THE GAY AND PIOUS ELIZABETH
ELIZABETH has already entered so frequently, and so picturesquely, into
the story that little further introduction is necessary. She was the
younger of the two surviving daughters of Peter the Great and Catherine,
and she inherited the independent temper of her father. Her pretty,
merry figure was one of the most piquant of the court, and she had
hardly attained a precocious puberty when it became necessary to watch
her movements. She had, during the last three reigns, regarded both the
court and its rulers with disdain. For the belated prudery of the
Empress Anne she had no respect; it was the awful threat of confining
her hot blood in a convent which had for a time curbed her public
behaviour. For the baby-Emperor and his foolish parents she felt
contempt, and she was prepared at any time to see the wheel of fortune
turn toward her.
It was, as I said, the enterprising Marquis de la Chétardie who opened
for her a plausible path to the throne. I would not stress her virtue in
refusing to promise to yield Russian territory to Sweden. She knew, and
the Marquis ought to have known, that such a concession would have cost
her the throne. But she continued to negotiate with him, and her French
physician, Lestocq, assisted in the plot. Count Ostermann, the wise old
German councillor who survived all revolutions at court, suspected her,
and she had to use strategy. Chétardie took a villa up the Neva, and
Elizabeth was fond of boating. She contrived to meet him casually and
discuss the plot. She had, further, a few confidants at court, who were
ready to speculate on the chances of a revolution, and she had,
especially, the affection of the guards. Like her mother she was amiable
with the soldiers. She held their children at the font and inquired
genially about their families. Ostermann, we saw, detected the
conspiracy, and Anne was directed to charge her with treasonable
relations with France and Sweden, the enemies of Russia. The interview
ended in sisterly tears and embraces, and the conspirators got speedily
to work.
Ostermann, seeing the weakness of Anne, ordered the guard to be ready to
leave for the frontier within twenty-four hours. It was probable, he
mendaciously said, that Sweden was about to re-open the war. He had
recently quarrelled with Elizabeth, and had no mind to see her Empress.
This was on December 5th, the day after her interview with Anne. That
night at ten the conspirators met to decide upon immediate action.
Lestocq, the doctor, went out into the snow to see that all lights were
out at Ostermann’s mansion and the palace. They were as feeble a
group of conspirators as ever engineered a revolution in Russia, and
Elizabeth wavered between dread of a convent and eagerness for the
throne. The most active and eloquent of them was the French physician.
Then there were Vorontsoff, her chamberlain; Schwartz, her music-master;
the brothers Shuvaloff, gentlemen of her household; and Alexis
Razumovsky, her lover at the time, of whom we will see more. They raised
Elizabeth’s courage to the required pitch, and Lestocq stealthily
introduced twenty grenadiers of the guard who professed that they
were--for a consideration--ready to die for her. Elizabeth
donned a cuirass under her cloak and slung a crucifix at her breast, and
then, after a long and fervent prayer, committed her fortunes to
Providence and the modest skill of her friends. Her lover was left to
guard the house.
At two in the morning the party passed swiftly through the frozen
streets to the Preobrajensky barracks. A small crowd of about two
hundred soldiers gathered round Elizabeth and listened to her appeal to
support her, the daughter of Peter, and exterminate the foreigners. They
would cut them to pieces, they assured her; and she had to explain that
she would have no bloodshed. Other soldiers joined them, and presently a
troop of four hundred marched with her and her supporters to the palace.
It was the tamest revolution Russia had yet seen. Ostermann, Golovkin,
and the other leading ministers were pinned into their mansions; the few
loyal guards at the palace were thrust aside; and, as I said, Anne and
Julia awoke to find Elizabeth in their bedroom at the head of a crowd of
grenadiers.
Anne was not of the stuff of heroines. She meekly begged Elizabeth to
spare her family and not take away her dear Julia, and she and her
imperial baby were put upon the sledge and driven to Elizabeth’s house.
The blaze of fires in the courtyards and noise of soldiers soon roused
the city, and courtiers and soldiers rushed out to study the situation.
It is said of Lacy, the Irish commander, that, when a friend asked him
which party he stood for, he promptly replied: “For the party that is in
power.” Few were so candid in speech, but all behaved alike. They rushed
to take the new oath of allegiance, and the Empress Elizabeth
inaugurated her reign.
