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It does not satisfy you to be the friend of a Princess Elizabeth, but I must become an empress for your sakes." "How well the diadem would become that proud pure brow!" exclaimed Alexis, with animation. "How happy would this poor Russia be under your mild sceptre!" said the chamberlain, Woronzow.
"They may henceforth call this proud Catharine my wife," thought Peter, "but I shall never love her, as my heart will ever belong to my dear Woronzow! But Elizabeth has decided that Catharine shall be my wife. I accommodate myself to her command, and obey now, that I may one day command! But then woe to the wife this day forced upon me!"
A movement suddenly arose in the rooms, the crowd divided and respectfully withdrew to the sides, and through the rows of smiling, humbly bowing courtiers passed the Princess Elizabeth, followed by her chamberlain Woronzow, her private secretary Alexis Razumovsky, and her physician Lestocq, in the splendor of her beauty and grace, all kindness, all smiles.
My son, Woronzow Greig, had been educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was travelling on the Continent, when Somerville and I received an invitation from the Principal, Dr. Whewell, to visit the University. Mr. Airy, then astronomer at Cambridge, now Astronomer-Royal at Greenwich, and Mrs.
I do not deny that the late Count von Bernstorff was a great politician; but I assert, also, that his was a greatness more calculated for regular times than for periods of unusual political convulsion. Like your Pitt, the Russian Woronzow, and the Austrian Colloredo, he was too honest to judge soundly and to act rightly, according to the present situation of affairs.
She hated Elizabeth because the latter surrounded her with spies and watchers, and required of her a strict virtue, a never-violated matrimonial fidelity fidelity to the husband who so far derided and insulted his wife as to demand that she should receive into her circle and treat with respect and kindness his own mistress, the Countess Woronzow fidelity to this husband, who had never shown her any thing but contempt and neglect, and who had no other way of entertaining her than teaching her to march in military fashion, and stand as a sentinel at his door!
Herr Lestocq, a physician; Herr Grunstein, a bankrupt shopkeeper and now under-officer; Herr Woronzow, chamberlain; and Alexis Razumovsky, my private secretary. And here I am, the empress of such vassals, and what sort of an empress? An empress of four subjects, an empress without a throne and without a crown, without land and without a people an empress who never was and never will be an empress!
"I will never desert you, even if I must follow you to suffering and death!" exclaimed Alexis Razumovsky, casting himself at the feet of the princess. "We will remain true and faithful to you unto death!" cried Woronzow and Grunstein. "Well, and you alone remain silent, Lestocq?" asked the princess, with tears in her eyes.
The motive remains a mystery to this day, for it was not robbery. The youngest died in childhood. The eldest was Woronzow Greig, barrister-at-law, late Clerk of the Peace for Surrey.
Now the touch, the vicinity of Elizabeth's friends became an evil-breathing pest, a death-bringing terror; they anxiously avoided the vicinity of Lestocq, they crowded back from Woronzow and Razumovsky, whom they had before sought with every demonstration of friendliness; they even avoided looking at the French ambassador; for, if the regent knew all, she must know of the intimate relations of Lestocq with the Marquis de la Chetardie, and he was therefore doomed like the other three.
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