Petersburg and Warsaw: scenes witnessed during a residence in Poland and Russia in 1863-4

LIBRARY

OP

CALIFORNIA

SAN

PETERSBURG AND WARSAW:

SCENES WITNESSED

DUKING A RESIDENCE IN POLAND AND RUSSIA
IN 1863-4.

BY

AUGUSTIN P. O'BRIEN.

LONDON:

EICHAKD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET,
IJttbiisIjer m ©rbinarg to P
1864.

LONDON;

PRINTED BY R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR,
BREAD STREET HILL.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.

PAGE

THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT AND THE POLES . 1

CHAPTER II.
PRINCE WITTGENSTEIN'S LETTER 20

CHAPTER III.

WILNA 33

CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL MOURAVIEFF 36

CHAPTER V.

PRISON-HOSPITALS 39

CHAPTER VI.

WOUNDED INSURGENTS . , 46

iv Contents.

CHAPTER VII.

PAGE

POLITICAL PRISONEKS ............ 51

CHAPTER VIII.

POLITICAL ASSASSINS ............ 61

CHAPTER IX.

COURTS-MARTIAL .............. 66

CHAPTER X.

PEASANT-DEPUTATIONS ............ 72

CHAPTER XI.

WERKEY ............... 76

CHAPTER

THE HOUSE OF RADZOVILL .......... 80

CHAPTER XIIL

THE BISONS ........... ... 83

CHAPTER XIV.

MEMORIES OF 1812 ............ 86

CHAPTER XV.

BAD OMENS .......... 89

Contents. v

CHAPTER XVI.

PAGE

NAPOLEON'S WRITING-TABLE 91

CHAPTER XVII.

FLIGHT FROM WILNA 97

CHAPTER XVm.

REPENTANT INSURGENTS 102

CHAPTER XIX.

STATE OF LITHUANIA 108

CHAPTER XX.

WARSAW 117

CHAPTER XXI.

THE CONSUL GENERAL 128

CHAPTER XXn.

COUNT DE BERG 134

CHAPTER XXm.

THE SPIRIT OF THE PRESS 139

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE . .. * ', .... 141

vi Contents,

CHAPTER XXV.

PAGE

THE GRAND DUCHESS 145

CHAPTER XXVL

ASSASSINATION AND THE CATHOLIC CHUECH 148

CHAPTER XXVIL

A SOIREE AT THE VICEREGAL COURT 150

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE CITADEL OP WARSAW 155

. CHAPTER XXIX.

THE PRISON DIET 159

CHAPTER XXX.

FEMALE PRISONERS 160

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE MALE PRISONERS 164

CHAPTER XXXII.

TORTURE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS 166

CHAPTER XXXIII.

ATTEMPT TO MURDER COUNT DE BERG .... . 169

Contents. vii

CHAPTER XXXIV.

PAGE

THE PANIC 172

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE MONASTERIES 176

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD AND THE POIGNARD .... 181

CHAPTER XXXVII.

GENERAL TREPOIT 185

CHAPTER XXXVIII.
A MOTHER'S PRAYERS 191

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE CARBONARI 195

CHAPTER XL.

SENTENCED TO DEATH 201

CHAPTER XLI.

TORTURE AT WARSAW 204

CHAPTER XLII.

MANIFESTO OF THE -NATIONAL GOVERNMENT . . 210

viii Contents.

CHAPTER XLIIL

PACK

THE PRESS 214

CHAPTER XLIV.

FOREIGN JOURNALS «221

CHAPTER XLV.

POLAND AND ITALY 227

CHAPTER XLVI.

ACTUAL STATE OF POLAND . . . 232

PETERSBURG AND WARSAW,
CHAPTER I.

THE ENGLISH GOVERNMENT AND THE POLES.

AMONGST the discontented nationalities of
Europe, none has excited more sympathy than
Poland, though it must, at the same time, be
confessed that none has received less active
support. Without going back to the original
partition of the country amongst the three
great European Powers that now hold it;
without referring to that anterior period when
the seeds of dissension sown in the nature of
the monarchy, were perpetually bringing forth
their prickly produce; without pausing to
discuss that dream of a revived Poland enter-
tained by the Czar Alexander I., I shall content
myself with speaking of the Poland of the

2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

present day, and of how far she has been
aided or injured by her sympathizers. If
verbal sympathy could have healed the wounds
or redressed the wrongs of Sarmatia, enough
was said and written in England alone in the
beginning of the present century to accom-
plish the work. But Poland's land-bound
position, which cuts her off from any material
aid that her insular sympathizers might be
inclined to give her, prevents them in like
manner from testing the truth of accounts
they receive, and which are more frequently
prepared in accordance with the preconceived
notions of those by whom they are intended
to be read, than with a regard to truth. This
remark does not apply to gentlemen of the
press, nor to English gentlemen travelling
through Poland, who, touched by tales of
oppression related to them, take up their
pens, and, filled with virtuous indignation,
make the English people acquainted with
tales of horror, which the narrators firmly
believe, but whose origin may be traced to
the interested framers of such reports. And

'The English Government and the Poles. 3

this spirit of exaggeration is a characteristic
that distinguishes the late disturbances in
Poland, from all previous outbursts of national
feeling in that country. It is not that the
Poles have become aliens to truth, or that
they wish the rest of Europe to believe their
position to be other than it is. On the con-
trary, great as is the sympathy felt for the
Poles in England, I can confidently aver that
they deserve still more commiseration than
they excite. And the grounds for this com-
miseration are that they have been doubly
deceived. They have been deceived by those
foreign emissaries under whose influence this
outburst of feeling has been excited; and
they have been deceived by the hopes — -well-
grounded as they thought — of foreign aid.

If the true history of the late insurrection
in Poland were thoroughly understood in
England, public opinion would soon undergo
a very great change. Not that sympathy for
Poland would become less, but indignation
would be directed against those who, to serve
their own ends, trafficked in the patriotism of

B2

4 Petersburg and Warsaw.

the Poles, and caused a profitless expenditure
of blood.

The spirit of anarchy unchained by the
French Revolution, and so often mistaken for
the spirit of freedom which at the same epoch
rose from a long slumber, has since then num-
bered her worshippers and her martyrs by
thousands throughout Europe. Anarchy so
often assumes the garb and name, and takes
the tone of freedom, that the blinded multi-
tude to whom a well-cooked feast is offered,
does not perceive that the voice of Jacob is
combined with the hand of Esau. Freedom !
Liberty ! These, like many other of the best
gifts accorded to man, have been trafficked in,
and some of the noblest instincts from nature
made instrumental to the darkest crimes.

These truths have been brought vividly
before my eyes during my late residence in
Warsaw. I went to that city filled with
what I am inclined to call a hereditary English
indignation against oppression, and I found —
but I must confess it was long before I dis-
covered the truth — that the Poles had been

'The English Government and the Poles. 5

misled; that their patriotic sentiments had
been made a matter of traffic ; that they had
fallen into the hands of men, revolutionists by
profession, who undertook to organize a revo-
lution in Poland. The Poles discovered their
mistake, but too late: thev could not draw

w

back, for the machinery of the National
Government was by that time in full opera-
tion, and the gendarmes pendeurs were always
ready for their work.

Nothing can be more unfortunate than the
position of Poland. I would wish to speak
loudly and energetically on the subject. The
English people at this moment misjudge the
conduct of their own government as much as
they misunderstand the position of the Poles.
A full and public discussion of the question
would reveal truths as astonishing to the well-
meaning English public as they were to me
and to some few others who learned the facts
on the scene of action.

The cosmopolitan revolutionists, whose head-
quarters are at London and Paris, having done
a considerable share of work in Italy, and

6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

having tickled a few of the minor nationali-
ties of Europe, turned their eyes to Poland.
Here they found materials ready to their use.
With the Poles, patriotism is their strength
and their weakness. There is no sacrifice that
a patriot Pole is not ready to make for his
country ; there is no folly, no act of rashness,
which he may not be induced to commit, if
presented to him shadowed over with the veil
of patriotism. The revolution-makers knew
this, and found little difficulty in exciting fer-
mentation in the elements present in Polish
society ; and the Poles, blinded by the vapours
rising from their own quickly -heated imagina-
tions, did not see, could not divine, the motives
of their advisers. They were dazzled by the
prospect of a thoroughly-organized revolution,
ramifying itself into France and England,
whence the roots should be supplied with
nutriment. It was not to be wondered at,
that many Polish noblemen and landowners
were seduced; it was not to be wondered
at, that old hopes, old visions, should again
revive. These gentlemen believed that the

The English Government and the Poles, 7

emissaries of the revolutionists spoke the
sentiments of England and France. The
prospect was unfortunately too alluring. The
Polish nobility, who are for the most part
very rich, gave large sums of money freely,
and the revolution-makers, thus supplied with
what they most needed, set to work. These
men understood perfectly well how to perform
the task they had undertaken. The experience
they had had in other countries, they utilized
in Poland. They established what they called
the National Government, an institution so
effectually hidden from the eyes of the un-
initiated, that it may be deemed a myth,
were it not that its decrees were executed
with fatal punctuality. But the most power-
ful weapon in the hands of the revolution-
makers was the institution of the national
gendarmerie, now known as the "hanging
gendarmerie." This was a secret police, of
wonderfully perfect organization, distributed
over the country, in bands varying in number
from two and three to twenty and thirty,
according to the wants of the locality in

8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

which they were stationed. These men were
for the most part foreigners; those amongst
them who were Poles were the lowest of
society, such as are to be found in every
country; men who from their boyhood up-
wards have seldom had a stationary home,
except when in a public prison ; men familiar
with crime, and who can be easily induced to
" do murder for a meed." These elements
were compounded into a "national gendar-
merie," and trained to assume every species
of disguise, they went about the streets in
cities armed with concealed poignards, with
which as they passed a " marked man " they
stabbed him. In the commencement of the
revolution, it was almost impossible to detect
these assassins, their disguise was so complete,
and they chose their time so well. They com-
menced their work in the early dusk, before
the streets were quite deserted, so that they
could profit by the double advantages offered
by the presence of the passengers and the
advancing obscurity.

This system of stabbing in the streets is

English Government and the Poles. 9

one of the most hideous treasons against
humanity that assassination ever invented.
It was done so quietly ; the victim fell, and
when the passers-by ran to his assistance,
they found him dying, or perhaps already
dead, of a stab in the heart. As the practice
of this crime spread, the terror of the inhabi-
tants in the different cities became intense.
No mother who blessed her son as he left
her house in the morning, could reckon upon
ever seeing him alive again. No wife who
embraced her husband as he left his home,
could be sure that before night his murdered
corpse might not be laid at her feet.

I must premise that before things had
reached this height in the cities, many of the
Polish noblemen and landowners who had, at
first, abetted the revolution, had discovered
their mistake. They found that they had
placed themselves in the hands of men who
were revolution-makers by profession, that a
wonderfully well -devised system of terror had
been brought into operation, and that instead
of becoming necessary to what they had hoped

io Petersburg and Warsaw.

would be the regeneration of their country,
they found themselves instruments in the
hands of men who recognised no law but the
dagger or the gallows. Remonstrance was
vain, they could not free themselves from the
clasp of the spectre they had raised, and
nothing remained for them but to retire to
their homes, and, with barricaded doors and
windows, try to defend themselv.es from the
incursions of these national gendarmerie, who
went about extorting contributions for defray-
ing the expenses of the revolution. Refusal
to comply with these demands was attended
with the risk of assassination.

When the secret of the Polish revolution was
discovered, when numbers of the anti-Russian
Poles perceived that they had been deceived,
that they had unwittingly sold themselves to
a secret society, which as Kossuth expressed
it, saura se faire obeir, they would most
willingly have retired from the trap into which
they had fallen, but the issue was barred with
poignards. The exactions of the soi-disant
National Government were exorbitant. There

The English Government and the Poles. 1 1

is scarcely a landed proprietor in the country
whose revenue has not become embarrassed
by the sums he has been obliged to pay to
the revolutionists. I have seen nobles and
large landed proprietors living in hourly terror
of assassination, barricaded in their own
houses, dreading the entrance of the " hang-
ing gendarmerie," to whose presence in the
country they might have been themselves in-
strumental, but who now kept them in per-
petual terror.

I saw a very sad instance of the effects
produced by this terrorism. I visited Count
Colonthai at his residence in Warsaw, where,
with his family and his father-in-law, he had
retired some months before. When the Count
saw the revolution in its true light, he was
desirous of immediately leaving the country
with his wife, his property being so circum-
stanced, that he could do so without loss.
But it was otherwise with his father-in-law.
He could not leave Poland at so short a notice
without great pecuniary loss. His son-in-law
consented to remain. In the house where I

1 2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

saw them they lived barricaded, and as in a
state of siege. It had been so for months.
The ladies of the family looked pale and
anxious ; I saw them sit at the dinner-table
without tasting food, and the lady of the
house told me that but in compliment to her
guests she would not have appeared at all.
Her anticipations of evil were founded upon
what she had already suffered and seen others
suffer. Her old father had not been able to
resist the effects that the hourly dread of
assassination wrought upon his mind. His
reason wandered. It was one amongst the
many calamities occasioned by the national
gendarmerie.

The National Government organized this
gendarmerie in the first instance, for the pur-
pose of intimidating the peasantry and those
inhabitants of the towns who were not inclined
to revolt ; for, I am sorry to be compelled to
say, that the worst enemy that the Polish
peasant ever knew was his Polish landlord.
When we speak of the " patriotic" Poles,
those who have at any time risen against their

The English Government and the Poles. 13

foreign rulers, we must remember that these
" patriots " were all nobles and landowners ;
there were no peasants in these patriot bands.
I say it with a feeling of shame, because of
my hereditary admiration for the Poles, but
truth compels me to repeat that in Poland
little sympathy exists between tenant and
land-owner. Consequently, the peasantry
had no interest in revolutions, and it was to
intimidate that class that the national gen-
darmerie were first organized. It was on
the peasantry that these bands of hired assas-
sins, these off-scourings of every country in
Europe, first practised their barbarities ; and
when the Polish nobles, they who had abetted .
this revolution, discovered the great error they
had committed, and wished to retrace their
steps, they, in turn, became obnoxious to the
power they had themselves raised up in the
land, and were made to suffer in loss of pro-
perty, and too frequently in loss of life.

The plotters and framers of this revolution
were men who understood perfectly well the
work they had in hand, and in no instance

14 Petersburg and Warsaw.

did they show their skill more than in their
successful efforts to mislead the European
press. I speak especially with reference to
the press of France and England, those
countries where sympathy for the Poles has
been most strongly felt. "Our Correspon-
dents" on both sides of the Channel were
loud in their outcry against the enemies of
the Poles, but unfortunately they did not at
first know — have they yet learned ? — who were
the worst enemies of the Poles during the late
insurrection.

There is not, perhaps, a man in England
who was not deceived as to the character and
origin of the late insurrection in Poland. The
British Government were deceived, and when
they at first so warmly interfered in the affairs
of Poland, it was because they were then
under the impression that the movement in
Poland was a national one. Lord Napier, the
English Ambassador at St. Petersburg, first
discovered through reliable sources that the
British ministers had been misinformed, and
that the well-contrived and terribly executed

'The English Government and the Poles. 1 5

revolution was not the work of the Poles,
except in so far as they had been instru-
ments in the hands of cosmopolitan revolu-
tionists.

It was very much to the honour of the
British Government that they hastened to ex-
postulate with Russia upon her treatment of
the Poles. It was a generous impulse be-
coming the Government of a free people, and
one for which the Polish nobility will always
feel grateful, but none know better than the
noble Poles themselves how much falsehood
was in the reports circulated with regard to
the late insurrection. When the British mini-
sters learned the facts of the case, and saw
that they had been misled, they felt that their
interference had been misplaced. They were
striding with a war pace towards a nation
whose exact relations with her dependencies
at that moment they did not understand.
They retraced their steps, and, for this move-
ment, which not alone policy but honesty
would have dictated, they are loudly blamed
by some. Nor were the British ministers

1 6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

ignorant of what little dependence could be
placed upon one of England's principal allies,
who, it was then discovered, had some months
before attempted secret negotiations with
Russia, inimical to the policy and interests of
this country. It behoved the ministers to act
with caution and promptitude, and they did so.
This is the history of the October despatch,
about which some persons think- there is so
much mystery. An undelivered despatch
cannot be considered a parliamentary docu-
ment, but were the disputed despatch made
public, it would only serve to convince the
English people that the ministry having acted
generously in the first instance, acted pru-
dently in the second. What would the feel-
ings of the English people be, if, pursuing
a well-intentioned but mistaken policy, the
Government had drifted them into war with
Russia ? What would they say if, at the
end of some months, after money and human
life had been uselessly squandered, we should
only then learn the truth, and discover that
we had not been fighting in the cause of op-

The English Government and the Poles. 1 7

pressed Poland, but for the benefit of the cos-
mopolitan revolutionists ? As much has been
said about this recalled despatch, as if it were
an event unexampled in the annals of diplo-
macy, but diplomatists on both sides of the
House know that such is not the case, and
were the ministerial benches to become filled
by gentlemen opposed in politics to those who
now sit there, and should political combina-
tions, exactly similar to those now under dis-
cussion, arise, there can be no doubt but that
the new occupants of the ministerial benches,
actuated by a sense of duty to the country,
would behave in precisely the same way as
that in which the present ministry have
acted.

Another circumstance connected with the
Polish insurrection, which the English people
could scarcely divine, is that the getters-up
of that insurrection did the Czar of Russia
service of grave importance. The Czar had
emancipated the serfs, and by so doing had
wounded the prejudices of a large and power-
ful party in Russia — men who did not wish to
c

1 8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

see the old system of things changed. It will
be remembered that the year before last, con-
flagrations broke out in different parts of
Russia, and a great deal of property was
destroyed. These fires were supposed to be
expressions of hostility directed against the
Czar and his advisers. The Russians, though
they regard the Czar with feelings little short
of worship, were not all quite pleased with
his proceedings towards the serfs. The revo-
lution-makers profited by these symptoms of
discontent in Russia, to hasten their negotia-
tions with the Poles. The insurrection broke
out. The two greatest nations in Europe
openly expressed sympathy for the Poles, and
the remonstrances addressed by their govern-
ments to the Czar sounded threateningly. The
patriotism of the fanatical Russians rose to a
terrible pitch. Their Czar was insulted, their
country threatened. They declared themselves
ready to die for both. Not since the commence-
ment of the Crimean war had the Muscovite
nation been so electrified. It was not the Czar,
it was not Prince Gortschakoff, who would have

'The English Government and the Pot.es. 1 9

replied to a hostile despatch — it was sixty
millions of combined and angry Russians.

A rupture between England and Russia
would not serve the cause of Poland, but it
would help to carry out the designs of the
re volution -makers, who have done the Poles
such heavy detriment. It would exactly coin-
cide with the object contemplated by the
organizers of the " hanging gendarmerie."

During a visit I made in the district of
Wlodslawek, of which Prince Emile de Sayn
Wittgenstein is governor, I asked the Prince
to give me a sketch of his experience during
the insurrection, and to say what he thought
of the organization of the " National Gendar-
merie." The Prince wrote me a long letter on
the subject. His account agreed with the
information I had already received and with
my own experience. As the Prince speaks
very freely both of the " hanging gendarmerie "
and of his own exertions in suppressing them,
I subjoin his letter.

c2

2O Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER II.

PRENCE WITTGENSTEIN'S LETTER.

"THE institution of the national gendarmes,
which the people, with their characteristic
felicitousness of expression, have denominated
* the hanging gendarmes/ was originally de-
signed for the purpose of obtaining by force
and by systematic terrorism, what the revolu-
tionary party in Poland had not been able
to obtain either by patriotic speeches or by
promises, or even by the powerful influence
of the clergy, that is to say, the voluntary
co-operation of the agricultural classes and the
richest of the bourgeoisie in the Insurrection
of 1863.

"The first acts of cruelty on the part of these
national gendarmerie took place, as well as I

Prince Wittgenstein's Letter. 11

can remember, about the end of May and the
beginning of June. Drawn without exception
from the dregs of the populace of the towns,
recruited amongst liberated malefactors and
vagabonds of every kind, that the revolution
has let loose upon this unfortunate country,
the ' National Gendarmerie ' rose suddenly
and simultaneously all over the country, and
inaugurated their advent by hangings en masse,
which for a time had the effect of completely
suspending the co-operation we were beginning
to receive from the peasantry, and which ulti-
mately contributed more than all the repressive
measures of the Government to recall the
great mass of the population to a correct view
of the state of the country, and made them
apprehend a future of inevitable ruin and car-
nage, should Poland be abandoned to the rule
of a party that employed such auxiliaries ; in
a word, the proceedings of the hanging gen-
darmerie effected a powerful reaction in favour
of order and of the established Government,
a reaction which still operates in all classes of
society and in all parts of the kingdom.

22 Petersburg and Warsaw.

"Established in detachments of three or four
in every village, and upon every large estate,
these Thugs of modern civilization spread like
a net-work over the whole country, obeying
district officers, who in turn obeyed the com-
mands of provincial chiefs, who received their
orders direct from Warsaw.

" The mission of these men was to collect by
threats of assassination the levies called national
taxes, to point out the recalcitrant peasants and
oblige them by force to join the revolutionary
bands, and, as I have said, by incessant cruelty,
by accumulated assassinations, to compel that
co-operation which terror alone could procure
them. Concealing themselves by day and
doing their work of terror by night, they often
acted as guides to bodies of troops sent to
track them ; and the very peasants that they
oppressed, hid them or protected their flight,
knowing that if they did otherwise the gallows
and flaming villages would follow quickly the
slightest suspicion of connivance with the Rus-
sian Government. It has often happened that
words dropped from the lips of a child, of a

Prince Wittgenstein's Letter. 23

drunken person, or a village gossip, that the
delay in the execution of an order, a passing
rumour, a refusal to go to the forest, or like
trifling causes, have sufficed to bring ruin and
death on entire families. A delay in sending
provisions or the means of transport that had
been demanded, a want of money to pay
these contributions, denominated ' voluntary/
was invariably followed by cruel retaliations,
most frequently by death ; and if the person
threatened succeeded in eluding his execu-
tioners, his family were obliged to pay his
debt to ' the vengeance of his country/

"It was under such circumstances that a
patrouitte that T sent into the neighbourhood
of Wincenti, in the government of Angustowo,
found a family hanged because the father, who
had refused to join a revolutionary band, had
taken flight. The members of this family
who were hanged consisted of the man's wife
and his five children, the youngest between
two and three years of age.

" In a military excursion that I made through
the same government in the month of July, I

24 Petersburg and Warsaw.

met at Rajgroed an old half-pay Russian offi-
cer, Captain Nitschaeff, who had lived in that
town a great many years, and who had become
suspected by the district commander of the
* National Gendarmerie,' and against whom
sentence of death was recorded. Warned in
time by his friends he escaped. The execu-
tioners not finding him seized his wife, the
mother of four children ; and s the unhappy
man appealed to me to assist him in his search
for her. Two days later I received a report
from the military commander of the district of
Angustowo, saying that the body of Madame
Nitschaeff had been found hanging on a tree in
the forest of Lipsk. Her eyes had been plucked
out, and her tongue and breasts cut off.

" An elderly lady, owner of an estate in the
neighbourhood of Sopockin, received about the
same time 100 lashes, because she had not
prepared at the appointed time a number of
vehicles required by a certain band of revolu-
tionists.

" It was after this fashion that the apostles
of the national Polish cause preached to the

Prince Wittgenstein's Letter. 25

masses of the population the emancipation and
regeneration of their country.

