his bureau in the Winter Palace, St. Petersburgh.
Huge palatial apartment: style, Russia in the eighteenth century
imitating the Versailles du Roi Soleil. Extravagant luxury. Also dirt
and disorder.

Patiomkin, gigantic in stature and build, his face marred by the loss
of one eye and a marked squint in the other, sits at the end of a
table littered with papers and the remains of three or four successive
breakfasts. He has supplies of coffee and brandy at hand sufficient for
a party of ten. His coat, encrusted with diamonds, is on the floor. It
has fallen off a chair placed near the other end of the table for the
convenience of visitors. His court sword, with its attachments, is on
the chair. His three-cornered hat, also bejewelled, is on the table.
He himself is half dressed in an unfastened shirt and an immense
dressing-gown, once gorgeous, now food-splashed and dirty, as it serves
him for towel, handkerchief, duster, and every other use to which a
textile fabric can be put by a slovenly man. It does not conceal his
huge hairy chest, nor his half-buttoned knee breeches, nor his legs.
These are partly clad in silk stockings, which he occasionally hitches
up to his knees, and presently shakes down to his shins, by his restless
movement. His feet are thrust into enormous slippers, worth, with their
crust of jewels, several thousand roubles apiece.

Superficially Patiomkin is a violent, brutal barbarian, an upstart
despot of the most intolerable and dangerous type, ugly, lazy, and
disgusting in his personal habits. Yet ambassadors report him the ablest
man in Russia, and the one who can do most with the still abler Empress
Catherine II, who is not a Russian but a German, by no means barbarous
or intemperate in her personal habits. She not only disputes with
Frederick the Great the reputation of being the cleverest monarch in
Europe, but may even put in a very plausible claim to be the cleverest
and most attractive individual alive. Now she not only tolerates
Patiomkin long after she has got over her first romantic attachment to
him, but esteems him highly as a counsellor and a good friend. His love
letters are among the best on record. He has a wild sense of humor,
which enables him to laugh at himself as well as at everybody else. In
the eyes of the English visitor now about to be admitted to his presence
he may be an outrageous ruffian. In fact he actually is an outrageous
ruffian, in no matter whose eyes; but the visit