Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/31

 9* s. v. JAN. is, i90o,] NOTES AND QUERIES,

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accomplishment in no wise dims the tran- scendent brilliancy of his many others. I am simply and solely holding a brief in the interests of "whatsoever things are true";! and until Mr. Verity can adduce better proof than mere assertion of Shakespeare's musical knowledge, I shall continue to believe that he was, so far as direct evidence is con- cerned, entirely ignorant in that line. The efforts made of late years to make him a master of everything to which he has referred have something of the reductio ad absurdum in them. Because he fre- quently refers to archery, Mr. Rush ton ('Shakespeare an Archer') forthwith turns him into an archer ; because he often uses legal terms the same author ('Shakespeare a Lawyer') incontinently makes him a lawyer; because he writes of "sweet music" Mr. Verity would have us believe he was a musician ; because his pages bristle with passages about bees and glowworms he is an entomologist, though his numerous and glaring blunders anent those insects give him less claim to that than to the other titles. Clearly Shakespeare, or any man of wide reading arid observation, could be generally conversant with all four without actually being any one of them. Macaulay can scarcely be considered a soldier, though he is the author of the 'Battle of Ivry,' nor Kipling a sailor because he wrote 'A Fleet in Being.' But enough. Shakespeare's know- ledge, like Gladstone's, was encyclopaedic ; but it is surely the Ultima Thule of bathos to hoist him into the professorial chair of every branch of it, or at least to credit him with a proficiency which he himself would be the first to repudiate. J. B. McGovERN.

St. Stephen's Rectory, C.-on-M., Manchester.

THE MURDER OF THE EMPEROR PAUL OF RUSSIA.

THE accompanying account of the murder of Paul I. of Russia is taken from 'Etude Critique du Materialisme et du Spiritualisme par la Physique Experiment-ale,' by the well- known writer and chemist Prof. Raoul Pictet, of the University of Geneva, published two years ago. The interest of the historical event in question, and the fact of the work in which the narrative appeared being pro- bably unknown to many readers of 'N. & Q.,' may iustify its insertion in that valued periodical whose jubilee has just been cele- brated so worthily :

1 am about to relate an historical event which was told me by an eye-witness of the assassination pf the Emperor Paul I. of Russia on 15 Jan., 1804.

This witness was one of my aunts, who died at the advanced age of ninety-three years in 1869, having preserved the fulness of all her intellectual faculties until that extreme old age. As a young lady of the Livonian nobility, having been born Countess Sievers, she had been admitted into the palace in the capacity of one of the empress's maids of honour.

The last few months of the Emperor Paul's reign were signalized by eccentricities verging on madness. This monarch, whose brain was turned by his absolute power, ordered carriages and sledges to be stopped in the streets, and obliged all his serfs, lords, nobles, and villains to alight on the carriage- road and kneel before him as he passed ! In short, those about him determined to obtain his abdication by fair means or foul. Some days before the exe- cution of the palace plot my aunt noticed some uneasiness at the drawing-rooms and during the. receptions. Various sentences exchanged in a low tone, suspicious behaviour and secret conferences in corners of the rooms, did not escape her observa- tion. The emperor, too, guessed that something was brewing against him, and appeared to be more reserved, as if on his guard.

The very evening of the crime there was a grand court at the palace ; all the official world and the diplomatic body were invited. The foreboding signs had become so evident that, about midnight, my aunt, who had retired to her rooms, which opened on to the long corridor of the Winter Palace, instead of going to bed, wrote a long letter to her father, who was at that time marshal of the Livonian nobility. She had half-undressed herself and sat writing at her table, with uncovered shoulders and wearing a short petticoat (les epaules nues et en simple jupon). About half-past one an unusual noise was heard in the corridor. This corridor, which was very long, traversed the palace from end to end, and termi- nated at the emperor's private apartments. Seized with emotion and fear, my aunt hurriedly took up the taper which was on her table and opened her chamber door. At the same moment Count Pahlen, the grand chamberlain, went by very agitated, and accompanied by four other nobles of the Court.

What passed through my aunt's mind then no one can say ; but this is her true story of what happened. I heard it more than twenty times at least during the two years I lived near to her at Paris in 1868-9, when I was studying at the Ecole Polytechnique and at the Sorbonne. My aunt loved to tell me this tragic adventure, which still moved her so much after sixty-four years that she never dared to write it down.

" So I seized my taper, and, impelled by a force for which I cannot even now account, followed Count Pahlen and his four acolytes. Not one of them was astonished to see me following them thus in so unusual a costume. We walked a distance of about sixty yards to the emperor's chamber. The five men only exchanged gestures, not a word was uttered. Count Pahlen entered first without knock- ing ; he held in his hand a roll of white paper. Behind him walked his colleague carrying a taper in his hand ; then all the others and myself entered. The Emperor Paul was seated at his table w r riting. Evidently he expected something and his suspicions were aroused. Count Pahlen first addressed him : ' We come, your Majesty, to ask of you, for the good of the country and your own, your abdication ! Your health condemns you to retirement ; all the physicians and we have arrived at the conclusion