he arch-curse of their own country. Catherine took the
side of the Dissidents, and figured as the champion of religious
toleration. Toleration was chief among the philosophic watchwords, and
seeing that great device on her banners, the Encyclopaedic party asked no
further questions. So, with the significant exception of Rousseau, they
all abstained from the cant about the Partition which has so often been
heard from European liberals in later days. And so with reference to
more questionable transactions of an earlier date, no one could guess
from the writings of the philosophers that Catherine had ever been
suspected of uniting with her husband in a plot to poison the Empress
Elizabeth, and then uniting with her lover in a plot to strangle her
husband. "I am quite aware," said Voltaire, "that she is reproached with
some bagatelles in the matter of her husband, but these are family
affairs with which I cannot possibly think of meddling."

[82] _Corresp._, pp. 135, 144, etc.

One curious instance of Catherine's sensibility to European opinion is
connected with her relations to Diderot. Rulhiere, afterwards well known
in literature as a historian, began life as secretary to Breteuil, in
the French embassy at St. Petersburg. An eyewitness of the tragedy which
seated Catherine on the throne, he wrote an account of the events of the
revolution of 1762. This piquant narrative, composed by a young man who
had read Tacitus and Sallust was circulated in manuscript among the
salons of Paris (1768). Diderot had warned Rulhiere that it was
infinitely dangerous to speak about princes, that not everything that is
true is fit to be told, that he could not be too careful of the feelings
of a great sovereign who was the admiration and delight of her people.
Catherine pretended that a mere secretary of an embassy could know very
little about the real springs and motives of the conspiracy. Diderot had
described the manuscript as painting her in a commanding and imperious
attitude. "There was nothing of that sort," she said; "it was only a
question of perishing with a madman, or saving oneself with the
multitude who insisted on coming to the rescue." What she saw was that
the manuscript must be bought, and she did her best first to buy the
author and then, when this failed, to have him locked up in the
Bastille. She succeeded in neither. The French government were not sorry
to have a scourge to their hands. All that Diderot could procur