upon the boy who had tried to prevent a drunken riot and a scandalous fight. His mother never recovered from this shock. Her intelligence survived it, and her energy remained, along with the necessities for work, for money, and for intercourse with her fellow-workers; but her heart was broken. It may not have shown much in her novels; but there is a little book which has only been published since her death, and which, as the "Livre d'une Femme," lets one into many secrets of the woman's life. We see its loneliness. Then, after some sharp struggles to forgive the enemies of her father, and the murderer of her son, comes a gentler sense of pity and of humility. some dust to put on her own head-many tears to give to past errors, and a linger- M. Speransky had interested himself ing passionate return to that great and greatly in the translation of the Bible tender love which had subsisted be- into Russ; but in one of his Siberian tween her father and herself. One says letters he begs his daughter not to read a return, because at the time of Count the Word of God except in Sclavonic Michael Speransky's death many circum- that is, in the time-honoured language stances must have conspired to divert and idioms appropriated to the service of

a

-

the "Orthodox" Church. The vulgar we propose to give a sketch, are less tongue, he says, deprives the sacred likely to live than are the letters of her writings of their majestic beauty, and lays friend,-letters all alive with those strong them open to the jarring of vulgar and sympathies, and with that ardent love of trivial associations. God and of her neighbour, which made Madame Swetchine a real power in the society of her day. Elizabeth's style is more studied, and throughout her whole career her paragraphs sound as if they had been composed with a view to her father's praise or blame. Both women were very sensitive to the approach of old age. Madame Swetchine's remarks on it have the sustained dignity of a mind determined to rise above that last weakness, and to see always more of heaven through "chinks that time has made;" but Elizabeth lets a cry escape from her now and then, "See," she exclaims, "what generally fills up a woman's life once youth is past; sicknesses of the body, sorrows of the soul, regrets for the past, and fears for the future! But let women resign themselves; let them crown themselves with thorns, and walk without murmuring in the austere way of the Cross."

His own commentary on the Gospel of St. John, Elizabeth was wont to render into German; and many a long winter's day had the father and daughter spent over the MSS., which the latter was afterwards to preserve with pious care. The work was probably intended for publication at least, M. Speransky seems to hint at this when he says, "Your thoughts about inspiration are so attractive that I am tempted to write an essay upon them, and to demonstrate that inspiration is not an illusion, but in truth a very real and substantial property of the Spirit. We can speak of this when we meet, and when I am able to write the book which I have been thinking of for years." The book never saw the light; but 200 folio sheets of commentary remained in his daughter's care, and often afforded texts for the remarks and notes which abound in the "Livre d'une Femme." But the daughter is less "orthodox than the father. For example, we find Speransky dwelling with pleasure on the belief in the Guardian Angel; and though he has been accused of holding Protestant ideas, he often speaks of Protestants with great reprobation, as per- Of all her novels, the one which is most sons who, "under the pretence of likely to live is "Une famille Tongouse." a greater spirituality, have refined their It is thoroughly original, and written with faith into mere abstract propositions, banished gentle and devout feelings from religion, and left it blunt, coarse, and spiritless." Elizabeth has a good deal of this same mysticism; but she often differs freely from the teaching of her own Church, though she was never tempted to do like Madame Swetchine, and to abjure it for that of any other communion. It is doubtful, however, whether the "Livre d'une Femme" would be considered as an altogether orthodox work in any Church. It is full of curious speculations, especially on the subject of the transmigration of souls; yet when read in the light of the events of Elizabeth's life and of her mistakes, some of its confessions are very pathetic.

It is difficult through the medium of a translation to convey any idea of the excellence of style or of the grace which distinguishes some of Madame Speransky-Bagréeff's sayings. She is a less powerful and a less eloquent writer than Madame Swetchine; and her writings, with the exception of one novel, of which

Against her own share of these haunting fears and regrets Madame SperanskyBagréeff was still also able to defend herself by work, and by the friendships which her works had helped to gather round her.

great spirit; while the scenes, the characters, and the treatment of them all carry her readers into a new country, and give us the pleasure of new associations,

and yet the simple plot is founded on those feelings which, as Lamartine says, keep the heart of humanity ever young.' Its Siberian details have evidently been elaborated by Madame Speransky-Bagréeff as a labour of love, and many of them are very curious.

She begins by telling us that on the very confines of civilization, and on the borders of the Lake Baikal, which the Cossacks and Siberians dignify with the name of the Holy Sea, there dwelt in a small Stanitza, or commune, two families distinguished by their labours and virtues. The first was that of the village priest, the père Jossiff, with his gentle wife; the other was that of the Cossack, Wassili-Ivanoff, with a helpmate who might have sat for one of the Biblical portraits, so virtuous, hard-working, and devoted was she. Wassili (Basil) was a mighty hunter, a faithful subject of the