"So, then, Constantine is not Czar, but Nicholas. That is plain." Pushkin said this in a tone from which it was easy to infer that it was a matter of indifference to him.
"Not quite so plain as you think. Grand Duke Nicholas refuses to accept the succession. He is a follower of the old régime, which suffers no changes, and now the war of high-mindedness runs high between St. Petersburg and Warsaw. Grand Duke Michael, the third brother, acting as intermediary, goes from one brother to the other with the request that he should accept the crown."
"Anyway, a display of great brotherly love, unexampled in the world's history. Up to now princes have been more apt to dispute a crown!"
"And what makes the farce complete is that two accomplished facts, contradictory to each other, have to be surmounted. It is an accomplished fact that Constantine has been proclaimed Czar and cannot relinquish the throne; and, equally so, that he has taken to wife Johanna Grudzinska, a Pole, a Catholic, and only of aristocratic birth, three circumstances which render it impossible for her husband to wear the crown. And so, on the one hand, Constantine cannot relinquish the throne; on the other, he cannot ascend it."
"For all I care, let him stay where he is."
"You, in your Tusculum, can afford to make cheap jokes; but what are all the poor devils about the court to do in such an imbroglio?"
"Especially as his wife is more to the Czarevitch than his crown!"
"No more of that! With that overdrawn conjugal love we do not throw sand into other people's eyes. I had opportunity of putting that love to the proof. I assure you that it needed no magic to have led Frau Johanna to forget her Grand Ducal lover for a knightly one. At that time she had not the right to call him husband. Ah! had not a more powerful feeling swayed my heart"—a suppressed sigh and secret side-glance at Bethsaba here explained his words—"truly in my hands would have lain the power to present Grand Duke Constantine the nineteen crowns of Russia—even a twentieth. It only needed me to have stayed one day longer in the gardens of the lovely Lazienka."
Pushkin was disgusted at this bragging. He knocked the ashes out of his pipe. Galban's boasting he valued at the same rate as those ashes.
"I happen to know, however, that the Czarevitch and his wife are so devotedly attached to each other that Constantine would not exchange Johanna's head-dress for Rurik's crown."