" But this is not all. There were bands like
that of Bonsza, for example, in the government
of Plock, that traversed the country, hanging
at random in every village through which they
passed one or more peasants, merely to keep
up a feeling of terror in some, and to secure
the silence and co-operation of others. This
Bonsza, I must observe, was originally a ser-
vant, and was dismissed his employment for
theft. He commenced his political career by
hanging his master. The peasantry became
so depressed, so brutified, by these continual
threats of death, tiiat they at length sunk into
dejection, allowing themselves to be slaugh-
tered like sheep.

" The following circumstance occurred whilst
I was at Suwalki. In a large village, of more
than a hundred families, situate, if I remember
correctly, in the neighbourhood of Segny, a
national gendarme appeared one day. He
was armed with two revolvers. He assembled
all the inhabitants in the open air, and made

26 Petersburg and Warsaw.

them a long speech, reproaching them with
their want of patriotism. He chose at random
four, and hanged them in the presence of the
villagers, without a man of that multitude
making an effort to save them.

" I shall relate you another fact that occurred
fifteen days since at Gombin, the district at
present under my jurisdiction ; a district in
which, thank Heaven ! owing to the activity
of my leaders of columns, and the good dispo-
sitions of the peasantry, a like circumstance
had not occurred for two months previously.
A German colonist, named Bohme, who some
time before had informed the authorities that
one of these cut-throats was hidden in the
village, received a citation, I know not under
what pretext, to appear before the tribunal of
the city of Gombin. Having arrived at Gom-
bin he was seized in the middle of the street
by three unarmed men, who rushed out of an
inn, and in presence of a number of bystanders
tied his hands behind his back, threw him into
a cart, and drove out of the town. They made
a long detour through the environs, torturing

Prince Wittgenstein's Letter. 27

their prisoner the whole time in the most cruel
manner. They cut away the inside of his
nostrils, fleed his back, and flogged him inces-
santly with whips. The victim suffered so
that the imprint of his teeth was found in the
wood of the blood-stained cart. Having
arrived at the house of a proprietor, whom I
shall not name, the executioners halted, and
ordered some brandy. Whilst they were en-
joying themselves their victim profited by the
opportunity, and, all bleeding as he was, fled
and hid in the garden. The executioners,
aided by the servants of the nobleman, pursued
him, whilst the daughter of the house looked
on from the window. The pursuers overtook
the fugitive, carried him a little further still,
flogging him until he became insensible. They
then flung him into a yard, where he expired
of cold and pain. The torturers returned
again, and in mockery hung the dead body in
a Protestant cemetery a few versts beyond.

" On learning these horrible details I resolved
to make a terrible example, convinced that by
doing so I should save the lives of many. I,

28 Petersburg and Warsaw.

therefore, imposed a fine of 3,000 roubles on
the city of Gombin, and ordered the house
which had been the theatre of the crime to be
sacked from top to bottom, leaving the owners
only their personal effects. The effect of this
example was, that within three days, the three
assassins were delivered up by the peasants
themselves, who certainly, if I had acted with
less severity, would have hesitated to take such
an initiative. One of these assassins was a
German named Miiller. I ordered the three to
be hanged at Gombin.

" It is a remarkable fact with regard to the
national gendarmes, — whose number I must
say diminishes daily, thanks to our incessant
pursuit, and thanks above all to the spirit of
conservation which for some time past has
awaked in the peasantry and land-owners, and
which stimulates them to track these cut-
throats themselves, and deliver them up to
justice, — it is, I must say, remarkable that a
third, at least, of these gendarmes are foreign-
ers, for the most part Prussians. One was lately
brought before me who was a Schleswiger.

Prince Wittgenstein's Letter. 29

This man was caught at the very moment
when he was about to hang a woman. He had
come from his own country to advance the
Polish propaganda by means of the patriotic
cord.

" This class of wretches will have soon dis-
appeared, thanks to the activity with which
the people join the troops in freeing the coun-
try from them. Their great stronghold at
present is Warsaw, whose vast rabble quickly
fills the gaps made by those who 'meurent
pour la patrie.' But the energy of Count de
Berg, supported by that of General Trepoff,
will soon suppress these.

" Such are the ' martyrs' of the Polish cause
whom Russian barbarity, to the great scandal
of the foreign press, punishes with death.

" I shall mention a few whom I have myself
got hanged, and who would have deserved
death in any other country, even in liberal
England. I do not speak of regenerated Italy,
that now incessantly pours forth upon us her
civilizing phrases and her superabundance of
patriotic vagabonds. She has proved iii the

3<D Petersburg and Warsaw.

city of Naples that she did not hesitate to
shoot down by hundreds those whom she
called brigands. The Italians did not look
very closely to examine whether amongst the
slain there were women and children. Ob-
serve that during the entire time that the revo-
lution lasted in Poland not one woman was
executed.

"I shall now speak of the martyrs I have
made : —

" Panlinsky, head of the ' National Gendar-
merie' in the district of Gostynin, for having
put to death more than thirty peasants; of
whom twelve were shot at one time in a row.
He hanged a woman who was enceinte, and
whose child was born at the moment that the
mother was strangled. The infant was nailed
to a tree close by.

" Corfini, chief of the ' National Gendarme-
rie' of the district of Wlodslawek ; convicted
of having assassinated twenty-nine persons,
amongst whom were two women whom he got
flogged to death.

" Bliachowski, successor to Panlinsky ; who

Prince Wittgensteins Letter. 31

had assassinated an unknown number of per-
sons.

"Kopczinsky; he had flogged a woman
to death, stoned one man, and shot two
others.

" I could mention some others of the same
calibre, but I am at present pressed for time.
I merely give you this sketch in order that on
your return to England, where people know
how to distinguish between truth and false-
hood, you may take our part against system-
atic calumny and charlatanism, and may open
the eyes of those amongst your compatriots
who are willing to see.

" 1 shall add a piece of intelligence which I
have just learned from a letter that has been
seized at Warsaw. It is from one of the chiefs
of the ' National Gendarmerie' of the govern-
ment of Plock ; who, finding political assassina-
tion by the poignard and pistol too dangerous
for the executors, proposes to replace this
system by poison, a means which he praises
highly, as superior to the poignard in facility
and secrecy — with the additional advantage of

32 Petersburg and Warsaw.

being capable of being administered by women,
who certainly will not refuse thus to concur in
the great patriotic work.

" I wish you a pleasant journey, and hope
to see you soon.

" PRINCE EMILE DE SAYN WITTGENSTEIN.

" WLODSLATTEK,

28M January, 1864."

Lithuania. 33

CHAPTER III.

WILNA.

IN the August of last year I left Peters-
burg for Poland. Since the breaking out
of the Insurrection in the latter country,
every traveller before he can obtain his rail-
way ticket must show his passport to a police
officer at the station. My passport being
in order, I at once obtained a permis de
depart, and took my place in a first-class
carriage for Wilna. We left Petersburg at
10 o'clock, P.M. and did not arrive at the
capital of Lithuania till between 7 and 8
o'clock next evening. The distance, how-
ever, is not more than about 300 English
miles. My fare was £3 3s. ; and for my bag-
gage, consisting of a portmanteau and travel-
D

34 Petersburg and Warsaw.

ling bag, I paid about 8s. The charges, it
will thus be seen, are higher than on any rail-
way in Europe, and yet the Warsaw line, as
far as regards the interests of the shareholders,
has been a ruinous undertaking. The accom-
modation at all the stations was very bad, and
the prices for refreshment absurdly high.

On arriving at the Wilna station, I found it
as free from police restrictions as the station
at Windsor. A commissionaire took charge
of my baggage, and I drove in a very comfort-
able carriage, infinitely superior to the public
conveyances to be found at the railway stations
of Petersburg, to the Hotel de T Europe.

This hotel is kept by a German who was
many years resident in England, and who
speaks our language fluently. There is a
degree of comfort, cleanliness, and order in
this establishment not to be found in any
of the hotels of Petersburg, with the single
exception of Miss Benson's, on the English
Quay. The charges are exceedingly moderate,
when it is remembered that the town is at
present crowded with military. You can dine

Lithuania. 35

at the table d'hote for about 2$., and have a
comfortable room for 3s. a night. These
details may seem trivial ; but, as many of my
countrymen will in all possibility go over the
same road as myself, to visit places which have
now attained a melancholy celebrity, I have
determined to give them all the information
I can with regard to pecuniary expenses and
personal comfort.

D 2

3 6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER IV.

GENERAL MOURAVIEFF.

THE next day I went to the chateau, which
was formerly a palace belonging to the Kings
of Poland. I was kindly received by General
Mouravieff, to whom I presented the letters
of recommendation which I had brought
with me from Petersburg. The general told
me that he had received instructions from
his Government to show me the prisons and
hospitals, the courts of justice, and any
other public institutions that I might wish to
inspect. " Here," General Mouravieff said,
" there is no mystery, there is no concealment ;
everything is done openly and in the face of
day." I remarked that I was very glad that
his Excellency was so willing to facilitate my

Lithuania. 37

inquiries. I had come determined, I told him,
to believe nothing that I did not see with my
own eyes, and the truth of which I had not
submitted to the severest tests. Reports of
cruelties practised by the Russian authorities
in Lithuania, I said, had reached the Go-
vernments of Western Europe, and had caused
remonstrances to be addressed to the Govern-
ment at Petersburg. "I do not acknow-
ledge," the general said, very sternly, " the
right of any foreign Government to interfere
in the internal administration of the Russian
Empire. What Prince Gortschakoff's mode
of treating this question is I do not know,
but this I will say, that I have here an army of
120,000 men, and that I am ready to hold my
own against any foreign Power whatsoever.
The entire district under my command is now
perfectly quiet, and you are safer from insult
and annoyance in the streets of Wilna than
in the streets of Petersburg. This army of
120,000 men was not necessary for the paci-
fication of the province ; all that was required
was a good administration. When I arrived

38 Petersburg and Warsaw.

here I found a number of Poles in Government
employment. I dismissed them all, and placed
Russians in their stead. My army is now idle ;
there is nothing for them to do. I sent some
of my troops the other day into the Kingdom,
to assist in suppressing the insurrection in a
part close to my Government. The Grand
Duke, que le bon Dieu le benisse! has ideas
different from mine about the way to restore
order. However, that is not my business ; you
will be able to judge for yourself when you go to
Warsaw." The general then offered to allow
any officer of his staff that I chose to accompany
me in my visits to the places I wished to see.
I had had the good fortune of being intro-
duced to Colonel de Lebedeff, Director of the
Committee of Prisons of Petersburg. The
Colonel had not long before been in England,
collecting information about our penal system,
and was on intimate terms with the late Sir
Joshua Jebb. I mentioned Colonel deLebedeff's
name, and was very much pleased when General
Mouravieff said he would give him instructions
to accompany me in my visits of inspection.

Lithuania. 39

CHAPTER V.

PRISON-HOSPITALS.

THE next morning Colonel de Lebedeff called
upon me, and we drove together to the monas-
tery of St. Jacob, which is situated at a short
distance outside the town, in the midst of
most picturesque and fertile scenery. This
monastery has, under the direction of Colonel
de Lebedeff, been converted into a commo-
dious, clean, and well-ordered hospital for the
sick and wounded insurgents. It has been
modelled, as nearly as the difficulties of the
case would allow, upon the plan of our English
hospitals. Every ward, and every cell where
the patient was in solitary confinement, was
provided with all the requisites for cleanliness.
In one part of the building, on the ground-

4O Petersburg and Warsaw.

floor, were vapour baths, something like the
so-called Turkish baths in London, together
with the ordinary hot and cold water baths.
Attached to the hospital was an ice-house ; for
ice is largely used by Russian medical men,
with excellent effect, for the suppression of
inflammation in case of wounds, fractures,
amputations, &c. When the application of ice
is necessary, an iron rod of a semicircular form
is placed across the bed of the patient, forming
an arch immediately over the part inflamed.
From this arch are suspended waterproof oil-
cloth bags, filled with ice, which touch the
wound just sufficiently to keep it cool, without
causing any painful pressure.

In the first room which we visited were
five men; the oldest appeared to be sixty
years of age, the youngest thirty. They were
all labouring under mental derangement,
caused either by fear at having fallen into the
hands of the Russians, or by the scenes of
desolation and death of which they had lately
been witness. One man took me by the hand,
and told me that he was the king of Poland,

Lithuania. 41

and that he knew me to be the Emperor of
the French, and that he hoped I would speak
to the Czar in his favour. There was a keeper
with these poor creatures, and there are sen-
tries constantly outside the door, to prevent
any accidents occurring.

We then visited the room in which was
Chaplinsky, the young student who, in obe-
dience to the orders of the National Govern-
ment, conducted Bankowsky and Marchewscky
to the house of M. Domeiko, the Marshal of
the Nobility of the government of Wilna. The
secret tribunal of the National Government
had sentenced the marshal to death, and Ban-
kowsky, an assistant surgeon, was appointed
to execute the sentence, with the aid of
Marchewsky. As both these young men were
strangers in Wilna, Chaplinsky was ordered to
be their guide. It will be remembered that
all three were taken separately. Chaplinsky
at first denied all knowledge of the crime ; but,
when he was confronted with the two others,
he fell senseless on the ground, and the shock
to his system was so great that he was taken

42 Petersburg and Warsaw.

to the hospital and placed under medical care.
When we entered the room he was lying in
his bed in a state of lethargy. His cheeks
were pale and sunken, and he had the emaci-
ated look of one in the last stages of decline.
When he spoke, his voice was weak and plain-
tive ; and, as it evidently distressed him to talk,
we left him, having first assured ourselves that
he was properly cared for by his attendant.

We then visited a large ward, some fifty
feet long by fourteen in width. There were
twenty beds, ranged in two lines in the centre
of the room, and at the head of each bed was
a board on which was painted the name of the
patient, together with the nature of the wound
or illness from which he was suffering. Each
patient, not only in this ward, but throughout
the hospital, was furnished by the authorities
with clothing, consisting of a shirt, white
canvass trousers, slippers, and a loose dressing-
gown of coarse striped linen. In this, and in
a corresponding ward of the same size, I found,
amongst the other patients, six youths, of ages
varying between fifteen and eighteen years.

Lithuania. 43

They were students, who had run away from
college and joined in the insurrection, and
were taken on the field of battle. They were
mild-looking, gentlemanly lads, but their cap-
tors reported them as having fought with the
most desperate courage. One of them, sixteen
years of age, had received no less than seven-
teen bayonet stabs ! He was then convalescent,
which fact I looked upon as a proof that the
medical treatment in the hospital was exceed-
ingly good. Another youth of the same age
had his left hand, which had been shattered
by a musket ball, amputated. He also was
convalescent. Both were quite cheerful, and
readily answered my questions. I told them,
as 1 had made it a rule to tell all the captured
Poles with whom I came in contact, that I
was an Englishman, and that if they had any
request to make, that I was ready to assist
them to the best of my power. They told me,
in reply to my questions, that their food was
good and abundant, and that they were treated
kindly by the officers of the hospital. As it
was near the dinner-hour, I waited till that

44 Petersburg and Warsaw.

meal was brought into the ward. Each con-
valescent patient received a tureen of very
palatable soup, a dish of roast or boiled meat,
and a loaf of bread. Those who were still
suffering had a diet prescribed by the doctors.
In the latter category was a youth of eighteen,
whose entrails had been frightfully torn by a
gun-shot wound. He tried to look cheerful,
and smiled feebly when I approached his bed.
He said his sufferings were great, but that
the doctors assured him he would recover.
He whispered to me that I could do him a
great favour. There was a person, he said, that
he knew was unhappy about him — and here
for an instant a hectic flush came into his pale
face, and his eyes filled with tears — he knew
she was in Wilna, he faltered out, and would I
find her, and tell her that he was alive and
would recover ? He told me her name and the
locality where her father's house was situated.
I promised to do as he wished, and to come
and see him again. He pressed my hand in
both of his, and then hid his face in the pillow.
Not far off lay a boy of fifteen years old. A

Lithuania. 45

Russian soldier had, in the charge, stabbed him
in the breast with his bayonet, and the weapon
had gone through and through his frail body.
When I stooped down to speak to him his
cheeks were wet with tears. He said it was
not the pain of his wound that made him
cry, but that he was thinking of his two little
sisters and of his mother, who loved him so
much.

46 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER VI.

WOUNDED INSURGENTS.

THAT evening I dined with General Moura-
vieff, and, as I sat beside him on a bench in
the garden of the palace, I told him of those
poor lads who lay wounded in the hospital.
The general is an old man, he is a father, he
has known what it is to suffer. His heart was
touched by what I said, and he promised that
all these boys should be released as soon as
they were well, and be handed over to their
families. Three days after, I returned to the
hospital with a tolerably light heart, for I had
good news for some of the inmates. The
kind Russian officer who had accompanied me
had, in his pocket-book, two or three lines
full of a simple, childlike love, written by the

Lithuania. 47

trembling hand of a young girl. When we
entered the ward where the poor wounded
youth lay that had asked me to let that same
young lady know that he was alive and would
recover, his face lit up with hope. We gave
him the pocket-book, open at the place where
the lines were written, and walked away whilst
he read them. It was his best medicine.
How bright and happy he looked when we
turned back to speak to him ! My friend, the
father himself of boys and girls, gave him a
pencil and told him he might write an answer
on the same leaf. Hurriedly he wrote, but it
was on another page, for that on which the
young girl had written was blistered with his
tears.

I then turned to look for the boy who had
been wounded in the breast, to tell him he
would soon be well and happy in his own
home, with his mother and his little sisters
who loved him so much. He was not in the
ward ; his bed was empty. I found him alone,
in a room in another part of the building.
He was lying on his back j his long fair hair

48 Petersburg and Warsaw.

was combed away from his pale young face,
which looked more placid than when I had
seen it last. A crucifix lay upon the coverlet
of his bed, and his hands were crossed meekly
upon his breast, as if he were praying.
When I came nearer I saw that his sorrows
and his sufferings were ended for ever — he
was dead !

He was buried according to thorites of the
Catholic Church, in the cemetery of Wilna.
A pious hand placed a small wooden cross at
the head of his narrow grave, and a kind-
hearted Russian soldier planted a few flowers
in the freshly-turned earth of the boy-patriot's
last resting-place. But long before the flowers
wither in the cold of the coming winter, his
young life so ruthlessly closed, his lonely
death-bed and his silent tears, will all be for-
gotten, save by the sisters he loved so well, and
by the widowed mother, who mourns in her
desolate home the loss of her only son.

In the same hospital was a prisoner named
Albert. He was a civil engineer; he had
resided many years in Paris, and spoke French

Lithuania.

49

remarkably well. He was taken prisoner not
long before on the defeat of a band, of which
he, from his superior intelligence, was supposed
to have been the chief. He said that, as a
Pole, he was naturally anxious that his country
should be free, but that he knew the insurrec-
tion could not succeed without the aid of
France and England. "Then," I said, " why
did you not wait for an armed intervention on
the part of the Western Powers?" He was
forced into the movement, he replied, in oppo-
sition to his better judgment. His health was
bad, he continued, and he obtained leave from
the chief of the works where he was employed
to come for change of air to Wilna, where he
had a cousin who was a curate. When he
called at his cousin's residence he was from
home, and he determined to take a walk in
the neighbourhood whilst waiting his return.
During his walk in the suburbs of the town
he met some young men, with whom he entered
into conversation. They told him that a
national rising was intended, and that every
Pole ought to join in the insurrection. They
E

50 Petersburg and Warsaw.

said they belonged to a band which was sta-
tioned at a short distance, and that he had
better become a member. He objected, upon
which they showed him that they were armed,
and swore they would kill him if he did not
join them, for that he was then in possession
of their secret, and that for their own safety
they could not allow him to return back into
the town. Seeing there was no other alterna-
tive, he went with them, and after walking
some miles they found the band bivouacked in
a wood. He then took the oath of fidelity to
the national cause, and stuck to his comrades
through good and evil fortune till they were
beaten by the Russians and he was made
prisoner.

Lithuania.

CHAPTER VII.

POLITICAL PRISONERS.

THE day following ray first visit to the Hos-
pital of St. Jacob we went to see the Convent
of the " Missionaries," which had been fitted up
as a prison for three hundred men and sixty
women. As a general rule, when the accusa-
tion is of a serious nature, the prisoner is kept
in solitary confinement till after trial. The
convent cells are appropriated to this purpose,
and the large rooms are inhabited in common
by those who have already been tried and
are waiting the execution of their sentence,
and also by those against whom there is no
charge of an aggravated nature. We first went
into a room where there were twenty women
of the humbler class, all lodged apart from
E 2

52 Petersburg and Warsaw.

the other female prisoners, who were ladies
of rank. I asked, on entering, if any of the
women spoke French, when a rather well-
dressed young person hurried towards me,
and, in a very excited way and in excellent
French, exclaimed, that she felt she would die
if she were kept much longer in prison ; that
she was innocent, that she had taken no part
whatever in the insurrection, and that she was
separated from her baby, who she knew must
perish without her care. The gaoler told us
she was subject to fits of great excitement,
that her mind wandered strangely at times,
and that the doctor said she was suffering
from a form of milk fever. Her baby about
whom she was then crying so bitterly was
dead. All the female prisoners in the Con-
vent of the Missionaries were accused of
being members of a committee for nursing
the sick and wounded insurgents, of holding
seditious meetings in their houses, and of
distributing the proclamations of the National
Government. In solitary confinement, in one
of the cells, I found a girl of between nineteen

Lithuania. 53

and twenty. She was accused of having
secretly received insurgents in her house,
where the oath of fidelity to the national cause
was administered to them by a Catholic priest.
The priest and some of the men to whom
he had administered the oath were arrested,
and all admitted the truth of the accusation
made against them. But the girl, when con-
fronted with them, denied that they had ever
been to her house, or that she had ever seen
them before in her life, and refused to answer
any of the questions addressed to her by the
court. It was evidently from a determination
not to incriminate others that she persisted in
her denial. She had been three weeks in
solitary confinement ; she had no books to read,
no companions to talk to, nothing to divert
her mind from her own sad thoughts. She
had no other fare than the rough prison diet,
she saw no other faces than those of her gaolers,
and was addressed by no other human voices
than those of her judges. Yet her determina-
tion to give no information as to the part she
had taken in the insurrection seemed as deter-

54 Petersburg and Warsaw.

mined as ever. From her cell I went to that
of the priest who was her accomplice. Nothing
could be more remarkable than the contrast
between the two. The moral force displayed
by the girl seemed to be totally wanting in the
man. He had already avowed all, and admitted
his complicity with the young woman. He
was an elderly, heavy-looking person, with a
countenance in which there was a strange
want of either dignity or intelligence. He
closed the breviary he was reading when we
entered, and stood before us with a crouching,
broken-spirited look. He told his story over
again without reservation. He then seized
the hand of my friend, the colonel, and, in a
voice broken with sobs, implored him to say
if there were any danger of his being put to
death. The colonel assured him there was
not, for which information he showed a servile
gratitude. We then entered a room where
seven Catholic clergymen were confined. They
all stood up when we appeared, and returned
our salute in silence. They were grave, digni-
fied-looking men. The oldest appeared to be

Lithuania. 55

about sixty, with white hair and a form pre-
maturely bent. He, however, showed in the
ascetic lines of his wan face the same passion-
less serenity as his younger and stronger
fellow-prisoners. They were all accused of
inciting their flocks to take part in the insur-
rection. From thence we went to a very large
room, which had formerly been the refectory
of the convent. Here were imprisoned more
than thirty ladies of different ages, from
seventeen to forty. Amongst the younger,
some were very pretty, delicate-looking girls.
But even the prettiest and most delicate
amongst them when first spoken to assumed
a defiant and rather fierce expression, which
contrasted strangely with the soft outlines and
gentle voice of youth. Their beauty, however,
was not disfigured ; it was merely changed by
the expression. They looked like young fal-
cons that had just been caged, with eyes as
proud and courage as undaunted. It was
their hour for dinner. It was Friday, a day
of abstinence in the Catholic Church. The
food was therefore not very palatable. It

56 Petersburg and Warsaw.

consisted of vegetable soup, bread, and salt
fish. It requires an appetite sharpened by
active exercise in the open air to eat such a
repast with pleasure. Very few of the por-
tions served out were consequently eaten, and
some were left almost untouched.

