The king was sleeping in a chateau, two miles from Moscow.

At midnight the conspirators, twenty in number, having inflamed themselves with brandy, burst into the house and rushed towards the chamber where the aged monarch was reposing.

The clamor awoke the king, and he sprang from the bed just as two of the conspirators entered his chamber.

Aged as the monarch was, with one blow of his vigorous arm he felled the foremost to the floor.

The comrade of the assassin, in the confusion, thinking it was the king who had fallen, plunged his poignard to the hilt in his companion's breast.