The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

The advantage of women in affairs of this sort is, that they are natural opportunists, and care nothing for the tyranny of your system. There is a wise inconsequence in their ideas, for the logic of the universe is not professed from an academic chair. "Moi," she says, "je ne suis qu'un composé de batons rompus!" Voltaire had learned from Bayle, and Catharine tells us she had learned from Voltaire, to distrust "the men of a system." "Stulti sunt innumerabiles," said Erasmus, and theirs was but an ingenious foolishness. Diderot, on that adventurous visit of his, was bursting with eagerness to take Russia off the wall, and put it "in the kettle of magicians." Never before now had such projects been seen in a government office! He gesticulated by the hour: she was delighted to listen. He drew up scores of schemes; they were as well ordered, as regular, as his own meals. But presently he realized that no one had taken him seriously! Catharine once remarked herself that she wrote on "sensitive skins, while his material was foolscap." And finally, like Mercier de la Rivière, he departed wiser, and a little hurt. "A wonderful man," she said afterward to Ségur, "but a little too old—and a little too young!" His Plan of a University for Russia, which had an appreciable influence on education elsewhere, "has never to this day," says Waliszewski, "been translated into Russian."

How natural again, and with what vivid abandon, she presents herself in her correspondence with Grimm! He lives in Paris, factotum and confidant, passes his life in executing her commissions. To him she talks, rather than writes, as she talks to her intimates, in overwhelming voluble fashion, gossiping, punning, often playing the buffoon, as she does with that little set of hers at her retreat of the "Hermitage." Persons, even places, have their nicknames. St. Petersburg is the "Duck-pond"; Grimm himself the "Fag," "Souffredouleur," George Dandin, "M. le Baron de Thunder-ten-Tronck." Frederick the Great appears as "Herod" (a palpable hit that!), the diplomats as "Wind-bags," "Pea-soup," "Die Perrueckirte Haeupter;" Maria Theresa becomes "Maman;" Gustavus of Sweden, "Falstaff;" and so on. There is no question here of making a figure; often she has nothing to say; she writes purely to give extravagance an outlet. We have her here as though we had been present at one of those sparkling conversations which, in old days, used to send Grimm sleepless to his rooms, but of which nothing remained memorable, which in truth charmed by their vivacity rather than by wit—by that verve which so often supplies the place of brilliancy. This familiar note will appear again in her letters to the Emperor Joseph; as unlike those addressed to Herod as the letters to Grimm are unlike those to Madame Geoffrin or Voltaire. He was also des nôtres. She, who judged men in general poorly enough, though she used them incomparably well, not only recognized—unlike most of his contemporaries—but was fascinated by the elements of greatness in that extraordinary man. She used him, it is true, as she used Orloff and Patiomkin; her good-fortune helped her as it did before, and will again; their great alliance against the Ottoman brought her everything, and him nothing. Still, no foreigner ever dazzled her as he, who could so little impose himself on his age. "He will live unrivalled," she wrote in her enthusiasm; "his star is in the ascendant, he will leave all Europe behind!" A wandering star, alas! He will go before her to the grave, the great failure of his generation, in the bitterness of death dictating that saddest of epitaphs, "Here lies one who never fulfilled an aim." Impar congressus! like Michelet's Charles the Bold, "il avait trop voulu, des choses infinies."