A not less curious individuality, notably for the memories she recalled, was the old Comtesse Pratazoff, the favourite of Catherine II., near whom she had occupied a most intimate if not most important position. In Vienna she was accounted a celebrity. I was indebted for a glimpse of that relic of the past to the Prince de Ligne. ‘Our acquaintance dates from very long ago,’ he said, while taking me to her temporary residence one day. ‘She also belonged to the company during that famous Crimean journey, not because she had any particular functions, but because the empress had got so used to talk to her, especially in the morning and in the evening, as to be unable to dispense with her. Royal favour often springs from nothing more than a mere habit on the part of the sovereign of seeing a certain person near him. In the Comtesse Pratazoff’s case it was, however, something more than that.’ Catherine the Great’s intimate friend had taken up her quarters at the inn. On entering the room I saw, seated on a couch, a voluminous mass filling the whole of its space. To judge from the quantity of jewels she wore, she might have passed muster as an Indian idol. From the top of her head to her waist, she was literally covered with necklets, diadems, bracelets, pendants, brooches, earrings, etc. This jeweller’s shop seemed to me about seventy. On our entering the apartment, she made an attempt to rise, but fell back into her original position, trying, not, however, without great difficulty, to find room for the prince on the sofa beside her. Having become aware of my presence, she welcomed me with some of those ultra-polished, not to say finical, phrases the whole vocabulary of which was a very open book to the educated Russians of her time. Then the conversation drifted on to the halcyon days of the fêtes of the Hermitage. The past was dignified and the present vilified. The most curious feature of this hour’s visit was the prince’s seeming oblivion of the thirty years that had passed since that journey to the Crimea, and his persistent effort to treat this enormous dowager as a young and skittish thing, calling her ‘my dear’ and ‘my little girl’; and her absolutely serious acceptance of this kind of flirting by mincing and mouthing in a most ridiculous, though to her evidently natural, manner. When we left her, I promptly repaired home to inscribe on my notes the portrait of that puppet who had come to show Europe in Vienna the sight of her decrepit old person, her ancient jewels, and her superannuated pretensions.