Elizabeth insisted that there should be no bloodshed, but what happened
may give the true measure of such advance as this indicated. Little Ivan
and his parents must, she said, receive a pension and go back to
Germany. Anne and Anthony, glad to escape so lightly, started for the
frontier, but a courier reached them before they had left Russia, and
they were imprisoned at Riga. After a time they were transferred, still
prisoners, to Oranienbaum. Whether Elizabeth was struggling with her own
glimmer of a conscience or with less humane counsellors it would be
difficult to say. She consulted everybody. Was her life really in
danger, or might she follow her impulse of humanity and let the
weak-minded couple depart? Humanity was a new and rare thing in Russia.
In 1744, when Anne expected a third baby, the deposed couple were, at
the instigation of Frederick of Prussia, confined in the fortress of
Schlüsselburg, and four months later they were put upon sledges and
driven north. They were to be imprisoned in a monastery on an island
near Archangel. When, however, they reached Kholnagory, on the coast,
the state of the ice would not allow the guards to take them to the
island and they were left in the village. There, on the bleak shore of
the Arctic, father and mother and five children--Anne added two to the
family before she sickened and died three years later--lived and slept
together in a common Russian hut. The children grew up feebler in mind
and body even than their parents, but Russia would have it that the
pale-faced Ivan was still the nucleus of a conspiracy. He was in 1756,
in his thirteenth year, removed to a remote dungeon, to await his murder
under the reign of Catherine. Prince Anthony was weak-minded enough to
survive the horrors for thirty years, and his children were at length
released by Catherine and sent to live on a small pension in Denmark.
The “clemency” of Elizabeth--of which the decrees of the time speak--was
equally exhibited toward the surviving servants of her father and her
predecessor. Away with the Germans, was the cry; and a few distinguished
Russians were included in the batch of prisoners who now looked forward
to the customary reprisals. Old Ostermann, gouty and stoical, had fought
Elizabeth, and he knew that his forty years of sound service would count
for nothing. He was to be broken on the wheel. Münnich was to lose his
hands and his head; Golovkin his head; and so on. A vast crowd gathered
in the square on January 29th to see the “traitors” butchered. At the
last moment an order of the Empress spared Ostermann the wheel and
changed the sentence to decapitation. The old man moved toward the
block, and a new order changed the punishment to exile. He quietly asked
for his coat, and was packed off to the bleak northern region to which
he had once helped to send Menshikoff. The crowd murmured when fresh
orders from the Empress cheated them of the sight of blood. Münnich was
sent to the spot--the very house--in Siberia to which he had sent Biren,
who was summoned back to life. They met on the way, in Siberia, and
bowed; and the great soldier settled down to rearing chickens and
growing vegetables. The others were scattered over the bleak north.
There had been no torture of witnesses--though much suborning of
witnesses--and no bloodshed. Russia was improving.
While the goats were scattered, the sheep were gathered on the right
hand. Vorontsoff became a leading minister, and his humble colleagues
strutted also in gold lace and silks. Lestocq, first physician of the
new court, was so richly rewarded with gold and favour that he imagined
himself the prime spirit of the new regime, and will presently come to
grief. The Marquis de la Chétardie became a saviour of Russia (which he
would like to ruin in the interest of France, and indeed expected to be
at least gravely weakened under the rule of Elizabeth), and soldiers
kissed his hand. The guards, heavily rewarded, put on insufferable airs,
and wandered insolently about the palace as if they were part owners of
it. The state of the court was chaotic, and foreign envoys sent word
home that Russia would sink back into barbarism.
The strange fortune of Alexis Razumovsky deserves a paragraph, since it
cannot have a chapter. He was a tall, handsome Cossack, with fine black
eyes and eyebrows and a rich black beard; a man in his thirty-fourth
year when wealth and power were thus thrust upon him. Twenty years
earlier he had been a guardian of his father’s sheep and a
chorister in the church of the little Cossack village where his mother
kept an inn. An imperial courier, passing through, had heard him sing,
and had sent him to St. Petersburg to be trained and then got him a
place in the choir of the imperial palace at Moscow. He was then
twenty-two, and Elizabeth saw and appropriated him for her household.
The Marquis de la Chétardie says that one of her maids first
appropriated the handsome Cossack and Elizabeth got the news from her.
