Page:Julian Niemcewicz - Notes of my Captivity in Russia.djvu/161

had received his education in the Military Academy at Warsaw. For more than twenty years he was Polish Ambassador at St. Petersburg; weak, submissive, and cringing, he represented an enslaved King with a suitable baseness. He married a Russian lady, but he was not, on that account, more respected by the Empress. Devoted to Stanislaus, he blindly followed all the oscillations of his uncertain and pusillanimous character. At the time of the Diet of four years, scarcely had the King delivered some speeches full of energy and patriotism, when Deboli became immediately a zealous and active minister. His despatches, although written in a confused and abstruse style, were full of sure information, and salutary advices. He did so much to distinguish himself as a patriot, that when, in 1792, the King had, in a cowardly manner, abandoned the national cause, the Russians, trampling all etiquette under foot, drove his minister from St. Petersburg, without granting him even an audience of leave. When he returned to Warsaw, at the time of the perse-