“...  I KNOW that Marie expects ME to do something from the inquiring way she gazes in my eyes....  She says nothing, but any man of spirit who looks into such clear, unflinching eyes under conditions such as these, will understand instinctively what is written in their suggestive depths!...  They literally SHAME me for the little I can do....  Some lounge lizards may speculate on the nature of the sentiments this grateful princess will reveal if I display sufficient ingenuity to save us all from this slowly approaching DEATH!...  How dramatic!...  How absurd!

“...  I have lately laughed at those Italian poets who bewail the isolation of their Lauras, yet, recalling my Lady Buckingham’s repeated rescues, I begin to recognize a reason for the existence of that poetic fervor which agitates the artistic heart when either its safety or its vanity is at stake."...

35.  This entry offers a little encouragement: 

“There is no such thing as physical exhaustion....  Hunger and thirst may weight us down, but with the right kind of inspiration a man can do miraculous things....  I began rolling up balls of mud from the tunnel and carrying them into the cistern until my tongue hung out of my mouth....  With those balls I started making a winding stairway around the wall of this cistern until I had a dozen steps completed ... then the girls began making the balls and bringing them in to me like muddy little hod-carriers....  My masonry took on proportions as the minutes dragged by....  Finally we have a stairway four feet wide and extending from the bottom to within four feet of the top as I write these lines with the girls sitting a few steps below me in the slowly hardening clay....  We can all hear plainly the tramping of feet on the planking overhead....  It is a kind of shuffling one hears when seated somewhere beneath the dancers in a ballroom, and it may mean that we are headed directly toward the LION’S DEN."...

36.  In this entry the Emperor speaks of Rasputin, spooks and Jews: 

“It became dark and spooky when our lights gave out.... and while we sat huddled together the subject of ‘ghosts’ came up....  ‘Ghosts!’ the ‘prisoner’ almost snarled; ’that reminds me of the Jewish propaganda against my Government....  There was hardly a Yiddish banker in the world who did not accuse ME personally of inspiring Sheglovitov to have the Jews executed for ritualistic murder; and I am sure their influence will be very strong with certain statesmen and opportunists to have my Empire dismembered when the time comes to settle the terms of peace, as poor Nilus predicted....  I wish I could show you a letter I received from a Jewish banker in New York threatening to kill my loan in America and have our existing treaties denounced unless I complied with certain Jewish demands....  I did not think it possible and ignored the letter, of course....  You may judge of my astonishment when the Jew’s threat was made good by the American