provided by the Empress Nathalie for her coarse-grained son. From the
hour at which they stood together at the altar the union was doomed to
tragic failure; before the honeymoon waned Peter had terrified his bride
by his brutality and disgusted her by the open attentions he paid to his
favourites of the hour, the daughters of Botticher, the goldsmith, and
Mons, the wine-merchant.

For five years husband and wife saw little of each other; and when, in
1694, Nathalie's death removed the one influence which gave the union at
least the outward form of substance, Peter lost no time in exhibiting
his true colours. He dismissed all Eudoxia's relatives from the Court,
and sent her father into exile. One brother he caused to be whipped in
public; another was put to the torture, which had its horrible climax
when Peter himself saturated his victim's clothes with spirits of wine,
and then set them on fire. For Eudoxia a different fate was reserved.
Not only had he long grown weary of her insipid beauty and of her
refinement and gentleness, which were a constant mute reproach to his
own low tastes and hectoring manners--he had grown to hate the very
sight of her, and determined that she should no longer stand between him
and the unbridled indulgence of his pleasure.

During his visit to England he never once wrote to her, and on his
return to Moscow his first words were a brutal announcement of his
intention to be rid of her. In vain she pleaded and wept. To her tearful
inquiries, "What have I done to offend you? What fault have you to find
with me?" he turned a deaf ear. "I never want to see you again," were
his last inexorable words. A few days later a hackney coach drove up to
the palace doors; the unhappy Tsarina was bundled unceremoniously into
it, and she was carried away to the nunnery of the "Intercession of the
Blessed Virgin," whose doors were closed on her for a score of years.

Pitiful years they were for the young Empress, consigned by her husband
to a life that was worse than death--robbed of her rank, her splendours,
and luxuries, her very name--she was now only Helen, the nun, faring
worse than the meanest of her sister-nuns; for while they at least had
plenty to eat, the Tsarina seems many a time to have known the pangs of
hunger. The letters she wrote to one of her brothers are pathetic
evidence of the straits to which she was reduced. "For pity's sake," she
wrote, "give me food and drink. Give clothes to the beg