The Assassination of Paul I enters the narrative not as a settled historical scene but as a question that Antoine Roquentin tries, and fails, to answer through his study of the Marquis de Rollebon. Several accounts place Rollebon among the conspirators, yet their inconsistencies leave his exact role unproved. As the evidence branches into hypotheses about payment, persuasion, and a possible disguise, the episode becomes a demonstration of the difference between reconstructing the past and arranging documents into a convincing story.

The assassination as a historical problem

Rollebon’s biography initially supplies the kind of dramatic outline that seems to invite a decisive explanation. The notes Roquentin first reads describe an adventurer who intrigued at court, travelled widely, and later attempted to assassinate Paul I. They give him a place in the history of political conspiracy, but do not explain what he did during the assassination or establish the chain of evidence behind the claim.

When Roquentin returns to the question, the difficulty is not a simple lack of records. He has letters, memoir fragments, secret reports, and police records, yet they do not combine into a consistent portrait. They neither directly contradict one another nor agree enough to settle what happened. The more material he gathers, the less securely it seems to point to a single person or motive.

Roquentin nevertheless considers a possible reconstruction: Rollebon actively participated in the assassination, then accepted an important espionage mission in the East from the Czar, while repeatedly betraying Alexander to Napoleon. At the same time, he might have corresponded with the Comte d’Artois, sending information too minor to compromise his other activities. Roquentin also entertains the possibility that Rollebon supplied rifles to Asian principalities for personal profit. Each proposal can be made to fit the available facts; none is thereby proved.

Accounts of Rollebon’s role

One account, attributed to Tcherkoff, makes Rollebon an agent of Count Pahlen, who allegedly wanted Paul killed rather than merely deposed and imprisoned. Alexander, by contrast, appears to have favoured the less violent outcome. According to Tcherkoff, Rollebon’s particular task was to persuade the conspirators toward assassination, visiting them individually and using theatrical mime to kindle or intensify their desire to murder the Czar.

Roquentin resists this version. He distrusts Tcherkoff as a witness, describing him in his notes as a half-mad, sadistic magician who turns events into something demonic. The alleged performance also seems out of character to Roquentin: he imagines Rollebon as cold and insinuating, someone who exposes little and succeeds through pale, reasoned methods with politicians rather than through melodramatic displays. That interpretation is not independent proof, however; it is Roquentin’s attempt to make the historical figure conform to a coherent character.

A separate anecdote complicates that portrait. In a story reported by Ségur, Rollebon persuades a dying pantheist to accept Christian last rites, not by argument but by frightening him with Hell. The story suggests that Rollebon could exert powerful psychological influence, giving some plausibility to Tcherkoff’s claim that he could affect other people’s conduct. Yet it does not establish that he incited the conspirators, and Roquentin’s own uncertainty about Rollebon remains intact.

The curfew, the possible disguise, and the aftermath

The practical question of how Rollebon could have taken part leads Roquentin to reconstruct the night’s movements. An officer friend reportedly escorted the Marquis to his door that evening. If Rollebon went out again, he would have had to cross St. Petersburg under Paul’s nighttime order: after nine o’clock, passersby were to be arrested, except for midwives and doctors.

Roquentin considers the legend that Rollebon disguised himself as a midwife to reach the palace. The idea is absurd, but he cannot dismiss it as impossible: Rollebon might have been capable of such a stratagem. The distinction matters. Roquentin says Rollebon was not at home on the night of the assassination, and treats that as apparently established; the disguise remains conjecture, not a documented account of how he reached the scene.

The aftermath also leaves room for suspicion without resolving responsibility. Alexander may have suspected Rollebon strongly, since one of his official acts was to send the Marquis away on the vague pretext of a mission to the Far East. The order can be read as a response to suspicion, but Roquentin does not produce proof that Alexander knew Rollebon had participated in the killing. Exile and the alleged eastern mission therefore add context to the mystery without closing it.

Evidence, conjecture, and narrative meaning

The episode’s central reversal is epistemic: a larger archive does not necessarily yield a firmer past. Roquentin can construct an account that accommodates the testimonies, but recognizes that the order comes from him. The facts seem to adapt to the arrangement he wants to impose; no answering certainty comes from Rollebon himself. What appears at first to be historical reconstruction risks becoming, in Roquentin’s judgment, an act of imagination.

That doubt affects the novel’s presentation of the assassination. It remains mediated through dated notes, reported testimony, and Roquentin’s competing interpretations rather than unfolding as an independently witnessed scene. The reader encounters claims and counterclaims, not a final revelation of Rollebon’s guilt. Even the possible disguise is framed as an implausible legend that cannot quite be excluded, preserving the difference between what the evidence supports and what an engaging story would supply.

Roquentin’s question—whether Rollebon participated—therefore exposes the limits of the project as much as it concerns the historical event. He needs a decision to proceed with his account, but the documents do not compel one. The assassination becomes a hinge between political history and the act of narration: the past invites a plot, while the surviving traces refuse to guarantee that the plot is true.