To tell all the _legends_ of the Russian court would need many
volumes, and would offend the taste of our polite age, but no one
seriously questions that Razumovsky took the place of Elizabeth’s
latest lover whom Anne had sent to Siberia.
At Elizabeth’s accession he was made a Count and a Field Marshal. He was
never spoiled by prosperity--“you may make me a Field Marshal,” he said
genially, “but you’ll never make me a soldier”--and never interfered in
politics. He took his great wealth pleasantly and generously, and drank
royally. His brothers and relatives were--not by him, but by the
Empress--similarly enriched, and even his old Cossack mother was brought
from her inn, richly dressed, and presented at court. There was a story
that the bewildered woman took her own reflection in the glass for the
Empress and nervously curtsied to it; which would not flatter Elizabeth,
as she was still one of the most handsome women of Russia.
Whether Elizabeth ever married Razumovsky cannot be exactly determined.
It is generally accepted that she privately, at the instigation of her
confessor, married him in the fall of 1742. Elizabeth openly doted on
him and would always have him with her. He kept his even temper when, in
her later years, she returned to her early license, and he was present
at her death; after which, it is said, he was seen to burn a casket of
papers which _may_ have included a wedding-certificate.
A still greater favourite, in a different way, was Elizabeth’s nephew,
Karl Peter Ulrich, son of the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp and Anne of
Mecklenburg, the elder daughter of Catherine and Peter. His mother had
died of consumption a few months after his birth at Kiel, in 1728, and
her sickly taint was on the boy. He was mean in body, intellect and
character, and, as his father had died when he was eleven, his education
had been rough. Elizabeth sent for him, gave him excellent tutors, and
completely spoiled what bit of manliness he had. He was made a Grand
Duke and heir to the throne--being the last male with any Romanoff
blood--and, as he disliked the Empress’s feminine circle, he surrounded
himself with Germans, affected a contempt for Russia, and laughed at his
aunt’s amours.
[IMAGE: img214.jpg Paul the First]
But Elizabeth was very far from being a fool. She adopted Peter in order
to keep the crown in her father’s family, making, out of dynastic
feeling, a mistake which wise men like Marcus Aurelius had made. For the
government of the country she chose her men well, as a rule, and she
tried to put a stop to the disgraceful rivalry which had so often rent
the court. At first her chief ministers were her Grand Chamberlain,
Prince Tcherkasky, a corrupt old noble of the traditional school, and
his son-in-law Trubetskoi. But she saw the greater merit of Michael
Bestuzheff, the Grand Marshal of her household, a grave and learned man,
and his able younger brother, Alexis, who was to become her chief
minister.
Elizabeth herself was lazy. She let documents wait weeks for her
signature and at ordinary times paid little attention to affairs. Her
more resolute admirers say that she was so conscientious that she took
weeks to consider a matter. She was, in point of fact, a thorough
patriot, eager to maintain the work of her father; but most of her time
was spent in the preservation of her health and beauty and the
satisfaction of her insatiable thirst for pleasure. Her toilet took
several hours every day, and it did not generally begin before midday,
as she was apt to sit up with her intimate friends until the early hours
of the morning. It is said that she drank heavily in her later years,
but that is disputed. Her chief passion was for dress and entertainment.
In a palace-fire she lost four thousand costly dresses, yet there were
fifteen thousand in her wardrobe when she died. She had a large and
opulent figure--a little too opulent as time went on--a face
with few rivals in Russia, charming blue eyes and dark-golden hair.
One of her characteristics was a love of dressing as a soldier or
sailor. She had good warrant for this in the example of her parents;
and, to say the truth, she thought that no lady of her court could match
her in male dress. So fancy-balls became very frequent, and Elizabeth,
who was still fond of dancing and hunting until she grew too heavy, made
a handsome Dutch sailor or colonel of the guard. She would change her
garments three times in a ball; a dozen times in a day. Like Anne, she
set her face against the old Russian debauches, and was for a French
elegance, or a poor imitation of it. Luxury of every kind she
encouraged, until the court shone with diamonds and gold brocade; and
for her operas singers were brought from the ends of Europe. Reading was
bad for the health, she said, and she avoided it.
