WHO SET FIRE TO MOSCOW?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13730, 22 April 1908, Page 9

WHO SET FIRE TO MOSCOW?

The question of who set fire to Moscow and so tinned Napoleon's great triumph into the most bitter defeat, has always been of international interest. Count Theodore liostopehine, Governor-General of Moscow in 1812, was almost immediately credited with the- larnic recklessness of the order. But in 1823 he published a pamphlet, entitled "The Truth Concerning the Great Fire of Moscow," in which he deliberately repudiated having had anything to do with the matter. It therefore remained more or less of a mystery. Now, his granddaughter, the Comlesso Lydie liostopehine, in a very intimate and human study of her grandfather's life, asserts that he did, as was originally supposed, set fire to the town, and that his denial was due to the influence exerted over him by his wife, whom he adored. THE BEAUTIFUL COUNTESS. The story of this romantic and in the end tragic marriage makes interesting psychological reading. The Countess liostopehine was a delightful looking woman, for whom her husband felt something like infatuation. To him she Was not only adorable, but the perfect woman. At the time of the burning of Moscow, when he had sent- her and the children to a distant province for safety, lie wrote her the love letters one might expect from a young, enthusiastic man to a bride of less than, a year'. When the town was once mere safe he begged her to come back "to a husband who worships you, and who respects you be; : ond all utterance." RETRIBUTION IN A WILL. This kind of passionate adoration breaks out in all his correspondence with | her, though in 1812 Rostopeliinc was a man of forty-seven and his wife a woman [of thirty-live, who _ had already given . him six children. No domestic life could ; have seemed more absolutely sincere as ; well as tender than that of these two. } And suddenly all confidence, all respect — ' everything, in fact, upon which happiness had been built—foundered for the count. The wife, who for years had been the embodiment of saintly truth for him was, he discovered secretly, no longer of the orthodox religion, but, while outwardly professing to believe in the same faith as himself, was privately following the tenets of Roman Catholicism and declaring her husband a heretic and doomed-to eternal perdition. The shock was so great that the count never recovered from it. But though from that moment he became morose, embittered, and unhappy, he never spoke on the subject, but kept the secret of his discovery until the day of his death. His wife was to discover the immense change in his feelings for her through his will, and through Ids leaving his youngest son. then still a child, to the care of the Emperor. Originally he had made a will leaving everything to his wife; upon the discovery of the profound deceit of her relation'-! with him the unhappy man made another, leaving her only the amount customarily received by widows if no will is made at all.