that the unfortunate beast had
transgressed the laws of war; it had climbed the ramparts of a
card-board fortress, and had actually eaten two pith sentries on duty at
the bastions. It was to be exposed to the public view as an example
during three days following! Catharine, unluckily, was so lost to the
fitness of things as to betray open merriment. The Grand Duke was
furious; and she had to retire, excusing herself with difficulty on
account of her ignorance of military discipline. The affair sensibly
aggravated the estrangement between them.

Of Elizabeth, who led an eccentric life with her own peculiar intimates,
Catharine knew little; but she was the victim of an unrelenting if petty
tyranny, which kept jealous watch over every word and movement, deprived
her of any attendant of whom she made a friend, and dictated every
minute circumstance of her life. It was like nothing so much as a dame
school, even to the various tutors and governesses ordered her by the
Czarina. When her father died she was allowed a week's mourning; at the
end of that time the Empress sent a command to leave off; "she was a
grand duchess, and her father was not a king." But Catharine was not of
the stuff from which are modelled the monuments of docility. Little by
little, as her character develops, she acquires a proud and lonely
self-dependence. She awakens to intellectual interests; from the first,
indeed, she had flung herself with ardor into the study of Russian
history and language. During these early years books are her great
distraction; "_dixhuit annees d'ennui et de solitude_," we read in a
epitaph written by herself, "_lui firent lire bien des livres_."

After a trial in the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction,
Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that
incomparable _verve_ and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders
herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like some
triumphant will-o'-the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of
things. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of
Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical
speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion
to ideals of monarchy expressed for her in Henri Quatre and Louis
Quatorze.

After Voltaire and Madame de Sevigne, Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus,
Bayle, Brantome, and the early volumes of the _Encyclopaedia_. But her
gay, expansive n