It was thus a strange and unhappy caprice of fate that united Peter, while still a youth, to his first Empress, the refined and sensitive Eudoxia, a woman as remote from her husband as the stars.  Never was there a more incongruous bride than this delicately nurtured girl 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 beggar.  There is nothing here.  I do not need a great deal; still I must eat.”