His vengeance was swift and terrible.  Mons was arrested the same night in his rooms, and dragged fainting into the Tsar’s presence, where he confessed his disloyalty.  A few days later he was beheaded, at the very moment when the Empress was dancing a minuet with her ladies, a smile on her lips, whatever grief was in her heart.  The following day she was driven by her husband past the scaffold where her lover’s dead body was exposed to public view—­so close, in fact, that her dress brushed against it; but, without turning her head, she kept up a smiling conversation with the perpetrator of this outrage on her feelings.

Still not content with his revenge, Peter next placed the dead man’s head, enclosed in a bottle of spirits of wine, in a prominent place in the Empress’s apartments; and when she still smilingly ignored its horrible proximity, his anger, hitherto repressed, blazed forth fiercely.  With a blow of his strong fist he shattered a priceless Venetian vase, shouting, “Thus will I treat thee and thine”—­to which she calmly responded, “You have broken one of the chief ornaments of your palace; do you think you have increased its charm?”

For a time Peter refused to be propitiated; he would not speak to his wife, or share her meals or her room.  But she had “tamed the tiger” many a time before, and she was able to do it again.  Within two months she had won her way back into full favour, and was once more the Tsar’s dearest Katierinoushka.

A month later Peter was dead, carrying his love for his peasant-Empress to the grave, and Catherine was reigning in his stead, able at last to conduct her amours openly—­spending her nights in shameless orgies with her lovers, and leaving the rascally Menshikoff to do the ruling, until death brought her amazing career to an end within sixteen months of mounting her throne.

CHAPTER II

THE “BONNIE PRINCE’S” BRIDE

In the pageant of our history there are few more attractive figures than that of “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” the “yellow-haired laddie” whose blue eyes made a slave of every woman who came under their magic, and whose genial, unaffected manners turned the veriest coward into a hero, ready to follow him to the death in that year of ill-fated romance, “the forty-five.”

The very name of the “Bonnie Prince,” the hope of the fallen Stuarts, the idol of Scotland—­leading a forlorn hope with laughter on his lips, now riding proudly at the head of his rabble army, now a fugitive Ishmael among the hills and caves of the Highlands, but ever the last to lose heart—­has a magic still to quicken the pulses.  That later years proved the idol’s feet to be of clay, that he fell from his pedestal to end his days an object of contempt and derision, only served to those who knew him in the pride of his youth to mingle pity with the glamour of romance that still surrounds his name.