like a naughty child sent to bed with a whipping."

So far the revolution had been bloodless, but its darker hour was to
come. "I placed the deposed Emperor under the command of A. Orloff, with
four 'chosen' officers and a detachment of 'quiet' and 'sober' men, and
sent him to a distance of twenty-seven versts from St. Petersburg to a
place called Ropsha, 'very retired,' but very pleasant"--so runs
Catharine's account to Poniatowski. On the 15th he was dead; of
"hemorrhoidal colic," said the official announcement; strangled, as
Europe rightly believed, by Alexis Orloff with his own hands. It is
hardly possible that this hideous murder was without Catharine's at
least tacit consent. She certainly condoned the crime. There was danger
in a name; and her sentiment was doubtless that of Lord Essex when the
fate of Stafford hung in the balance: "Stone dead hath no fellow!"
Already, where the Neva turns toward the Baltic, one wretched boy-Czar
languished beneath the melancholy fortress of the Schluesselburg. Two
years, and he too, after having known the bitterness of life, will be
violently done to death in his turn. But Voltaire wrote to Madame du
Deffand: "I am aware that people reproach her with some bagatelles _a
propos_ of that husband of hers; however, one really cannot intermeddle
in these family squabbles!"

Such was the tragedy of Peter III. He dies, as Catharine said, unpitied:
a fool, echo her friends, who perished in his folly. But history is
precise and simple; truth complex and difficult. Was there no light, no
touch of nobility at all in that strange chaotic temperament? No
reverence in the boy who would kneel to the picture of the great
Frederick? No generosity in the Czar who sacrificed victory to a
sentiment; who abolished the hateful "secret chancery," torture,
monopolies, and refused a statue of gold offered by St. Petersburg,
"desiring rather to raise a monument in the hearts of the people"? There
was something inarticulate there, surely--in the would-be musician who
must shut himself up for hours to scrawk madly, passionately, on a crazy
violin, and whose last request was for his confidant and instrument.
"What is history," said Napoleon, "but a fiction agreed upon?" Such,
nevertheless, is the form and spirit of the hapless Peter as portrayed
by his enemies.

This was the Catharine of Elizabeth's court, and protagonist of that
revolution which first made her known to Europe. But it was the
sovereign wh