o dazzled her contemporaries, and still lives splendidly
with the "Great Czar" in the annals of Russia. That exuberant
personality of hers is so eloquent, so omnipresent in the sphere of
politics, that one is often the most luminous illustration of the other.
There is a note you will find common to her grandiose schemes of
territorial expansion, of intellectual enlightenment and domestic
reform. It is the note of theatricality, of extravagance, of excess. The
strangest chimeric phantasy sometimes here possesses her, hitherto
prosaic enough in so many ways; and it communicates itself to men like
the Orloffs, Patiomkin, Suvaroff. It is, I think, M. Leroy-Beaulieu, who
remarks that in Russia the shows of things are more important than
reality. So rite, ceremonial, the spectacular, the symbolic, seem to
have a power there greater than in any other people of civilization.

But stronger still was Catharine's overmastering desire to play to the
applause of Europe. She had conceived herself as the heroine of a
grandiose drama. It was her ambition to be the "Grand Monarque" of the
North, and to show the Paris of Louis Quinze that the age of Olympian
sovereignty was not yet past. Hence her sensitiveness to Western
opinion, her assiduous court to the men of intellect, her anxiety to be
admired and feared in Europe. Nowhere is this pose, this consciousness
of a gallery, more evident than in the sphere of foreign policy. The
great Peter had fulfilled the dream of Ivan in reaching the Baltic, and
so, in her wars with the Turk, Catharine realized the aim of Peter by
forcing her way to the Black Sea.

But a Hellenic empire at Constantinople haunts her dreams. She stirs up
Greek against Ottoman, and her trumpeter Voltaire heralds a new Sparta
and Athens; she calls her grandson Constantine, and surrounds him with
Greek nurse and servants. Her famous progress southward, the most
eccentric pageant in history, is typical of Patiomkin's _regime_. This
extraordinary man--mountebank, writes the English envoy, "_esprit
reveur_," says the keener-eyed Prince de Ligne--a barbarian, of terrific
appearance; fantastic beyond the verge of madness, acquired a greater
influence with Catharine than any other man of her reign. He had been
created "Prince of Taurida" (the Crimea) after the conquest of the
southern provinces; and was resolved to dazzle Europe and his sovereign
with her new acquisitions.

In January, 1787, she set out on her triumphal jour