When Joseph entered, he found the empress reclining with careless grace upon the divan, perfectly unconscious that he was anywhere within her palace walls. But when she saw him, she sprang up from the cushion on which she lay, and, with protestations of delighted surprise, gave him both her hands. He bent over those soft white hands, and kissed them fervently.
"I come to your majesty because I am anxious and unhappy, and my heart yearned for your presence. I have bad news from Vienna. My mother is ill, and implores me to return home."
"Bad news, indeed!" exclaimed Catharine, sadly. "The noblest and greatest woman that ever adorned a throne is suffering, and you threaten to leave me? But you must not go, now that the barriers which have so long divided Austria from Russia have fallen."
"Your majesty may well speak of barriers," laughed Joseph, "for we were parted by a high Spanish wall, and the King of Prussia walked the ramparts, that we might never get a glimpse at each other. Well! I have leaped the walls, and I consider it the brightest act of my life that I should have journeyed thither to see the greatest sovereign of the age, the woman before whom a world is destined to succumb."
"Do not give me such praise, sire." replied Catharine, with a sigh; "the soil of Maria Theresa should not bestow such eulogium upon me. It is the Empress of Austria who unites the wisdom of a lawgiver and the bravery of a warrior with the virtues of a pure and sinless woman! Oh, my friend, I am not of that privileged band who have preserved themselves spotless from the sins of the world! I have, bought my imperial destiny with the priceless gem of womanly innocence!—Do not interrupt me—we are alone, and I feel that before no human being can I bow my guilty head with such a sense of just humiliation as before the son of the peerless Empress of Austria!"
"The Empress of Austria is still a woman, reigning through the promptings of her heart, while Catharine wears her crown with the vigor of a man. And who ever thought of requiring from an emperor the primeval innocence of an Arcadian shepherdess? He who would be great must make acquaintance with sin; for obscurity is the condition of innocence. Had you remained innocent, you had never become Catharine the Great. There are, unhappily, so many men who resemble women, that we must render thanks to God for vouchsafing to our age a woman who equals all and surpasses many men."
"You have initiated a new mode of flattery, sire," said Catharine, blushing with gratification; "but if this is your fashion of praising women, you must be a woman-hater. Is it so?"
"I would worship them if they resembled Catharine; but I have suffered through their failings, and I despise them. You know not how many of my bold schemes and bright hopes have been brought to naught by women! I am no longer the Joseph of earlier days—I have been shorn of my strength by petticoats and cassocks."
"How can you so belie yourself?" said Catharine. "It is but a few months since we had good proof that the ambition of the Emperor Joseph was far from being quenched forever."
"Ah! your majesty would remind me of that ridiculous affair with Bavaria. It was my last Quixotism, the dying struggle of a patriotism which would have made of Germany one powerful and prosperous nation! And it was YOU who opposed me—YOU who, of all the potentates in Europe, are the one who should have understood and sustained me! Believe me, when I say, that had Catharine befriended me there, she would have won the truest knight that ever broke a lance in defence of fair ladye. But, for the sake of a dotard, who is forever trembling lest I rob him of some of his withered bays, the bold Athene of the age forgot her godlike origin and mission, and turned away from him whom she should have countenanced and conciliated. Well! It was the error of a noble heart, unsuspicious of fair words. And fair words enough had Frederick for the occasion. To think of such a man as HE, flaunting the banner of Germany in my face—he who, not many years ago, was under the ban of the empire as an ambitious upstart! He thought to scare me with the rustling of his dead laurel-leaves, and when he found that I laughed at such Chinese warfare, lo! he ran and hid himself under my mother's petticoats; and the two old crowns fell foul of one another, and their palsied old wearers plotted together, until the great war upon which I had staked my fame was juggled into a shower of carnival confetti! Oh, you laugh at me, and well may you laugh! I am a fool to waste so much enthusiasm upon such a fool's holiday!"