"Not yet, sire," I replied in French.
"What! here two months, and not yet a word! Why, that is outrageous. Can't you even say no in Russian?"
"I ask pardon, your majesty; I do speak Russian with my comrades."
"Well, why then, stupid, if you can speak it with your comrades, do you answer me in French when I address you in Russian?"
"Because, if I express myself incorrectly to a simple page, I am not annoyed, whereas, with your majesty—"
"Very well, that will do."
I had heard he wished nothing badly done in his presence, and I knew too little Russian to dare venture it before his majesty.
"Did you hear that?" said the emperor; and turning toward General Philosophoff, "Here is one who will never be a fool," added he, and passed on.
Nicholas I., Paulowitch, the third son of the Emperor Paul III., had never dreamed of a crown. He believed himself destined for the pompous and useless life of a grand duke. Between him and the empire were two older brothers, both young and both intelligent.
However, since his earliest youth his character had shown itself self-willed, domineering, and tyrannical, in a manner the presage of his reign and harbinger of his politics. There has been discovered among the books used in his education while he was quite a child, a volume of the History of Russia, by Karamsin, and on the margin of which are written in his own hand these remarkable words, "The Czar Ivan IV., the Terrible, was a severe but a just man, as one ought to be to govern a nation."