In reply to my inquiries, those ladies who
stood near me said, that in general the food
given them, though plain, was good and whole-
some in quality, and always more than suf-
ficient in quantity. Some of the young girls,
however, objected to being obliged to eat with
a horn spoon and a pewter fork. They
all spoke with more boldness and abandon
than the male prisoners. None of them
offered an excuse for having taken part in the
insurrectionary movement, but, on the con-
trary, seemed proud of what they had done,
and regretted that they had not been able to
give more efficient aid to the " national cause."
I went apart with some of the oldest, who
were all married women. We were out of
hearing of the officers of the prison, whose
proximity, I was afraid, might prevent them

Lithuania. 57

from speaking freely oil a subject which
had been reported to the English and French
Governments, and had caused a great deal of
indignation. I asked these ladies to tell me
with the same frankness that they had already
shown in speaking on other subjects, if any of
those who then heard me, or any of their
friends or aquaintances, had been struck or
beaten, or in any way outraged, by the Russian
authorities. They all, with one voice, answered
" No," and seemed surprised that I should have
asked the question. They complained of the
suddenness with which they had been hurried
to prison, without being allowed to make
sufficient preparation, of the bad accommoda-
tion, and of their not being permitted to take
exercise ; but with regard to insult or outrage,
they persisted in saying there was no ground
for such a charge.

We then visited a room in which six young
men were confined. These prisoners, as well
as many others that I subsequently saw,
amused themselves, or rather sought a diversion
from their thoughts, by moulding different

58 Petersburg and Warsaw.

figures in bread. Some of these productions
showed a great deal of art. I have several
now in my possession. One is an obelisk,
surrounded by a railing, and all the details,
even to the bas-reliefs on the plinth and the
tracery on the iron-work, are represented ;
another is a pretty equestrian statue ; and a
third is that of an old man with a long
beard, who is leaning on a stick* All these
figures are coloured either black or light
brown, the materials being supplied by the
prison authorities. One of the six young
fellows to whom I have alluded made me a
present of the figure of the old man with the
long beard. It was so nicely executed, that I
sent it as a curiosity to General Mouravieff.
The artist had been an officer in the Russian
army, but, on the breaking out of the insur-
surrection, he joined a party of his fellow-
Poles who had taken up arms against the
Imperial Government, and, after many adven-
tures, he was captured and sent a prisoner to
Wilna. He looked in bad health, yet he
assured us he was quite well, but that the

Lithuania. 59

sudden change from an active open-air life to
the atmosphere of a prison did not improve
his appearance. He thanked me for my visit
to himself and his companions, and begged
me to accept the statuette that I have men-
tioned. I did not see him again till two days
later. He was no longer breathing the atmo-
sphere of a prison ; he was in the open air
outside Wilna. He cast a glance of recogni-
tion upon my friend and myself, who stood
amongst the crowd, and then, whilst calmly
offering his last prayer to Heaven, the signal
was given, the soldiers fired, arid he lay still and
dead before us — the first ball had gone through
his heart. This was Macovetzky, who was
shot on the 29th of last August, in accordance
with the sentence of a court-martial. Sen-
tence had been pronounced, and the day fixed
for his execution, when he gave me the
statuette, but he knew nothing of his intended
fate till he was led out to be shot. In the
evening, when I was leaving General Moura-
vieff's study, he said suddenly, "Ah, I had
almost forgotten it ; here is something which

60 Petersburg and Warsaw,

belongs to you ; " and he took from his table
and placed in my hand the statuette which
had been given me by Macovetzky. I received
it with a strange sensation : it seemed to me
like a present from the dead.

Lithuania. 6 1

CHAPTER VIII.

POLITICAL ASSASSINS.

I ALSO visited the Dominican Convent, which
had been fitted up as a prison. Here
twenty-eight persons were confined, five of
whom were accused of acts entailing the
punishment of death. In the first cell which
I entered was Bankowsky, the assistant sur-
geon who had attempted to murder M.
Domeiko. He was not alone. In the same
room was a youth who seemed to belong to
the humbler classes of society. He, because
he had not received the entire sum promised
him as an accomplice, " turned King's evi-
dence," as it is termed in England, and assisted
the police in capturing Benkowsky and his
companion. The would-be murderer was

62 Petersburg and Warsaw.

quite ignorant of the real character of his
neighbour, and looked upon him as a friend
and fellow-unfortunate. The daring duplicity
of the other was most extraordinary. Night
and day he remained within a few feet of an
assassin who had avowed his crime, and was
awaiting his execution from hour to hour, and
for whom there was no hope of pardon in this
world. That doomed man he had helped to
deliver into the hands of justice, and he was
with him now as a spy upon his words and
actions. It did not seem to occur to him
that Benkowsky might, by some accident,
discover his real character, and strangle him
whilst he slept.

The Poles, as a general rule, are a good-
looking people, but Benkowsky had an ill-
favoured, sinister look. His hair was of a
black colour; he told us it was naturally
fair, but that he had it dyed as a means of
disguise. Being a surgeon, it was thought
that he would be less sensible to human suf-
fering than another, and that, moreover, his
anatomical skill would enable him to use the

Lithuania. 63

poignard with more deadly effect. He was,
therefore, enrolled amongst the band emplyoed
by the " National Government " to assassinate
those who were obnoxious to that body. He
was chosen, in company with Marcefsky, to
murder M. Domeiko, for which he was pro-
mised a sum of money, the whole of which,
however, he did not receive, for the money
advanced for the expenses of his journey and
of his stay in Wilna had been deducted.
After the crime, he dressed himself in woman's
clothes, and hid for some days outside the
town in the cemetery. When he was captured
at the railway station, he had with him a
number of roubles which had been sent him
by the " National Government."

We then went to see Marcefsky. He
seemed about the same age as Benkowsky,
namely, twenty-six or seven. He was little
more than five feet in height, with broad
shoulders and a very massive head, in which
what phrenologists call the organ of firmness
was strongly developed. We then entered a
large room in which were eleven prisoners.

64 Petersburg and Warsaw.

They, as well as all the accused that I saw in the
Dominican Convent, looked at us in an anxious,
feverish manner, as if they expected that we
had brought with us some evil tidings. The
reason, I subsequently learned, was, that seve-
ral had only left the prison to be hanged or
shot, and that it was considered by those
confined there to be something like the Con-
ciergerie at Paris at the time -of the first
revolution, and that the prisoner left hope
behind him on entering its gates. One of
those who looked most anxiously at us was a
well-dressed youth, whose brother had been
executed a few days before. There were also
a father and son. The father was an elderly,
feeble-looking man, the son was tall and strong,
and in the flower of youth. The father's eyes
were blood-shot, and his face sallow and hag-
gard. He sat on the side of his bed in an
attitude of mute despair. They were both
apothecaries in Wilna, and were accused of
having supplied poison for anointing the dag-
ger of Benkowsky. When I spoke to the son,
he said that his father and himself were inca-

Lithuania. 65

pable of committing so infamous a crime. Yet
he said he was willing to bear the ignominy of
the accusation and to remain in prison till the
case was cleared up ; " but oh, sir," he said,
"beg of them, for God's sake, to have pity
upon my poor old father. He is weak, his
health is breaking fast. The shame of having
such a crime imputed to him, whose whole
life has been blameless, has had a more fatal
effect upon him than the imprisonment or the
fear of punishment. I implore you to get
my father set at liberty, and they may act
with me as they please." He then covered
his face with his hands and burst into tears.
A few hours later their case was laid before
General Mouravieff, and, as the accusation
turned out to be unfounded, both father and
son were set at liberty.

66 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER IX.

COURTS-MARTIAL.

THE Military Court, in which all political
cases are tried, holds its sittings in one of the
houses in the suburbs. The President of the
tribunal is Lieutenant -General Wesselitzky,
who was well known to several of our officers
on the cessation of hostilities at Sebastopol.
This court sits with closed doors, and no
stranger is admitted without a special permis-
sion from General Mouravieff. Not only had
I this permission, but the President, General
Wesselitzky, gave orders to the door-keepers
to admit me whenever I chose to coine. On
my first visit I found in the ante-room of
the court a young Catholic priest, awaiting his
turn to be tried by the court-martial which

Lithuania. 67

was sitting within. Into this ante-room the
prisoners are admitted one by one, when an
officer, who is stationed there for the purpose,
hands them a paper divided into two columns.
One contains a series of printed questions,
opposite to which, in the adjoining column,
the prisoner is directed to write his answers.
The questions are the names, age, place of
birth, religion, and profession of the prisoner,
and, lastly, a demand for a statement of the
crime of which he is accused. The prisoner
is not told by the court, as is the case in
England, of the charge upon which he has
been arrested ; he is left to say what he thinks
it is, according to his conscience.

The President, having politely offered me a
seat at his table, handed me a list of the
prisoners who were to be examined that day,
and told me that I might choose from amongst
them any that I wished to be tried in my
presence. I requested that the Catholic priest
I had seen in the ante-room should be placed
at the bar. He was at once called in, and
directed to sit down close to the table at which

F2

68 Petersburg and Warsaw.

I was seated, so that I might without difficulty
ask him any questions I pleased. He, as well
as all the prisoners I saw brought before that
court, displayed the same feverish, anxious
manner that I had observed amongst the per-
sons confined in the Dominican convent.

In reply to my question, put through the
court, the prisoner said he was arrested be-
cause arms and ammunition had been found
concealed in his house. The arms and ammu-
nition were there without his knowledge, and
had been placed in his house solely, he
said, for the purpose of bringing him into
trouble. He stated, that for some time before
his arrest he had been preaching in favour of
temperance, and met with so much success
that the consumption of spirituous liquors
amongst his parishioners had considerably di-
minished. The Jews, who are the persons
engaged in the commerce of vodka, or native
brandy, in Wilna, were exasperated at the
injury done to their trade. They annoyed
him at times when he passed through the
streets, and on one occasion they gathered in

Lithuania. 69

a crowd before his house, and broke the
windows. The chief rioters were punished
by the police, and, he said, that it was in
revenge for this, as well as for his having
preached against the use of ardent spirits,
that some of the Jews hid the arms and am-
munition in his house, and then laid informa-
tions against him as one in league with the
insurgents. His house was consequently
searched, the arms and ammunition found,
and he was imprisoned.

Nearly opposite to the door by which I had
entered the apartment where the court sat,
was another door, opening into a corridor
which led to the back of the building. In
the upper panels of this door were bored two
holes, of about half an inch in diameter. I
observed that a human eye glittered through
them occasionally, and then disappeared. Pre-
vious to the coming of the priest into court, I
asked the president for what these holes were
used. He explained that when it was neces-
sary to identify a prisoner, the witness who
undertook to do so, peeped at the person on

70 Petersburg and Warsaw.

trial through one of these apertures, and then
made his statement in the usual form to
an officer of the tribunal by whom he was
accompanied. The eyes which glared through
these "judas" upon the apostle of tem-
perance had not, I am happy to say, a
baneful effect, for by order of General Moura-
vieff he was set at liberty on the following
day.

A country lad who could neither read nor
write was also put upon his trial. When told
to sit down, he thought it was done in mockery,
and refused. He explained that when a peasant
sat down in the presence of gentlemen in his
part of the country the peasant was always
beaten. The prisoner had been taken after a
conflict between the troops and the band to
which he belonged. He stated that he was a
shepherd, and that one night some of the in-
surgent gendarmes, came to the hut in which
he lived amongst his flocks, and told him they
would hang him if he did not join their band.
He joined them because he was afraid, he
said, and because, moreover, they carried off

Lithuania. 7 1

several sheep, for which his master would be
sure to bring him to account.

To this statement, which was written down
by a clerk, he put his mark in the same way
as it is done in England by a person who does
not know how to write. I had very little
anxiety about his fate, for, as a general rule,
all the peasants of Lithuania who were sent to
prison for being implicated in the insurrection
were, after a short detention, set at liberty.

72 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER X.

PEASANT-DEPUTATIONS.

ONE morning that I called at the castle upon
General Mouravieff, I found assembled in one
of the ante-rooms, twenty-five Polish farmers,
each one the deputy elected by his fellows to
represent his parish. They were all tall, well-
made, good-looking men ; they wore long
surtouts of rough cloth, jack-boots, and wide
breeches, and each had round his neck a brass
chain, from which a medal of the same material
was suspended. This was his badge of office
as head man of the parish. When General
Mouravieff came into the room, followed by a
numerous staff, all in gorgeous uniforms, the
generals wearing their stars and " cordons,"
the sturdy farmers, not in the least abashed by

Lithuania. 73

the presence of the redoubtable governor, or
the splendour by which he was surrounded,
bowed respectfully, but not servilely. At their
head stood the clerk of the peace for the
district, whom they had brought with them to
read an address of thanks to the Emperor for
having given them General Mouravieff for a
governor, who, by his energy, had delivered
them from the imposts and cruelties of the
insurgents.

The General took the address, which he
promised to send to 'the Emperor, and thanked
them for the sentiments which they had ex-
pressed towards himself. He asked them if
there were still any insurgents in their part of
the country. " Thank God," they said, " at
present there are none, and we can now live
quietly and happily." "No people in the
world," said the oldest man amongst them,
"could support two Governments without being
ruined. We are obliged to pay taxes to the
Emperor, and the gendarmes of the National
Government took from us money and provi-
sions as they thought proper, and threatened

74 Petersburg and Warsaw.

us with death if we complained. They were
the stronger, and we were obliged to submit.
But since you, General, have come amongst
us, our properties are protected from plunder,
and our families from outrage. We are very
happy to live under the Emperor, who is the
father and friend of the peasants, whereas the
insurgents have in every way acted towards
us as enemies."

" If you catch any insurgents," said General
, Mouravieff, " bring them to me, and they shall
be punished. But you must not take the law
into your own hands, and punish them your-
selves. You must also remember your duties
towards your landlords, for I will suffer no in-
fraction of the law under that head ; landlord
and tenant, noble and peasant, are all alike the
children of the Emperor, whose wish is that
you shall all live happily and contentedly to-
gether." The General then wished them a
pleasant journey back to their homes, and
they withdrew.

What struck me as remarkable in these
peasants, as well as in the others that I sub-

Lithuania. 75

sequeutly saw at the castle, where they had
come with addresses to the Emperor, was, that
they spoke out as calmly and boldly in the pre-
sence of the terrible Mouravieff and his staff
of generals and court chamberlains, as a mem-
ber of parliament would address the ministerial
benches. Each seemed fully impressed with
the importance of his position as a popular
representative, chosen by the free voices of
his fellow -citizens, to express their wishes to
the governing powers.

Amongst the members of one of the deputa-
tions which arrived at the castle, whilst I was
at Wilna, were twelve peasants who lived upon
the crown lands. They wore the same form
of costume as their companions, but it was of
darker colour, and was bound with gold lace.
With their low-crowned hats, ornamented with
a peacock's feather, open shirt-collar, loose
caftan, and long boots, they were exactly like
the figures seen in a Polish ballet at Her
Majesty's Theatre.

76 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XL

WERKEY.

AT about five miles from Wilna is the
country seat of Prince Seyne Wittgenstein, at
present military agent for the Russian Govern-
ment at Paris. Werkey is the name of the
place. Every stranger who stops for any
time at Wilna is expected to visit Werkey.
I, consequently, determined to go thither, if
I could get an escort to protect me from any
disagreeable mistakes on the part of either
Cossack or insurgent along the road. The
landlord of the hotel, however, assured me
that for leagues round Wilna the country
was quiet and orderly. The coachman,
he said, knew the road ; and he gave me
a note for his friend, the Prince's game-

Lithuania. 77

keeper, who would show me the house and
grounds.

We drove past the church of St. John, and
by the public garden, across the open space in
front of the cathedral, and in a few minutes
more crossed the long, low, wooden bridge
which spans the river. The ground, which
rises rather abruptly on the other side, is
crowned by a church, in front of which, and
overlooking the road by which we ascended, is
a gigantic figure of Our Saviour carrying the
cross, which is held in particular veneration
by the Catholics of Wilna. When we reached
the table-land above the church, the view we
obtained of the city and its environs was
picturesquely beautiful. Wilna is built upon
undulating ground ; on each eminence is seen
the sharply pointed red-tiled roof of some
monastery, with its quaint belfry, blackened
by time, rising solemnly behind, or an old
clock tower, with its high pyramidal roof
surmounted by its vane and cross. Here and
there, in breaks amongst the houses, are seen
waving acacias and slender poplars, their

7 8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

green contrasting pleasantly with whitened
wall, red-tiled roof, and sombre tower.

Below, on the level ground, flows the Villa,
a bright limpid river, now hidden by a rising
ground or clump of trees, now flashing like
burnished silver in the warm autumnal sun.
On the bank of this river, opposite the town,
is a hill which rises sharply high in the
air, and on its summit is the citadel. Seen
from the road to Werkey it stands apart, like
a Greek acropolis ; but the soft verdure, the
terraced walks, and the mediaeval outline of
the fort itself, give it more the appearance of
the stronghold of some feudal margrave.

After stopping for some time to admire the
view which I have attempted to describe, we
proceeded towards Werkey. At little more
than half-way, we passed the residence of
the Greek Archbishop of Wilna. It is a
handsome pile of building, composed of the
archiepiscopal palace, and a church, to which
recent additions give something of a Byzantine
character. This edifice, I believe, formerly
belonged to the Catholics. It is beautifully

Lithuania. 79

situated in the midst of handsome gardens,
backed by a hill covered to the summit with
trees. On the front side, the land falls in a
gentle slope about a hundred yards to the
river which here flows on, broad, and calm,
and deep. Barges and rafts were gliding
slowly along its surface, and on the opposite
side were wide pastures dotted with cattle,
and, beyond, a fringe of woodland fading away
into the blue distance. After passing the
Archbishop's residence, the road lies through
dense woods for a mile or so, and then winds
up the side of a steep hill, on the broad
summit of which stands the chateau of
Werkey. The well macadamised road, with
a strong wooden pailing on one side separating
it from a dark ravine, through which, hidden
by tangled brushwood, tumbles a noisy
stream, the handsome gateway, the lodge, the
gravelled avenue, the velvet lawn, and the
white walls of the mansion peeping out from
amongst the trees, made me for a moment
fancy that I was in the grounds of one of our
English noblemen.

8o Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XII.

THE HOUSE OF RADZOVILL.

THE Princes of Seyne Wittgenstein are of
German origin. The first of the family es-
tablished in Russia was the celebrated Field-
Marshal, so often mentioned in the des-
patches of Napoleon I., during the memorable
campaign of 1812. A son of the Marshal
married the Princess Radzovill, heiress in her
own right to the chateau and lands of Werkey,
and the other possessions belonging to that
branch of the great Lithuanian family. The
present prince is the offspring of this marriage.
In the dining-hall of the chateau is a well-
painted full-length portrait of the Marshal,
and in the same room is another picture which
does not possess so much artistic merit, repre-

Lithuania,. 8 1

senting the late prince and princess as a
knight and lady of the middle ages on a
hawking expedition, and the present prince
appears as a little page holding a greyhound
in a leash. Here is also a rudely-executed
portrait of the beautiful Barbara Radzovill,
who was married secretly to Sigismond
Augustus, King of Poland, after the death
of his first wife, an Archduchess of Austria.
When Sigismond proclaimed to the nation
his marriage with Barbara, the nobles, urged
on by Sigismond's mother, demanded that the
marriage should be annulled. But Sigismond
loved his beautiful wife too dearly to act
traitorously towards her, either for the frowns
of his mother, or the threats of his nobles.
" How can you expect your king to be faithful
to you, if he is not faithful to his wife ? "
exclaimed Sigismond, addressing the nobles.
He was willing to resign the crown, he said,
but he would never abandon his beloved
Barbara. Sigismond's chivalrous determination
prevailed ; the nobles acknowledged Barbara as
their queen, vied with each other in showing

6

82 Petersburg and Warsaw.

her their devotion, and even her mother-in-law
became her friend. But poor Barbara's whole
being was wrapped up in her love for Sigis-
mond, and the attempt to tear him from
her so affected her health that she pined away,
and died six months after her mother-in-law
and the nobles had demanded her divorce.
More than three hundred years have gone by
since Queen Barbara's death, but stories of
her loveliness and worth, her sufferings and
her early death, are still heard in the long
winter evenings, round the stove of the
Lithuanian peasant.

On the oaken panelling of the dining-hall
are grouped trophies of antique arms, and
standing around are suits of mail, with helm
and lance and closed vizor, the grim iron
.shells of departed knights of the house of
Radzovill.

In the other rooms are one or two paintings
of merit, and there is a very good copy of
Correggio's " Christ arguing with the doctors,"
the original of which is in the National Caller *
in London.

Lithuania. 83

CHAPTER XIII.

THE BISONS.

WE visited the preserves at Werkey, which
are swarming with game, the grounds not
having been shot over for a considerable time.
Since the breaking out of the insurrection the
prince's gamekeepers have not been allowed
to carry guns.

In one part of the park where a clearing
had been made in the centre of a plantation
of fir-trees a cock was tied by a long string
to a peg driven into the ground. Upon four
upright posts a strong net was loosely hung,
forming a square of about six feet about the
place where the cock was attached. This net
was for catching eagles and other birds of
prey. Attracted by the crowing of the cock

G2

84 Petersburg and Warsaw.

they perch upon the branch of some neigh-
bouring tree, and making a sudden swoop
upon their intended victim, they are caught
in the meshes of the net. The gamekeeper
told me that several eagles, hawks, and vul-
tures, had been captured in this manner.
They were all found entangled close to the
ground, none having ever darted vertically
downwards, when they would have- been sure
of their prey, for the net is entirely open at
the top.

In another part of the grounds were several
hundred head of deer, who came trooping out
from their leafy hiding-places at the call of the
gamekeeper. But the most remarkable sight
in the park was a family of bisons, consisting
of a male and female and a young one. They
were confined in a field surrounded by a high
paling. They had a wooden shed in which
to sleep, and their food was passed to them
through a small door in the inclosure. They
seemed very savage and irritable. They had
been brought from a forest at several miles
distant, where the bison is found wild. It is a

Lithuania. 8 5

strange fact in natural history that, throughout
the entire Russian empire, it is only within
the precincts of this forest that the bisons live
healthily, and continue to multiply. When
removed, even to a little distance from their
native haunts, they sicken and die in a short
time. Several attempts have been made to
acclimatize them at Werkey, but all without
success. Those that I saw, though the food
they were supposed to like best was given
them in abundance, were unhealthy and
suffering, the gamekeeper told me, and would
evidently end as their predecessors had ended.
In their native woods they are shy and timid,
and fly at, the approach of a passenger, but
when shut up as they were at Werkey, they
become fierce and dangerous.

86 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XIV.

MEMORIES OF 1812.

