At last, one August morning, it began to be rumoured in Peterhof, where the Court was spending the summer, that a happy event was impending. Courtiers and Ministers and ladies-in-waiting assembled in the halls of the Palace in expectation of the announcement of the birth of the fifth child of the Imperial pair. They did not wait very long. As the clock struck noon a doctor entered the room and told the assemblage that at last an Heir was born to the Throne of All the Russias.

Great was the joy in the Imperial Family, and great was the excitement in St. Petersburg when the guns of the fortress proclaimed by three hundred shots that the succession to the Throne of the Romanoffs was so far assured in the direct line. But through the country as a whole the event, which under different circumstances would have been hailed with joy, passed almost unperceived, so much was the public mind absorbed by the grave political events that were taking place. Russia was mourning too many of its children to welcome with anything but indifference the boy whose advent into the world had filled with such joy the hearts and the lives of Nicholas II. and Alexandra Feodorovna.

CHAPTER XII
THE DEATH OF MADEMOISELLE VIETROFF

I did not like to interrupt the preceding chapter by reproducing in full the proclamation that was distributed among the public after the death of Mademoiselle Vietroff. I shall quote it now, believing that it constitutes an historical document worthy of remembrance in spite of the harrowing details it contains. It is remarkable because it had certainly a visible influence upon the subsequent events that led to the outbreak of the Revolution in 1905. It was very often mentioned as the first appeal of the student classes to the masses, who up to that time had not participated in the anarchist movement; and as such it may not be devoid of some interest for the reader.

This is the document. It was circulated, just as I reproduce it, by thousands of copies, without any signature:

“On the 12th of February of the present year (1897) died in the fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, after two days of terrible sufferings, a student of the Higher School for Women, Marie Feodorovna Vietroff. According to the words of the Assistant Public Prosecutor, on the 10th of February she threw the contents of a paraffin lamp over her clothes and bedding and set fire to them afterwards. As we therefore see, awful cases of people burning themselves to death, among other terrible ways of committing suicide, as the only means of escaping a doom more horrible than death itself, are again occurring.

“The deceased lady was imprisoned not so very long ago (during the night of the 22nd of December). She had been accused merely of secreting illegal literature. The only punishment she could legally have incurred, therefore, would have been to be sent beyond the limits of the town of St. Petersburg.

“According to people who knew her well, she was a person of very strong personality, and would not shrink from even penal servitude in defence of her views. There was nothing in her disposition which could have led one to think that she would have proved herself to be such a coward as to feel frightened at the future that seemed to lie in store for her. She was not at all of a melancholy disposition. The letters which she wrote to her friends from her prison, and the diary which she kept during that time, tend to confirm that belief. It was also only latterly that the visits which her sister had been allowed to pay had been interrupted; and during these visits she was always very cheerful.

“What sorrow, therefore, and what despair could have led her to put an end to her life in such a horrible way?

“She is the only one that could have replied to this momentous question; she, or else those who were the direct cause of it. But she has already settled her accounts with this life, and, of course, neither the witnesses nor the instigators of her fearful death will give a true account of the circumstances that brought it about. It is only the few words that have escaped the lips of fellow-prisoners of her (who since her death have been transferred from the fortress to the house of preventive detention) which give a faint inkling of the truth and from which we can surmise the details of the tragedy of Marie Vietroff’s death, and of the circumstances that drove this energetic girl to decide upon the step which she took. We can only make shrewd guesses that this death was but the final end to a moral tragedy of the most painful and awful kind. Our presumptions are justified, if we take into consideration the personality of the deceased on the one hand, and the habits and customs in our prisons on the other. The tactics observed by the authorities in charge of these establishments have been sufficiently demonstrated in more than one case where individuals have been driven to desperation, or tortured to within an ace of death, and then sent out of prison to end their lives, where the authorities could not be blamed for the result, thus carefully evading the consequences that might have resulted had their victims succumbed within prison walls.