Note 19 — EMPIRE OF RUSSIA (continued 8)
Reading edition
Marshal Munich was eighty-two years of age. Elizabeth had sent him to Siberian exile. Peter liberated him. Upon his return to Moscow, after twenty years of exile, he found one son living, and twenty-two grandchildren and great grandchildren whom he had never seen. When the heroic old man presented himself before the tzar dressed in the sheep-skin coat he had worn in Siberia, Peter said,
"I hope, notwithstanding your age, you may still serve me."
Munich replied, "Since your majesty has brought me from darkness to light, and called me from the depths of a cavern, to admit me to the foot of the throne, you will find me ever ready to expose my life in your service. Neither a tedious exile nor the severity of a Siberian climate have been able to extinguish, or even to damp, the ardor I have formerly shown for the interests of Russia and the glory of its monarch."