To-day, a Dutch merchant’s wife, who died of dropsy, was buried. The Tsar himself performed the operation of tapping her. They say her death was caused less by illness than by the operation. The Tsar was present at both funeral and commemoration banquet. He drank and enjoyed himself vastly. He considers himself a great surgeon. Persons about him unlucky enough to have a swelling or gathering do their best to conceal it, for fear the Tsar should begin cutting it. He has a strange liking for anatomy. He cannot see a body without having it dissected, and examines post mortem all the bodies of his relatives.
He delights in drawing teeth, having learnt the art in Holland from a travelling dentist. There is a bagful of rotten teeth extracted by the imperial forceps preserved in the Kunst-Kammer here.
In the face of suffering he displays cynical curiosity and a cynical kindheartedness. He has himself performed an intestinal operation on his page, an Arab.
His whole nature is a combination of strength and weakness. This is apparent at once even in his face: terrible eyes from which nothing escapes, one look of which suffices to make people swoon; lips, thin, delicate, almost feminine, with a cunning smile; a chin, soft, round, plump, with a dimple.
We are positively sick of hearing about the hat pierced with bullets at Poltava: I have no doubt that he can be brave, especially when victorious. All victors are brave. But has he always been as brave as it is believed?
The Saxon Engineer Hallart, who took part in the Narva campaign of 1700, tells me, that when the Tsar knew of the approach of Charles XII, he made over the command of the army to the Duc de Croy, with instructions hurriedly written, bearing neither date, nor seal, quite unintelligible, confused, and himself in great perturbation quitted the scene of action.
The Swedish prisoner, Count Pipper, has shown me a medal struck by the Swedes; on one side the Tsar is warming his hands at the fire of his cannons which are sending shells into the besieged Narva. The inscription is—“And Peter stood at the fire and warmed himself,” an allusion to the Apostle Peter in the court of the high priest! On the other side Russians are represented retreating from Narva; Peter in front, his crown tumbling from his head, his sword thrown away, wipes his tears with a handkerchief; and the inscription runs—“And going out, he wept bitterly.”
All this may be slander; yet why has no one even dared to invent slanders about Alexander or Caesar? Something similarly strange happened during the Pruth campaign. At the most dangerous moment, just before the battle, the Tsar was about to leave the army for the rear, under pretext of bringing up fresh forces. That he did not leave was only due to the retreat being cut off. He wrote to the Senate—that never, since he had been in service, had he been in such despair. Does not this again almost justify the legend that “going out, he wept bitterly?”
Blumentrost says that doctors know more about heroes than ever will go down to posterity;—it appears the Tsar cannot endure the slightest physical pain. During a serious illness which was expected to result in death, he was anything but heroic. “It is hardly credible,” exclaimed a Russian who had been praising the Tsar in my presence, “that a great and fearless hero should be afraid of so insignificant an insect as a cockroach.” When the Tsar travels about Russia, new huts are erected for him to sleep in, as it is difficult to find in Russian villages a dwelling without cockroaches. He is also afraid of spiders and other insects. I myself once observed how at the sight of a cockroach he trembled, his face became pale and contorted, as at a ghost or some supernatural monster; another moment and he would have swooned or fallen into a fit, like a tremulous woman. O to play a trick upon him, like those he plays on others! He would probably die of fright if he were stripped and half a dozen spiders and cockroaches were let loose on him. No doubt historians would never believe that the conqueror of Charles XII died from the touch of a cockroach’s legs. This dread in the presence of a small harmless creature is astonishing in a great Tsar before whom everybody trembles. I remembered the teaching about monads by Leibnitz; it almost would seem that it was not their physical, but their metaphysical pre-existent nature, which is alien to the Tsar’s nature. His fear was not only ludicrous but awful to me: it seemed as though I had suddenly penetrated some mystery.