She was, and always had been, very pious. There she differed
emphatically from her father, and the orthodox clergy fell furiously
upon dissenters and seceders. She observed the fasts rigorously, she
knelt in prayer until she fainted, and she had a great veneration for
the relics of the saints and holy places. To the end she made
pilgrimages afoot to famous shrines like the Troitsa monastery. In her
youth she had made the journey in a day, and had had a lover to meet her
there. Now she would walk out a few miles from Moscow--the court
spent one year in four at Moscow--then ride back to the city, and
begin her pilgrimage on the morrow at the point where she had left it
the day before. It often took weeks to make a pilgrimage. She insisted
so closely on decency that one day, as she prayed in church, it occurred
to her that the angels painted on the walls were really cupids, and she
had them repainted. Her own elderly gallantries we will see later.
With all this she, as I said, paid substantial attention to the
interests of Russia. Sweden had collapsed in the late struggle, but
Chétardie and Lestocq were instructed to induce her to be generous and
give it some of the territory taken from it. It is generally difficult
to disentangle the action of a sovereign from that of her advisers, and
Elizabeth may have more credit for firmness than she deserves. She, at
all events, refused, and the war went on until Sweden was crushed.
Russia kept a large part of Finland. At last intercepted letters made it
plain to the Empress that the gallant French marquis who bowed and
flattered her was really trying to injure Russia in the interest of his
country, and he had to go. She was, however, still infatuated with
France and her French doctor, though Count Bestuzheff, who became her
chief adviser, persistently warned her against France. Lestocq, who took
bribes from all Powers and fancied himself a master of intrigue, now,
with the aid of the French minister, made a desperate attempt to win
her.
Elizabeth’s chief rival in good looks was Natalia Lapukhin, a noble lady
of equal freedom in manners and morals who had viciously tormented
Elizabeth when she was the Cinderella of the court. To her surprise she
had been, at the coronation, made a Lady in Waiting. But she remained
insolent, and at a ball she appeared in a pink robe and with pink roses
in her hair; and pink was understood to be an imperial monopoly at
Elizabeth’s court. Elizabeth’s temper was much shorter than her prayers.
Many a maid got the heavy imperial slipper across her mouth for talking
when the Empress dozed on her couch, and her language at times resembled
that of the guards. She had a buffoon cruelly tortured for playing a
trick which frightened and upset her. She now fell furiously upon the
audacious Lady in Waiting. She sent for scissors, made her kneel while
she cut off the roses (and hair along with them), and cuffed her twice
across the face. “Serves her right,” she said, when they told her that
the countess had fainted. To her bosom friend, the Countess Bestuzheva,
wife of the elder Bestuzheff, Natalia often told what she thought of the
Empress, and in both families the talk over tea was mildly seditious.
Lestocq got his agents to ply Natalia’s son, young Colonel
Lapukhin, with drink and learn it.
And on July 21st, 1743, the physician rushed to the palace with a report
of a conspiracy. Elizabeth lived in daily dread of a conspiracy, knowing
how easy such things were in Russia. She cowered behind a hedge of
soldiers and let Lestocq arrest whom he would. She had humanely
abolished torture and the death-sentence; but this was a different
matter. Natalia and her husband and a score of others were imprisoned,
and the old torture-chambers rang again with the shrieks of delicate
women whose limbs were stretched until they cracked. It is said, but is
difficult to believe, that Elizabeth was secretly at hand to hear their
confessions. There was, in fact, no conspiracy to confess, but Lestocq
was one of the three commissioners appointed to examine the prisoners,
and Elizabeth was stung by the table-talk that was wrung from them. One
of the women was pregnant, and the Empress was asked to spare her the
torture. “She did not spare me,” said the daughter of Peter the Great.
They were all condemned to death. For ten days Elizabeth lingered over
the sentence, but in the end, she observed her own decree. She commuted
the sentence to exile, flogging, and mutilation. Natalia Lapukhin, a
beautiful woman in the prime of life, was partly stripped before an
immense crowd, and brutally knouted. She sank, covered with blood, to
the floor of the scaffold, and the executioner roughly finished his
work, and, with a brutal laugh, offered to sell her tongue to the
highest bidder. Countess Bestuzheva slipped a bribe into the man’s
hands. The lash fell less heavily on her white back, and less of her
tongue was cut out. The mutilated wretches went the worn way to Siberia
and the north. Count Michael Bestuzheff, who was innocent, was
despatched on a foreign embassy. Alexis, at whom the French had chiefly
aimed, was untouched. He was astute as well as able.