IT was late in the evening when I again
found myself on the height above the wooden
bridge which crosses the Vilia, at the entrance
to Wilna. In the closing shades of evening
I could no longer distinguish those features in
the landscape which had excited my admira-
tion some hours before. The town was wrapped
in the sober livery of twilight, the busy hum
of its population was growing gradually fainter,
and the impatient rush of the river broke
more distinctly upon the ear. It was the same
Vilia upon the bank of which Napoleon I.
had stood, at the head of a countless host,
fifty-one years before. He was then in the
neighbourhood of Kovno. The Cossacks had

Lithuania. 87

destroyed the bridge, and prevented the pas-
sage of Oudinot's corps. Napoleon, in a moment
of irritation, ordered a squadron of his Polish
body-guard to ford the river. Obedient to the
order, they at once plunged in, but the waters
were deep and the current strong. They tried
to swim their horses to the opposite bank, but
in vain. Horses and men sunk and rose in a
frightful struggle with death, and, when all
hope was over and the Polish horsemen saw
their fate inevitable, they turned their eyes
towards Napoleon, who stood calm and motion-
less upon the bank, and, shouting with their
remaining strength " Vive I'Empereur!" sunk
to rise no more. The whole squadron perished.
The French soldiers upon the bank, unable to
render assistance, were struck with horror and
admiration. The superstitious amongst them
looked upon the incident as a bad omen, as
they had already pronounced it to be an
ominous warning when on the bank of the
Niemen, not very many hours before, the
horse of the emperor stumbled and fell, rolling
his imperial rider in the dust. It was on the

88 Petersburg and Warsaw.

day succeeding that latter accident that the
first of the invading army stood upon the soil
of Russia. On the evening of the 24th of
June a party of sappers crossed the Niemen
in a small boat. Arrived on the opposite bank,
they were surprised to find themselves in com-
plete solitude. After a time a Cossack officer,
at the head of a few of his men, emerged
from a neighbouring wood, and, riding towards
the sappers, asked them who they were and
what brought them to Russia. "We are
Frenchmen," answered a sapper, "we have
come to fight the Russian army, to take Wilna,
and to deliver Poland ; " upon which the Cos-
sacks rode away, but as they were disappearing
through the wood they were fired at by three
of the sappers. Those were the first shots
fired by the invading army in Russia.

Lithuania.

CHAPTER XV.

BAD OMENS.

IF bad omens could have influenced the
conduct of Napoleon I. when he appeared on
the Russian frontier at the head of more than
half a million of men, he would have hesitated
before he embarked in that disastrous cam-
paign. Napoleon advanced from Kovno to
the neighbourhood of Wilna, hoping that the
Russian army would have defended the capital
of Lithuania. But such were not the tactics
of the Czar. The Russian generals had deter-
mined to adopt the old Scythian system of
drawing the invaders as far as possible into
the interior of the country, and then leaving
the chief work to be done by their best ally —
the terrible northern winter.

90 Petersburg and Warsaw.

The gates of Wilna were open wide, and
Napoleon rode through its streets at the head
of his Polish guard amidst enthusiastic shouts
of welcome from the Lithuanian population.
But he was insensible to the ovation ; this
absence of all resistance fell upon his mind as
the first dark shadow of the coming disasters
of the campaign. The Russian army had
retired in the direction of Drissa: Napoleon
ordered Murat and his cavalry to follow in
their track, and Ney to move on his left to the
support of Oudinot, who had that day come
up with Wittgenstein and driven him with
loss from Develtovo to Wilkomir. It was
amongst his advanced posts to which he had
ridden from Wilna, that he gave these orders.
He then returned back into the town and took
up his quarters in the palace, which had just
been vacated by the Emperor Alexander, and
which is at present occupied by General
Mouravieff.

Lithuania. 91

CHAPTER XVI.

NAPOLEON'S WRITING-TABLE.

IN the boudoir of Madame Mouravieff is a
writing-table of moderate size. The frame is
of rosewood, the centre is covered with green
cloth, the edges of the table are bordered with
gilt brass, and a light railing of the same
material, of three inches high, runs along the
back and comes half way down on each side.
It was at this table that Napoleon I. wrote
his despatches directing the operations of his
generals for the conquest of Russia, and at this
table he wrote his instructions to his ministers
at Paris with regard to the policy to be pursued
throughout Europe, of whose fate he then con-
sidered himself the sovereign arbitrator. A
few days before taking up his quarters in

92 Petersburg and Warsaw.

Wilna, he issued the following proclamation to
his army : —

" Soldiers ! The second Polish war has
commenced. The first ended at Friedland
and Tilsit. At Tilsit, Russia swore to maintain
an eternal alliance with France, and to wage
war with England. She has violated hef oaths
and refuses to give any explanation of her
strange conduct, until the French eagles have
re-passed the Rhine and left our allies at her
mercy. Russia is hurried along by fate — her
destiny will be fulfilled. Does she think us
degenerated? Are we not the same soldiers
that fought at Austerlitz ? She has placed us
between dishonour and war. There can be no
doubt as to our choice. Let us, then, advance ;
let us pass the Niemen, and carry the war
into her territory. The second Polish war
will be glorious for the French arms, as was
the first ; but the peace which we shall con-
clude will carry with it its guarantee : it will
put an end to the fatal influence which Russia
for fifty years has exercised upon the affairs of
Europe."

Lithuania. 93

At the same time Alexander also issued an
address to his army, and a French historian
says, that in these two productions might have
been seen the characters of the two emperors,
and of the two peoples over which they ruled.
The Russian proclamation was a defence ; the
French was an accusation. The first was sim-
ple and moderate, the other defiant and in a
tone prophetic of victory. Alexander invoked
the aid of heaven ; Napoleon spoke only of
fate. The former appealed to the love of home
and country ; the latter to the love of glory
and the pleasures of conquest. But neither
one nor the other spoke of the independence of
Poland, which Napoleon had, however, pre-
viously stated to be the real object of the
war.

One of the Emperor Napoleon's despatches,
dated Wilna, July 9th, 1812, is written with
that certitude of success which it was natural
should be felt by the master of an army of
600,000 men. Its tone contrasts strangely
with a despatch written from the same town,
and in the same palace, five months later.

94 Petersburg and Warsaw.

Napoleon, writing from Wilna, 9th July,
says : —

" Cousin, consider the last letter I wrote to
you for the Duke of Tarento as non-avenue,
and substitute for it the following : —

"The Duke de Reggio has received orders
to advance upon Solok, the Duke d'Elchingen
upon Kozatschizna ; the King of Naples is at
Widzy. The enemy appears to- concentrate at
Dunaburg. The Prince d'Echmulh has arrived
at Minsk. The Hetman Platoff with his
Cossacks, and the corps of Bragation who
thought to move upon that town, have been
cut off, and have gone towards Bobrmsk.
They are pursued by the King of Westphalia ;
they were yesterday at Mir. The Viceroy is
marching towards the Duna ; the Guard and
the head-quarters ought to leave this in a few
days. The Emperor intends to march upon
Moscow and St. Petersburg, and from thence
force the army which is at Dunaburg to return
up, and he will liberate the whole of Courland
and Livonia.

" The garrison of Riga, commanded by

Lithuania. 95

General Esseii, whose army has been dismem-
bered, is composed of thirty-three battalions,
each consisting of two or three hundred men.
They are all recruits of this year, and are not
worthy of attention. It is possible that as soon
as the place is threatened, a division from
Diinaburg will march there, for, according to
the information we have received, the present
garrison is not sufficient for its defence," &c.
&c.

Five months later the following order, dated
Wilna, December 9th, was sent to Comte
Daru : —

" The King has removed his head-quarters
to the barrier of Kovno. The Duke d'Elchiri-
gen conducts the retreat, and will leave to-
morrow as late as he can. Send off the trea-
sure during the night. I have ordered Gene-
ral Eble to give the horses of the artillery if
it is necessary. Everything must be done to
save it. Let it be brought to-night to the
head-quarters at the barrier of Kovno, where
we will have it escorted.

" Distribute, without anv slow official forms,

96 Petersburg and Warsaw.

and in abundance, provisions and clothing to
all those who ask for them, as the position of
the enemy forbids the hope of being able to
hold out all day to-morrow at Wilna. Join
the head-quarters to-night, and set everything
going to evacuate upon Kovno, if that seems
possible."

Flight from Wilna. 97

CHAPTER XVII.

FLIGHT FROM WILNA.

IT was on that same 9th of December that a
portion of the wreck of the mighty army,
which Napoleon had assembled for the con-
quest of Russia, arrived half dead with cold
and hunger in the streets of Wilna. There
were in that town stores of flour, bread, and
meat, sufficient to feed 100,000 men for more
than a month; but such was the confusion
and helplessness which existed, even amongst
the chiefs, that no one thought of distributing
these provisions amongst the unfortunate
beings who had struggled on as far as Wilna,
in the hope of there finding shelter and food.
Some had crawled to the hospitals, and died
upon the stairs and in the passages. The

98 Petersburg and Warsaw.

doors of the barracks were blocked up with
dead bodies heaped one upon the other. Thou-
sands, weak from hunger and fatigue, sunk in
the streets and were frozen to death. At
length, after ten hours' delay, some relief was
given to the survivors.

The Lithuanians from pity, and the Jews
on payment, received them into their houses.
But scarcely had they begun to feel the un-
wonted pleasure of heat and food, than the
roar of the Russian artillery was heard at the
gates of Wilna.

Again all was confusion. The drums beat
to arms, but none, not even the soldiers of
the Old Guard, answered the appeal. A cry
had risen "the Cossacks are coming!" and
all, veteran and recruit, officer and private,
all who had strength, fled through the streets
in wild disorder.

Murat himself, in the midst of the confusion,
lost his presence of mind. He hurried out of
the palace on foot, and was borne along by the
reeling crowd till he reached the extremity of
the suburbs on the road to Kovno. There he

Flight from Wilna. 99

stopped, till he found means of communicating
with Ney. The marshal, who had volunteered
to take charge of the rear-guard, retired from
Wilna not many hours after, and a cloud of
Cossacks under Platoff immediately swept
down upon the town.

The treasure, consisting of 10,000,000 of
francs in gold and silver, and the Emperor's
baggage, had been pushed on in front of the
3,000 men with whom Ney tried to protect
the retreat. But at about a league from
Wilna all attempt at order was abandoned;
and the flying crowd, seeing themselves closely
pressed by the enemy, determined to anti-
cipate the capture of the carriages bearing
the treasure, by plundering them themselves.
Not only the men of the escort, but those of
the rear-guard, as they came up, threw down
their arms, to join in the terrible and even
sanguinary struggle which took place between
French soldiers for the possession of a portion
of the treasure or of the valuable effects of
their Emperor. So absorbed were they by
the thirst of plunder, that they took no heed
H 2

ioo Petersburg and Warsaw.

of the Cossacks, bodies of whom had already
come up with the French. But they, too,
at the sight of the gold and silver and the
Emperor's costly baggage, forgot their work of
slaughter in a desire for pillage.

Such was one of the last terrible episodes
in the campaign of 1812, of which the neigh-
bourhood of Wilna was the scene. Nearly
20,000 French, unable or unwilling to move —
unable from their wounds, or unwilling in the
reckless apathy of despair — were left behind in
the capital of Lithuania, which was then little
better than a vast charnel-house. Amongst the
living men thus abandoned were 300 officers
and seven generals.

As the above passages in the history of the
terrible Russian campaign of 1812 recurred to
my memory, I drove slowly across the bridge
which crosses the Vilia, and through the silent
streets of the town to my hotel. There were
still the same houses from which the wounded
French had been flung to be trampled under
the hoofs of the charging Cossacks ; there were
the same streets that had been the scene of the

Flight from Wilna. 101

triumphant entry of the great Emperor, and
that, a few months later, flowed with the blood
of the panic-stricken wreck of his mighty army.
Nearly a whole generation has passed away
since then, but the dark pages of the world's
history which record that dreadful war are still
read, and will be read to the end of all time,
with the same wonder and admiration, and the
same shuddering horror, as when they were first
written. And Napoleon himself, whose legions
were commanded by kings and sovereign
princes, whose relatives and whose favourites
sat upon half the thrones of Europe, and who
for a time seemed to hold in his hands the
destinies of the world, died a helpless, broken-
hearted exile on a rock in the midst of the
ocean, with half the globe between him and
the scenes of his glory.

IO2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XVIII.

REPENTANT INSURGENTS.

DURING my stay in Wilna, I was witness on
several occasions to a solemn act of submis-
sion made by repentant insurgents. They
were all Catholics, and gentlemen by birth.
The ceremony on each occasion that I was
present took place in the church of St. John.
The ex-insurgents, on entering, went in a body
within the railing which separates . the great
altar from the aisle. Here they knelt and
joined in the prayers which were offered up
by the officiating clergyman. The prayers
over, the clergyman turned to a reading desk
in the centre of the enclosure, on which stood
a copy of the Holy Testament, open at the
passage containing the words of our Saviour,

, Repentant Insurgents. 103

" Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and
give to God what belongs to God."

Upon this text the clergyman preached in
the following sense : —

He said that the Catholic Church had at
all times exhorted the faithful, in countries
where civil strife existed, to remember the
words of our Divine Lord, which he had
quoted. "We are bound," he continued, "to
obey those who rule over us, and to pray for
their welfare, that we may lead a happy and
peaceable life. It was said at the beginning
of the insurrection, that it was, in a great
measure, a struggle between the Catholic and
the Greek faith. That assertion was made
for the purpose of gaming the sympathies of
a large party among the Poles, and also of
the faithful in foreign countries. But, after a
time, it was seen that the chief promoters of
the insurrection were men without faith, and
whose aim was, not only a war against the
Emperor, but against all divine and social
laws."

"If the Church," he continued, "con-

IO4 Petersburg and Warsaw.

demned open rebellion, how much more
strongly must it condemn the dreadful crime
of murder, which, during the insurrection, had
been so often perpetrated by the agents of
the so-called ' National Government/ It was
murder of the foulest and darkest kind,
effected by paid assassins. This crime was
committed, always in the name of their
country, and often in the name of Heaven.
The men who instigated others to the perpe-
tration of these atrocities did not hesitate to
brand with the foul and indelible stigma of
assassin, the Polish name; and, in their impious
daring, they invoked the name of Heaven as
if Heaven were an accomplice of their wicked-
ness. Horrors such as these are sufficient
to bring down upon a people the anger of
the Almighty/'

" The Church," he said, " has at all times
condemned secret societies ; for it is crime
which hides in darkness and secrecy, whilst
what is pure and good fears not the light of
day. No form of secret society is tolerated
by the Catholic Church, and they who belong

Repentant Insurgents. 105

to such societies have, by that act, brought
upon themselves the penalty of excommuni-
cation."

" Let us humbly beseech the Almighty, that
in His mercy he will turn aside his wrath
from us and from our brethren."

" May your example be followed by all who
are still openly, or covertly, opposed to the
Government which has been set over us by
Heaven. May your protest against violence
and bloodshed, falsehood and assassination, be
shared in by the entire Polish people, so that
the Emperor may be able to put into execution
his benevolent intentions towards our unfor-
tunate nation. Let us humbly pray that all the
horrors of this fratricidal strife may speedily
come to an end, and that peace and good- will
may again prevail in the land ; and that the
entire Polish people may feel that their only
true friend here below is the Emperor Alex-
ander ; and that once, when they have entered
into the path of duty, as you have done, that
his Majesty, in the benevolence of his heart,
will forget the past, and that he will then

io6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

bestow upon his Polish subjects those laws
and institutions which will enable them to
become contented, prosperous and happy."

The oath of allegiance to the Czar was then
slowly read by the clergyman, and repeated,
word for word, by the Polish gentlemen. Each
of them then came forward in his turn, and
kissed the Holy Testament at the place where
the words of our Saviour, which I have quoted
above, were printed, after which, they all set
their names beneath the written copy of the
oath which they had taken.

The organ of the church, which is a very
splendid one, and celebrated throughout the
country, then pealed forth a triumphant hymn.
It imitates with wonderful effect a complete
orchestra, with drums, loud twanging trum-
pets, and clashing cymbals. At the first
harmonious outburst, I fancied that a large
band of musicians was stationed in the choir,
till I looked, and saw that the great resound-
ing melody was the work of the solitary
organist.

The crowd then began to stream slowly

Repentant Insurgents. 107

through the aisles, and the Polish gentlemen
who had subscribed to the oath of allegiance,
having descended the steps of the altar, were
embraced with tears of joy by their relatives
and friends.

io8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XIX.

STATE OF LITHUANIA.

I HAVE remarked at the beginning of these
pages, that when I arrived from St. Petersburg
at the Wilna station I found it as free from
police regulations as the station at Windsor.
On several occasions I rode alone and unat-
tended over miles of country in the Wilna
district. In my excursions I met with neither
gendarme, nor soldier, nor Polish insurgent,
and the inhabitants that I encountered in the
villages or along the road were civil, and even
kind whenever I had occasion to ask them for
information about the way, or the places where
I could obtain refreshment. On holidays and
Sundays, I remarked that itinerant musicians

State of Lithuania. 109

plied their trade, and that the peasantry danced
and sang, and that there were all the other
outward signs of rejoicing that mark the feast
days in Russian villages.

On the St. Petersburg line, for several
leagues before reaching Wilna, the stations
were guarded by armed peasants, who had
volunteered to perform that duty. Their
offer was readily accepted by the local govern-
ment, who supplied them with muskets and
ammunition.

In the streets of Wilna, barrel organs and
mountebanks were met with as in the streets
of St. Petersburg, and the population were
free to move about at every hour of the
twenty-four. For the convenience of travellers
arriving or starting by the different trains,
the hotels were open all night, and carriages
plied for hire between sunset and sunrise
for the same charges, and with the same
freedom, as during the day.

Deputations were constantly arriving at the
" Chateau, " with addresses to the Emperor
Alexander, and solemn acts of submission in

1 10 Petersburg and Warsaw.

the principal churches, by the Polish gentry
who had taken part in the insurrection, were
of equally frequent occurrence. The Catholic
clergy preached in the pulpit against the revolt,
and some of the dignitaries amongst them
issued mandates to their flocks in favour of
peace and order, and exhorting obedience to
the lawrs of the Imperial Government.

The terrorism which the " National Govern-
ment " attempted to exercise by means of
assassination had entirely failed ; and, whilst
the news arrived from Warsaw by nearly every
train, that murders were perpetrated in open
day in the streets of that city, a passenger in the
capital of Lithuania enjoyed the same security
as if he traversed the streets of St. Petersburg.
Persons who did not think proper, or to whom
it was inconvenient, to comply with the childish
edict of the <c National Government," for
adopting a sort of masquerading costume, were
not insulted when they went abroad, and no
threats were used against those Poles, lay or
clerical, who openly protested against the in-
surrection, or who gave in their adhesion to

State of Lithuania. 1 1 1

the Imperial Government. Lithuania, as far
as I could see, was not only pacified, but a
complete revulsion had taken place in the
feelings of those who, either from religion, or
race, or political feeling, had taken part in the
insurrection.

I have reason to believe that this compara-
tively sudden change, from the wild excesses
of civil war to the calm of ordinary life, was
not entirely owing to the rigorous measures
adopted by General Mouravieff. History
shows us that no system of severity, short
of a general extermination, can produce that
result, where the rising is of an entire and
united people. Armed resistance may be
put down by superior force ; the flames of
rebellion may be extinguished ; but, beneath
the embers, the fire will still smoulder, to break
out again with the same fury when fanned
by the first breath of revolution.

It was not an army of 120,000 men, said
General Mouravieff, that was necessary for the
suppression of the insurrection, but a good
administration. " It will be found on exami-

1 1 2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

nation," he remarked to ine on another oc-
casion, "that less blood has been shed in
Lithuania in restoring order, than has been
shed in the kingdom of Poland up to the
present time. My edicts," he continued,
" were sternly worded, and it was known that I
would act up to them if necessary ; but, in the
Kingdom, the conciliatory tone of the Govern-
ment was looked upon as a sign of weakness,
which, encouraging the revolt, made the ne-
cessity for exemplary punishment more fre-
quent. It was similar to a man caressing
with one hand whilst he struck with the other."
It is probable that if the blood-stained
columns were summed up, the result would
prove that General Mouravieff s calculation
was correct. But it is more than probable
that it was not entirely the iron will of the
Governor-General of Wilna, nor the excellence
of his administrative powers, which brought
the revolt in Lithuania to so speedy a ter-
mination ; it was rather this simple fact that
the insurrection had never taken any deep root
in that province.

State of Lithuania. 1 13

It will be seen by statistical returns, that
the great mass of the inhabitants of Lithuania
are of the Eastern Church, and they are,
consequently, by education and sentiment, as
thoroughly Russian as the people of Moscow
or Novogorod, especially the inhabitants of
the eastern part of the province ; whilst those
who, from race, religion, or sympathy, enter-
tained the idea of a Polish nationality, are in
a minority, composed of some of the landed
proprietors, the small gentry, and a portion
of the tradespeople in the large towns.

The insurrection in Lithuania was, compared
to that in the kingdom of Poland, merely super-
ficial; it had no hold on the popular mind,
and its only effect has been to weld that pro-
vince more closely than ever with the Russian
Empire, and to render, for the future, all hope
of exciting revolt, in favour of a Polish national
cause, in that part of the Czar's dominions,
utterly desperate.

As an Englishman, living under a consti-
tutional government, my sympathies would
naturally be enlisted on the side of a people
i

1 14 Petersburg and Warsaw.

struggling for their natural rights. But I
saw from the beginning that the cause of the
Polish nation was helpless, that it was an use-
less effusion of blood, a wanton courting of
suffering and ruin. I knew that Poland had
nothing to hope from foreign intervention. I
knew from the best source that one of the
Great Powers, upon whose aid she most
fondly reckoned, had only the year before
entered into negotiations with the Russian
Government for the formation of an alliance,
by which that Power offered to bind itself to
aid the Czar in his domestic and foreign
policy, provided the Emperor Alexander con-
nived at certain projects of aggrandizement on
the part of his ally. The same doubt which
induced Russia to decline the proffered alli-
ance subsequently cast its shadow over the
cabinets of London and Vienna, and finally
awakened something like fear in the minds of
statesmen at Berlin. I knew that England
would not, that France could not, and that
Austria dare not give material assistance to
Poland. To whom, then, were the Poles to

State of Lithuania. 115

/

turn for help ? They had nothing to expect
from without, and they were too weak to carry
on the struggle alone. Amidst the slaughter
of insurgent bands, amidst the hangings and
the shootings, not a single arm was stretched
out in their defence. Sharp despatches, slash-
ing articles, and eloquent harangues were
made in their favour, and the effect of this
was to awaken false hopes which encouraged
them to resistance, and which widened the
dark field of ruin and despair.

It is evident, then, that there is no earthly
chance of safety for the Poles, but to give up
the struggle and trust to the promises of the
Emperor Alexander. It is not to be supposed
that the sovereign could act ungenerously,
who has given freedom to millions of his
fellow-men, not as we gave freedom to our
negro slaves when we released them from their
owners, and then abandoned them to their
own resources, but who, when he emancipated
the serfs, gave them the means of living in
comfort and independence. History offers no
example of an action so noble, and it is
12

1 1 6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

against reason to suppose that the sovereign,
who has so acted, can look otherwise than
with sorrow upon the sufferings which the
Poles have, in a great measure, brought upon
themselves ; or that he can entertain any other
wish than to see temperate laws, order, and
contentment, take the place of military rule,
and the horrors of civil war.

In quoting the above facts, -I wished to
show that there was no other alternative left to
the Poles than to submit, and then trust to
the generosity of the Emperor ; and I hope in
God, that by the time this work comes before
the public, that the Polish nation will have
seen that the advice is a sound one, and that
their future prosperity, happiness, and free-
dom, will be best secured by placing faith in
the words of the Czar.

Warsaw. \ \ y

CHAPTER XX.

WARSAW.

ON the third of September, at half-past
four o'clock in the morning, I left Wilna for
Warsaw. At the different stations along the
line guards of soldiers were drawn up, and
officers of every grade from general to ensign,
all in full uniform, were standing about. Rail-
way officials displayed an exuberance of zeal,
and their badges of block-tin were unusually
resplendent. Some wonderful Frenchman, con-
nected with the mysterious company that had
originally received the concession for this de-
lectable line of railway, rushed madly up and
down whenever the train stopped, shouting out
hoarse words of command to the guards and
engine-drivers; and, when they had worked

1 1 8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

themselves into a perspiration, they jumped
into their waggon, from which they emerged
again at the next station to go through the
same ceremony. Like all Frenchmen of their
class now-a-days, they affected a military bear-
ing and looked quite proud and happy as
they hurried about, evidently under the im-
pression that the spectators regarded them as
great captains who were kindly showing the
barbarous Russians how to manage a railway.
Nothing inclines me more to a pleasant train
of kindly thoughts than the contemplation of
a Frenchman under such circumstances. His
vanity is so harmless, and it makes the poor
fellow so happy, that it would be a positive sin
to do anything which could spoil his illusions.
The cause of all this holiday display and
feverish excitement I did not learn till I
reached the Warsaw station. There we were
all hurried out of the train as quickly as
possible and directed to enter the waiting-
room, the doors of which were immediately
locked. Our train at once moved on, and
was soon succeeded by another, a special

Warsaw. 1 1 9

one, in which were the Grand Duke Con-
stantine and his suite.

