AN UNKNOWN MONK. 279 



sympathies of former days, which in Poland, as in 

 Russia, had ended in a reaction ; of his broken pur- 

 poses and changed life." ^ 



His body was of course carried to St Petersburg for 

 burial, but the people of Tomsk will tell you that 

 spurious corpses are easy to obtain in Kussia, and that 

 whosoever it may have been, it was not the body of 

 Alexander over which was read the royal funeral service 

 of 1825. An old Cossack officer told Mr Simpson that 

 he was a boy in St Petersburg at the time when the 

 remains of the deceased emperor were brought up from 

 the south ; and that he remembered distinctly how it 

 was quite openly remarked that the body was not that 

 of Alexander, and how it was a cause of comment at 

 the time that people were not allowed to pass by and 

 look on the face of their late emperor as he lay in state, 

 according to custom ; ^ and I was told stories to the 

 same effect in Tomsk. So much for the accredited 

 history of the death of Alexander. Now for the version 

 which is not to be found in the chronicles of recognised 

 historians. 



Not very long after the supposed death of that 

 monarch, a vagrant, having in his possession a horse of 

 a quality which did not, in the opinion of the police, 

 coincide with his humble status, turned up on the 

 eastern borders of Russia, and, as he refused to explain 

 how he came by his property, was beaten and despatched 

 across the frontier to Siberia. The first years of his life 

 in that country were spent in the neighbourhood of 

 Krasnoyarsk ; but in 1832 he moved to a village twenty 

 miles from Tomsk, where he lived a retired and ascetic 

 life for seventeen years. In 1849 he came to Tomsk 

 itself, to spend the remainder of his life amid the humble 



^ History of Eussia. Alfred Eambaud. 

 2 Sidelights on Siberia. J. Y. Simpson. 



