ause she gave her whole soul
to them and sang with her voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing,
and sometimes magnificently desperate, giving much significance to words
which on paper had not aroused the suspicions of the censor. The
taste of the day was obviously still a taste for the revolution, which
retained its influence on the banks of the Neva. What she was doing was
certainly very bold, and apparently she realized how audacious she was,
because, with great adroitness, she would bring out immediately after
some dangerous phrase a patriotic couplet which everybody was anxious to
applaud. She succeeded by such means in appealing to all the divergent
groups of her audience and secured a complete triumph for herself. The
students, the revolutionaries, the radicals and the cadets acclaimed the
singer, glorifying not only her art but also and beyond everything else
the sister of the engineer Volkousky, who had been doomed to perish with
her brother by the bullets of the Semenovsky regiment. The friends of
the Court on their side could not forget that it was she who, in front
of the Kremlin, had struck aside the arm of Constantin Kochkarof,
ordered by the Central Revolutionary Committee to assassinate the Grand
Duke Peter Alexandrovitch as he drove up to the governor's house in
his sleigh. The bomb burst ten feet away, killing Constantin Kochkarof
himself. It may be that before death came he had time to hear
Annouchka cry to him, "Wretch! You were told to kill the prince, not to
assassinate his children." As it happened, Peter Alexandrovitch held
on his knees the two little princesses, seven and eight years old. The
Court had wished to recompense her for that heroic act. Annouchka had
spit at the envoy of the Chief of Police who called to speak to her
of money. At the Hermitage in Moscow, where she sang then, some of
her admirers had warned her of possible reprisals on the part of the
revolutionaries. But the revolutionaries gave her assurance at once that
she had nothing to fear. They approved her act and let her know that
they now counted on her to kill the Grand Duke some time when he was
alone; which had made Annouchka laugh. She was an enfant terrible,
whose friends no one knew, who passed for very wise, and whose lines of
intrigue were inscrutable. She enjoyed making her hosts in the private
supper-rooms quake over their meal. One day she had said bluntly to one
of the most powerful tchinovnicks of Moscow: "Yo