The Grand Duke had been on a short visit
to his brother, the Emperor Alexander, at St.
Petersburg, for the purpose, it was said, of
tendering his resignation as Viceroy of Poland.
Through a window of the waiting-room I saw
the Grand Duke descend from his carriage,
and at the same moment the Grand Duchess
with her children hurried forward to welcome
him on his return. The platform was crowded
with general officers in brilliant uniforms, who
offered their respectful greetings to his Imperial
Highness.

When the Grand Duke Constantine, the
Grand Duchess and their children, had driven
away surrounded by their escort, and the mili-
tary crowd on the platform had dispersed, the
railway officials turned their attention to myself
and fellow-travellers.

At the door of the station I had given up
my passport to a police officer, and I was
now directed to proceed to a little office in
the waiting-room to get a receipt for that

1 20 Petersburg and Warsaw.

document. I mentioned who I was to the
clerk, and he handed me a bit of litho-
graphed paper, about two inches long and
an inch wide, in which he had filled up in
writing two vacant spaces, one with my name,
the other with the date of my arrival. My
baggage was then minutely searched, not for
contraband goods, as I had last come from
Wilna, but for incendiary documents, fire-
arms, and infernal machines. Nothing of a pro-
hibited nature was found, and I was allowed
to re-arrange my effects as well as I could,
and lock my portmanteau and travelling-bag.

I then sent a porter for a carriage to take me
to the hotel, and, during his absence, which
lasted about half an hour, a police officer that
I had not seen before came and asked me if
I had in my pockets any forbidden documents
or any weapons. I answered in the negative ;
but he seemed to doubt what I said, for he
proceeded to search me, but he found nothing
to excite his attention except an old cigar case,
which he regarded with a good deal of curi-
osity. It had been given to me, filled with

—*

Warsaw. lit

good Havaima cigars, as long ago as 1851, by
one of the chiefs of the great organ of the
Press at the close of a tete-a-tete dinner at his
club. I had kept it through all these years as a
memento of that pleasant dinner and of many
agreeable hours which I had passed in the
company of the donor. It was a good deal
worn and weather-beaten. It had been with
me all through Italy and Greece, on the
Danube, and in the Crimea, and its contents
had helped to solace me in many a weary
ride through the wilds of Asia Minor, of
Palestine, and Egypt, but it had never before
excited the attention of a policeman.

" Why do you carry about with you so old
a cigar case ?" he asked. I answered that it
was more valuable in my eyes than a new one,
because it was a souvenir. He looked per-
plexed. He took out, one by one, the cigars
which it contained, examined them, and then
put them slowly back in their places. At
length he returned me the cigar case, but with
evident suspicions of its being an object suffi-
ciently doubtful to deserve confiscation.

122 Petersburg and Warsaw.

"What countryman are you?" he then asked.

" I am an Englishman," I answered.

" Are you quite sure," he inquired, " that
you are not a Frenchman?"

" I am perfectly sure," I replied, " that I
am not a Frenchman." Here the porter came
up to say that the carriage I had asked for
was arrived. I gave him my baggage, and
was proceeding to follow him out, when a
police officer at the door asked to see the
receipt which had been given me for my pass-
port. After he had looked at it for some
time, he said it was not in order, and that I
must go back and have it changed. I did as
I was told ; and when the clerk who had given
me " the bit of paper " heard that it was not
in order he smiled pleasantly, seemed to make
some alterations with his pen, and handed it
me back. But again the cautious Cerberus at
the door found an error in the document, and
said it must be rectified. I again appealed to
my friend the clerk, who this time seemed
thoroughly amused. He took the receipt
between his finger and thumb, touched it with

Warsaw. 1 23

his pen, and then told me, with a confident
air, that it was quite correct. The man at the
door again carefully scrutinized this wonderful
receipt, which in all contained but three written
words. This time, luckily, he seemed satisfied,
and allowed me to pass out.

Near the carriage I found the police officer
who had taken such an interest in my cigar case.
I asked him if he were a Russian ? he said no,
that he was a Pole. " And are the other police
officers," I said, " with whom I have spoken,
Poles?" He replied that they were. It was
for that very reason, possibly, I thought, that
they were afflicted with the defect, so ob-
noxious to Talleyrand, of " trop de zele"

I drove from the station to the wooden
pontoon-bridge which crosses the Vistula from
the suburb of Praga to the town of Warsaw.
As we proceeded across at a moderate pace,
I had an opportunity of admiring the appear-
ance of the city from that point of view, which
is, perhaps, one of the best. The most
striking object was a huge pile of building
crowning an eminence on my right hand.

1 24 Petersburg and Warsaw.

The walls were covered with stucco, painted
of a dull yellow colour, and entirely devoid of
architectural beauty of any kind. Its massive
dimensions, however, and its position on a
height which rises perpendicularly from the
level of the river, give it an imposing appear-
ance. This was the zamek, or Royal Palace.
By a winding road we ascended slowly from
the river's banks till we came to the open
place in front of the Vice-regal residence, on
one side of which stands a very thin column of
about fifty feet high, with an enormous capital
of the composite order, on which is the statue
of the Polish king, Sigismund III. So entirely
out of proportion is the diameter of the shaft
of the column with the size of the super-
structure, that, at a distance, you might take
the statue for an acrobat balancing himself on
the end of a pole.

We turned to the right out of this open
place, and drove along the " Regent Street "
of Warsaw, which is called in French "the
Faubourg de Cracovie." I was agreeably
surprised at the animation of the scene. The

Warsaw. 125

footpaths were thronged with pedestrians, and
the. carriage-way crowded with vehicles of every
description. There was nothing to indicate to
a superficial observer that the town was in a
state of siege. The number of military was
.not greater than in the "Nefskoi Prospekt"
at St. Petersburg, and the only feature which
corresponded with what I had read of Warsaw
in the newspapers, was that the men all wore
caps or wide-awake hats, arid that the women
were dressed in black. About ten minutes'
driving from the zamek brought me to the
Hotel de £ Europe.

It was a large, oblong block, four stories
high, with two entrances, one through a
courtyard in the "Faubourg de Cracovie,"
and the other, and principal one in the im-
mense platz, which runs from the latter street
to the Saxon Gardens. This hotel was built
by subscription, and is conducted something
on the principle of the Hotel du Louvre
at Paris, each floor being a sort of separate
establishment under the care of a superinten-
dent. The prices were moderate, but the

126 Petersburg and Warsaw.

rent of the apartments was arranged in what
seemed to me an original manner.

The sleeping-rooms on the first floor con-
tained each two or more beds, and you were
charged in the bill according to the number.
The waiter assured me that no person of
condition ever thought of sleeping in anything
under a double-bedded room at least, and
that a traveller's social position was known
by the number of beds in his apartment, just
as the rank of a mandarin is known by his
buttons. Not being ambitious, I fixed upon
a room with two beds, agreeing to pay for
both, as if I had been, not " two single gentle-
men rolled into one," but like Mrs. Malaprop's
Cerberus, " two gentlemen at once."

" You have an English lord for a neigh-
bour," said the waiter.

" And how many beds does he pay for? "
I asked.

" He pays for seven," said the waiter, with
a look of pride, " a British peer could not pay
for less. He is a great man," continued the
waiter, " he has promised the Polish patriots

Warsaw. 127

to send an English army to their assistance if
they will only hold out against the Russians a
little longer. He is brave, too : he would not
salute the Grand Duke and the Grand Duchess
when they drove past him in the street the
other dav."

128 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXL

THE CONSUL-GENERAL.

EARLY the next morning I received a visit
from Colonel Annenkoff, aide-de-camp to the
Emperor, and employed on special service in
Poland. Though aide-de-camp to His Imperial
Majesty, and a colonel, M. Anneukoff is little
more than twenty-seven years of age. He owes
his rapid advancement, however, entirely to
his own merit. Though heir to a handsome
fortune, he worked as hard, when a pupil in the
Ecole des pages, as if he were to be entirely
dependent upon his profession, and carried off
the first prize at his examination. Though
young and wealthy, he resisted the temptation
of joining one of those brilliant cavalry regi-
ments always quartered in the neighbourhood
of the court, and preferred entering amongst

'The Consul-General. 129

the hard-working officers of the Russian staff,
of which he is one of the most promising mem-
bers. He speaks English fluently, has been a
good deal in London, and is honorary member
of one of our military clubs.

He told me that he was directed by Count
de Berg to let me know that his Excellency
received the letters which I had sent him the
evening before, and that he would be glad to
see me if I called at the palace that afternoon.

After speaking to me for some time in that
frank, honest, and ingenuous way on the Polish
question, which I have always remarked in
him, Colonel Annenkoff took his leave, pro-
mising to return and accompany me to Count
Berg at the hour appointed for my reception.

Shortly after his departure, Colonel Stanton,
the British Consul-General, at whose house I
had left, the night before, a letter, addressed to
him by Lord Napier, called and invited me to
dine with him on the following day. On hear-
ing that I was going to see Count Berg, he bid
me tell his Excellency that he would be happy
to present me to the Grand Duke Constantine.
K

Petersburg and Warsaw.

Colonel Stanton is an officer of engineers,
He has been through the Crimean war, and
was one of the Commissioners appointed by
the British Government to determine the line
of frontier at Bolgrad in Bessarabia — about
which a misunderstanding had arisen after
the congress of Paris. His manner and ap-
pearance are exceedingly good, and when in
uniform, as I had the pleasure of seeing him
a few days afterwards at a levee at the palace,
he looked in every way a worthy representative
of the officers of the British army.

He told me that the Polish society of War-
saw was very much irritated against me,
because they fancied that I was the author
of some letters, dated from Wilna, which had
appeared in The Morning Herald.

I gave him my word that I was not the
author of the letters he mentioned, and that I
had never written a word in TJie Morning
Herald, or in any other newspaper, on the
Polish question. I did this, not that I sup-
posed for an instant that Colonel Stantou
shared in the idea of his Polish friends with

'The Consul-General. 131

regard to ine, but simply that he might be in
a position to contradict the statement if again
made in his presence. The author of the letters,
I said, I believed to be a person who had been
in Wilna at the same time as myself, and who
subsequently went back to St. Petersburg.

I have never seen these letters, and, there-
fore, can form no judgment upon their merits,
except from the reports of others. But
whether they be good or bad, abusive, or in
praise of England, provoking to bloodshed, or
exhorting to peace, I positively object to
having thrust upon me the responsibility of
writings to which I am a total stranger.

These writings attracted no public attention
in England, for the reason, possibly, that they
bore the mark, as all such writings do, of
being written to order, and not according to
matured judgment and honest conviction.
With regard to the effect which such pro-
ductions have upon the public mind, they
may take literary rank with the advertise-
ments of cheap tailors, like Moses and Son.

It is strange that since the breaking out of
K 2

132 Petersburg and Warsaw.

the Insurrection in Poland, every Englishman
who visited the country was supposed to be
the correspondent of London newspapers. I
lay under the suspicion of the general
public for several weeks of being the corre-
spondent of one or other of the great London
journals.

It is not a pleasant thing to be thought
a newspaper correspondent in a' town in a
state of siege. People, wherever you happen
to go, scowl or look pleasant, are friendly
or ferocious, according as their views coincide
with, or differ from, those of the paper by
which you are supposed to be employed.
In any assembly that you enter, all confi-
dential conversation amongst those present
ceases at once, as if you were a member of
the secret police, come to report the words
and actions of the company. Every one with
whom you come into contact plays a part.
There is either an exaggerated cordiality or a
stern reserve ; a wish to cajole you into good
nature, or to make you ashamed of the
iniquity of our ways.

The Consul-General .

The newspaper correspondent in most
countries is looked upon as a literary de-
tective, who is thought to be very useful
by some, or very disagreeable by others, but
whose occupation is not considered by any
to be quite as venerable as that of a bishop,
or as distinguished as that of a Lord High
Chancellor.

In Warsaw the correspondent was in this
peculiar position, that if suspected of abetting
the Insurrection, he was ordered out of the
country by the police, and if he wrote against
the National Government, he ran the risk of
being murdered. A writer in a London
journal left the kingdom of Poland by direc-
tion of the Russian authorities, and joined
his family in Moscow. A writer in the
Komunaly* was murdered by order of the
National Government, and sent into eternity.
The first still continues his arguments in
favour of the Insurrection from a distance —
the latter is silenced for ever.

* Miniszewski.

134 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXII.

COUNT DE BERG.

I FOUND Count de Berg lodged in the
Royal Palace, in apartments adjoining those
of the Grand Duke Con stan tine. The con-
trast between General Moravieff and Count
de Berg in appearance and manner is most
striking. The Governor- General of Lithuania
is inclined to obesity, is short of stature,
and is lame from a wound received in the
leg when a youth at the battle of Borodino.
His features coincide with the popular idea in
the west of Europe of a Russian face — high
cheek bones, a nez retrousse, and small sharp
eyes. The expression of his face is stern, his
voice is deep-toned and dissonant, and his
manner is trenchant and abrupt, like that of

Count de Berg. 135

a man accustomed to command and to be
obeyed.

Count de Berg is seventy-three years of age,
but looks twenty years younger. He is tall
and slight, and full of nervous activity. His
features are regular, and when a young man
he must have been remarkably good-looking.
His voice is soft and sympathetic, and his
general tone and bearing have all the well-
bred animation and graceful cheerfulness of
the grand seigneurs of the old school — a
type now rarely met with except in some of
the aristocratic saloons of the Faubourg St.
Germain.

His career has been most eventful as well
as unceasingly active. When a youth he
was present at the different battles which took
place between the troops of Napoleon I. and
the Russian army in the retreat from Moscow.
He entered Paris with the allied armies, and
was employed in several important missions
during the occupation. After the peace he
was sent on a scientific expedition to the
wild country bordering the Caspian Sea, to

136 Petersburg and Warsaw.

discover if a safe communication could be
opened between that part of the Russian
Empire and India. He was for some years
employed in the diplomatic service in Italy,
and was afterwards attached to the Russian
Embassy at Constantinople as military agent.
In 1831, during the period of the Polish
Revolution, he was chief of the staff of the
Russian army, and was employed to negotiate
with the Polish generals during the siege of
Warsaw. Subsequently, during ten years, he
occupied a high command in Poland.

On the breaking out of the Crimean war
he was appointed by the Emperor Nicholas
Governor General of Finland, with a large
army under his orders for its protection from
invasion. During his vice-royalty in Finland,
he did much for the improvement of that
province. He drained lakes, cut canals, con-
structed roads, protected commerce, and was
untiring in his efforts to improve the con-
dition of the labouring classes.

About a twelve-month since, he was sent
to Warsaw to act conjointly with the Grand

Count de Berg. 137

Duke Constantino in the government of the
Polish kingdom, and when his Imperial High-
ness retired from his post in last September,
Count de Berg was appointed by the Emperor
to be the Grand Duke's successor.

Count de Berg is a Protestant, but his
wife, who is an Italian of a noble Lombard
house, is a Catholic. Count de Berg has
been, during his life, a good deal in England,
for which country he has a strong partiality.
His daughter he placed for her education
in a Catholic convent at Roehampton, near
London.

During several months I saw a great deal
of Count de Berg, and had ample oppor-
tunities of judging of his character. He is
eminently religious — religious after the man-
ner of the knights of old, who feared God
and honoured the sovereign, and with whom
fidelity to the crown was an article of faith.
His private life is as pure and almost as
austere as that of an anchorite. All day long
and the greater part of the night he is
unceasingly busy with the never-ending toil

138 Petersburg and Warsaw.

of his office. He does not go to bed till long
after midnight, and rises at six in the morning.

Though unbounded in his hospitality, he
himself takes but one hurried meal in the day,
and is as abstemious with regard to wine as
if he were a disciple of Father Mathew. It is,
perhaps, owing to this abstemious life which
he has led for years, that he owes the youthful
freshness of his character, and that marvellous
intellectual and physical energy which would
be remarkable even in the prime of manhood.

It may be easily supposed that the Viceroy
of Poland does not lie upon a bed of roses.
For him there is no hour of quiet cheerfulness.
From his rising to his lying down he hears of
nothing but courts-martial, inquiries, execu-
tions, assassinations, murders, sorrow, and ruin.
And in the midst of this are the rival am-
bitions, the jealousies, the intrigues, and the
treasons to be found in every court, great and
small.

The Spirit of the Press. 139

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE SPIRIT OF THE PRESS.

IT has been an old custom at the Viceregal
court of Warsaw, that a secretary or the
aide-de-camp on duty should each night read
to the lieutenant of the Emperor extracts
from the principal papers of Europe, com-
menting on the affairs of Poland. I have been
present at some of these readings, which, in
general, consisted of the most savage abuse of
Count de Berg himself, and that often in a style
of Billingsgate which would make even a trans-
atlantic journalist hide his diminished head.
Then there were astounding recitals of events
said to have taken place at our own doors —
of women dishonoured, others beaten with
the knout, of churches desecrated, of lawless

140 Petersburg and Warsaw.

bloodshed and revolting tortures — all asserted
to have been perpetrated by order of Count
de Berg. At first I listened with terror whilst
these falsehoods and that wild abuse were
being read to the lieutenant of the Emperor,
lest his anger should be excited and prompt
him to acts of needless severity. But he lis-
tened throughout with the calm of a well-
disciplined mind, which made 'me inwardly
thank Heaven that it was he, and not some
violent and headstrong man that had been
sent to govern unhappy Poland.

The Grand Duke Const antine. 141

CHAPTER XXIV.

THE GRAND DUKE CONSTANTINE.

IT was at his Sunday morning levee that I
had the honour of being presented to the
Grand Duke Constantine. His Imperial High-
ness shook hands with me and invited me to
follow him into his private study. When the
door was closed he sat down at a small table
in the centre of the room, and told me to
take a chair near him.

The Grand Duke Constantine is in the
prime of life, is of middle stature, with a well-
formed head and delicate and expressive fea-
tures. He speaks English fluently and with
a certain elegance, and has the staid and quiet
manner of a high-bred gentleman. With
remarkable lucidity and a certain eloquence,

142 Petersburg and Warsaw.

he sketched the most remarkable events in the
history of Poland, from the time of the annex-
ation of that country to Russia, down to his
appointment as Viceroy of the kingdom.

" I came here," the Grand Duke said, " to
try if, by ample concessions and a kind and
conciliatory policy, I could not establish order
and quiet in Poland. I had full powers to carry
into effect my plans for reforming whatever
abuses existed in the country, and for con-
vincing the Poles by acts that our sole desire
was to see the country prosperous and happy.
We wished to secure a good local government
to the Poles, to place in their own hands the
administration of laws framed by themselves,
to place natives of the kingdom in every post
of trust and honour, to establish civil and reli-
gious liberty, to make all men equal before the
law, and to deal out impartial and even-handed
justice to all classes of the community. The
Emperor thought that in sending me, his
brother, to carry his benevolent intentions
into effect, he was giving a pledge to the Poles
of the sincerity of his wishes for their welfare.

'The Grand Duke Const antine. 143

That I came as the representative of concilia-
tion with the power and with the firm intention
to redress every real grievance of which the
Poles complained, and to grant every legitimate
demand which they had addressed to the Rus-
sian Government, was known to the whole
world. 1 arrived here with my wife and chil-
dren, full of confidence in the good sense, the
loyalty, and the honour of a Christian and
civilized people. Strong in these sentiments,
I went, not very many hours after my arrival,
to the theatre. On coming out a man advanced
towards me, and, thinking he had some request
to make, I bent down to listen. He had placed
the muzzle of a revolver against my breast,
but through my bending forwards the weapon
glanced upwards, and, when he fired, the ball
instead of entering my heart wounded me in
the shoulder.

" Here," continued the Grand Duke, " are
the clothes which I wore on that night, and
here is the revolver with which the assassin
fired, and here is a dagger with which he was
also armed."

144 Petersburg and Warsaw.

The Grand Duke's valet, an old man, had
brought in the clothes ; the revolver and dagger
were lying on a side table.

There, true enough, was the uniform coat,
the breast just over the heart pierced by the
ball and burnt by the flame, and there was the
epaulette rent and blackened by the shot. The
shirt, too, which he wore was there — it was
torn by the bullet and stained with blood.
The revolver was of the largest size, and the
dagger was of the same kind as those now
familiar to Europe as the daggers of the Polish
assassins.

'The Grand Duchess. 145

CHAPTER XXV.

THE GRAND DtlCHESS.

WHILST I was looking with horror at the
objects before me, the Grand Duchess entered
the room. Her Imperial Highness is general!}'
considered as one of the most beautiful women
in Europe, and she fully deserves the title.
Her figure is tall, lithe, and graceful. Her
complexion is of transparent fairness, with a
faint changing blush on the rounded cheek.
Her eyes are large, dark, and luminous, the
nose slightly aquiline, sufficiently so to give
an air of command when the features are in
repose. But there is an expression of settled
melancholy in the lines of the mouth, as if the
full and slightly parted lips had long been
unused to smile.

146 Petersburg and Warsaw.

After Her Imperial Highness had honoured
me by saying that she was glad to see me in
Warsaw, she sat down beside the Grand Duke,
by whom I was invited to resume my chair.

" Had I known," said the Grand Duchess,
"that my husband ran any danger in going
to the theatre I would have gone with him,
and sheltered him from the assassin. But
who could suppose that there were people in
• the world so wicked as to wish to murder one
who not only had never done them any harm,
but who had come amongst them to do them
good? On the day of our arrival from St.
Petersburg the assassin was waiting at the
station to murder my husband, but he de-
ferred making the attempt because I and
the children were present. Since then I am
never happy when the Grand Duke goes abroad
without me, who would shield him from
danger."

" Yes," said the Grand Duke with emotion,
" she is a brave and devoted wife."

The Grand Duchess turned away her head,
but I saw that she was weeping.

The Grand Duchess. 147

" I am now going away from Poland," said
the Grand Duke, " because my presence here
would be an anomaly. I came to Warsaw as
the representative of a conciliatory policy ; that
policy has signally failed, another system is
about to be introduced, and it must naturally
be put into execution under another chief."

L 2

148 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXVI.

ASSASSINATION AND THE CATHOLIC
CHURCH.

THAT evening I dined with Colonel Stan ton.
Befofe dinner was announced, I spoke privately
to the Consul- General of the coming events in
Poland, and I told him of the measures which
the Russian Government intended to adopt,
and I begged of him, in the name of humanity,
to do what he could to avert the coming storm.
I asked him, as he had a cypher, to telegraph
to Lord Russell, so that his lordship might let
those chiefs of the Polish Insurrection who
resided in London know how hopeless was
their cause, and how terrible were the cala-
mities which they were bringing upon their
unfortunate country.

Assassination and the Catholic Church. 149

During dinner the conversation turned
upon assassination. The Vice-Consul was sur-
prised to find that I looked upon assassination
as a crime. He said that he was a Catholic,
and that lie knew that the Catholic clergy at
home approved of assassination under certain
circumstances ; and that in Ireland they
preached it openly to their flocks. I made
no reply, as I presumed that the Consul-
General and the Vice-Consul had official in-
formation on the subject. It is for Cardinal
Wiseman and Archbishop Cullen to admit or
to deny the assertion made, uncoutradicted,
at the table of Her Britannic Majesty's repre-
sentative in Warsaw.

