zabeth resolved to marry Alexis Razumovsky;
this was the reason why she, in a solitary chapel, accompanied only by
Lestocq and the priest, stood before the marriage-altar with Alexis, and
became his wife.

She breathed freer when the priest had pronounced his blessing upon her;
an oppressive weight was lifted from her heart; the child she was about
to bear was saved and sheltered, and Eleonore's curse had no longer any
power over it!

On the next day Elizabeth appointed Alexis field-marshal, and raised him
in the ranks of the nobility.

"We must at any rate give our son a respectable father," said she. "I
hope we shall have a son, who will be as beautiful as his father; whom
I will overload with honors, and place high above all the magnates of my
court. Ah, a son! No daughter, Alexis!"

"And why no daughter?" smilingly asked Razumovsky.

Elizabeth shuddered, and, clinging to her beloved, whispered:

"Has not Eleonore Lapuschkin said, 'Give her a daughter, and let her,
before the eyes of her mother, experience what I now suffer!' Oh,
Alexis, wish me therefore no daughter! I shall always tremble for her!"

And God seemed to have listened to the anxious prayer of the empress.
Again she bore a son, but again the son died shortly after his birth.

"It is very sad to lose a child, and especially a son," sighed
Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom
she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless
imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be
converted into an idiot!

"This is God's vengeance!" whispered something in her breast, but
Elizabeth shrank from these low whisperings of her conscience, and she
tremulously said: "I will not listen to it! Away, ye intrusive thoughts!
I am an empress--for me there are no crimes, no laws! An empress is
exalted above all law, and whatever she does is right! Away, away,
therefore, ye troublesome thoughts! This boy Ivan must remain in prison;
I cannot restore him to his mother. May she bear other children, and
then new joys will bloom for her!"

But these thoughts would not be thus be banished, they constantly
haunted her; they left not her nightly couch; they constantly renewed
their dismal, awful whisperings; and this all-powerful empress would
loudly shriek with mortal anguish, and she was dismayed at being left
alone with her thoughts.

"I will have society around me," said she, "and will never be alone