When young Peter was fourteen years of age, the Empress Elizabeth, his maternal aunt, to the surprise and delight of the family, summoned the young prince to St. Petersburg, intimating her intention to transmit to him her crown. But Peter was a thoroughly worthless boy. All ignoble qualities seemed to be combined in his nature without any redeeming virtues. Elizabeth having thus provided twenty millions of people with a sovereign, looked about to find for that sovereign a suitable wife. Upon the banks of the Oder there was a small principality, as it was called, containing some thirteen hundred square miles, about the size of the State of Rhode Island. Christian Augustus, the prince of this little domain, had a daughter, Sophia, a child rather remarkable both for beauty and vivacity. She was one year younger than Peter, and Elizabeth fixed her choice upon Sophia as the future spouse of her nephew. Peter was, at this time, with the empress in Moscow, and Sophia was sent for to spend some time in the Russian capital before the marriage, that she might become acquainted with the Russian language and customs.
Both of these children had been educated Protestants, but they were required to renounce the Lutheran faith and accept that of the Greek church. Children as they were, they did this, of course, as readily as they would have changed their dresses. With this change of religion Sophia received a new name, that of Catharine, and by this name she was ever afterward called. When these children, to whom the government of the Russian empire was to be intrusted, first met, Peter was fifteen years of age and Catharine fourteen. Catharine subsequently commenced a minute journal, an autobiography of these her youthful days, which opens vividly to our view the corruptions of the Russian court. Nothing can be more wearisome than the life there developed. No thought whatever seemed to be directed by the court to the interests of
the Russian people. They were no more thought of than the jaded horses who dragged the chariots of the nobles. It is amazing that the indignation of the millions can have slumbered so long.
Catharine, in her memoirs, naively describes young Peter, when she first saw him, as "weak, ugly, little and sickly." From the age of ten he had been addicted to intoxicating drinks. It was the 9th of February, 1744, when Catharine was taken to Moscow. Peter, or, as he was then called, the grand duke, was quite delighted to see the pretty girl who was his destined wife, and began immediately to entertain Catharine, as she says, "by informing me that he was in love with one of the maids of honor to the empress, and that he would have been very glad to have married her, but that he was resigned to marry me instead, as his aunt wished it."
The grand duke had the faculty of making himself excessively disagreeable to every one around him, and the affianced haters were in a constant quarrel. Peter could develop nothing but stupid malignity. Catharine could wield the weapons of keen and cutting sarcasm, which Peter felt as the mule feels the lash. Catharine's mother had accompanied her to Moscow, but the bridal wardrobe, for a princess, was extremely limited.
"I had arrived," she writes, "in Russia very badly provided for. If I had three or four dresses in the world, it was the very outside, and this at a court 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."