But a man’s companionship and homage were always necessary to her, and in Fabre she found her ideal cavalier.  Her salon now became more popular even than in the days of her young wifehood.  It drew to it all the greatest men in Europe, men of world-wide fame in statesmanship, letters, and art, all anxious to do homage to a woman of such culture and with such rare gifts of conversation.

That she was now middle-aged, stout and dowdy—­“like a cook with pretty hands,” as Stendhal said of her—­mattered nothing to her admirers, many of whom remembered her in the days of her lovely youth.  She was, in their eyes, as much a Queen as if she wore a crown; and, moreover, she was a woman of magnetic charm and clever brain.

And thus, with her books and her salon and her cavalier, she spent the rest of her chequered life until the end came one day in 1824; and her last resting-place was, as she wished it to be, by the side of her beloved Alfieri.  In the Church of Santa Croce, in Florence, midway between the tombs of Michael Angelo and Machiavelli, the two lovers sleep together their last sleep, beneath a beautiful monument fashioned by Canova’s hands—­Louise, wife of the “Bonnie Prince” (as we still choose to remember him) and Vittorio Alfieri, to whom, to quote his own words, “she was beyond all things beloved.”

CHAPTER III

THE PEASANT AND THE EMPRESS

Many an autocrat of Russia has shown a truly sovereign contempt for convention in the choice of his or her favourites, the “playthings of an hour”; and at least three of them have carried this contempt to the altar itself.

Peter, the first, as we have seen, offered a crown to Martha Skovronski, a Livonian scullery-maid, who succeeded him on the throne; the second Catherine gave her hand as well as her heart to Patiomkin, the gigantic, ill-favoured ex-sergeant of cavalry; and Elizabeth, daughter of Peter and his kitchen-Queen, proved herself worthy of her parentage when she made Alexis Razoum, a peasant’s son, husband of the Empress of Russia.  You will search history in vain for a story so strange and romantic as this of the great Empress and the lowly shepherd’s son, whom her love raised from a hovel to a palace, and on whom one of the most amorous and fickle of sovereign ladies lavished honours and riches and an unwavering devotion, until her eyes, speaking their love to the last, were closed in death.

It was in the humblest hovel of the village of Lemesh that Alexis Razoum drew his first breath one day in 1709.  His father, Gregory Razoum, was a shepherd, who spent his pitiful earnings in drink—­a man of violent temper who, in his drunken rages, was the terror not only of his home but of the entire village.  His wife and children cowered at his approach; and on more than one occasion only accident (or Providence) saved him from the crime of murder.  On one such occasion, we are told, the child Alexis,