I was not aware till then that there was
any known religion which sanctified murder,
with the exception of that of the Thugs of
India, but I hope that I may safely assert
that the Catholic Church does not authorize
its clergy to preach murder in any country,
even in Poland.

1 50 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXVII.

A SOIREE AT THE VICEREGAL COURT.

AFTER dinner I went to a soiree given by the
Grand Duchess. The state apartments were
filled by a brilliant crowd, but all looked more
or less sad and thoughtful. The Grand Duke
and Grand Duchess had announced their de-
parture for the Tuesday following, and this had
thrown a gloom over the company.

When the Grand Duchess was retiring she
told me not to forget that I was to call upon
her next morning.

When I came at the hour appointed, Her
Imperial Highness was at luncheon with her
children.

I have seen few things more touching than
the love which unites all the members of this

A Soiree at the Viceregal Court. 151

family together — a love evidently made all the
deeper and the more binding by the terrible
scenes amidst which for many a weary month
they had been living.

" You will be surprised when I tell you,"
the Grand Duchess said, "that I leave this
place with the greatest regret. It is a general
idea that we are only attached to places where
we have been happy, but yet this palace is
dear to me, though it is here that I have first
known real sorrow. It was here, in this room,
that I received my wounded husband the night
the attempt was made upon his life. He had
changed his dress and mastered the pain of
his wound, and also his weakness from loss of
blood, so that I might not be alarmed ; for the
doctor thought that in my then state of health
any violent shock might have a fatal effect.

"After the Grand Duke had gone to the
theatre and I sat here alone, I felt a sudden
presentiment that I was threatened with some
terrible calamity. When he returned and
entered this room, my joy was unbounded. I
asked him if nothing had happened to him

152 Petersburg and Warsaw.

whilst he was away. He tried to re-assure
me by evading an answer; but I knew by
the paleness of his face that he had been
wounded.

" It was here, in this room, that he told me
of the assassin's attempt and his miraculous
escape. It was here, often and often when
the Grand Duke was absent, that, my children
kneeling by me, I prayed to God to save their
father's life. God heard the prayers that came
from those little innocent hearts.

"Every object around me is associated in
my mind with some bitter sorrow, or some
deceptive gleam of joy. And yet my affections
cling to them, just as bright sunny plants
grow nfllir graves and twine themselves fondly
round some memorial of grief.

" My old nurse," continued the Grand
Duchess, " has never left me since I was born.
She came with me to Russia from our quiet
home in Germany. She watches over me as if
I were her life. Sometimes, when I am alone
and unhappy, she tries to comfort me by talk-
ing as she used to talk to me long ago, as if

A Soiree at the Viceregal Court. 1 53

I were still a little child. At the time that an
attempt was made to poison the Marquis Wil-
lopolsky, she came to me and said, " You must
not eat any of that cake which has been sent
up with your tea, it does not look nice, it
may make you ill."

Her Imperial Highness was struck by the
words of her nurse, as on that very day the
Grand Duke had received information from
the police, that a man known to them as an
agent of the National Government was em-
ployed in the viceregal kitchen. The nurse
was not aware of this ; her warning was the
result of affection for her foster-child ; but the
Grand Duchess, conscious that there might be
danger, took the necessary precautions that no
one should eat of the cake. This is one of the
almost hourly-recurring incidents of torturing
anxiety for the safety of her husband and chil-
dren which the Grand Duchess had to suffer
during her residence at Warsaw.

At the close of my audience, the Grand
Duchess said " 1 am superstitious. Look at
me and tell me if you feel that you shall soon

154 Petersburg and Warsaw.

see me again." 1 said I hoped that I should.
It does not seem very probable, however, that
I shall again see her Imperial Highness in
this world. The sufferings she went through
in Warsaw have gradually undermined her
health, and whilst I write she is dying of
a lingering consumption. Her little court
at Warsaw was broken up at her departure,
and its members went their different ways
through the world; but there will be aching
hearts among them when they hear that the
earth is about to close for ever over her that
they loved so well.

The Citadel of Warsaw. 1 5 5

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE CITADEL OF WARSAW.

I HAVE visited the prisons and hospitals of
Warsaw, where political offenders are confined.
On my first visit to the citadel I went round
the ramparts, accompanied by the Governor,
who is an old veteran general officer. This
fortress covers a large extent of ground. With-
in the walls, there is quite a good-sized town.
The ground on which the citadel is built is on
a level with the street called the Faubourg de
Cracovie. The position is not a commanding
one, except from the approaches by the river.

The style of the fortifications is the ordinary
one of drawbridges, double moats, curtains
and casemates, earthen bastions, &c.; the whole
kept perfectly clean and in good repair. The

156 Petersburg and Warsaw.

cannon and mortars are almost medieval in the
primitiveness of their construction, and would
be utterly useless in presence of our new
artillery.

A most beautiful view of the town and
river is to be had from one of the angles of
the fortification.

The first prison which I visited within the
walls of the fortress was that devoted to the
poorer class of insurgents. Most of them had
been captured with arms in their hands, when
forming the rank and file of the Polish bands.
Some of them to whom I spoke told me that
when taken they were in the most abject
misery — nearly dead from hunger and with
their clothes in rags. The clothes which they
had on when I spoke to them were coarse but
comfortable. They had been given to them,
the prisoners told me, by the Russian author-
ities. I asked them if they were supplied
with good and sufficient food. They answered
that they generally got more than they could
eat ; and, in proof of what they said, several
showed me the remains of their last meal,

The Citadel of Warsaw. 157

which they had put aside. The rooms in
which they were confined were of large size
and might more properly be called halls than
rooms. The beds were laid on the floor round
the^ walls. They were rolled up in the day-
time, and spread out at night by the prisoners
themselves.

It must be remembered that all these
prisoners belonged to the labouring classes,
though, in general, they claimed to be " noble-
men." One youth to whom I spoke told
me that he was " noble." His father, he
said, was a hackney coachman, but he also
Avas noble by descent, and enjoyed the privi-
leges accorded by the law to his rank. None
of these prisoners were either ragged or dirty,
thanks to the Russian officials, who supplied
them with the necessary raiment and who
enforced habits of cleanliness.

158 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE PRISON DIET.

I VISITED the kitchen where the food is pre-
pared for these prisoners. It was spacious and
well kept. It was close to the hour for dinner,
and pots and saucepans were simmering mer-
rily over the fire. I asked to taste the contents
of some which I pointed out, and found them
very good and palatable. Soup, meat, and
vegetables were supplied to each prisoner. My
friend, who was with me, felt hungry after his
walk round the ramparts, and had, at my re-
quest, a full ration supplied to him, in one of
the rooms adjoining the kitchen. Had we
been at our hotel, he would have asked for the
daintiest dishes that the chef-de-cuisine could
furnish ; he, however, consumed with evident

The Prison Diet. 159

satisfaction to his inward man, the whole of
his . ration of soup, meat, vegetables, and
bread.

A part of the citadel, known as the Sixth
Pavilion, is of a dark and terrible interest to
the people of Warsaw. Numberless are the
stories told in frightened whispers of the
sombre dramas which have been enacted within
its walls in former times. It was with the
same awe that I crossed its threshold, as I had
felt in Venice when crossing the Ponte Sos-
piri. I felt my blood chilled as I walked
through its long silent corridors, till I reached
the point from which I intended commencing
my visits to the different cells.

160 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXX.

FEMALE PRISONERS.

THE first into which I entered 1 found in-
habited by a lady of perhaps twenty-six or
twenty-seven years of age. She was pretty,
and was very neatly dressed in mourning.
Her auburn-coloured hair was as carefully
arranged a la Marie Stuart as if she were
seated in her own drawing-room expecting
some morning calls. On a chair was lying
open a morocco dressing-bag, evidently of
English manufacture, filled with the usual
silver-mounted articles.

I apologized to her for presuming to come
into her room. I said that I did not do so
from simple curiosity, but from a desire of

Female Prisoners. 161

being of service to her in any way that I
could.

In reply to a question of mine, she said
that she had entered Poland with written com-
munications for some of the insurgent chiefs,
sewed in the lining of her dress. She was sus-
pected, was searched, the correspondence was
found, and she was sent a prisoner to Warsaw.

We had hitherto been conversing in French,
when I suddenly saw several Tauchnitz
editions of English books lying on her
table. One which was open, as if she had
just laid it down, was "Aurora Floyd." I
then spoke to her in English, at which she
seemed surprised and displeased. I pointed
to her books which were all English, and I
said it was that which made me suppose either
that she was an Englishwoman, or that she
spoke our language.

She told me her story. May Heaven help
her, and all of her sex in whom sentiment is
stronger than reason 1 At the present time I
know that she is well, and I hope that she is
happy.

M

1 62 Petersburg and Warsaw.

The next cell into which I entered was of
a larger size, and, it seemed to me, more
sparingly furnished. The light came through
a square strongly -barred window, fixed high
in the wall, and the rays of the sun fell aslant
the room, leaving that side where was the
window in shadow. At first I thought the
place uninhabited, and looked with astonish-
ment at a series of cartoons . which covered
the walls from floor to ceiling. They were
done in charcoal, but it was evident that they
had been executed by the hand of a master.
The subjects were strange and fantastic, and
might have served to illustrate some wild
Teutonic legend.

Whilst lost in surprise at the style of the
drawings on the walls, I heard a low sigh
close behind me. I turned, and saw, in the
shadowed side of the room, a young girl
standing beside a bed. As I moved towards
her, to ask pardon for my intrusion, T observed
that she became red and pale by turns, and
trembled violently as if she were in great fear.
She was a murderess ! Incited to the crime

Female Prisoners. 163

by others, she thought herself a second Judith,
with beauty to win and courage to strike, and
that the act was sanctioned by Heaven, as was
that of the Jewish girl.

M 2

164 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE MALE PRISONERS.

THERE is a large room in that Sixth Pavilion
in which I found some fifty prisoners. They
were all gentlemen, and several of them were
rich landed proprietors.

They told me that the food supplied to
them was good, and more than abundant, and
that, moreover, those who pleased were allowed
to purchase wines, brandy, tobacco, and any
luxury in eating or drinking they thought
proper.

They were, moreover, free to receive any
number of books they wished, provided they
contained nothing of an incendiary nature re-
lating to the Polish question. One of the
books which I found in the hands of a young

Male Prisoners. 165

gentleman was Guizot's Life of Cromwell. I
mention this to show that there was a fair
latitude allowed with regard to works of a
politico-historical nature.

I visited all the prisoners in solitary con-
finement, as well as those who were two or
three together in each cell. Where a prisoner
had one or more companions, he always looked
calm if not cheerful, but those who were
alone had generally a vague, anxious look, but
not that indescribable expression seen in those
wretched beings condemned to solitary con-
finement in some of the gaols in England.
This I attribute chiefly to the free supply of
entertaining and instructive books allowed in
the political prisons in Poland.

1 66 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXXII.

TORTURE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS.

DURING the entire time that I remained in
Poland, I resorted to every means within
my reach to discover if there were any truth
in the stories which have appeared in almost
every paper in England, from the Times down
to the Halfpenny Journal, of political prisoners
having been tortured by the Russians.

I here protest solemnly that no case of the
kind has ever come to my knowledge. Several
gentlemen, whose acquaintance I made in the
political prisons in Poland, and chiefly in the
citadel of Warsaw, are now free, and are will-
ing to declare, if called upon, that not only
have they never been tortured in any way
themselves, but that they did not know of a

Torture of Political Prisoners, 167

single one of their friends or acquaintances
having so suffered. The persons to whom
I allude are men of title and fortune, to
whom the happiness of Poland is as dear
as it is to Prince Czartorisky or any of his
companions in the National Government, but
who protest against the name of Pole be-
coming synonymous with that of liar and
assassin.

Nearly all these gentlemen have written to
me on the subject of the treatment which
they received from the Russian officials during
their imprisonment, and these letters have
been shown to those whose duty it is to
obtain truthful information of what is passing
in Poland.

In the hospitals for the wounded and sick
Polish prisoners in this country, the order
and cleanliness were excellent, and the medical
attendance unexceptional ; the pharmaceutical
laboratory in the citadel of Warsaw is well
worthy the visit of scientific men. The director
is a German professor of distinguished ability.
The retorts, the crucibles, and all the multi-

1 68 Petersburg and Warsaw.

farious apparatus, are of the most improved
kind, and are kept in a state of delicate neat-
ness, which would delight the heart of the
most scrupulous analyser.

Attempt to Murder Count de Berg. 169

CHAPTER XXXIII.

ATTEMPT TO MURDER COUNT DE BERG.

A FEW days after the departure of the Grand
Duke Constantine I was dining in company
with the brother-in-law of the Marquis Willo-
polsky, and some other Polish gentlemen, when
the news was brought to us that an attempt
had been made on the life of Count de Berg.
I had been then but a very short time in
Warsaw, and refused to give credit to such
extraordinary intelligence. Not so my com-
panions. They knew what they call the " red
party," namely, that of the National Govern-
ment, better.

The landed proprietors, as they have often
since told me, were aware that the idea of the
foreign revolutionists, once that they had esta-

170 Petersburg and Warsaw.

blished their influence in Poland, was to keep
perpetually renewed a barrier of blood between
Poles and Russians. Their hope was that the
latter would be thus maddened into frenzy,
and driven into sanguinary excesses — like those
of the Turks in Scio and Damascus, and the
Sepoys in India. Poland was to be sacrificed ;
and they, the landed proprietors, who had
everything to lose, would naturally be the first
victims. Burning, pillage, and massacre were
hoped for, even the extermination of an entire
people, if it could only bring about a general
war in which it was thought the anti-religious
and anti-social element would be sure to gain
the ascendant. It was this knowledge which
caused the panic amongst my companions.

General Luders, whilst walking in the Saxon
garden, was attacked by assassins, and carried
home it was thought mortally wounded. He
was succeeded as Viceroy of Poland by the
Grand Duke Constantine, whose murder, as I
have already related, was attempted not many
hours after his arrival in Warsaw. And the
life of Count de Berg, the present lieutenant

Attempt to Murder Count de Berg. 171

of the Emperor, was only saved by a sort
of miracle from the assassins of the National
Government.

The intervals between these events were
filled up by almost daily murders in the
streets, the cafes, and the hotels and private
houses of Warsaw, as well as in the towns
and villages throughout the kingdom.

It was supposed by Czartorisky, Mazzini,
Kossuth, &c. that the murder of Count de
Berg would cause the cup to overflow, and that
at length the long wished-for massacre of the
Poles by the Russian soldiery would take place,
and that the indignant "peoples" of Europe
would rise at the call of their natural leaders,
and that the war of democracy against kings,
priests, and statesmen, would rage from the
Nile to the Neva, and from the remote east
to tjie shores of Ireland, for the Emerald Isle
had an important part allotted to her in the
projected drama.

172 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

THE PANIC.

As I have already said, my companions on the
day of the attack on the life of Count de Berg
were seized with a panic, and fled. It was a
little after 5 o'clock, on a beautiful autumn
evening. Surprised and bewildered I went out
into the streets. At that hour and at that
season they are generally thronged with people.
Every door and window was closed, and the
streets and squares through which I passed
were as silent and deserted as if the city were
stricken with the plague.

Unable to obtain any details, but seeing
from the appearance of the town that it must
be true that Count de Berg had been attacked
by the assassins of the National Government, I

The Panic. 173

hurried away to the royal palace. There was
the usual guard on the staircase, but there was
no one in the ante-room where the aides-de-
camp wait. My heart sunk within me ; I was
afraid the Count had been killed. I heard voices
in the next room, and forgetting all etiquette I
pulled open the door, and to my great delight
beheld his Excellency, looking hale and unin-
jured, seated at dinner surrounded by his staff.

The meal was soon over, and we all accom-
panied Count de Berg to his study, where coffee
is usually served.

We had scarcely entered, when news was
brought that the soldiers who had been di-
rected to take possession of Zamoyski House
had begun to throw the furniture out of the
windows. Count de Berg was, as it may be
supposed, exceedingly angry when he received
this intelligence, and at once despatched Colonel
Annenkoff to prevent any further destruction
of property, and to order that the severest
military discipline should be observed amongst
the soldiers occupying the house where the
attempted assassination had taken place.

174 Petersburg and Warsaw.

Count de Berg knew well what were the
ulterior hopes of the revolutionary party in
ordering an attempt to be made upon his life,
and therefore it was that he was so grieved
that anything which could be made to look
like a disposition to lawless retribution should
have been shown by the soldiery.

Later that night, I went with Colonel An-
nenkoff to Zamoyski House. .The orders of
Count de Berg had been obeyed, and a noise-
less quiet reigned throughout the vast building.
We passed the sentries and moved along
amongst the sleeping soldiers, stretched on
the floors in the corridors and saloons. Almost
all the windows in the front of the house were
broken j and here and there in the rooms was
to be seen the wreck of what had once been
a handsome piece of furniture. The remains
of the articles which had been flung through
the windows were, before our arrival, collected
in a heap near the statue of Copernicus and
burnt. The panic amongst the upper classes,
caused by the attack on the life of Count de
Berg, continued for several days, and did not

The Panic.

'75

entirely cease till they were convinced by
experience that the line of conduct which
his Excellency intended to pursue was one of
impartial justice, but always, when occasion
offered, tempered by mercy.

176 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE MONASTERIES.

WHEN the cold weather came on, the Russian
soldiers, who during the summer had lived
chiefly under canvas, were ordered into bar-
racks. As there was not sufficient accommo-
dation in the Government buildings for the
unusually large force stationed in Poland, it was
determined to quarter some of the men in the
monasteries, which, in Warsaw especially, are
very numerous and of enormous dimensions.

On the evening of the very first day that
troops had been placed in the different convents
in Warsaw, I went to see in what manner
they were lodged, and if their behaviour was
as orderly and quiet as it ought to be within
the walls of an edifice dedicated to the worship

'The Monasteries. 177

of God. I found that the soldiers had been
invariably quartered in the cells, refectories,
and dormitories on the ground floor, or in a
detached wing, whilst the upper stories were
entirely left to the members of the religious
orders residing in the convent. I observed
that there was a strong guard at the principal
gates, and that sentries were posted at short
intervals round the building.

Up to this time, the monasteries and convents
in Warsaw had not been visited by the Russian
police, and their precincts were, by order of
the Viceroy, to be considered as sacred, and
the inmates were not in any way to be inter-
fered with, lest the Poles should be shocked
in their religious prejudices. The consequence
was, that as far as the Russian Government
was concerned, these edifices, and all that
took place therein, were enveloped in an im-
penetrable veil of mystery.

The indications that the coming winter
promised to be one of unusual severity pro-
duced an increased anxiety in the mind of
Count de Berg for the comfort of the troops,

N

178 Petersburg and Warsaw.

and he determined to follow the example given
him by the Sovereign Pontiff himself, and
quarter the soldiers who were without barracks
in the unoccupied portions of the monasteries.

In Rome the French troops are quartered
in the religious establishments, and many of
the officers are lodged even in the churches,
where apartments were fitted up for them, as
at Santa Maria Maggiore.

Scarcely had the Russian soldiers taken up
their residence in the monasteries of Warsaw,
than the press of Western Europe teemed with
the most harrowing details of the atrocities
committed by them in the churches, monas-
teries, and convents in Poland. The frightful
sacrilege, the impious crimes of lust and
plunder, the robbery of sacred vessels, the
desecration of graves amidst the wild blasphe-
mous ravings of a drunken soldiery, which
history attributes to the French army in Spain,
were scarcely to be compared to the crimes
said by some organs of the press to have been
perpetuated by Russians in the churches and
monasteries of Warsaw, No wonder that a

'The Monasteries. 179

shudder of horror ran through the civilized
world when such events were told with graphic
minuteness by some of the leading newspapers
in Europe.

When these terrible recitals were sent to
me, to inquire into their truth, I was perfectly
bewildered. There, in great London journals,
and in excellent English, were all the minute
details of the most astounding horrors said to
have occurred under my own eyes.

I hurried off at once to the places where
these sacrilegious crimes were said to have
occurred. I was not accompanied by Russian
aides-de-camp, or by Government officials, but
by two Polish gentlemen, both ardent lovers
of their country, and who had abetted with
money and influence the insurrection at its
outbreak. We questioned everybody who
could give us the slightest information on the
subject, and I found, to my great relief, that
those terrible recitals, which had so startled
Europe, were pure fabrications.

Some of the clergymen, inmates of the
monasteries where these horrors were said to

N2

1 80 Petersburg and Warsaw.

have occurred, were evidently grieved to see
that their unhappy country must bear the
stain of such unblushing falsehoods. Three
of these clergymen drew up in writing a solemn
protest against the statements in the press of
the sacrilegious conduct of the Russian soldiers,
against whom, on the contrary, they asserted
that they had no cause of complaint. They
signed this paper in the evening, and on the
following morning all three were found, in
their cells, apparently at the point of death.
The best medical aid was promptly called in,
and two of the sufferers were saved,, but the
third died in great agony.

These were anointed priests, ministers in
the Church of Christ, exhorting by word and
example, according to the commands of their
Divine Master, to a love of truth and brotherly
union. But their sacred calling was no pro-
tection to them in the eyes of the " National
Government," by whom, for having signed the
document mentioned above, they were con-
demned to death.

The Catholic Priesthood. 181

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE CATHOLIC PRIESTHOOD AND THE
POIGNARD.

As stated in the preceding chapter, the monas-
teries and convents were, under the rule of
the Grand Duke, considered as sacred edifices,
devoted to the worship of God. The police,
therefore, had orders never to enter their pre-
cincts for the purpose of making a perquisition,
or in any way to interfere with the personal
freedom of the inmates. The consequence
was, that these places became sanctuaries for
the agents of the "National Government,"
who, safe from the eyes of the police in these
" deep solitudes and awful cells," carried on
the direction of assassination, of forced con-
tributions, and of correspondence with the

1 82 Petersburg and Warsaw

heads of the insurgent bands, and with the
chiefs of the movement in London and Paris.
Shortly, however, after the soldiers were
quartered in these religious houses, discoveries
of the most extraordinary nature were gradually
made by the Russian police. Daggers for
arming the assassins were found buried in the
gardens ; arms and uniforms for the insurgent
bands were hid away in the Cells, together
with all the materials for printing incendiary
proclamations, flying sheets of news, and
pamphlets. Finding daggers for the assassins
hidden within the walls of the monasteries,
coupled with some other circumstances, led
many to suppose that the Catholic clergy in
Poland approved of assassination. It was
believed at the time, from the assertions made
by some of " the hanging gendarmerie " who
had been captured, that their poignards were
blessed by the priests before going to perform
their work of blood. I cannot believe in so
frightful an accusation as that the anointed
priests of a Christian Church could be abettors
of murder. I am rather inclined to think

'The Catholic Priesthood. 183

that the idea was propagated by the revolu-
tionary committees in London and Paris, for
the purpose of leading ignorant Catholics to
suppose that, in the cause of "oppressed
nationalities," the Church of Rome did permit
assassination.

It was certainly a most deplorable circum-
stance that at the very time assassinations of
the most horrible kind were rifest in Poland,
a solemn mass should have been offered up in
the Eternal City, asking the aid of Heaven for
the Poles, and that the avowed representative
of the " National Government " was, in his
official capacity, invited to be present at the
ceremony.

I can, however, positively state, from my
own personal knowledge, that many of the
Catholic priests in Warsaw stood as much in
awe of the assassins of the National Govern-
ment as any simple layman.

When the astounding fabrications were
circulated by the press of Western Europe,
of the sacrilegious conduct of the Russian sol-
diers in the religious houses in Warsaw, there

1 84 Petersburg and Warsaw.

were other Catholic priests besides the three
mentioned in the preceding chapter who drew
up and signed a document in which it was
stated that the allegations made against the
troops were utterly false. The document was
already in my hands, when I was earnestly
implored to restore it to the writers ; for the
priests said, if were it to become known to the
" National Government " that they had dared
to tell the truth in such a case, they were
sure to be either poisoned or poignarded.

