conquerors. At the outset
Catherine II in her correspondence speaks contemptuously of him as "a
fool in all the meaning of that word"; but presently her language
changes to a more complimentary, if still patronizing, tone, and after
some months she had him removed from the fortress and conveyed to the
Orlov palace, as a place more suited to his physically shattered
condition. He was allowed to be carried into the garden and to take
drives in the town under guard. He was provided with a good table, from
which he daily sent meals to the Polish prisoners in the fortress.
Always deft with his fingers, he whiled away the hours by working at a
turning-lathe. A wooden sugar-basin that he made during his imprisonment
is now in the Polish Museum at Rapperswil, Switzerland.

All this time he lay sick and crippled. The wounds he had carried from
Maciejowice, unskilfully tended by the Russian surgeons, remained
unhealed: grief of mind for his country did the rest. An English doctor
named Rogerson attended him. He wrote: "The physical and mental forces
of that upright man are nearly exhausted, as the result of long
sufferings. I am losing hopes of curing him. He has suffered so much in
body and soul that his organism is entirely destroyed."[2]

[Footnote 2: _op. cit_.]

Two years passed thus. In the November of 1796 there was an unusual stir
in the fortress, which to the Poles immured there could mean only one
thing: the death of their arch-enemy, Catherine II. After a few days the
suspicion was confirmed. The Empress was scarcely in her coffin before
the son she had hated, now Paul I, entered Kosciuszko's prison,
accompanied by his retinue and by the Tsarewitch, Alexander, on whom for
a transitory moment the fondest hopes of Poland were to rest, and whose
friendship with a son of the house of Czartoryski is one of the romances
of history. The Tsarewitch embraced Kosciuszko, and his father uttered
the words: "I have come to restore your liberty." The shock was so
overwhelming that the prisoner could not answer. The Tsar seated himself
by Kosciuszko's side: and then ensued this remarkable colloquy between
the Tsar of all the Russias and the hero of Polish freedom, which is
known to us more or less textually from a Russian member of the court
who was present, and also from the accounts of the Polish prisoners, who
eagerly picked up its details which Niemcewicz collected and recorded.

"I always pitied your fate," said the Tsar, wh