Yet this man, so rude and so haughty, evidenced occasionally great delicacy of sentiment. One very cold day, returning from a review, where he had been almost frozen, he stopped at the house of a lady, whom he knew to be in ill health, and met the doctor in the waiting-room.
"How is Madame ——?" said he to the latter.
"Very poorly, sire. The cold of St. Petersburg is killing her."
"Ah! the cold is injuring her? Feel my hands. They are frozen, are they not?"
"Very cold, sire."
"Well, I will wait here until they are warm; I would not for the world increase her malady."
And the emperor waited in this sort of an antechamber, talking to the doctor, until his hands resumed their natural warmth.
So this character, which, at first sight, appeared all of a piece, was composed of contrasts the most dissonant. Nicholas bared his breast to the revolted regiments in 1826 and recalled them to duty by this single attitude; at the time of the cholera, alone amid a populace mad with terror and exasperated by famine, a gesture from him, a single word, could constrain the delirious multitude and throw them on their knees before him; in cases of fire, so frequent at St. Petersburg, and under the burning beams, a hundred times he uselessly risked his life; yet on another occasion, when the safety of an empire depended upon him, he resolutely refused to repair to Sebastopol.
His long reign was fatal to Russia. For nearly thirty years it accomplished nothing. During the lifetime of Nicholas, the wheel-work of the machine moved regularly under his powerful hand, the cogs upon which he impressed the movement never being completely paralyzed. But the evil, being hidden, was not the less deep or real. Under this show of factitious strength, the downfall was already visible, and the approaching disaster keenly felt. The army, upon which Nicholas concentrated all his attention and intelligence—the army, his strength, his hope, his pride, began to be disorganized under the influence of an administration without control. Alone, the will of the czar sustained the edifice, and his pride sustained his will. And this word pride embodies to my mind the character, the conduct, the whole politics, of the Emperor Nicholas. His ruling passion was pride, a pride incommensurable, a pride such as neither Louis XIV., Henry VIII., nor Solyman the Magnificent—these three crowned representatives of capital sins—could ever equal. The idea of humiliation would leave him smiling, so entirely he believed such an event impossible. It may be truly said that he never submitted, for the first repulse he had to suffer killed him.