General Trepojf. 185

CHAPTER XXXVII.

GENERAL TREPOFE.

SHORTLY after the appointment of Count de
Berg as Viceroy of Poland, it was determined
to place an officer of rank at the head of the
gendarmerie of the kingdom. General Trepoff
was accordingly named by the Emperor to
that important post. At the time of his nomi-
nation he was living quietly with his wife and
numerous family of young children. He was
possessed of an independent fortune ; he was
no longer young, and had earned honours and
rank by long years of arduous service. Had
he consulted his own inclinations, he would
have passed the remainder of his days in un-
obtrusive retirement, devoting himself to his
domestic cares, to the education of his chil-

i86 Petersburg and Warsaw.

dren, and to watching over the failing health
of his wife. But he was a soldier, and at the
call of duty he determined to repair at once
to the post to which he had been named.

The frightful assassinations which were of
daily occurrence in Warsaw had filled with
horror the public mind in Russia, and the
husband and father who had repaired to that
ill-fated city, upon which seemed to have
fallen the curse of Heaven, had to go through
a heart-breaking parting from those he was
forced to leave behind.

I met General Trepoff at dinner at the
Viceroy's table, on the day of his arrival in
Warsaw. That evening we spoke long and
intimately, and I was happy to think that a
man so humane and upright, and so free from
prejudice, should have been chosen to fill a
post in which so much could be done in the
cause of Christian pity.

So great was the affection existing between
General Trepoff and his wife, that the latter
could not bear the pain of separation ; and the
doctors, fearing for the result in one so delicate ;

General T'repoff. 187

at length consented that she should undertake

o

the long and weary journey which was to
bring her to her husband.

Attended by her eldest daughter, a child of
fourteen, and a waiting-maid, she started on
her way, and after a fortnight's travelling
reached Warsaw.

The joy of meeting between husband and
wife was not, however, of long duration. The
dark stories which had reached her in her
retirement of the stealthy murders and myste-
rious deaths of which Warsaw was the scene
fell short, she soon learned to know, of the
terrible reality. Her love exaggerated the
perils which her husband ran in a city swarm-
ing with assassins, and her anxiety for his
safety, joined to the fatigues of her long jour-
ney, were too much for her feeble health, and
she died. Her last words were a prayer to
Heaven to watch over her husband and her
child in that place of terrors.

I will not attempt to describe the grief of
the widower and of his little girl, or the pity
that all who had hearts felt for their sufferings.

1 88 Petersburg and Warsaw.

General Trepoff is a pious man, and in the
church where the dead body of his wife was
laid during the solemn funereal rites, he asked
that prayers should be offered up each day for
the repose of her soul.

From that sad day, every morning the sor-
rowing widower, with his little girl, in her
mourning dress, walked from the Palais Briihl,
where they lived, to the church, and kneeling
humbly on the steps of the altar, they joined
the officiating priest in prayers for her they
had lost.

Thus day after day they went and came
on their mournful mission, till the " National
Government" heard that a Russian general
walked slowly each morning in the streets of
Warsaw, so absorbed in grief for the death of
his wife that he took no heed of what was
going on around, and that he had no com-
panion but his little daughter. The National
Government thought it too good an occasion
to lose, and they ordered that General Tre-
poff should be 'assassinated when on his way
to church.

General Trepoff. 189

Possibly the men of blood who direct these
crimes chuckled that night, in their safe re-
treats in Paris and London, at the thought
that with one blow they would kill the father
and break the daughter's heart.

One morning, bowed down with sorrow
his eyes fixed upon the ground, the General
walked slowly from the church where he had
been praying towards his home, with his
little daughter clinging to his arm. Swiftly
and noiselessly the assassins glided behind
them — one seized the child — and another,
lifting an axe sharp as a razor, aimed a
blow at the old man's head.

But Heaven had heard the dying prayer of
his wife ; the axe turned slightly in the hand
of the murderer, and instead of cleaving the
head of the General4, it cut his ear and wounded
him in the shoulder.

Though stunned by the blow, he turned
quick as lightning upon his assailant; and
seizing him by the throat, he wrenched the
hatchet from his grasp, and held him till some
Russian soldiers ran to his assistance. He

190 Petersburg and Warsaw.

then turned to his little daughter, who was
lying senseless on the ground, and taking her
in his arms he carried her to the nearest shop,
where she soon recovered sufficiently to be
able to continue her way home. The assassin
by whom she had been seized, seeing that the
blow struck at the General had failed, had
dashed her to the ground and fled.

A Mother's Prayers. 191

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

A MOTHER'S PRAYERS.

EVERY day during my stay in Lithuania and
in the kingdom of Poland, I tried, with all the
very limited means within my power, to stop
the effusion of blood, and to save from the
severities of the law the unhappy beings who
had taken part in the insurrection and fallen
into the power of the Russian authorities.

If facts, drawn from the highest and most
.reliable sources, could have given additional
weight to my words, then powerful I should
have been for the attainment of my object.
But I met with opposition in places where it
was least of all to be expected. The opposi-
tion did not come from the Russians or from
the Poles, but from persons who, like myself,

192 .Petersburg and Warsaw.

were strangers in the country,, and who,
having committed themselves to certain views,
were determined to support these views at
any cost rather than submit to what they
considered the humiliation of abandoning their
error. Such an attitude would, under ordi-
nary circumstances, have been of little conse-
quence, but here it tended to perpetuate and
increase the horrors of civil war.. To attempt
entering into communication with the Poles
through such a medium was of course hope-
less, and that everything would be done to
prejudice the Poles against me was quite natu-
ral to expect. The attempt to prejudice the
natives against me succeeded to admiration,
and for some days after my arrival in Warsaw
I found myself as isolated with regard to
Polish society as if I had taken up my abode
in Novogorod.

As the sole object of my mission was one of
humanity, my first duty was naturally to visit
the prisons and hospitals.

In one of the rooms of the citadel which I
entered on the day of my first visit, was con-

A Mother's Prayers. 1 93

fined as a prisoner a young gentleman named
Blumer.

In answer to my usual questions, he
answered frankly that he had nothing to com-
plain of with regard to his treatment ; that the
food given him was wholesome and abundant ;
that he had books to read, which he showed
me ; and that his bed was good and his room
clean and airy.

I asked him if I could serve him in any
way. He said there was only one thing he
desired in the world, and that was that he
should be permitted to see and converse with
his mother. " She is old," he said, " and I
am her only child, and I know that the thought
that I am in prison will break her heart ; for
she will think that I am perhaps in a dungeon
and treated cruelly. I only ask to see her and
to assure her that I am well. For myself
I do not care ; I am resigned to my fate ; but
the thought that my poor mother suffers on
my account almost drives me mad."

His eyes were filled with tears as he
spoke. I was greatly touched by that filial
o

194 Petersburg and Warsaw.

love which was stronger than all thoughts
of self.

An hour later I told this young gentleman's
story to Count de Berg. The Count was as
much affected as I had been, and he promised
that my prayer should be granted.

The old lady went to the citadel, was ad-
mitted, and weeping she embraced her son.
They were happy tears, for mother and son
left the prison together and returned to their
home.

This young gentleman called on me, in
company with others of his countrymen whose
acquaintance I had made in the citadel, and
who then, like him, were free.

These were my first Polish friends in War-
saw, but I gradually came to know others ; and
as time wore on, and they saw that all I told
them came out true, they shut their ears to
those counsels which could only lead to ruin.

Many a Polish mother promised to remem-
ber me in her prayers, and I had then, as I
shall ever have, a humble faith that such
prayers are acceptable to heaven.

The Carbonari. 195

CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE CARBONARI.

DEATH by the poignard of the assassin and by
poison, and where the poignard and the poison
could not reach by defamation of character
by cunningly fabricated lies, and the ruin of
opponents compassed by subtle intrigue, are
vices which we have all from our childhood
learned to look upon as peculiar to the Italian
soil. How our young bloods grew chill as we
devoured the novel from the Minerva Press
which described so graphically some terrible
tale of Italian villany, and with what breath-
less interest we watched from our place in a
crammed theatre the sanguinary career of the
bravo with his corked eyebrows and his hoarse
voice.

In the hurry and bustle of after-life, these
o 2

1 96 Petersburg and Warsaw.

first impressions of childhood wear gradually
away, holding the same dim place in the
memory with our old nurse's fairy tales, and
would be blotted out altogether were we not
startled from time to time by revelations
coming to us from beyond the Alps more
dark and horrible than any romance-writer
or dramatist had imagined.

How strange that a land so favoured by
nature, with lovely and varied scenes, with
genial skies, a teeming soil, and possessing
more of the graceful and the beautiful in art
than all the rest of the world besides, should
be doomed to suffer by the hands of her own
children !

After the fall of Murat, and the establish-
ment of peace throughout Europe, Sir Richard
Church, with the consent of the British Go-
vernment, went to Naples to organize the
army of the restored King of the Two Sicilies.
The stronghold of the Carbonari at that time
was in the province of Apulia, where they com-
mitted the most frightful atrocities under the
name of patriotism.

'The Carbonari. 197

The King appointed General Church his
Alter Ego. He endowed him with despotic
and irresponsible power, and his mission
was to extirpate the Carbonari and restore
order to that part of the fair kingdom of
Naples.

Nothing could surpass the terror which Sir
Richard Church found that the assassins of
the Carbonari had established amongst all
classes in Apulia. No one was safe from the
dagger or the poison, the instruments of death
mainly employed by these ardent patriots.
Sir Richard, who has often spoken to me on
the subject, showed me many of the docu-
ments, emanating from this secret society,
which had fallen into his hands.

The sentences of death issued by this " Na-
tional Government " against individuals were
signed with blood, and their proclamations
and edicts were surmounted by devices of an
inverted mitre, an inverted cross, and an in-
verted crown.

Were Sir Richard Church to publish his
memoirs of this period of his life, they would

198 Petersburg and Warsaw.

reveal some terrible features in the secret poli-
tical societies of Italy.

The English general restored order in the
province, and amidst the blessings of the
entire population returned to Naples to re-
ceive the praises of the King and the approval
of his own Government.

Though the Carbonari for a time seemed to
have disappeared, the principles -of their orga-
nization still lived.

The doctrine that murder and falsehood are
virtues when they are employed in the name of
liberty, cannot be propagated with impunity
amongst a people. Such instruments cannot
be thrown away at will and then forgotten.
The nation is familiarised with blood, and
crime and virtue are confounded together in
the popular mind. The assassin who has been
paid to strike in the name of freedom will not
hesitate to murder in any other cause for a like
recompense. The ex-carbonaro was in his
hours of leisure a bravo or a bandit, till the
sacred cause of liberty should again require his
services.

The Carbonari. 199

He had not long to wait, for under new and
abler chiefs, and under another name, the poli-
tical assassin began to ply his dreadful trade
in Italy.

Victor Hugo makes Marie Tudor to say,
"Mon pere me disait toujours qu'on ne re-
tirait jamais autre chose de la bouche d'un
Italien qu'un mensonge ni autre chose de sa
poche qu'un poignard."

I had lived in Italy, and have known
amongst Italians some of the noblest and
purest of human beings. I have met with
many who commanded the respect of all with
whom they came into contact, by the stern
rectitude of their sentiments and by their pure
and spotless lives. And that I believe to be
the character of the great majority of the
Italian nation. It is for these, then, to show
that they are jealous of the fair fame of their
country, and that they protest against the
name of Italy being associated with the vilest
and most atrocious crimes.

Amidst all the nations of Christendom, Italy
stood alone with that dark blot upon her name ;

2OO Petersburg and Warsaw.

but now she has a rival in her bacl eminence,
and that rival is Poland. But assassination
and falsehood are not natural to the country
of John Sobieski ; they have been brought
thither from the land of Borgia and Machia-
velli.

Sentenced to Death. 201

CHAPTER XL.

SENTENCED TO DEATH.

ONE evening General Trepoff, who had now
been appointed Minister of Police, spoke to
me in the following terras : —

" When you first came here, in contradic-
tion to what was asserted by others, you told
the Poles that they had no material assistance
to expect from England, and that France
could not act without the concurrence of
the British Government. Your words were
said to be false. But as time' went on and
neither England nor France sent the expected
aid, the Poles began to think that it was you
that had spoken the truth, and not their soi-
disant friends. Then, when a telegram arrived,
announcing that the Emperor Napoleon had

2O2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

proposed a Congress to settle the affairs of
Poland, it was shown triumphantly about
Warsaw, but you on that very day told every
Pole that you met that they must not do
anything rash, or allow themselves to be
buoyed up with false hopes, because that
England would never consent to such a Con-
gress, and that consequently it could not
possibly take place.

" When events showed that all that you had
said was correct, the Poles would no longer
listen to those who had deceived them by false
promises, and who had done nothing but lead
them deeper and deeper into trouble. In you,
however, they have now implicit confidence.

" The ' National Government ' was so dis-
pleased at all this, that they sent an order
here that you should be assassinated. Fortu-
nately, one of the men designated to murder
you revealed the circumstance to us, and I at
once took every precaution for your safety.

" I did not intend to shock you by commu-
nicating to you so horrible a circumstance, but
fearing that you might not keep sufficiently

Sentenced to Death. 203

out of the way of danger, I thought it better
to put you on your guard.

" I know that you often sup at the Hotel
d'Angleterre, and as you run great risk in
so doing, I have ordered additional sentries
to be posted near there, and I have also
ordered some policemen in plain clothes and
well armed to be stationed in the interior of
the house."

From thenceforth I never went out after
sunset, unless accompanied by an armed police-
man.

2O4 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XLI.
TORTURE AT WARSAW.

As I have already observed, I visited Warsaw
filled with sympathy for the Poles, and dis-
posed to view their rulers with no friendly eye.
So strongly had I prejudged their case, that I
must confess that facts had largely accumu-
lated within the sphere of my observation before
I ventured to draw a conclusion. I associated
with Polish families of high social rank, and I
found them more afraid of the secret agents
of the National Government than of Russian
officials. I have met in society Polish ladies
whose names I had seen figuring in the co-
lumns of newspapers as martyrs in the cause
of national freedom — ladies, some of whom
were described as having been outraged and

Torture at Warsaw. 205

tortured ; others, who were said to have been
insulted for wearing mourning, or made the
victims of some other atrocity. At the early
period of my acquaintance with these ladies, I
felt a kind of shame-faced awe in their pre-
sence. Whatever honour they may deserve as
martyrs in the cause of their country, it was
impossible not to feel that, as women, they
had suffered in their social relations. This
impression weighed so heavily on my mind
that I could never feel or act towards these
ladies as I should have done had they not at-
tained so painful a notoriety. It seemed as
though they ought not to appear in public,
as though they ought to shut themselves up
and shun a stranger's gaze. I had been some
months at Warsaw, when, having dined one
day at the house of a Polish nobleman, where
a large company was assembled, I, in the
course of the evening, said something to Count
Gurondsky about the tortures and insults to
which some had been subjected. The Count
looked astonished, and assured me that the
histories I was narrating would sound very

206 Petersburg and Warsaw.

strangely in the ears of the ladies whom I
named, nor would their families be pleased to
learn the notoriety that their wives and sisters
and daughters had acquired. I was able to
adduce certain European journals as my au-
thority. The Count opposed his personal
knowledge. The next morning I received the
following note : —

" MONSIEUR,

" After you left us yesterday evening, I went
round amongst the ladies of my acquaintance,
and I was unanimously assured, that neither
during the time that they wore mourning, nor
since they left it off, have they been arrested
or insulted by the police or soldiers.

"Accept, Monsieur, the assurance of my
distinguished sentiments,

"N. GURONDSKT."

The subject of female martyrdom being
once broached, I had no longer any difficulty
in speaking on the subject. The indignation
of the ladies to whom I talked of these mat-

'Torture at Warsaw. 207

ters was always vehement. I remember on
one occasion how a number of them railed
against Mirochawlski and the red republicans,
and said that these men and their agents
dared to trade in the names of respectable
persons, and outrage them by falsehoods in-
serted in foreign journals, whilst the truth was,
that they were living in hourly terror lest some
member of their family might meet his death
at the hands of the national gendarmerie.

Whilst the agtens of the National Govern-
ment were lawlessly striking down with a dag-
ger, or suspending on the gibbet, those who,
having discovered their error, wished to with-
draw from all association with the insurgents,
or those who refused to pay the imposts levied
in the name of the " National Government,"
they were not less zealous in propagating re-
ports of the cruelty of the Russians, who, it was
commonly believed in Prance and England,
tortured their prisoners. The horrors of civil
war and the reprisals it entails are quite terri-
ble enough in themselves, and need no artifi-
cial darkening. Wishing to know the exact

20 8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

truth, I made inquiries in quarters where I
was most likely to learn it, and the following
letter is one of the many assurances I received
that the charge of torture made against the
Russian Government is a fabrication. The
writer was confined in the citadel at Warsaw,
and in the same room with Count Zamoyski.
Both said they were well treated during their
captivity, and, were it otherwise, the writer of
the following letter, with whose family I was
intimate, would certainly have told me so in
confidence. He writes frankly : —

" MONSIEUR,

" You have done me so many acts of kind-
ness, that I am sure you will be glad to learn
that I was set at liberty yesterday. I know
that it is to you I am indebted for my freedom.
Allow me to offer you again my sincere thanks.

" During the four weeks that I was detained
in the citadel and at Pavia Street, not only had
I ho cause to complain of the treatment I and
my companions received, but on the contrary,
I must say, we experienced all the considera-

'Torture at Warsaw. 209

tion compatible with imprisonment. Nor have
I ever heard that anybody whomsoever has
been subjected to torture.

" As everything depends on His Excellency
the Count de Berg, allow me, Sir, through
you, to thank him for the benevolence and
clemency he has exhibited in my regard.

"Accept, Monsieur, the assurance of the
profound respect of

" Your very humble servant,

" VINCENT PRADRTNSKI."

Were I not convinced that the worst period
of the Polish Revolution is passed, and that
the National Government and the hanging
gendarmerie will soon cease to be, I would
not venture to introduce Pradrynski's name
into these pages. It would have been to ex-
pose him to the action of the dagger or the
gallows. He would have been marked as a
renegade, when in truth he was only one of
the many Polish gentlemen who mistook the
qualities of the instruments with which they
hoped to realize their fondest dreams.

2io Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XLII.

MANIFESTO OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

THE designs of the National Government, and
their mode of putting them into execution,
may be deduced from one of their manifestos,
of which the following is a copy : —

" The National Government,
" Taking into consideration that the execu-
tive authorities of the invasion condemn to
death, without a legal trial, the members of
the national organization arrested by them —
for the commissions of inquiry, and the courts-
martial, which outrage all notions of right,
cannot be looked on as legal tribunals — the
National Government, in order effectually to
defend the safety of the members of the national
organization, have, acting upon the suggestion

Manifesto. an

of the heads of the police department, decreed
as follows : —

" 1st. That the commissions of inquiry,
established to examine into so-called poli-
tical crimes, the courts-martial, the gen-
darmerie employed in political inquiries
and in espionage, the military heads of
governments, districts, and departments,
as well as their civil assistants, the execu-
tive police at Warsaw, with the exception
of the administrative sections, are all ex-
cluded from the protection of the law.

"2d. The execution of the present decree
is confided to the civil and military au-
thorities.

"Decreed at the sitting of the National
Government.

" Warsaw, 25th August, 1863."

This edict of the National Government, to
which the official seal is attached, is a conden-
sation of their policy, which, in fact, may be ex-
pressed in one word — " dagger." That Italian
weapon has become the symbol of the Polish

212 Petersburg and Warsaw.

insurrection, and plainly reveals its origin and
the character of its organizers. The Polish
nobles who at first took part in the movement
were, I repeat, deceived. They believed that
their cherished dream of Polish independence
was about to be realized, and when they dis-
covered their error, they found that they had
not alone compromised themselves with the
Russian Government, but had given themselves
over to the power of men to whom the in-
terests of Poland were nothing, but who found
in the chronic restlessness of the Poles, and in
their high susceptibility, those elements which,
properly fermented, might produce in Poland a
result similar to that which had already been
obtained in Italy. Besides, amongst the Polish
nobility there were men of great wealth, who
were only too happy to place their riches at
the disposal of those who undertook to carry
out all the details of the insurrection, and put
the revolution-making machinery into opera-
tion. The Poles were bade to look at Italy.
They could see there what had been done in
the cause of freedom by the " moral aid " of

Manifesto. 213

England and the material assistance of France.
Their country, too, should be freed, and should
again become a nation.

A. fact not to be lost sight of is, that the
national gendarmerie were for the most part
foreigners. Prince Emile Willgenstein says,
that in his Government they were mostly Prus-
sians. What conclusion can we draw from
this ? It is not to be supposed that these men
volunteered to hang and stab, and were wil-
ling to expose themselves to the consequent
risk, without what is called a " handsome con-
sideration." The plain truth is, these men
were hired assassins, and the subscriptions of
numbers of honest-minded people in England
and France helped to furnish their pay.

214 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XLIII.

THE PRESS.

BUT for the press, the National Government
of Poland would have been little known to the
rest of Europe, and silence would have been
fatal to the interests of the revolution-makers.
It was necessary that their views should be
propagated throughout Europe, and it was
equally necessary that they should supply the
source whence such information was to circu-
late. Opinion is, in the present day, under
certain conditions, as powerful as the sword ;
it is the " moral aid " of which so much has
of late been said, and the press is the exponent
of opinion. Amongst belligerents, therefore,
the party that secures the advocacy of the
press receives that moral aid which, in the

The Press. 215

eyes of the majority, throws a halo of justifi-
cation round its proceedings. This advocacy
the National Government was able to secure,
and the " foreign correspondence " of English
and French journals often served the cause of
the revolutionists abroad as much as the dagger
did at home.

Men of great talent, members of some
secret society, often sent a " correspondence "
to some journal of Western Europe, detailing
events often wholly fabricated, or so highly
coloured, as to be scarcely recognisable by
those who knew the truth. Whether the news-
paper correspondent was the framer of the in-
telligence, or whether the information was
furnished by others upon whose word he
relied, but who practised on his credulity and
prejudices, I cannot take upon me to say ; but
this I can confidently affirm, that whilst stay-
ing in Poland, I have read " foreign corre-
spondence " in English and French papers,
purporting to narrate circumstances said to
have occurred in the town where I was re-
siding, and of these narrations, I must say

2i6 Petersburg and Warsaw.

that they were baseless as an air-vision. A
popular horror once set afloat circulates
rapidly ; it is not always easy to discover the
source ; and many journals copied in good faith
tales of Russian barbarity that had no other
foundation than the author's imagination. It
was in this way that some of the leading
journals of Europe unwittingly misled their
readers.

Everybody must remember the sensation
produced by Mr. Grant Duff's letter, published
in the Times of the 14th of last January.
That gentleman had gone to Wilna and to
Warsaw. He had seen and judged for him-
self. He visited the prisons and the hospitals ;
he found the inmates properly cared for :
there was no want of food or of rational
recreation ; there were no traces of torture.
" I am happy to say," says Mr. Grant Duff,
" that the impression left upon my mind, by
a visit to these establishments, is one highly
favourable to the humanity of the Russian
Government."

The Times — the great organ of public

The Press. 217

opinion — published Mr. Grant Duff's letter,
and the English public for the first time heard
at least a portion of the truth with regard to
the Russo-Polish question. I must say that
my experience coincides with that of Mr.
Grant Duff. Public opinion, led by the press,
may yet experience a reaction. What has
been exalted may be condemned, and even-
handed justice declare the truth.

