Menshikoff, and was preceded by an interview with the Dowager-Empress
and his Princess sisters, in which Peter declared his intention to make
Catherine his wife and commanded them to pay her the respect due to her
new rank. Then followed, in brilliant sequence, State dinners,
receptions, and balls, at all of which the laundress-bride sat at her
husband's right hand and received the homage of his subjects as his
Queen.

Picture now the woman who but a few years earlier had scrubbed Pastor
Glück's floors and cleaned Menshikoff's window-panes, in all her new
splendours as Empress of Russia. The portraits of her, in her
unaccustomed glories, are far from flattering and by no means
consistent. "She showed no sign of ever having possessed beauty," says
Baron von Pöllnitz; "she was tall and strong and very dark, and would
have seemed darker but for the rouge and whitening with which she
plastered her face."

The picture drawn by the Margravine of Baireuth is still less
attractive: "She was short and huddled up, much tanned, and utterly
devoid of dignity or grace. Muffled up in her clothes, she looked like a
German comedy-actress. Her old-fashioned gown, heavily embroidered with
silver, and covered with dirt, had been bought in some old-clothes shop.
The front of her skirt was adorned with jewels, and she had a dozen
orders and as many portraits of saints fastened all along the facings of
her dress, so that when she walked she jingled like a mule."

But in the eyes of one man at least--and he the greatest in all
Russia--she was beautiful. His allegiance never wavered, nor indeed did
that of his army, which idolised her to a man. She might have no boudoir
graces, but at least she was the typical soldier's wife, and cut a brave