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At length he came to a spacious hall, where he beheld his mother sitting, arrayed in royal robes. Ivan embraced her tenderly, telling her how he had travelled far and wide with his brothers in search of her. Then the Tsarina told Ivan Tsarevich that a spirit would soon appear, and bade him hide himself in the folds of her cloak.
Frederick felt that the best safeguard against further attempts of Austria to recover Silesia was a firm alliance between Prussia and Russia. And it was an outcome of that alliance that in 1772 he joined with the Tsarina Catherine in making the first partition of Poland. Catherine appropriated the country east of the Duena and the Dnieper rivers.
As Yaroslav gazed on her beauty he was troubled at heart, but he could not refuse her request, so he remained there and ruled over her kingdom. Meanwhile the Tsarina Anastasia had a brave little son; her father was greatly rejoiced, and gave him the name of Yaroslav.
In 1780 Maria Theresa died; Joseph and Kaunitz launched on ambitious adventures for imperial domination of the German Empire, making overtures to the Tsarina for dual empire of east and west, alarming to Frederick.
Moreover in France, mobilisation required weeks; in Russia, months; and even then the Russian army, otherwise unequipped, the Tsarina had supplied with two hundred Teuton generals. That woman used to exclaim at her resemblance to Marie Antoinette. She flattered herself. It is Bazaine whom she resembled. But where was I? Oh, yes.
The Corsican parvenu passionately desired a matrimonial alliance with the House of Romanov, and repeatedly applied for the hand of one of Alexander’s sisters; the dowager Tsarina, Alexander’s mother, a daughter of the King of Würtemberg, as persistently refused. She had all the pride of birth of a German Princess, and all the hatred of a reactionary against the armed soldier of the Revolution.
Moreover, although Boris, fore-warned, had prevented the Tsarina Maria from supporting the pretender out of motives of revenge, he had forgotten her two brothers; he had not foreseen that, actuated by the same motives, they might do that which he had prevented her from doing. This was what occurred.
Then Lyubim related all his adventures; and the Tsar and Tsarina, after summoning their sons, Aksof and Hut, asked them why they had acted so unnaturally; but they denied the charge. Thereat the Tsar waxed wroth, and commanded that they should be shot at the gate of the city.
Of the luckless inhabitants of the town two hundred were put to death by his orders, and the rest sent into banishment beyond the Ural Mountains, whilst the Tsarina Maria, Demetrius's mother, for having said that her boy was murdered at the instigation of Boris, was packed off to a convent, and had remained there ever since in close confinement. That had been in 1591.
The Coronation gown, which cost four thousand roubles, was made at Paris; and from Paris, too, came the gorgeous coach with its blaze of gold and heraldry, in which the Tsarina made her triumphal progress through the streets of the capital from the Winter Palace.
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