sword. When a light was brought in he was dead.

Count Pahlen had not entered the room, being engaged in guarding the doors
with a troop of soldiers: he went to call on the new emperor. Alexander
was not ignorant of the plot formed to force from his father an abdication
which had become necessary; but he had not considered, and did not
anticipate, the fatal consequences of that enterprise. Pahlen's silence
was the only reply to his questions about the Czar: the young man burst
into tears, hiding his face in his hands and heaping reproaches upon the
Governor of St. Petersburg, who still remained motionless before him. But
by this time the empress, out of her mind from sorrow, and suddenly seized
with an ill-regulated ambition, sent to announce to her son that she was
resolved to take possession of the power. Count Pahlen at once threw off
his apathy. "Enough of childish tears," said he to the young emperor;
"now, come and reign!" He then presented him to the troops, by whom he was
well received.

A few days afterwards the Emperor Alexander was crowned. "Before him
marched his grandfather's murderers," wrote Madame de Bonneuil, "beside
him those of his father, and behind him his own." Count Pahlen's ambition
was to govern the young monarch, but he was not to reap the fruits of his
crime. The empress-mother insisted upon the banishment of the murderers of
Paul I. In the retirement of his country estate, where he lived a long
time, the count on the 23rd of March made himself drunk from daybreak, in
order to pass in oblivion the dreaded anniversary which awoke in his mind
a remorse which was only slumbering. "That's the regular mode of
deposition in Russia," said Talleyrand, cynically, on hearing of the
emperor's assassination. The First Consul's anger overcame his judgment.
"The wretches!" he exclaimed; "they failed here on the 3rd Nivose, but
they have not failed in St. Petersburg." And bent on showing his spite