One day her nephew and I took a walk, and there was with us a young servant of hers who taught us to read and was at the same time studying himself. Her nephew and prospective heir led us to an apple-tree that grew outside the enclosure, and he began to knock down some apples, without having first asked his aunt’s permission. This crime was reported to his aunt. She ordered all three of us to be brought into her presence for a just punishment. She ordered in great anger to take up at once our innocent servant and teacher and to place him on a wooden horse, and he was unmercifully whipped for a long time, while they kept on repeating: “Don’t knock the apples off the tree!” Then came my turn: the widow ordered to have me put on the horse, and I received three blows on my back, though I, like the teacher, had not knocked down any apples. Her nephew was frightened, and he thought that his turn would now come to be punished, but his fear was groundless; all the widow did was to reprimand him as follows: “It is wrong, it is not proper, sir, to knock down apples without having received my permission,” and then she kissed him and said: “I suppose, Ványa, you were frightened as they whipped your companions; don’t be afraid, my darling! I’ll not have you whipped.” Catherine the Great. (1729-1796.) The French culture, which had held sway in Russia before Catherine II., became even more pronounced when she ascended the throne. She corresponded with Voltaire, offered d’Alembert the place of tutor to her son, paid Diderot a salary as keeper of his own library, which she had purchased from him, and, in the first part of her reign, laboured, at least platonically, for the introduction of new laws in the spirit of Rousseau and Montesquieu. She planned to build schools and academies, encouraged the establishment of printing presses, by making them free from government control, and by her own example did much to foster literature. One of her earliest ventures is her famous _Instruction_ for the commission that had been called to present a project for a new code of laws. She composed a large number of comedies, tragedies and operas, wrote a work on Russian proverbs and a number of fairy tales. Of the latter her _Prince Khlor_ gave Derzhávin an occasion to immortalise her as _Felítsa_, and to inaugurate a new style of ode. Catherine was the first to found a satirical journal, the _All Kinds of Things_ (see p. 326), the prototype of a number of similar periodical publications. The latter part of her reign is characterised by a reactionary tendency, due to her general distrust of the Masons, who had taken a firm foothold in Russia and whom she suspected of favouring the French Revolution. She then put literature under a ban, and caused much annoyance to men like Nóvikov and Radíshchev.