Commodore Paul Jones meets the Empress Catherine in her Palace of Czarsko-Selo. Outside the snow lies thick; for it is April, and winter is ever reluctant to quit St. Petersburg. He is pricked of curiosity concerning this Russian Empress, for whom he is to draw his sword. He hopes—somewhat against hope, it is true, when he recalls her sixty years—that she will prove beautiful. For he is so much the knight of romance that he fights with more pleasure for a pretty face than for a plain one.
The Empress is before him; he can now put his hopes to the test. His eyes fall upon a thick, gross figure—a woman the antithesis of romance.
Her mouth is coarse, her nose high and hawkish, her forehead full, her gaze hard and level, her whole face harsh—having been so often burned and swept of passion. And yet he feels the power of this white, fire-eyed savage, with her heart of a Phryne and her brain of a Henry the Eighth. There is so much that is palpable and brutish about her, however, that he stands off from her contact and remembers with regret his delicate Aimee of the red-gold locks.
Commodore Paul Jones has been too well trained as a courtier to let fall the polite mask which he wears, and nothing could be more elaborately suave than are the manners he assumes. The ferocious Catherine gets some glimmer of his inward thought for all that. Every inch the Empress, she is even more the woman. To the day of her death the unpardonable offence in any male of her species is a failure to fall in love with her. She receives some chilling touch of her new Admiral’s aversion, and it turns her into angry ice. Still, if he will not sigh for her, he shall serve her: so she says to herself. He remains in St.
Petersburg a fortnight; the Empress sees him more than once. When they are together, they talk of Potemkin, Suwarrow, the Turks, and the Black Sea.
CHAPTER XXVI—AN ADMIRAL OF RUSSIA
Admiral Paul Jones travels to the mouth of the Dnieper and joins Potemkin, who is a military fool. Suwarrow, old and cunning and vigilant and war-wise, is another man. He goes aboard his flagship, the Vladimir, of seventy guns. From the beginning he is befriended by the grizzled Suwarrow and thwarted by the foppish Potemkin. This latter is a discarded favorite of Catherine; and, since she is very loyal to a favorite out of favor, he knows he may take liberties. Old Suwarrow, over his brandy, tells Potemkin’s story to Admiral Paul Jones.
“He kept the Empress’ smiles for a season,” explains Suwarrow; “when all of a sudden, having seen Moimonoff, she fills Potemkin’s pockets with gold and jewels, gives him a two-thousand-serf estate, and bids him ‘travel,’ as she bid twenty of his predecessors travel. ‘In what have I offended?’ whines Potemkin. ‘In nothing,’ returns the Empress. ‘I liked you yesterday; I don’t like you to-day; that is all. So you see, my friend, that you can no longer stay in Petersburg, but must travel!’ This was ten years ago,” continues old Suwarrow. “Potemkin comes down here, and the Empress puts him in charge, and sustains him in all he says and does. My dear Admiral, you must get along with Potemkin to get along with her.”