The Daughter of an Empress

It was a jovial and brilliant evening, and, in dismissing her friends,

Elizabeth promised them many repetitions of it.

And she kept her word. Frenzied merry-makings, pleasures and festivals

of the roughest sorts were now the principal occupation of the new

empress. The amusement of her court, the providing it with new festivals

and pleasures, she considered as the first and most important of her

imperial duties; and these alone she endeavored to fulfil.

But who composed her court, and of what elements did it consist?

Elizabeth found the presence of her serious official councillors very

tiresome, as they knew not how to make themselves agreeable; she found

the surrounding of herself with the respectable ladies of her court to

be very incommodious, as there might some day be found among them one

with a handsomer or more tasteful toilet than herself, or, indeed, one

who might dare to be of a finer type of beauty than she! She therefore

gladly avoided inviting the distinguished men of her court with

their wives, or the higher class of state officials. It was far more

convenient, far more agreeable, to surround herself with frivolous and

handsome young men. They knew how to laugh and be cheerful, and she was

thus sure that no other lady would be there to dispute with her the palm

of beauty.

Elizabeth was not proud. She cared not whether noble blood flowed in the

veins of those who were invited to her festivals. The youth, beauty, and

agreeable qualities which the empress found in any person, alone decided

the question of their admittance to the court.

Peasants, grooms, soldiers, servants, abandoned reprobates, who by their

beauty had won the favor of the empress, were seen to attain to the

highest stations.

On them were lavished the treasures of the state; they were adorned with

orders and titles, and the magnates bowed to the ground before these

potent favorites of the all-powerful empress, and the people shouted

with transport when their beloved czarina, with her magnificent train

of newly-created noblemen, made her appearance in the streets, and with

gracious smiles returned the humble salutations of her kneeling slaves.

That was the ruler in perfect accordance with Russian ideas; they

sympathized with her inclinations and pleasures--she was blood of their

blood and flesh of their flesh! The strangers were at length banished,

and a real Russian sat upon the throne of the czars!

And yet Elizabeth trembled upon her imperial throne, surrounded by the

band of magnates and nobles of whom she could truly say, "I am their

creator--they are my work!" She trembled before those secret daggers,

those lingering poisons, which always surround the imperial Russian

throne as its truest satellites, and lay low many a high-born head; she

trembled before Anna Leopoldowna, who was sighing away her days in the

closed citadel of Riga, and before Anna's son, the infant Ivan, whom the

Empress Anna in her testament had named as Emperor of all the Russias!

She, indeed, would not work and trouble herself for her country and

her people, this good empress by the grace of God, but yet she would

be empress, that she might be enabled to enjoy life, and no cloud must

obscure the heaven of her earthly glory!