That travelling under such circumstances was not a pleasure, and would make a man exceedingly nervous, if not absolutely ill, may well be imagined. But in spite of these and other precautions almost passing human belief, a new attempt on the Emperor’s life was made during his return trip from Livadia to Moscow. On the first of December, 1879, Alexander had arrived at Moscow safely; but about ten or fifteen minutes later a mine exploded, which had been established under the railroad track in the immediate vicinity of the depot. The explosion occurred at the moment when the second imperial train was passing. It demolished the baggage car and threw seven or eight passenger cars off the track. Fortunately nobody was seriously hurt. The Emperor and his suite were on the first train this time, while the Nihilists had supposed they would be on the second.
Less than three months later, on the seventeenth of February, 1880, the Czar was in much greater danger at St. Petersburg. At about seven o’clock P.M., on that day, as he was on the point of entering the dining-room of his palace, suddenly a terrible dynamite explosion occurred underneath the hall occupied by the Imperial Guards. The explosion was so violent that all the windows in that wing of the palace were shattered, the ceilings of the rooms in the lower story and of the hall of the guards were full of holes, and the floors torn to pieces, while the tables and the dishes in the imperial dining-room were hurled in all directions. Eight soldiers and two servants of the imperial household were killed, while forty-five were more or less seriously wounded.
This new attempt on his life, with the attending number of victims, impressed the Czar’s mind so deeply that it brought on a new attack of melancholy which his physicians were powerless to subdue. Domestic troubles added to his mental depression, and caused apprehensions of a total collapse of his mental faculties. His general health had also greatly suffered from the long continued strain of his nervous system. In June, 1880, his wife died after a lingering illness. She was a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, very handsome and highly accomplished when he married her, in 1841. But the marriage was not a happy one. For quite a number of years the Czar carried on a liaison with the beautiful Princess Dolgorouki, and shortly after the death of the Empress he contracted a morganatic marriage with her, in spite of the energetic protests of the Czarowitz and his other children. The Princess had great influence over Alexander’s decisions as a ruler; and when he seemed to have made up his mind to abdicate and retire to private life, she prevented the consummation of this design by her emphatic protests. Alexander had formed the plan to transfer the crown to his son, but only on one condition: that the Princess, his wife, should always be treated by the imperial family with the same consideration as the deceased Empress, and that her children should also be treated as brothers and sisters by the Czar. But when he informed the Princess of this plan, she flew into a passion, rejected the proposition most angrily, saying that she knew the feelings of the Czarowitz toward her too well to place any confidence in his promises, and demanded, as a proof of his affection for her, that Alexander should forever renounce his plan of abdication. Alexander therefore remained, much against his own inclination, on the throne until the day of his death, the thirteenth of March, 1881.