Her extraordinary elevation had in no way altered her disposition; she was as unassuming as she had been when she was the servant of Mentchikoff; she did not mingle in the least in politics of which she understood nothing, but she was intelligent enough to at least feign an appreciation of what Peter was trying to do for Russia, and her quiet sweetness, her placid cheerfulness never grew stale to Peter; he looked upon her almost as his savior, from the devils of melancholy and horror that tore at his soul.
He was not nice in his tastes. Her lack of refinement did not vex him; her over-blown, untidy beauty still satisfied him, neither her manners nor her past troubled him; with a certain grandeur he disdained everything but the fact that she was the one woman he had found wholly pleasing; she went everywhere with him and knew all his secrets; so far she had been faithful to him, perhaps because in her heart she was entirely afraid of him, and, for all her outward calm, very wary.
The Czar flung himself on the seat she reclined on, and put his arm round her shoulders, turning her fair countenance, framed in the long, Russian veil, towards him.
“Saxony has delivered my Patkul to Sweden!” he said.
“Alas, poor gentleman!” cried Katherina, in genuine distress.
“What do you think I shall do, my rose?” he asked.
“That, if I can--if I am too late--” the veins stood out on his forehead and a light foam gathered on his lips. “Do you not think I shall avenge him?” he asked pitifully.
Katherina answered as if he had been a child.
Europe, absorbed in the war of the Spanish Succession, paid no heed to the Czar’s bitter protests against Saxony and Sweden, and Patkul was sent to Kazimicry.
Peter, with an army of 60,000 trained men, officered by Germans, obtained secretly from the Emperor of Austria, who was alarmed by the near approach of the terrible Swede, marched into Poland.
General Lewenhaupt was not able to guard the entries into this country which was neither fortified nor united, and the Czar took Lublin which had been left without a Swedish garrison, and there convoked a Diet on the model of that of Varsovia, thereby further distracting an already thrice distracted country.
Augustus was now as hateful as Stanislaus in the eyes of Peter, and his project was to give all that the Elector had renounced by the peace of Altranstadt to a third king; he had in his mind Racoczy, Prince of Transylvania.