the difference in station between the German
surgeon and the French ambassador, it is
undeniable that Elizabeth showed her sense
of the services of Lestoc as gratefully and
generously as she had shown her sense of the
services of the Marquis. The ex-surgeon
was raised at once to the position of the
chief favourite and the most powerful man
about the Court. Besides the privileges
which he shared equally with the highest
nobles of the period, he was allowed access
to the Empress on all private as well as on
all public occasions. He had a perpetual
right of entry into her domestic circle which
was conceded to no one else; and he held a
position, on days of public reception, that
placed him on an eminence to which no
other man in Russia could hope to attain.
Such was his position; and, strange to say,
it had precisely the same maddening effect
on his vanity which the prospect of an
imperial alliance had exercised over the
vanity of the marquis. Lestoc's audacity
became ungovernable; his insolence knew
no bounds. He abused the privileges
conferred upon him by Elizabeth's grateful
regard, with such baseness and such indelicacy,
that the Empress, after repeatedly
cautioning him in the friendliest possible
terms, found herself obliged, out of regard
to her own reputation and to the
remonstrances which assailed her from all the
persons of her Court, to deprive him of the
privilege of entry into her private apartments.

This check, instead of operating as a
timely warning to Lestoc, irritated him into
the commission of fresh acts of insolence, so
wanton in their nature that Elizabeth at
last lost all patience, and angrily reproached
him with the audacious ingratitude of his
behaviour. The reproach was retorted by
Lestoc, who fiercely accused the Empress of
forgetting the great services that he had
rendered her, and declared that he would
turn his back on her and her dominions,
after first resenting the contumely with
which he had been treated by an act of
revenge that she would remember to the
day of her death.

The vengeance which he had threatened
proved to be the vengeance of a forger and
a cheat. The banker in St. Petersburg who
was charged with the duty of disbursing the
sums of state money which were set apart
for the Empress's use, received an order, one
day, to pay four hundred thousand ducats, to
a certain person, who was not mentioned by
name, but who, it was stated, would call,
with the proper credentials, to receive the
money. The banker was struck by this
irregular method of performing the
preliminaries of an important matter of
business, and he considered it to be his duty to
show the document which he had received
to one of the Ministers. Secret inquiries
were immediately set on foot, and they ended
in the discovery that the order was a false
one, and that the man who had forged it
was no other than Lestoc.

For a crime of this kind the punishment
was death. But the Empress had declared,
on her accession, that she would sign no
warrant for the taking away of life during
her reign, and, moreover, she still generously
remembered what she had owed in former
times to Lestoc. Accordingly, she changed
his punishment to a sentence of exile to
Siberia, with special orders that the life of
the banished man should be made as easy
to him as possible. He had not passed
many years in the wildernesses of Siberia,
before Elizabeth's strong sense of past
obligation to him, induced her still further to
lighten his punishment by ordering that he
should be brought back to St. Petersburg
and confined in the fortress there, where her
own eyes might assure her that he was
treated with mercy and consideration. It is
probable that she only intended this change
as a prelude to the restoration of his liberty;
but the future occasion for pardoning him
never came. Shortly after his return to
St. Petersburg, Lestoc ended his days in the
prison of the fortress.

So the two leaders of the Russian
revolution lived, and so they died. It has been
said, and said well, that the only sure proof of
a man's strength of mind is to be discovered
by observing the manner in which he bears
success. History shows few such remarkable
examples of the truth of this axiom, as are
afforded by the lives of the Marquis de la
Chétardie and the German surgeon Lestoc.
Two stronger men in the hour of peril and
two weaker men in the hour of security have
not often appeared in this world to vanquish
adverse circumstances like heroes, and to be
conquered like cowards afterwards by nothing
but success.

OPIUM.
CHAPTER THE FIRST. INDIA.

IT not unfrequently happens that—amid
the storms of party, hostile divisions, bitter
speeches, parliamentary disruptions, dissolved
sessions, hustings' agitations, cabinet
reconstructions, plausible promises—the plain
facts of a large international question are
little understood by the people. The present
outbreak with China is not exactly an opium
war, yet opium gives flavour to it, and opium
chests are Pandora-boxes whence much
mischief flies out to trouble the Oriental world.
What opium is, and how it is used; who gave
it, and where; who buy it, and why; who
pay for it, and how; who fight about it, and
when—are questions that we ought, for
reasons presently to be shown, to be well able to
answer in England, since they bear very
closely on our relation with a hundred
million East Indians and three hundred millions
Chinese. An attempt is here made—in an