Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/394

 370 ziéro were already well acquainted, as the copies found in their own library prove. As for the spirit which inspired his intervention, it is made evident by the following detail: With the epistle he sent a gold bratina adorned with figures of naked women, in relief, as a present from the Tsar to the community he desired to recall to a sense of its duties!

Here we have the true spirit of the Sloboda of Alexandrov!

Ivan lived there, as Louis XI. had lived at Plessis-les-Tours a century previously, between the monks whose pious exercises he shared, the locksmiths who laboured on the famous fillettes du roi—heavy chains fastened on the legs of the prisoners shut up in the iron cages,—and those other servants of his, whose accounts appear in His Majesty’s books under the head of Voluptés—so much one day for having brought a lady who pleased the King's fancy from Dijon to Tours, and so much another for purchasing two dozen of canary-birds! (Henri Martin, Histoire de France, vii. 145). Though Louis did not turn Plessis-les-Tours into a monastery, we know he built one, close by, for the Calabrian monk Francesco di Paulo. He, too, surrounded himself with 'evil folk of low condition,' while at the same time, to drive away the ennui which devoured him, or still the terrors that haunted him, he collected 'players of the bass viol and of sweet instruments' from all parts of the world. But, so the chronicle of St. Denis tells us, 'nothing could amuse him.'

After evening prayers at the Sloboda of Alexandrov, Ivan betook himself to his bedchamber, where three blind old men awaited his coming. Their duty was to send him to sleep by telling him stories, and no doubt to save him, by their company, from the horrors of loneliness and darkness. In the daytime the Sovereign had other amusements. Is it true, as we have been told, that, when dinner was over, he went round the torture-chambers to enjoy the sight of the anguish inflicted at his command? Did he even act as executioner himself from time to time? Can it be that, morose and gloomy as he was everywhere else, his face changed and he grew merry in the midst of all these horrors, mingling his shouts of laughter with the shrieks of his victims? It may be so. But the Tsar also found pleasure in the less sanguinary—sport afforded him by skomorokhy—tumblers, jugglers, and bear-leaders. Search was made for these all over the country, and those who chose them out were not over-particular. The Novgorod chronicle tells us the story of a certain Soubota Osiétr, who, after abusing and striking a diak named Danilo Barténiev, turned a bear loose on the unlucky official's heels, and let it hunt him into his office, where it spread terror among