next. [The soldiers rush out.] Naryshkin: are you waiting to be knouted?
[Naryshkin backs out hastily.]

Catherine and Edstaston are now alone. Catherine has in her hand a
sceptre or baton of gold. Wrapped round it is a new pamphlet, in French,
entitled L'Homme aux Quarante Ecus. She calmly unrolls this and begins
to read it at her ease as if she were quite alone. Several seconds
elapse in dead silence. She becomes more and more absorbed in the
pamphlet, and more and more amused by it.

CATHERINE [greatly pleased by a passage, and turning over the leaf].
Ausgezeiehnet!

EDSTASTON. Ahem!

Silence. Catherine reads on.

CATHERINE. Wie komisch!

EDSTASTON. Ahem! ahem!

Silence.

CATHERINE [soliloquizing enthusiastically]. What a wonderful author is
Monsieur Voltaire! How lucidly he exposes the folly of this crazy plan
for raising the entire revenue of the country from a single tax on land!
how he withers it with his irony! how he makes you laugh whilst he is
convincing you! how sure one feels that the proposal is killed by his
wit and economic penetration: killed never to be mentioned again among
educated people!

EDSTASTON. For Heaven's sake, Madam, do you intend to leave me tied up
like this while you discuss the blasphemies of that abominable infidel?
Agh!! [She has again applied her toe.] Oh! Oo!

CATHERINE [calmly]. Do I understand you to say that Monsieur Voltaire is
a great philanthropist and a great philosopher as well as the wittiest
man in Europe?

EDSTASTON. Certainly not. I say that his books ought to be burnt by
the common hangman [her toe touches his ribs]. Yagh! Oh don't. I shall
faint. I can't bear it.

CATHERINE. Have you changed your opinion of Monsieur Voltaire?

EDSTASTON. But you can't expect me as a member of the Church of England
[she tickles him] --agh! Ow! Oh Lord! he is anything you like. He is a
philanthropist, a philosopher, a beauty: he ought to have a statue, damn
him! [she tickles him]. No! bless him! save him victorious, happy and
glorious! Oh, let eternal honors crown his name: Voltaire thrice worthy
on the rolls of fame! [Exhausted.] Now will you let me up? And look
here! I can see your ankles when you tickle me: it's not ladylike.

CATHERINE [sticking out her toe and admiring it critically]. Is the
spectacle so disagreeable?

EDSTASTON. It's agreeable enough; only [with intense expression] for
heaven's sake don't touch me in the ribs.

CATHERINE [putting aside the p