about three o'clock
The capital teemed with Germans like Stürmer and Fredericks , traitors like Protopopoff and Soukhomlinoff , men like Azeff , Guerassimoff and Kurtz -- one day the bosom friend of Ministers and powerful noblemen , and the next cast into the fortress of Peter and Paul -- Rogogin , the sycophant Raeff -- whom Rasputin had made Procurator of the Holy Synod -- and the drunken `` saint '' Mitia the Blessed -- at last dismissed -- spiritualists , charlatans , and cranks . Upon such fine society was the Throne of the Romanoffs based ! Was it any wonder that it was already tottering preparatory to its fall ? I left Peterhof with Rasputin at about three o'clock that afternoon , and on our return to the Poltavskaya I spoke over the telephone , at the monk 's orders , to Doctor Badmayev , the expert herbalist who prepared those secret drugs with which Madame Vyrubova regularly doped the little Tsarevitch , keeping him in a constant state of ill-health and in such a condition that he puzzled the most noted physicians in Europe . Badmayev , a small , ferret-eyed man , his features of Tartar cast , came and dined with us , after which Rasputin signed a cheque for twenty-eight thousand roubles , a sum to which `` the doctor '' was entitled under an agreement . Well did I know that the sum in question was payment for his active assistance in supplying certain drugs of which the monk in turn declared that he himself held the formula . The drugs -- which he pretended to be the secret of the priests of Tibet -- were those which he doled out in small quantities to his sister-disciples , and which produced insensibility to physical pain , drugs which were so baneful and pernicious that the monk always warned me against them , and never took any himself .