Great natural calamities often have a softening effect upon excited masses.
The "great power," the people, and the "little master," the Emperor, made friends again in the general distress.
The storm of November, 1824, had been a universal calamity. History knows no other so wide-spreading in its devastating effects. Not only did it lay St. Petersburg in ruins, but it raged throughout Asia and inundated the shores of California. Sailors saw the clear sea in mid-ocean thick with mud and slime; from India to Syria flourishing towns were laid in the dust by earthquakes; volcanoes burst forth in the Greek Archipelago; in Germany many springs were dried up. The whole world was in a state of upheaval. It was no time to think of revolutions.
Political secret societies changed themselves into philanthropic union. Party spirit died out. The poor went unhesitatingly to claim relief from the rich, and the doors of the rich were ungrudgingly opened to them. The incitements of the "Irreconcilables" found no fruitful ground. Prince Ghedimin and Araktseieff vied with each other in their efforts to relieve the distress of the people. Each impartially scattered his hundred thousand of rubles abroad: the one forgetting that his aim had been to free, the other to oppress, the people. The people now were in need of neither sword nor chains—only of bread.
Nor were the ladies of St. Petersburg backward in relieving the distress caused by the inundations. Princess Ghedimin presented her diamonds to the committee, the sale of which brought them in thirty thousand rubles, while Zeneida gave a concert at the Exchange for the sufferers, the tickets for which sold for enormous prices, and which realized forty thousand rubles. Prince Ghedimin presented his wife with diamonds double the value of those she had given away. Zeneida received a wreath of laurel from the jeunesse dorée of St. Petersburg and an ode from Pushkin. Thus once more had Korynthia lost the game, and her adversary had triumphed.
Those days of tribulation had made the Czar more reserved than ever. His melancholy had dated from the day on which he had witnessed the burning of Moscow, his capital; and now it had been his fate to witness the ruin of his second capital. One had been destroyed by fire, the other by water. Waking and sleeping, the dread visions were before him.
But the saddest sight to him of all was that pale child's face, to which nothing brought animation. One day he said to Sir James Wylie:
"It is vain to try and cure me; my sickness lies within, not without. Cure Sophie, and I shall be cured."
"Tell me frankly. Have you no hope?"