CHAPTER XI
It was at this time I first became intimate with a certain young lion cub destined before many years were passed—though few guessed it as yet—to become a very great and uncouth beast, and to startle the world with very loud roarings. Let me draw a picture of the said beast, whose name was Peter Alexeyevitch, the younger son of the Tsar Alexis.
‘You shall come and show my fellows how to ride,’ he had said to me, and to Preobrajensky I went, little dreaming how curious and suggestive a state of affairs I should find there. At Preobrajensky, but a few miles from Moscow, the younger Tsar lived with his mother, the Tsaritsa Nathalia, whose authority, since the Streltsi insurrection, had declined to zero, having given place to that of the Regent Sophia and her lover, Vassili Galitsin.
In this retreat mother and son lived almost undisturbed by the duties of young Peter’s high position, for it was the policy of Sophia to keep the Tsar in the background, causing him to visit Moscow only on those rare occasions of ceremony when the presence of the nominal heads of the realm was absolutely necessary. Peter was allowed to live as he would—his vices to have free run, his follies to remain unchecked, in the hope that his subjects might thus behold him develop into an unworthy prince, on whose behalf it would be foolish to overturn a better if less legitimate order of things.
And, indeed, there were few at this time who watched the growth of this prince with any particular interest, as of one destined to great things. Whether he himself guessed his own greatness or no I cannot tell, though it is certain that it was possible to gather from an occasional remark from his lips that he was at least awake, and that the present position of politics and its possible development in his favour had not altogether escaped him.
I found him among grooms and cook boys, a motley company of his chosen companions, the base lump being leavened by the presence of a few sons of well-known Boyars. These were one and all members of the ‘Pleasure Regiment’ which it was Peter’s delight at this time to keep and to train: an odd assortment indeed of young moujiks, servants upon the estate, young Boyars and dvoryanins, and every lad with a taste for soldiering or for wild living who had happened to hear of and be attracted by the half-serious, all-boyish activity of the young Tsar at Preobrajensky.
I found him drinking beer among the stable lads and moujiks who formed his chosen circle of friends and officers, and though assuredly Peter Alexeyevitch gave at that time scarcely a hint of the greatness that was in him, being as yet but in his sixteenth or seventeenth year, and with apparently little seriousness of thought about him, yet I felt marvellously attracted by the youth, believing that I saw in him more than I had been taught at Moscow to credit him withal, where it was the fashion to cry him down as a prince of little promise, given to excess of every kind, but possessing no solidity of character, no ambition, no sense of the responsibility of his position and of its duties. ‘He is a fool!’ Galitsin had said in my hearing, ‘a fool with many vices; one who, without the wisdom of the Regent to restrain him, might be a danger to the State.’
As to his personal appearance, this was most striking. Tall beyond belief, lanky, somewhat round in the shoulder, long-armed, dark-haired, large-eyed, round-faced, pleasant in expression until the moment when some word or action of his companion’s or even some thought of his own aroused a feeling of anger, when at once his eyes became harsh and cruel like a savage beast’s, and his brow would knit and his mouth scowl. At such a moment too, his head would turn with a spasmodic jerk over his shoulder as though he would look at his heel, and sometimes he would grasp the nearest object with his hands—whether a man or a piece of furniture—as if to steady himself.
During these paroxysms Peter Alexeyevitch was a dangerous neighbour, having little control over himself. I have heard it said at the Russian Court that he is not to be blamed for such attacks, which were the simple result of those scenes of horror and carnage to which he was condemned at the age of ten by the excesses of the Streltsi, when his young feet were dragged by them through the blood of his uncles, his mother’s brothers, the Naryshkins, and when he was a personal witness of the murders of Dolgorouki, Matveyeff, and other victims.
For myself I have rarely seen him in a fit of passion, for it happened that he was pleased to take a fancy for me from our first acquaintance, and was ever kind and gracious towards me.