I had not knocked him down immediately, he would doubtless have beaten
me. I dismissed him on the spot. There is not a better servant in the
world than a Russian. He works without ceasing, sleeps in front of the
door of his master's bedroom to be always ready to fulfil his orders,
never answering his reproaches, incapable of theft. But after drinking a
little too much brandy he becomes a perfect monster; and drunkenness is
the vice of the whole nation.

A coachman knows no other way of resisting the bitter cold to which he is
exposed, than by drinking rye brandy. It sometimes happens that he drinks
till he falls asleep, and then there is no awaking for him in this world.
Unless one is very careful, it is easy to lose an ear, the nose, a cheek,
or a lip by frost bites. One day as I was walking out on a bitterly cold
day, a Russian noticed that one of my ears was frozen. He ran up to me
and rubbed the affected part with a handful of snow till the circulation
was restored. I asked him how he had noticed my state, and he said he had
remarked the livid whiteness of my ear, and this, he said, was always a
sign that the frost had taken it. What surprised me most of all is that
sometimes the part grows again after it has dropped off. Prince Charles
of Courland assured me that he had cost his nose in Siberia, and that it
had grown again the next summer. I have been assured of the truth of this
by several Russians.

About this time the empress made the architect Rinaldi, who had been
fifty years in St. Petersburg, build her an enormous wooden amphitheatre
so large as to cover the whole of the space in front of the palace. It
would contain a hundred thousand spectators, and in it Catherine intended
to give a vast tournament to all the knights of her empire. There were to
be four parties of a hundred knights each, and all the cavaliers were to
be clad in the national costume of the nations they represented. All the