as too prudent to go to St. Petersburg, as he was too
prudent to go to Berlin. Montesquieu had died five years before her
accession, but his influence remained. She habitually called the Spirit
of Laws the breviary of kings, and when she drew up her Instruction for
a new code, she acknowledged how much she had pillaged from Montesquieu.
"I hope," she said, "that if from the other world he sees me at work, he
will forgive my plagiarism for the sake of the twenty millions of men
who will benefit by it." In truth the twenty millions of men got very
little benefit indeed by the code. Montesquieu's own method might have
taught her that not even absolute power can force the civil system of
free labour into a society resting on serfdom. But it is not surprising
that Catherine was no wiser than more democratic reformers who had drunk
from the French springs. Or probably she had a lower estimate in her own
heart of the value of her code for practical purposes than it suited her
to disclose to a Parisian philosopher.

Catherine did not forget that, though the French at this time were
pre-eminent in the literature of new ideas, yet there were meritorious
and useful men in other countries. One of her correspondents was
Zimmermann of Hanover, whose essay on Solitude the shelves of no
second-hand bookseller's shop is ever without. She had tried hard to
bribe Beccaria to leave Florence for St. Petersburg. She succeeded in
persuading Euler to return to a capital whither he had been invited many
years before by the first Catherine, and where he now remained.

Both Catherine's position and her temperament made the society of her
own sex of little use or interest to her. "I don't know whether it is
custom or inclination," she wrote, "but somehow I can never carry on
conversation except with men. There are only two women in the world with
whom I can talk for half an hour at once." Yet among her most intimate
correspondents was one woman well known in the Encyclopaedic circle. She
kept up an active exchange of letters with Madame Geoffrin--that
interesting personage, who though belonging to the bourgeoisie, and
possessing not a trace of literary genius, yet was respectfully courted
not only by Catherine, but by Stanislas, Gustavus, and Joseph II.[77]

[77] See M. Mouy's Introduction to her Correspondence with
Stanislas.

On the whole then we must regard Catherine's European correspondence as
at least in some measure the result of