How the Ambassador, instead of making peace, stirred up the embers of war into fresh flame is a matter of history.  But he was not long left to work such mad mischief.  While he was swaggering at a Jassy fete, in a costume ablaze with diamonds worth a million roubles, news came to him of a good-looking young lieutenant who was not only installed in his place by Catherine’s side, but was actually occupying his own apartments.  Within an hour he was racing back to St Petersburg, resting neither night nor day until he had covered the thousand leagues that separated him from the capital.

Before, however, his sweating horses could enter it, he was stopped by Catherine’s emissaries and ordered to repair to the Imperial Palace at Gatshina.  And then he realised that his sun had indeed come to its setting.  His honours were soon stripped from him, and although he was allowed to keep his lands, his gold and jewels, the spoils of Cupid, the diamond-framed miniature, was taken away to adorn the breast of his successor, the lieutenant.

Under this cloud of disfavour Orloff conducted himself with such resignation—­none knew better than he how futile it was to fight—­that Catherine, before many months had passed, not only recalled him to Court, but secured for him a Princedom of the Holy Empire.  “As for Prince Gregory,” she said amiably, “he is free to go or stay, to hunt, to drink, or to gamble.  I intend to live according to my own pleasure, and in entire independence.”

After a tragically brief wedded life with a beautiful girl-cousin, who died of consumption, Orloff returned to St Petersburg to spend the last few months of his life, “broken-hearted and mad.”  And to his last hour his clouded brain was tortured with visions of the “avenging shade of the murdered Peter.”

CHAPTER XV

A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CINDERELLA

It was to all seeming a strange whim that caused Cardinal Mazarin, one day in the year 1653, to summon his nieces, daughters of his sister, Hieronyme Mancini, from their obscurity in Italy to bask in the sunshine of his splendours in Paris.

At the time of this odd caprice, Richelieu’s crafty successor had reached the zenith of his power.  His was the most potent and splendid figure in all Europe that did not wear a crown.  He was the avowed favourite and lover of Anne of Austria, Queen of France, to whose vanity he had paid such skilful court—­indeed it was common rumour that she had actually given him her hand in secret marriage.  The boy-King, Louis XIV., was a puppet in his strong hands.  He was, in fact, the dictator of France, whose smiles the greatest courtiers tried to win, and before whose frowns they trembled.

In contrast to such magnificence, his sister, Madame Mancini, was the wife of a petty Italian baron, who was struggling to bring up her five daughters on a pathetically scanty purse—­as far removed from her magnificent brother as a moth from a star.  There was, on the face of things, every reason why the great and all-powerful Cardinal should leave his nieces to their genteel poverty; and we can imagine both the astonishment and delight with which Madame Mancini received the summons to Paris which meant such a revolution in life for her and her daughters.