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The
Court is dismissed. Reclamomorta will please me by remaining with me
for the present."
When the assembly dispersed, I followed their Autocrat at his desire
into his private apartments, where, resting among a pile of cushions
and motioning me to take a place in immediate proximity to himself, he
continued the conversation in a tone and manner so exactly the same as
that he had employed in public as to show that the latter was not
assumed for purposes of monarchical stage-play, but was the natural
expression of his own character as developed under the influence of
unlimited and uncontradicted power. He only exchanged, for unaffected
interest and implied confidence, the tone of ironical doubt by which
he had rendered it out of the question for his courtiers to charge him
with a belief in that which public opinion might pronounce impossible,
while making it apparent to me that he regarded the bigotry of
scepticism with scarcely veiled contempt.
"I wish," he said, "I had half-a-dozen subjects capable of imagining
such an enterprise and hardy enough to undertake it.


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