sometimes verged upon insanity. Too young to be admitted to the
councils of his imperial aunt, he occupied his time in ways that
were either ridiculous or vile.

Next to the sleeping-room of his wife he kept a set of kennels,
with a number of dogs, which he spent hours in drilling as if they
had been soldiers. He had a troop of rats which he also drilled.
It was his delight to summon a court martial of his dogs to try
the rats for various military offenses, and then to have the
culprits executed, leaving their bleeding carcasses upon the
floor. At any hour of the day or night Catharine, hidden in her
chamber, could hear the yapping of the curs, the squeak of rats,
and the word of command given by her half-idiot husband.

When wearied of this diversion Peter would summon a troop of
favorites, both men and women, and with them he would drink deep
of beer and vodka, since from his early childhood he had been both
a drunkard and a debauchee. The whoops and howls and vile songs of
his creatures could be heard by Catharine; and sometimes he would
stagger into her rooms, accompanied by his drunken minions. With a
sort of psychopathic perversity he would insist on giving
Catharine the most minute and repulsive narratives of his amours,
until she shrank from him with horror at his depravity and came to
loathe the sight of his bloated face, with its little, twinkling,
porcine eyes, his upturned nose and distended nostrils, and his
loose-hung, lascivious mouth. She was scarcely less repelled when
a wholly different mood would seize upon him and he would declare
himself her slave, attending her at court functions in the garb of
a servant and professing an unbounded devotion for his bride.