Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE YOUNG SPOUSES Childishness of the Grand-Duke?His favourite pastimes? Domestic life of the young spouses?Peter’s indiscretions? Madame la Ressource?Oranienbaum?The Grand-Duke’s establishment and military pastimes?Catherine’s literary pursuits?The Empress desires the consummation of the marriage?Birth of the Grand-Duke Paul?Rupture between the consorts?Peter’s mistress, Elizabeth Vorontsova?Peter’s philo-Prussian views alarm the Russian statesmen?Mortal illness of the Empress Elizabeth. Such an union between a Prince, who, physically, was something less than a man, and mentally little more than a child, and a Princess of prodigious intellect and with an insatiable capacity for enjoyment, was bound to end in a catastrophe; but it is a great mistake to suppose that this mariage de convenance was a whit more miserable than such alliances usually are. The oft-repeated fable that Catherine was the victim of a brutal and vicious husband, who habitually neglected and ill-used her, has no foundation in fact. Each member of this forced partnership, as soon as he and she fully grasped all the inconveniences, but also all the opportunities, of the situation, proceeded, with the tacit consent of the other, to go his and her own way, observing just enough of the outer forms of decorum to save appearances and satisfy the elastic conventions of an easy-going voluptuous court. Besides, as they were little more than boy and girl at the time of their marriage, it took them five years fully to realize that their tastes were divergent and their tempers incompatible. Catherine, moreover, in the short-lived period of her first innocence, had even some vague dispositions towards religion, and she has confessed that if her husband had really desired to be loved she would not have f…