His Russian text has never been published, but it was 
translated out of Russian into Czech and published in 
Myhologicky sbornik, in 1955 (no. 8, pp. 68-65, and no. 
4, pp. 97-99), a mushroom journal so obscure that few 
inside Czechoslovakia see it and only we abroad. It 
seems that when Paulet refers to ‘Miiller’ he means 
Friedrich Christian Weber, whose Das Veriinderte Russ- 
land first appeared in Frankfort in 1721, and again in 
German in 1729 and 1788. An English translation, The 
Present State of Russia, came out in two volumes in 
1723, and a French version, also in two volumes, in 
1725, entitled Nouveaux Mémoires sur ( Etat présent de 
la Grande Russie ou Moscovie. Some copies of the 
French edition were wrongly bound, carrying on the 
title page by mistake the heading of a chapter Les 
Moeurs et Usages des Ostyakes, contributed by Johann 
Bernhard Miiller, a Swedish prisoner-of-war living in 
Siberia. Endowed with a rare gift of serendipity, B.P. 
Vasil/kov came across one of the misbound copies in the 
M.E. Saltykov-Shechedrin Public Library in Leningrad, 
and there in Volume II, p. 59, was the telltale quota- 
tion showing precisely where Paulet had made his mis- 
take. (Vasil/kov was the one man in millions who would 
grasp the meaning of what he had found.) The French 
source reads: 
La Czarine Douairiére, veuve du feu Czar Alexis, étant morte au 
Caréme de l’année 1715, on ouvrit son corps, & l’on trouva que 
la principale cause de sa maladie, étoit d’avoir trop mangé de ces 
champignons marinés, pour observer le jeun plus réguli¢rement. 
In the English text, Vol. I, p. 883, this is the translation: 
The Czarina-Dowager, Relict of the late Czar Alexius, dying in 
the year 1715, during Lent, her Body was opened, and it was 
found, that her Indisposition was chiefly occasioned by eating 
too much of those pickled Mushrooms, out of Devotion of strictly 
observing her Fast. 
So there is no question of poisonous mushrooms, 
{ 112 ] 
