rt where people changed their dress three times a day. A
dozen chemises constituted the whole of my linen, and I had to use my
mother's sheets."

Soon after Catharine's arrival, the grand duke was taken with the
small-pox, and his natural ugliness was rendered still more revolting
by the disfigurement it caused. On the 10th of February, 1745, when
Catharine had been one year at Moscow, the grand duke celebrated his
seventeenth birthday. In her journal Catharine writes that Peter
seldom saw her, and was always glad of any excuse by which he could
avoid paying her any attention. Though Catharine cared as little for
him, still, with girlish ambition, she was eager to marry him, as she
very frankly records, in consideration of the crown which he would
place upon her brow, and her womanly nature was stung by his neglect.

"I fully perceived," she writes, "his want of interest, and how little
I was cared for. My self-esteem and vanity grieved in silence; but I
was too proud to complain. I should have thought myself degraded had
any one shown me a friendship which I could have taken for pity.
Nevertheless I shed tears when alone, then quietly dried them up, and
went to romp with my maids.

"I labored, however," writes Catharine, "to gain the affection of
every one. Great or small I neglected no one, but laid it down to
myself as a rule to believe that I stood in need of every one, and so
to act, in consequence, as to obtain the good will of all, and I
succeeded in doing so."

The 21st of August of this year was fixed for the nuptial day.
Catharine looked forward to it with extreme repugnance. Peter was
revolting in his aspect, disgusting in manners, a drunkard, and
licentious to such a degree that he took no pains to conceal his
amours. But the crown of Russia was in the eyes of Catharine so
glittering a prize, though then she had not entered her sixteenth
year, that she was willing to purchase it even at the price of
marrying Peter, the only price at which it could be obtained. She was
fully persuaded that Peter, with a feeble constitution and wallowing
in debauchery, could not live long, and that, at his death, she would
be undisputed empress.

"As the day of our nuptials approached," she writes, "I became more
and more melancholy. My heart predicted but little happiness; ambition
alone sustained me. In my inmost soul there was something which led me
never to doubt, for a single moment, that sooner or later I should
b