that made Catharine trust him absolutely.

When he died, he died as the supreme master of her foreign policy
and at a time when her word was powerful throughout all Europe.
Death came upon him after he had fought against it with singular
tenacity of purpose. Catharine had given him a magnificent
triumph, and he had entertained her in his Taurian Palace with a
splendor such as even Russia had never known before. Then he fell
ill, though with high spirit he would not yield to illness. He ate
rich meats and drank rich wines and bore himself as gallantly as
ever. Yet all at once death came upon him while he was traveling
in the south of Russia. His carriage was stopped, a rug was spread
beneath a tree by the roadside, and there he died, in the country
which he had added to the realms of Russia,

The great empress who loved him mourned him deeply during the five
years of life that still remained to her. The names of other men
for whom she had imagined that she cared were nothing to her. But
this one man lived in her heart in death as he had done in life.

Many have written of Catharine as a great ruler, a wise diplomat,
a creature of heroic mold. Others have depicted her as a royal
wanton and have gathered together a mass of vicious tales, the
gossip of the palace kitchens, of the clubs, and of the barrack-
rooms. But perhaps one finds the chief interest of her story to
lie in this--that besides being empress and diplomat and a lover
of pleasure she was, beyond all else, at heart a woman.