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Catharine tells many trifling, but interesting incidents, of various nature, in these Memoirs: of how, after the birth of her first child, she was left utterly alone and neglected, so that she famished with thirst for the lack of some one to bring her water; how her child was taken from her at its birth, and kept from her, she hardly being allowed even to see it; how it was always wrapped in fox-skins and seal-skins, till it lay in a continual bath of perspiration; how the members of the royal family itself were so badly accommodated, that sometimes they were made ill by walking through passages open to wind and rain, and sometimes stifled by over-crowded rooms; how at the imperial masquerades, during one season, the men were ordered to appear in women's dresses, and the women in the propria quae maribus, the former hideous in large whaleboned petticoats and high feathered head-dresses, the latter looking like scrubby little boys with very thick legs, and all that the Empress Elizabeth might show her tall and graceful figure and what beautiful things she used to walk with, which Catharine says were the handsomest that she ever saw; how in this court, where marriage was the mere shadow of a bond, it was yet deemed a matter of the first nuptial importance that a lady of the court should have her head dressed for the wedding by the hands of the Empress herself, or, if she were too ill, by those of the Grand Duchess; how Catharine used, at Oranienbaum, to dress herself from head to foot in male attire, and go out in a skiff, accompanied only by an old huntsman, to shoot ducks and snipe, sometimes doubling the Cape of Oranienbaum, which extends two versts into the sea, and how thus the fortunes of the Russian Empire, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, were at the mercy of a spring-tide, a gust of wind, or the tipping of a shallop.
"Guess we can't tell you!" replied the American mother, whose corsets were not in exact accord with the cushions upon which she sat, breathing heavily from her upper whaleboned register. "Nous espérons le mieux," said the Frenchman, winking at the dragoman. And that moment they were enlightened.
He sprang to the whaleboned pavement in front of the little church facing the blue bay and surrounded by the gray ruins of the old Presidio, and lifted her down. Chonita recalled, and angry with herself for having been beguiled by her enemy, took the infant from the nurse's arms and carried it fearfully up the aisle. Estenega, walking beside her, regarded her meditatively.
"The men," Catharine writes, "wore large whaleboned petticoats, with women's gowns, and the head-dresses worn on court days, while the women appeared in the court costume of men. The men did not like these reversals of their sex, and the greater part of them were in the worst possible humor on these occasions, because they felt themselves to be hideous in such disguises.
But at the fireside, curled up in the winged chair with her bandaged foot propped comfortably on a foot- stool, Felicia sat through the long afternoon and chattered and laughed and clapped her little hands. Oh, those foolish clothes that had belonged to Louisa! With their silly whaleboned waists and their grotesque basques and impossible pleatings!
The corsage is brought all sewn and whaleboned, but only basted below the arms and at the shoulder, and as soon as it is in place "crac! crac!" the corsagère, with angry fingers, breaks the threads, and then calmly and patiently rejoins the seams and pins them together so that the joinings may lie perfectly flat and even.
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