answers are short and pithily clear. He speaks the truth, says another Pole, or he does not speak at all.[1]
His high qualities began to gain upon his conquerors. At the outset Catherine II in her correspondence speaks contemptuously of him as "a fool in all the meaning of that word"; but presently her language changes to a more complimentary, if still patronizing, tone, and after some months she had him removed from the fortress and conveyed to the Orlov palace, as a place more suited to his physically shattered condition. He was allowed to be carried into the garden and to take drives in the town under guard. He was provided with a good table, from which he daily sent meals to the Polish prisoners in the fortress. Always deft with his fingers, he whiled away the hours by working at a turning-lathe. A wooden sugar-basin that he made during his imprisonment is now in the Polish Museum at Rapperswil, Switzerland.
All this time he lay sick and crippled. The wounds he had carried from Maciejowice, unskilfully tended by the Russian surgeons, remained unhealed: grief of mind for his country did the rest. An English doctor named Rogerson attended him. He wrote: "The physical and mental forces of that upright man are nearly exhausted, as the result of long sufferings. I am losing hopes of curing him. He has suffered so much in body and soul that his organism is entirely destroyed."[2]
Two years passed thus. In the November of 1796 there was an unusual stir in the fortress, which to the Poles immured there could mean only one
