ature was not capable, for long, of purely intellectual
or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth's
court it was too easy for the reader of Brantome to seek elsewhere the
"love" romances had spoken of, but marriage had denied her. She was
remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward
observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke
saw Marie Antoinette, the morning-star of a pleasure-loving society,
"full of life, and splendor, and joy." She says that she never
considered herself extremely beautiful, but "she was able to please, _et
cela etait mon fort_." All contemporary testimony bears out this
singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a
woman such as Catharine a very perilous one.

Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism.
She could be beautiful or terrible, playful or majestic, at pleasure. At
St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to
those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her
husband's friends of "Madame la Ressource." Despite Peter's difficult
relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities,
especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. "I
don't understand things very well myself," he would explain to
strangers, "but my wife understands everything." We observe in the
_Autobiography_ a fixed idea to "gain over" as many people as possible,
to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the
Czarina's circle, which gradually came to characterize the "_Jeune
Cour_," but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious
foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her
mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband's inadequacy to
his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress
Elizabeth Vorontsoff and her relations, above all with a passionate
thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively
preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more
precise premonitions of the memoirs, they are what would naturally
appear to her after the _fait accompli_. Ambition, calculation looking
before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the
weakness of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a
political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities--these are