At the end of the year Elizabeth transferred the court to Moscow and
prepared it for a new sensation. She had chosen a bride, or a girl to be
trained as bride, for her wastrel of a nephew. After her weakness for
France, which was then a deadly rival of Russia, came a weakness for
Frederick the Great, who was far more cynical and crafty in his
professions of friendship and determination to sacrifice Russia’s
interests to his own. He flattered Elizabeth, and laughed at her.
Hearing that there was question of a future Empress, he strongly
recommended the daughter of the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of his own
generals. A courier sped to the little court where Sophia Augusta
Frederika lived quietly with her mother, and that lady, a remarkably
ambitious person for her station in life, hurried to St. Petersburg, and
on to Moscow. Both Peter and Elizabeth were indecently impatient to see
the bride-elect, and they professed themselves entirely satisfied with
the quick-eyed, precocious maiden of fourteen who would one day be
Catherine the Great.
Sophia and her mother were lodged in the Kreml, and the work of
preparation began. The young princess soon realised her destiny and
determined not to spoil it. But she had three near misses within a year.
She worked so hard at the Russian that she would get up during the night
and pace the room, repeating her lessons, in bare feet; and she caught
pneumonia and nearly died a few weeks after her arrival. Incidentally
she won the Empress’s favour completely. In the hour of danger they
asked if she would see her Lutheran pastor. No, she said, the Russian
priest; and the rumour of her piety, which--she afterwards said--was
really policy, spread through the court. She was received into the
Russian Church in July, and solemnly betrothed to Peter. Then Peter had
the smallpox and nearly died; and in fine her mother nearly spoiled her
prospect. She had come with secret instructions from Frederick of
Prussia, and, like a good German, she stealthily pushed his interest.
The inquiry into the supposed Bestuzheff plot exposed her, and she
retired to her obscure province. But Elizabeth liked her daughter, and
Catherine--her name was changed on entering the Orthodox
Church--remained, and married Peter in the following year.
The years that followed were filled with European struggle, which does
not much concern us here. The capture of the letters of Chétardie
exposed the machinations of both France and Prussia. Elizabeth found
herself described as living in a state of “voluptuous lethargy,” and her
passion for France and Frederick suddenly chilled. Alexis Bestuzheff
became her chief counsellor, and inclined her toward England and
Austria. The court was honeycombed by intrigue, and even the favourite,
Lestocq, was at length (1748) detected in his treachery. He was put to
the torture and banished.
Elizabeth was not long drawn out of her “voluptuous lethargy.” In fact,
the attainment of middle age seemed to bring back the looseness of her
youth, and her lovers were the jest of the courts of Europe. One of her
pages, Ivan Shuvaloff, was promoted and placed in apartments near those
of the Empress. Ivan took his good fortune modestly, but the customary
tribe of relatives appeared and blossomed into wealthy and influential
courtiers. Count Bestuzheff and others were alarmed, and they put in the
way of the Empress a very handsome young amateur actor named Beketoff.
Elizabeth genially added the youth to the intimate circle which caroused
in her room at night, but Peter Shuvaloff, uncle of the earlier
favourite, did not like the prospect. The more credible version of his
action is that he met young Beketoff one day, and, impressing upon him
how much the Empress liked to see her favourites fresh and healthy, gave
him a box of ointment for his face. There was in the stuff something
which caused an eruption of the skin, and his condition was represented
to the Empress in such a light that he fled.
It should be added that she still guarded the propriety of her subjects.
The elder Count Bestuzheff held that his wife’s crime had dissolved his
marriage, and he wished to take a second wife. Elizabeth sternly refused
to consent, holding that marriage was indissoluble. When the desperate
Count did at length marry she refused to receive his “paramour” at
court.
In many other respects she tried to continue the process of cleaning the
face of Russia. At first she had undone her father’s control of the
monks, and let them gather enormous wealth. As the needs of war pressed
on her, she revoked this and checked them. She endeavoured also to check
the irregularities and dispel the ignorance of the secular clergy.
Wandering priests would gather in the streets of Moscow and importune
passers-by to give them the price of a mass. Some are said to have held
a crust in their hands, and threatened to eat (which would make them
unable to say mass that day), unless a man offered his purse. Elizabeth
set the bishops to remove these and other irregularities. She promoted
letters, since it was the proper thing for an enlightened monarch to do,
and her ministers attempted to improve trade and agriculture.
