He enquired after her affairs, her troubles, her health, her condition, with such sympathy, and his words and features were so full of intelligence and kindness that he seemed to me quite another being. I could scarcely believe my eyes and ears, remembering what had passed in the same room only yesterday.
When he left and we were alone, Charlotte said to me:
“What a strange man he is, not in the least what he seems. Nobody knows him. How he loves me! Ah, my dear Juliana, give me love, and all will be well, I can endure everything! And when a child will be born unto me, I pray God it may be a son, I shall be quite happy!”
I did not answer; I had not the courage to undeceive her; she was already so happy, but for how long? poor, poor woman!
Perhaps I am unfair to the Tsarevitch? May be, he is really different from what he seems.
He is the most reserved of men. When he is not drunk, he sits buried among his old books: he is supposed to be studying Universal History, and Theology, not only Russian, but also the Catholic and Protestant; he is said to have read through the German Bible eight times: or else he holds converse with monks, pilgrims, friars, and people of the lowest class.
One of his servants, a certain Fédor Yevarlakóff, an intelligent young fellow, a great lover of literature—he borrows from me various books, even Latin ones—told me one day something concerning the Crown Prince, which I at once set down in my note book, a gift from dear Leibnitz, which I always carry with me.
“The Tsarevitch is warmly attached to the priests and the priests to him. He reveres them like God, and they call him a saint; they always beatify him to the people.”
I remember Leibnitz telling me, that on being introduced to him in the summer of 1711, at the ducal castle of Wolfenbüttel, he had a long conversation with the Tsarevitch on his favourite subject: the union of the East with the West, China and Russia with Europe, and that later on he had sent him, through his tutor Baron Huissen, an abstract of the letters about Chinese affairs, Leibnitz asserted that, contrary to all rumours spread about the Tsarevitch, he is very clever, only his intelligence is of a different kind to his father’s. “He probably takes after his grandfather,” remarked Leibnitz.