3622. You can see from the forgoing that I am the Tsar of
the Russians, by the express will of the Almighty, because either He put me
here on my throne, or God forbid, there is no God, and this entire thousand
years of elaborately decorated architecture, grand hallways with gilded
mirrors, ceremonies with ermine capes studded with diamonds and rubies, is just
a big pathetic and very expensive farce.
3623. Katuzov had been listening thoughtfully and quietly
through the Tsar’s sermon, for a sermon is what you might say it was. It was a
meditation on the will of the Lord, a theological inquiry into how God makes
his will known on the earth. Everyone knows that God works in mysterious ways,
and the Tsar was theorizing on just what those mysterious ways might consist
of.
3624. Katuzov was paying careful attention to what was being
said, and as often happens in a theological discussion of any sort, he felt joyous
agreement with what the Tsar was saying and at the same time other ideas came
creeping into his head like little bugs crawling around on some fruit, and
these ideas did not completely agree with the thesis of the Monarch.
3425. Since he knew that Tsar Nicholas valued the
independent thought of his ministers he ventured to propose a small theological
thought of his own saying. “I understand that God must obviously take special
care of his royal children, but the question that troubles me is, since he
created the poor ignorant and benighted surf’s child with just as much care and
attention to detail, wouldn’t he be just as perturbed and upset by its death as
the death of any royal child.”
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