The part that many honest and independent
journals have had in misrepresenting the real
facts of the Polish insurrection is much to be
deplored ; but if, instead of trusting to "foreign
correspondents," some of the proprietors or
editors of these journals had themselves
travelled into Poland, public opinion in Eng-
land would long since have taken a different
tone. The doubly-deceived Polish nobles who
took part in the insurrection would have had
their eyes opened, and the real promoters of
the insurrection would have been unmasked.

No one honours the press more than I. It
is not alone one of our greatest institutions,
but it is in itself the concentrated expression

2 1 8 Petersburg and Warsaw.

of the power of our other great constitutional
bulwarks, of which we may say that it is at
the same time the offspring and the crowning
defence. It is in England that the press
realizes our ideal of freedom of thought and
speech. In other countries, the press is only
an exotic — a slip, so to speak, of our English
plant — and away from its native soil it does
not grow healthily. Under the too careful
supervision of a more Southern cliine, it loses
its hardy vigour ; in the colder North, it dies
for want of sustenance ; and amongst our Trans-
atlantic brethren, the once hardy plant, im-
bibing the rankness of the soil, degenerates
into a noxious weed. The press of England
is not alone the organ of British nationality ;
it has become the voice of the universe, and is
equally ready to uphold an oppressed nation-
ality against a crowned despot, or to inquire
into the conduct of a workhouse official who
refuses relief, or doles it out ungraciously, to
a craving mendicant. The press is a faith
with the British nation. The English are a
hard-working, commercial people. The Eng-

The Press. 219

lishman rises in the morning, and recommences
his daily pursuits as merchant, banker, or
tradesman, and during the intervals of busi-
ness, or at the close of the day, he reads his
favourite journal and he believes. His belief
is more in the honesty of the journalist than
in the truth of what he reads ; for whilst he
peruses a " leading article," or the letter of
a foreign correspondent, he retains the secret
though perhaps unacknowledged conviction,
that should what he reads contain an erroneous
statement, it will certainly, upon discovery, be
corrected. The Englishman regards the na-
tional press as a free-spoken, fearless spirit
always ready to declare the unvarnished truth,
ever ready to point out a grievance, especially
where the mighty seek to oppress the weak.
Never does an Englishman feel so satisfied
that the great organs of public opinion are
doing their duty as when they attack some
foreign potentate, or plead for some struggling
nationality. It is one of our popular weak-
nesses. It is a remnant of an old creed that
taught the Englishman that everything conti-

22O Petersburg and Warsaw.

nental was bad. In this, as in other cases, if
we wish to ascertain the truth, we must see
with our own eyes, or else rectify our opinions
by the testimony of credible witnesses.

Foreign Journals. 221

CHAPTER XLIV.

FOREIGN JOURNALS.

I DO not write in the interest of any party ; I
merely state what I have seen ; and I am very
sure that were a few gentlemen, as liberal and
as unprejudiced as Mr. Grant Duff, to go to
Wilna and to Warsaw, their impressions would
coincide with his and mine. It is most impor-
tant to the Poles that the English people should
learn the truth, and it is very certain that they
cannot learn it from foreign journals. I have
seen documents proving that an offer had been
made to the Russian Government by a certain
continental journal, to advocate the Russian
cause upon arranged conditions. It was there
stated that the National Committee had
offered 150,000 francs to secure the like ser-

222 Petersburg and Warsaw.

vices. The Russian Government refused, and
the journal became one of the most important
advocates of the insurrection.

The National Government had its own
official organ at Cracow, and the fabricated
accounts that appeared in its columns of out-
rages, floggings, and tortures, were copied in
good faith by many newspapers on the Conti-
nent and in England. Illustrated journals
gave engravings representing battles gained
by the Poles over the Russians, battles which
had never taken place, but these representa-
tions had the effect of raising still higher the
enthusiasm of the Philo-Poles of England and
France, who were far from suspecting the
truth.

Falsehoods of this nature must ultimately
harm even the most righteous cause, but false
reports propagated through the press are part
of the system introduced into Poland. It has
been, and is still, employed with a certain
effect, and for a time misled, not alone the
public of Western Europe, but even the Govern-
ments of England and France.

Foreign Journals. 113

I am far from pretending to assert that pain-
ful and distressing scenes did not occur in
Poland, or that the Russian Government did
not strictly enforce military law ; I only assert
that the stories of torture, flogging of women,
and such like atrocities, were not practised.
It was painful to see young lads — schoolboys
as many of the insurgents were — lying wounded
in the hospitals, or immured in the prisons.
I have often, moved by a mother's tears,
pleaded for some such foolish lad, and have
frequently succeeded in obtaining my request.
Count de Berg once said to me, " No one can
regret more than I being obliged to punish.
But what would you have me do ? The laws
must be enforced ; order must be maintained.
I am only the exponent of the law/'

Those writers who advocated in foreign jour-
nals the general principles of revolution were
unquestionably men of great talent, and under-
stood perfectly well how to colour the events
they described according to the opinions of the
persons by whom they were to be read. For
Catholic Rome, Liberal France, and Protestant

224 Petersburg and Warsaw.

England, the story was painted to suit the oc-
casion. At Rome it was believed ; and through
Rome, the inhabitants of the Faubourg St.
Germain, and the Catholics of England and
Ireland, believed that the Poles were perse-
cuted on account of their religion, that the
seclusion of convents was violated, priests and
nuns tortured and outraged, churches dese-
crated, and the rites of religion forbidden to
be administered. To the free-thinking public
of France and the Protestant people of Eng-
land, the insurrection was described as the
heroic struggle of a people galled by a hateful
yoke, anxious for constitutional freedom and
enlightened institutions. To all the appeal
was made, in the name of philanthropy, of
charity, and humanity. It is, perhaps, credita-
ble to human nature that such pleas are every-
where listened to. The Catholic and the
Protestant heart alike responded to the call.
The Pope feU into the snare in which he had
been before entangled. Sums of money were
contributed by the fine ladies of the Faubourg
St. Germain and by gentle Englishwomen, for

Foreign Journals. 225

on this point they were united; pity made
them akin ; and the Catholic clergy in these
islands, and chiefly in Ireland, expressed the
profoundest sympathy with the insurgents. It
did not seem to strike these gentlemen at the
time as an ominous fact, that the most active
coadjutor in the cause was Gavazzi.

The apostles of revolution understood well
how to practise on the passions and prejudices
of the masses ; they knew even how to make
the best feelings of communities subservient to
their designs. In Poland, assassination was
done in the name of Catholicity ; in Italy, it
was anti-papal ; and yet neither the partizans
of the Poles nor the partizans of the Italians
seemed to perceive that it was the same spirit
that directed the secret committees in both
countries. The ultramontane party in France
and England supported, in the press and in
the senate, the " National Government " of
Poland, which was based upon the most atro-
cious system of assassination the world had
ever seen, whilst they denounced the same
system when carried into operation against
Q

226 Petersburg and Warsaw.

papal Rome. The Duke of Florence prayed
Heaven to save him from his friends. The
Catholic Church in these islands may well offer
up the like petition. Her friends did her
questionable service whilst they upheld as
" Catholic " the Polish National Government,
whose agents accomplish their mission by
means of the dagger.

Poland and Italy. 227

CHAPTER XLV.

POLAND AND ITALY.

ITALY, the birthplace of the cosmopolitan re-
volutionists, was the country where they first
had an opportunity of carrying their principles
into operation. Some seventeen or eighteen
years ago that extraordinary movement com-
menced in Rome whose oscillations have since
been felt throughout Italy. At first, reforms
were talked of, the most philanthropic senti-
ments found utterance, and a profound respect
for the Pope and religion was expressed.
Pious IX., philanthropic and confiding, was
pleased at the prospect held out, and thinking
to do his people much good, he not only
joined the movement, but put himself at its
head. Gradually the revolutionists extended

228 Petersburg and Warsaw.

their toils ; little by little, as in Poland, they
rose in influence, until at last their true objects
became revealed. The Pope, alarmed, tried,
when he learned the truth, to draw back ; but
it was too late. The evil had taken root, and
Rossi, the Pope's minister, was stabbed on the
staircase of the pontifical palace. Whether the
dagger-thrust was a means taken to silence a
too vigilant observer, or whether the servant
was slain as a warning to the master, it mat-
ters not now to inquire. The Pope saw that
the demon of revolution was unchained, and
fled in terror to Gaeta, and the Eternal City
was abandoned to the revolutionists.

The revolutionary movement in Rome was
not an outburst against the Catholic religion,
as many persons supposed; it was a demon-
stration against authority of every kind, more
especially that represented by crowned heads.
That it was so considered by the Sovereigns
of Europe was manifest from the manner in
which they behaved to the Pope. The Queen
of England wrote a letter of condolence to the
Sovereign Pontiff ; the Emperor of Russia, the

Poland and Italy . 229

head of the Orthodox Greek Church, did the
like ; nor was the King of Prussia wanting in
expressions of sympathy. It was very evident
that the sovereigns did not view the disturb-
ances in Rome as a heterodox manifestation of
disaffection to a particular form of religion ;
they saw in the subversion of the Pope's
authority the operations of a spirit which, in
that instance successful against a weak sove-
reign, might on a future occasion be suffi-
ciently strong to shake the stability of more
powerful thrones. Louis Napoleon, then Presi-
dent of the Republic, took a bolder step. He
ordered his legions to Rome, and French bayo-
nets have since formed a rampart round the
papal throne.

Anybody who attentively traces the progress
of the Polish insurrection will observe a
striking similarity between the mode in which
it was conducted and that followed by the
revolutionists in Italy. The movement began
amongst the upper classes ; the National Com-
mittee was a hidden power whose symbol was
the dagger.

2jo Petersburg and Warsaw.

How strangely inconsistent seems the con-
duct of those men who advocate in Poland
what they condemn in Rome ! To judge the
conduct of any man or any body of men dis-
passionately, we must make allowance for the
influence of party spirit and national and social
prejudices. It is under such influences that
the facts of contemporary history are ignored ;
and some historian, a few generations later, will
win for himself some literary fame by proving
to our descendants that we. have been alike
extravagant in our praise and in our censure.
Distance in space acts with regard to our
knowledge of events with as obscuring an
effect as distance in time. We frequently
entertain as erroneous opinions of the conduct
and character of our foreign contemporaries
and of their surroundings, as of the founders
of empires that lived centuries before the Chris-
tian era. Our prejudices must become
mellowed by age before we can recognise our
error. We angelize or demonize our contem-
poraries. Even Mr. Grant Duff could not
name Count de Berg and General Mouravieff

Poland and Italy. 23 1

in the House of Commons without exciting a
mocking laugh ; but if some of the members of
the British Senate had witnessed what I have
seen in Warsaw, they would have listened with
different feelings to Mr. Grant Duff's state-
ment of the numbers whose lives had been
terminated by the dagger or gibbet of the
National Gendarmerie.

23 2 Petersburg and Warsaw.

CHAPTER XLVI.

ACTUAL STATE OF POLAND.

THE following official documents give a clear
and correct view of the actual state of Poland.
In these pages, a comparison is drawn between
the aspect presented by affairs in Poland in
the spring of 1863 and the spring of the pre-
sent year. This comparison is worthy the
attentive consideration of the English people.
It will be seen there that one of the great
incitements to insurrection, and one of the
delusive hopes that enabled the Poles to main-
tain the contest, was the expectation of foreign
interference. To hold out hopes that we do
not intend to fulfil is a cruel deception. As
Count Osten Sacken shrewdly remarks : " The
insurrection, left to its own resources, will
gradually die out."

Actual State of Poland. 233

What are now the sentiments of the different
classes of the Poles with regard to the insur-
rection? The peasantry, who never revolted,
and who, it must be confessed, had no interest
in common with their landlords, are becoming
every day bolder in resisting the " National
Gendarmerie ; " bands of villagers, acting as a
local police, assist the authorities in bringing
these men to justice. The landed proprietors,
who now see that all hope of foreign assistance
is vain, " have," we are told, " modified their
opinions." Nay, more, they " secretly " give
information to the Russian authorities, and
point out the lurking-places of the brigands.
The clergy, too, have yielded to pressure
acting from so many points, and withdrawn,
with one exception, the symbols of national
mourning from the churches. These are indi-
cations of peace, though not unaccompanied
by certain movements not calculated to raise
the actors in our estimation. The secret in-
former, or the public denunciator, is not a dig-
nified character in the page of history. His
trade is one which presents humanity in an

234 Petersburg and Warsaw.

unfavourable point of view, but which the
abnormal condition of revolution brings into
operation. Count Osten-Sacken says that
assassination no longer goes unpunished. This
is the best proof that the cosmopolitan revolu-
tionists are losing their hold of Poland.

No. 28, Annex 1. Warsaw,

17/29 February, 1864.

" MONSIEUR L'AMBASSADEUR,

" I profit by the departure of a courier
for Berlin, to transmit to your Excellency the
annexed notification.

" It is a plain statement of some considera-
tions about the probable renewal of the in-
trigues of the Polish revolution during the
approaching spring.

" Your Excellency will deign to observe, in
glancing over this document, that I have not
ventured in any way to prejudge the result of
the present insurrection only in as far as the
insurrection should be left to its own re-
sources.

" This statement is moreover, Monsieur le

Actual State of Poland. 235

Baron, only a logical deduction drawn from a
comparison between the general aspect pre-
, sented by events in Poland at the commence-
ment of 1863, and that which marks the
opening of the year upon which we have just
entered.

"In making a succint resume of the data
contained in the communications that Mr.
Tegoborski and I have had the honour of
transmitting to your Excellency, I hoped to
bring into stronger relief the actual state of
things.

" I have the honour to be, with the most
profound consideration, Monsieur 1'Ambassa-
deur,

" Your Excellency's very humble, and
very obedient servant,

" OSTEN SACKEN.

" To His Excellency Baron Brunnow."

236 Petersburg and Warsaw.

. Annex to No. 28. Warsaw,

7/19 February, 1864.

" The more nearly the spring draws nigh,
the more frequently are we tempted to ask
what turn events will take after the disappear-
ance of the cold weather, which had served as
a material obstacle to the formation of large
bands of insurgents ; for if, on the one hand,
thanks to the energetic measures of the admi-
nistration, and to the incessant activity of our
columns, the beaten and scattered insurgent
bands experience considerable difficulty in
rallying in the different suburbs and villages
of the kingdom, on the other hand, it becomes
impossible for them to rally in the forests on
account of the severity of the weather.

" When the winter shall have passed, this
latter obstacle will disappear.

" We have every reason to believe that with
the return of spring the conspirators will
endeavour to reassemble some bands. The
small groups of brigands that now make their
appearance, sometimes in one locality, some-

Actual State of Poland. 237

times in another, may combine and form
nuclei round which will cluster those insur-
gents who have escaped the vigilance of the
local police and the pursuit of our detachments
that traverse the country in every direction.

" Already the diminished cold of the month
of January has occasioned the concentration
of some bands numbering about one hundred
men each.

"Prom information received from many
quarters, we foresee fresh incursions from
Galicia and Posnania.

" Some of the advices we have received tell
us at the same time of increased excesses on
the part of the ' reds ' and of the partizans of
Mieroslawski.

" All that we have heard makes it our duty
to consider seriously what may be the result
of the intrigues which will probably be renewed
by the conspirators during the coming spring.

" We shall proceed to reason by compari-
son.

" It is, in fact, the real difference which exists
between the state of things that characterized

238 Petersburg and Warsaw.

the political situation of the spring of 1863
and that which marks the present time, that
can serve as a basis for provisions as to future
probabilities.

"At the beginning of the year 1863, the
insurrection first openly declared itself. The
insurrection sprang forth, replete with all the
resources of a carefully-prepared organization,
and which had not been yet weakened by use.
The effect which the system of terrorism intro-
duced by the conspirators exercised over the
minds of the population was, for the latter, a
new sensation. The mysterious dread of a
secret association whose vengeance overtook
its victims even in the bosom of their families
was experienced with the force that a sentiment
wholly new inspires.

" Moreover, the revolutionary enthusiasm at
that time existed in its full force, and created
a belief in the most improbable results, because
it had not yet been brought into contact with
realities.

" The agricultural population, who took no
part in the movement, were stupified by the

Actual State of Poland. 239

audacity of the insurgents, who committed
excesses upon so vast a scale.

" The nobility still flattered themselves that
they would be able to guide the movement.

" Partly of their own free choice, and partly
overruled by others, the nobility were far from
foreseeing the evils that awaited them, and the
disastrous effects that the ascendancy of the
' reds ' would bring upon them.

" The defection of the government employes,
for the most part kept secret, retarded the
administration of the laws.

" The police, consisting almost exclusively
of Poles, was not yet reformed, and often
afforded impunity to criminals, either through
want of activity or through the treason of
subalterns.

" Lastly, foreign intervention put a climax
to the difficulties of the situation.

" The hope of success which this intervention
inspired doubled the strength of the insurrec-
tion, and induced the majority of the upper
and middle classes to make immense sacrifices
to prolong the existing confusion, hoping for a

24° Petersburg and Warsaw.

foreign intervention of a definite and decided
character.

" Such was the position of affairs in the
spring of 1863.

"The characteristics of the present spring
are essentially different.

"Disorder still prevails. Small bands of
brigands commit revolting excesses in localities
where they do not expect to meet the regular
troops.

" But the insurrection has been worn out in
a struggle that exhausted its means of supply,
at the same time that public feeling has ex-
perienced sensible modifications, the result of
last year's experience.

" In fact, the first outburst of enthusiasm
having passed away, all that remained to the
insurgents was the hope of foreign assistance,
confidence in a system of terrorism, and
money.

" The brilliant diplomatic career which the
Imperial Cabinet has conducted, with an ability
that has won the admiration of its antagonists
and the gratitude of the country, has annihi-

Actual State of Poland. 241

lated the malevolent project of the Powers that
were combined against us, and crushed that
last hope of the Polish revolutionists.

" The majority of those became greatly dis-
pirited who had combined with the promoters
of the movement in the hope that foreign in-
tervention would come to the aid of the Poles,
and with the unavowed hope, that the question
once openly discussed, they would succeed in
supplanting the 'reds,' for the advantage of
their own party.

"Meanwhile, the energetic and sustained
measures of the Government had weakened
the sense of terror which the secret committee
had inspired, and had replaced it by that salu-
tary fear which criminals experience in the face
of a strong administration, which will inevita-
bly overtake crime.

"The numerous arrests and banishments
which the insurrection has entailed have weak-
ened the influence of the secret committee.

" Dissension amongst the promoters of the
insurrection, numerous defections, and the
want of pecuniary means, are facts which the

242 Petersburg and Warsaw.

revolutionists regard with alarm, as is proved
by many authentic documents that have fallen
into our hands.

" The contributions levied upon the different
classes that had directly or indirectly favoured
the insurrection, as well as the pecuniary fines
imposed in special cases upon persons who
might have prevented partial crimes, have
aroused a portion of the population, and in-
duced them to exercise a surveillance, without
which the operations of the Government would
have been insufficient. On the other hand,
the excesses committed by the insurrectionists
during more than a year have turned the
greater portion of the population against them.

'•"Emboldened by the energy displayed by
the administration, this sentiment has increased
amongst the people, and resolved itself into
facts.

" The peasantry look with great satisfaction
upon the activity gradually displayed by the
Government. Reposing with confidence upon
the well-timed operations of the legal autho-
rity, they have become themselves more active

Actual State of Poland. 243

and more enterprising against the agents of
the revolution.

" The enrolment of village guards, and seve-
ral local facts, give evidence of the spirit that
animates the peasantry.

" The landed proprietors, on their side, have
in general considerably modified their opinions.
. " Depressed by the conviction of the hope-
lessness of foreign aid, threatened with the
complete destruction of their properties, en-
tailed by the insurrection, great numbers have
sought the good graces and support of our
authority, whose operations they sometimes
secretly aid by private information, and by
pointing out on their estates the abode of soli-
tary insurgents, or small bands of brigands.

" The so-called national taxes are very badly
paid ; for the most part, they are refused.

"Under the pressure of the contributions
imposed by the Government, the clergy — this
powerful auxiliary of the Polish revolution —
have already begun in certain localities to
change their tone : the black drapery is re-
moved from all the churches in the kingdom,

244 Petersburg and Warsaw.

with the exception of the archdiocese of
Warsaw.

" The numberless denunciations enregistered
by the courts-martial prove, on the one hand,
the gradual diminution of the influence of the
revolutionary terrorism, and, on the other,
despair as to the success of the insurrection.

" In short, the efforts of a remodelled and
active police are gradually producing results
which induce us to augur ultimate success.

"Assassination no longer remains unpun-
ished ; the law overtakes the crime and the
criminal.

" Such are the results obtained during the
past months, and the principal characteristics
which mark the situation of affairs now, at the
beginning of the year 1864.

" This simple statement justifies us in draw-
ing the following conclusions : —

" Making allowance for unforeseen circum-
stances which often play so important a part
in the history of the events, and in the grave
complications that sometimes arise in Europe,
we may say, with some degree of confidence,

Actual State of Poland. 245

that the Polish insurrection, left to its own
resources and deprived of external assistance,
has small prospect of lasting much longer.

" The exhaustion consequent upon a violent
struggle is such, that it would be difficult to
believe that a factitious reproduction of the
insurrectionary movement could be anything
more than isolated outbursts arising in certain
localities, and of whose repression there could
be no doubt.

" The disorganization of the revolutionary
association, and the modifications which have
taken place in public opinion, are symptoms
which do not permit us to doubt that the
Polish insurrection will gradually fade away
along that descending scale down which it has
been gliding during the past months.

"Let it be thoroughly well understood, that
the incursions of bands from Galicia and Pos-
nania must be prevented at any cost.

"The moral influence resulting from the
entrance of these bands may be productive of
more evil than the excesses by which they
might mark their passage."

246 Petersburg and Warsaw.

No. 33. Warsaw,

17/29 February, 1864.

"MONSIEUR L'AMBASSADEUR,

" I have but little t6 add to the general in-
formation which I had the honour to transmit
to your Excellency in my last communications.

"The reports lately received by the Lieu-
tenant of the Emperor state, that the detach-
ments which incessantly traverse the kingdom
rarely meet any insurgent bands.

"Detachments have been sent in various
directions in pursuit of fugitives, and already
three hundred insurgents have been sent pri-
soners to Kelce.

" The only meetings of insurgents mentioned
in these reports are those which have taken
place in the south-eastern part of the govern-
ment of Radom.

"In fact, the passage of some bands from
Galicia has been facilitated by the ice which
covered the Vistula. These bands seem to
have attracted to their ranks the marauders
and vagrants who, in the government of Ra-

Actual State of Poland. 247

dom, had succeeded in escaping the vigilance
of our authorities, and who must have found
their way singly into the south-eastern part of
this government.

" The military arrondissement of Radom is
consequently entirely freed of this class of
persons.

" As I have already had the honour to in-
form your Excellency by a telegram this day,
a band of insurgents had formed the intention
of making a coup de main against the town of
Opatow.

" Repulsed by our troops, this band was
soon put to flight by General Tchiengeri,
who having captured their chief — bearing the
pseudo-name of Topor — had him hanged in
the market-place of the above-named city.

"The re-establishment of order and tran-
quillity, which I had the honour of notifying
to your Excellency in my preceding communi-
cations, continues to progress gradually.

" Captain Baron Brunning. who was sent
upon official business into the districts of
Olkersz and of Miechow, and who has re-

248 Petersburg and Warsaw.

turned this evening to Warsaw, has traversed
these districts without an escort.

" Your Excellency is aware that these two
districts, situated on the frontiers of Galicia
and of the Duchy of Cracow, were, during the
period of the insurrection, incessantly infested
by bands of insurgents.

"I have the honour to be, with the most
profound respect, Monsieur 1'Ambassadeur,
your Excellency's

"Very humble and obedient servant,
" OSTEN-SACKEN."

" To His Excellency Baron Brunnow."

THE END.

R. CLAY, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.

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