Yet many repaired to this quiet, silent palace, to know whom Biron would
perhaps have given princedoms and millions! But no one was there to
betray them to the regent; they were very silent and very cautious in
the palace of the Prince of Brunswick and his wife the Princess Anna
Leopoldowna.

It was, as we have said, about four weeks after the commencement of the
regency of the Duke of Courland, when a sedan-chair was set down before
a small back door of the Duchess Anna Leopoldowna's palace; it had
been borne and accompanied by four serfs, over whose gold-embroidered
liveries, as if to protect them from the weather, had been laid a
tolerably thick coat of dust and sweat. Equally splendid, elegant, and
unclean was the chair which the servants now opened for the purpose of
aiding their age-enfeebled master to emerge from it. That person,
who now made his appearance, was a shrunken, trembling, coughing old
gentleman; his small, bent, distorted form was wrapped in a fur cloak
which, somewhat tattered, permitted a soiled and faded under-dress
to make itself perceptible, giving to the old man the appearance of
indigence and slovenliness. Nothing, not even the face, or the thin and
meagre hands he extended to his servants, was neat and cleanly; nothing
about him shone but his eyes, those gray, piercing eyes with their fiery
side-glances and their now kind and now sly and subtle expression. This
ragged and untidy old man might have been taken for a beggar, had not
his dirty fingers and his faded neck-tie, whose original color was
hardly discoverable, flashed with brilliants of an unusual size, and had
not the arms emblazoned upon the door of his chair, in spite of the dust
and dirt, betrayed a noble rank. The arms were those of the Ostermann
family, and this dirty old man in the ragged cloak was Count Ostermann,
the famous Russian statesman, the son of a German preacher, who had
managed by wisdom, cunning, and intrigue to continue in place under five