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‘I thought I might perhaps have five minutes
more to live, and awful these moments were. I
kept staring at a church with a gilt dome, which
reflected the sunbeams, and I suddenly felt as
if these beams came from the region where I
was to be myself in a few moments!
‘Then there was a general stir. I was too
short-sighted to discern anything, but I felt that
something extraordinary was happening. At
last I descried an officer, who came galloping
across the square, waving a white handkerchief.
He was sent by the emperor to announce our
pardon. Afterwards we learned that the
sentence of death had only been a threat, intended
as “a lesson not to be forgotten.” But this lesson
had fatal consequences for many of us. When
Grigorief was released from the pole, he had
become mad through the terror he had undergone
whilst waiting for the fatal shot, and he never
recovered his reason. Nor do I think that any
of us escaped without lifelong injury to his
nervous system.
‘Besides, when we were taken up to the
scaffold, they took off our clothes, so that we had spent
more than twenty minutes standing in our bare
shirts in a cold of 22 deg. Réaumur below
freezing point! When we came back to our
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