Agricultural banks were opened; industries were protected; mines were
sunk; Siberia and the southern steppes were partly colonised. It was
forbidden for men and women to mix in the public baths. These were, on
the whole, slight improvements of a terribly backward country.
Ignorance, violence, drunkenness, dishonesty in trade, official
corruption, brigandage, listlessness, and idleness were still general.
The later years of the reign were filled with the inevitable Prussian
war. After years of diplomatic struggle Elizabeth, in 1756, concluded an
alliance with England. To her great disgust, and Bestuzheff’s grave
danger, England then formed an alliance with Frederick, and the French
redoubled their efforts to oust Bestuzheff and receive the friendship of
Russia. By this time the Princess Catherine openly disdained her husband
and went her own way. For years the Empress, eager to see an heir to the
throne she would leave to Peter, tried to bring them together, but each
hated the other, and Catherine found consolation elsewhere. In 1754,
however, Catherine had a son who was presumed to be a Romanoff.
Elizabeth fell ill, and Bestuzheff, believing that she would die,
approached Catherine, through her latest lover, Poniatowski, and
suggested that he could make her Empress if she would support his
anti-French and anti-Prussian policy.
Elizabeth recovered, however, and declared that the good of the world
demanded the destruction of Frederick of Prussia, who had said caustic
things about her. The Seven Years’ War opened, and Russia joined France
and Austria against Prussia. The Russian army under General Apraksin won
a great victory, and then, instead of pressing it, retired. Now this
coincided with a second serious illness of the Empress, and the French
envoy raised a cry of treachery. Vorontsoff, who waited impatiently for
the official shoes of Count Bestuzheff, and hated Catherine, joined the
French in demanding an inquiry. Bestuzheff’s papers were searched, and
it was found that he had been in communication with Catherine. A plot
was easily constructed out of this material. Bestuzheff was to raise
Catherine’s baby to the throne and make her Regent; and Apraksin’s
troops were withdrawn toward the capital for the event of the death of
Elizabeth.
Catherine in later years looked back with a shudder upon that critical
time. Bestuzheff contrived to send her word that he had burned her
letters, and there was no danger, but she saw a very serious danger. She
wrote to Elizabeth, and for weeks she received no answer. At last she
was summoned to the Empress’s room. Her enemy, Alexis Shuvaloff, was
with the Empress; her husband, another enemy, waited in the room; and on
the table she saw letters that she had written to Apraksin. They were
innocent letters, but what right had she to communicate with commanders
in the field, as if she were already Empress? With tears and prayers she
mollified the angry Empress, and her enemies were beaten. Apraksin died
of apoplexy, and Bestuzheff was compelled to retire to his estates.
For the brief remainder of the reign of the Empress Elizabeth Catherine
went warily. Elizabeth, who was little beyond her fiftieth birthday, would
not control her appetites, and her health slowly departed. She became a
chronic invalid and would lie for hours on a couch admiring the little
babe, Paul, who would carry on the line of the Romanoffs. Some
misgiving in regard to the future seemed to trouble her. Peter, though a
Romanoff, was emphatically a brutal German. He lived in an entirely
German atmosphere; an atmosphere of smoke and beer-fumes and Teutonic
disdain of everything Russian. Catherine, on the other hand,
had developed into a thorough Russian. Her strong sense and feeling of
policy told her to eradicate all Germanism from her composition and
wholly transnationalise herself. Peter had an immense admiration of
Prussia and Frederick, while Catherine was a Russian patriot.
And Elizabeth hated Prussia. Throughout her last years she kept alive
the League against Frederick and spurred her generals in the struggle.
Frederick sought peace, and she refused it. France and Austria became
faint under their efforts and sacrifices, and she lashed them to the
task. All through the year 1761 her strength ebbed, and she saw
Frederick sinking from defeat to defeat. Would death spare her to see
Prussia crushed? Would that unhappy nephew take over her power before
her work was completed, and spare his idol? Her own ministers drooped,
and her resources wore thin, but she cried for decisive and utter
victory. In December a fit of coughing brought on hemorrhage, and she
entered the last stage. She died on January 11th, 1762, in the
fifty-third year of her age, not the least picturesque figure of the
Romanoff gallery of monarchs.