head of her army; and, at her request, Charles VII. dubbed him Count of
the Holy Roman Empire, a distinction which Gregory Orloff in later years
prized more than all the honours Catherine II. showered on him; while
the estates of which she made him lord were a small kingdom in
themselves. Alexis, the shepherd's son, was now, beyond any question,
the most powerful man in Russia. If he would, he might easily have
taken the sceptre from the yielding hands of the Empress and played the
autocrat, as Patiomkin played it under similar circumstances in later
years. But Alexis cared as little for power as for rank and wealth. He
smiled at his honours. "Fancy," he said, with his hearty laugh, "a
peasant's son, a Count; and a man who ought to be tending sheep, a
Field-Marshal!"

When courtly genealogists spread before him an elaborate family-tree,
proving that he sprang from the princely stock of Bogdan, with many a
Grand Duke of Lithuania among his lineal ancestors, he laughed loud and
long at them for their pains. "Don't be so ridiculous," he said. "You
know as well as I that my parents were simple peasants, honest enough,
but people of the soil and nothing else. If I am Count and Field-Marshal
and Viceroy, I owe it all to the good heart of your Empress and mine,
whose humble servant I am. Take it away, and let me hear no more of such
foolery."

Such to the last was the unspoiled, child-like nature of the man who so
soon was to be not merely the first favourite but husband of an Empress.
Probably Alexis would have lived and died Elizabeth's unlicensed lover
had it not been for the cunning of the cleverest of her Chancellors,
Bestyouzhev, who saw in his mistress's infatuation for her peasant the
means of making his own position more secure. Elizabeth was still a
young and attractive woman, who might pick and choose among some of the