The Grand Duke Peter, heir to the Russian throne, who at sixteen took to wife the girl-Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was already an expert in almost every vice.  Imbecile in mind, he found his chief pleasure in the company of the most degraded.  He rarely went to bed sober—­in fact, his bride’s first sight of him was when he was drunk, at the age of ten.  He was, too, “a liar and a coward, vicious and violent; pale, sickly, and uncomely—­a crooked soul in a prematurely ravaged body.”

Such was the Grand Duke Peter, to whom the high-spirited, beautiful Princess Sophie (thenceforth to be known as “Catherine”) was tied for life one day in the year 1744—­a youth the very sight of whom repelled her, while his vices filled her with loathing.  Add to this revolting union the fact that she found herself under the despotic rule of the Empress Elizabeth, who made no concealment of her hatred and jealousy of the fair young Princess, surrounded her with spies, and treated her as a rebellious child, to be checked and bullied at every turn—­and it is not difficult to understand the spirit of recklessness and defiance that was soon roused in Catherine’s breast.

There was at the Russian Court no lack of temptation to indulge this spirit of revolt to the full.  The young German beauty, mated to worse than a clown, soon had her Court of admirers to pour flatteries into her dainty ears, and she would perhaps have been less than a woman if she had not eagerly drunk them in.  She had no need of anyone to tell her that she was fair.  “I know I am beautiful as the day,” she once exclaimed, as she looked at her mirrored reflection in her first ball finery at St Petersburg, with a red rose in her glorious hair; and the mirror told no flattering tale.

See the picture Poniatowski, one of her earliest and most ardent slaves, paints of the young Grand Duchess.  “With her black hair she had a dazzling whiteness of skin, a vivid colour, large blue eyes prominent and eloquent, black and long eyebrows, a Greek nose, a mouth that looked made for kissing, a slight, rather tall figure, a carriage that was lively, yet full of nobility, a pleasing voice, and a laugh as merry as the humour through which she could pass with ease from the most playful and childish amusements to the most fatiguing mathematical calculations.”

With the brain, even in those early years, of a clever man, she was essentially a woman, with all a woman’s passion for the admiration and love of men; and one cannot wonder, however much one may deplore, that while her imbecile husband was guzzling with common soldiers, or playing with his toys and tin cannon in bed, vacuous smiles on his face, his beautiful bride should find her own pleasures in the homage of a Soltykoff, a Poniatowski, an Orloff, or any other of the legion of lovers who in quick succession took her fancy.