other hand, he never strove to thwart it. To him, as to no other man,
she could turn at any moment and feel that, no matter what her mood, he
could understand her fully. And this, according to Balzac, is the thing
that woman yearns for most--a kindred spirit that can understand
without the slightest need of explanation.

Thus it was that Gregory Potemkin held a place in the soul of this
great woman such as no one else attained. He might be absent, heading
armies or ruling provinces, and on his return he would be greeted with
even greater fondness than before. And it was this rather than his
victories over Turk and other oriental enemies that made Catharine
trust him absolutely.

When he died, he died as the supreme master of her foreign policy and
at a time when her word was powerful throughout all Europe. Death came
upon him after he had fought against it with singular tenacity of
purpose. Catharine had given him a magnificent triumph, and he had
entertained her in his Taurian Palace with a splendor such as even
Russia had never known before. Then he fell ill, though with high
spirit he would not yield to illness. He ate rich meats and drank rich
wines and bore himself as gallantly as ever. Yet all at once death came
upon him while he was traveling in the south of Russia. His carriage
was stopped, a rug was spread beneath a tree by the roadside, and there
he died, in the country which he had added to the realms of Russia,

The great empress who loved him mourned him deeply during the five
years of life that still remained to her. The names of other men for
whom she had imagined that she cared were nothing to her. But this one
man lived in her heart in death as he had done in life.

Many have written of Catharine as a great ruler, a wise diplomat, a
creature of heroic mold. Others have depicted her as a royal wanton and
have gathered together a mass of vicious tales, the gossip of the
palace kitchens, of the clubs, and of the barrack-rooms. But perhaps
one finds the chief interest of her story to lie in this--that besides
being empress and diplomat and a lover of pleasure she was, beyond all
else, at heart a woman.

MARIE ANTOINETTE AND COUNT FERSEN

The English-speaking world long ago accepted a conventional view of
Marie Antoinette. The eloquence of Edmund Burke in one brilliant
passage has fixed, probably for all time, an enduring picture of this
unhappy queen.

When we speak or think of her we speak