not so, we must charge her with
an inconsistency amounting to madness, for undertaking so many immense
works of public utility, such as the foundation of colleges and
academies on a most extensive plan and at an enormous outlay, and then
leaving them incomplete, not even finishing the buildings for them."
They had served the purpose of making foreigners laud the glory of the
Semiramis of the north, and that was enough. The arts and sciences, said
the French Minister, have plenty of academies here, but the academies
have few subjects and fewer pupils. How could there be pupils in a
country where there is nobody who is not either a courtier, a soldier,
or a slave? The Princess Sophie of Anhalt, long before she dreamed of
becoming the Czarina Catherine II., had been brought up by a French
governess, and the tastes that her governess had implanted grew into a
passion for French literature, which can only be compared to the same
passion in Frederick the Great. Catherine only continued a movement that
had already in the reign of her predecessor gone to a considerable
length. The social reaction against German political predominance had
been accompanied by a leaning to France. French professors in art and
literature had been tempted to Moscow, the nobles sent to Paris for
their clothes and their furniture, and a French theatre was set up in
St. Petersburg, where the nobles were forced to attend the performances
under pain of a fine. Absentees and loiterers were hurried to their
boxes by horse-patrols.

Catherine was more serious and intelligent than this in her pursuit of
French culture. She had begun with the books in which most of the salt
of old France was to be found, with Rabelais, Scarron, Montaigne; she
cherished Moliere and Corneille; and of the writers of the eighteenth
century, apart from Voltaire, the author of Gil Blas was her favourite.
Such a list tells its own tale of a mind turned to what is masculine,
racy, pungent, and thoroughly sapid. "I am a Gauloise of the north," she
said, "I only understand the old French; I do not understand the new. I
made up my mind to get something out of your gentry, the learned men in
_ist_: I have tried them; I made some of them come here; I occasionally
wrote to them; they wearied me to death, and never understood me; there
was only my good protector, Voltaire. Do you know it was Voltaire who
made me the fashion?"[75] This was a confidential revelation, made long
after most of