Lord, help Russia! Thrice-pure Mother of God protect and intercede for us!
O martyrs of these latter days, Christ is about to rise again! Christ is, and will dwell within you, and you will say, Amen! to His Kingdom.
CHAPTER III
THE DIARY OF FRÄULEIN ARNHEIM
With these words the diary of Tsarevitch Alexis closed. I was present when he threw it into the fire.
December 31.
To-day died the last Russian Tsaritsa. Marfa Matveevna, the widow of Peter’s stepbrother, Fédor Alexeyevitch. At foreign courts she had been considered dead long ago; ever since her husband’s death, during thirty-two years, she had lived half mad, a prisoner in her rooms, and never showed herself to anybody.
She was buried at dusk with great pomp. The funeral procession moved between two rows of torches planted in the ice all the way along from her house, (she lived next to us near the Church of All the Sorrowing) up to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, across the Neva on the ice. It was the same way along which her Highness’s body had been borne two months or more ago in the frigate of death. Then the first foreign Princess was buried, now the last Russian Tsaritsa.