Page:Maud, Renée - One year at the Russian court 1904-1905.djvu/37

Rh surrounded, as we passed on our way through many lakes.

The locks of Juustila are very interesting—our boat sunk deeper and deeper, so deep indeed that I thought we would never reach the bottom! We returned enchanted with our Finnish trip.

At Monrepos, we had some charming neighbours, amongst whom were the Count and Countess de Stackelberg. The latter was before her marriage Countess Shouvaloff, a niece of my aunt and the daughter of a former Russian Ambassador at Berlin, while her husband, General Baron de Stackelberg, was attached to the person of one of the Grand Dukes. I have often met them in Paris since those days, and to my great regret I heard lately that at the outbreak of the late revolution in March 1917 Count Stackelberg was arrested and was actually being led off to the Bureau Central by a detachment of soldiers to be tried, when, while still on his own staircase, a shot was fired—presumably by some ill-advised person, at the top of the staircase—whereupon the soldiers, who were on the ground-floor and far from the unfortunate General who was unarmed, imagining that it was he who had fired at them, turned on him with violence and finally shot him in cold blood.

Half an hour after this tragedy my uncle, Baron Paul de Nicolay, called at the house, when he also was arrested by a young revolutionary who left him in charge of two soldiers while he went off to fetch his revolver. The soldiers' attention being taken away by their