CHAPTER XIV
AN EMPRESS AND HER FAVOURITES
CATHERINE THE SECOND OF RUSSIA.
When Sophie Augusta Frederica of Anhalt-Zerbst was romping on the ramparts or in the streets of Stettin with burghers' children for playmates, he would have been a bold prophet who would have predicted that one day she would be the most splendid figure among Europe's sovereigns, "the only great man in Europe," according to Voltaire, "an angel before whom all men should be silent"; and that, while dazzling Europe by her statesmanship and learning, she would afford more material for scandal than any woman, except perhaps Christina of Sweden, who ever wore a crown.
There is much, it is true, to be said in extenuation of the weakness that has left such a stain on the memory of Catherine II. of Russia. Equipped far beyond most women with the beauty and charms that fascinate men, and craving more than most of her sex the love of man, she was mated when little more than a child to the most degenerate Prince in all Europe.
The Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Russian throne, who at sixteen took to wife the girl-Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was already an expert in almost every vice. Imbecile in mind, he found his chief pleasure in the company of the most degraded. He rarely went to bed sober—in fact, his bride's first sight of him was when he was drunk, at the age of ten. He was, too, "a liar and a coward, vicious and violent; pale, sickly, and uncomely—a crooked soul in a prematurely ravaged body."
Such was the Grand Duke Peter, to whom the high-spirited, beautiful Princess Sophie (thenceforth to be known as "Catherine") was tied for life one day in the year 1744—a youth the very sight of whom repelled her, while his vices filled her with loathing. Add to this revolting union the fact that she found herself under the despotic rule of the Empress Elizabeth, who made no concealment of her hatred and jealousy of the fair young Princess, surrounded her with spies, and treated her as a rebellious child, to be checked and bullied at every turn—and it is not difficult to understand the spirit of recklessness and defiance that was soon roused in Catherine's breast.
There was at the Russian Court no lack of temptation to indulge this spirit of revolt to the full. The young German beauty, mated to worse than a clown, soon had her Court of admirers to pour flatteries into her dainty ears, and she would perhaps have been less than a woman if she had not eagerly drunk them in. She had no need of anyone to tell her that she was fair. "I know I am beautiful as the day," she once exclaimed, as she looked at her mirrored reflection in her first ball finery at St Petersburg, with a red rose in her glorious hair; and the mirror told no flattering tale.