and lowly have I heard the name of her blessed to whom the
nation owed so much glory and so much well-being. I do not speak of
the conquests by which the national vanity was so prodigiously
flattered, but of the real, lasting good that this Empress did her
people. During the space of the thirty-four years she reigned, her
beneficent genius fathered or furthered all that was useful, all that
was grand. She erected an immortal monument to Peter I.; she built two
hundred and thirty-seven towns in stone, saying that wooden villages
cost much more because they burned down so often; she covered the sea
with her fleets; she established everywhere manufactories and banks,
highly propitious to the commerce of St. Petersburg, Moscow and
Tobolsk; she granted new privileges to the Academy; she founded
schools in all the towns and the country districts; she dug canals,
built granite quays, gave a legal code, instituted an asylum for
foundlings, and, finally, introduced into her empire the boon of
vaccination, adopted by the Russians solely through her mighty will,
and, for the public encouragement, was the first to be inoculated.

Catherine herself was the source of all these blessings, for she never
allowed any one else real authority. She dictated her own
despatches to her ministers, who, in effect, were but her secretaries.
I am much annoyed that the Duchess d'Abrantes, who has recently
published a work on Catherine II., has either not read what the Prince
de Ligne and the Count de Segur have written, or has not given
credence to those irrefutable witnesses. If she had, she would have
more justly appreciated and admired the qualities distinguishing that
great Empress, considering her as a ruler, and she would have paid
more respect to the memory of a woman in whom our sex ought to take
pride for so many reasons.

[Illustration: THE DUCHESS DE POLIGNAC.]

Catherine II. loved everything that was magnificent in the arts. At
the Hermitage she built a set of rooms corresponding to certain rooms
in the Vatican, and had copies made of the fifty pictures by Raphael
adorning those rooms. She enriched the Academy of Fine Arts with
plaster casts of the finest ancient statues and with a large number of
paintings by various masters. The Hermitage, which she had founded and
erected quite near her palace, was a model of good taste in every
respect, and made the clumsy architecture of the imperial palace at
St. Petersburg appear to worse adva