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Potemkin hesitated at no expense. The journey had cost the empire no less than seven millions of rubles, fourteen thousand of which were expended on the throne built for the empress in what was named the admiralty of Kherson. Such was the scenery prepared for one of the most theatrical events the world has ever witnessed. It cost the empire dearly, but Potemkin's purpose was achieved.
In this neglige, Potemkin approached the door of his anteroom. As soon as he had been announced, a hundred weary faces grew bright with expectation; and princes, dukes, and nobles bowed before the haughty man who was even mightier than the empress; for HE bent before no mortal, while she was the slave of one will of Potemkin's.
The country through which she passed had been a year before an unoccupied waste. Now, by Potemkin's extraordinary efforts, the empress found it dotted thick with towns and cities which had been erected for the occasion, filled with a busy population which swarmed along the riverside to greet the sovereign with applause.
At a dinner at the young and pretty Princess Potemkin's, on entering the dining-room, we saw only a round table covered with fruit and sweetmeats, as if we had come in at the dessert; and so it remained while, first, soup, then cutlets, then fish, one dish at a time, ten or twelve one after another, were handed round, ending with game, sweet things, and ice.
Worn out in unrequited service, disgusted with Russian court intrigues of which he was the victim, resentful of the infamous Potemkin's brutal attempts at coercion, he asked leave of absence from Catherine's service and went to Paris, where, in the companionship of his friends, and in the society of the beautiful Aimèe de Telison, the one woman he loved, he lived two years and died at the age of forty-five.
In its attacks upon its specially selected victim this giant always struck as if with a withered right hand. All the campaigns against Turkey prove this, from Potemkin's time to the last Eastern war in 1878, entered upon with every advantage of a well-nursed prestige and a carefully fostered fanaticism. Even the half- armed were always too much for the might of Russia, or, rather, of the Tsardom.
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