se of the multitude and soon
he had become the main "attraction" of the Congress while Metternich and
Talleyrand and Castlereagh (the very able British representative) sat
around a table and drank a bottle of Tokay and decided what was actually
going to be done. They needed Russia and therefore they were very polite
to Alexander, but the less he had personally to do with the actual work
of the Congress, the better they were pleased. They even encouraged his
plans for a Holy Alliance that he might be fully occupied while they
were engaged upon the work at hand.

Alexander was a sociable person who liked to go to parties and meet
people. Upon such occasions he was happy and gay but there was a very
different element in his character. He tried to forget something which
he could not forget. On the night of the 23rd of March of the year 1801
he had been sitting in a room of the St. Michael Palace in Petersburg,
waiting for the news of his father's abdication. But Paul had refused
to sign the document which the drunken officers had placed before him
on the table, and in their rage they had put a scarf around his neck
and had strangled him to death. Then they had gone downstairs to tell
Alexander that he was Emperor of all the Russian lands.

The memory of this terrible night stayed with the Tsar who was a very
sensitive person. He had been educated in the school of the great French
philosophers who did not believe in God but in Human Reason. But Reason
alone could not satisfy the Emperor in his predicament. He began to hear
voices and see things. He tried to find a way by which he could square
himself with his conscience. He became very pious and began to take
an interest in mysticism, that strange love of the mysterious and the
unknown which is as old as the temples of Thebes and Babylon.

The tremendous emotion of the great revolutionary era had influenced the
character of the people of that day in a strange way. Men and women who
had lived through twenty years of anxiety and fear were no longer quite
normal. They jumped whenever the door-bell rang. It might mean the news
of the "death on the field of honour" of an only son. The phrases about
"brotherly love" and "liberty" of the Revolution were hollow words in
the ears of sorely stricken peasants. They clung to anything that might
give them a new hold on the terrible problems of life. In their grief
and misery they were easily imposed upon by a large number of imposters