Catharine had literary aspirations, one of her admirations being Voltaire, with whom she corresponded, and on whom she depended to chronicle the glory of her reign. The poet had his dreams, in which the woman shared, and between them they contrived a scheme of a modern Utopia, a Russo-Grecian city of whose civilization the empress was to be the source, and which a decree was to raise from the desert and an idea make great. This fancy Potemkin, who stood ready to flatter the empress at any price, undertook to realize, and he built her a city in the fashion in which cities were built in the times of the Arabian Nights, and made it flourish in the same unsubstantial fashion. The magnificent Potemkin never hesitated before any question of cost. Russia was rich, and could bleed freely to please the empress's whim. He therefore ordered a city to be built, with dwellings and edifices of every description common to the cities of that date,--stores, palaces, public halls, private residences in profusion. The buildings ready, he sought for citizens, and forcibly drove the people from all quarters to take up a temporary residence within its walls. It was his one purpose to make a spectacle of this theatrical city to enchant the eyes of the empress. So that it had an appearance of prosperity during her visit, he cared not a fig if it fell to pieces and its inhabitants vanished as soon as his supporting hand was removed. He only required that the scenes should be set and the actors in place when the curtain rose. And the city grew, on the banks of the Dnieper, eighteen million rubles being granted by the empress for its cost,--though much of this clung to the bird-lime of avarice on Potemkin's fingers. It was named Kherson. The desert around it was erected into a province, entitled by the wily minister _Catharine's Glory_ (Slava Ekatarina). Another province, farther north, he named after his imperial mistress Ekatarinoslaf. And thus, by fraud and violence, a city to order was brought into existence. The stage was ready. The next thing to be done was to raise the curtain which hid it from Catharine's eyes. It was early in the year 1787 that the empress began her journey towards her Utopian city, to receive the homage of its citizens and to exhibit to the world the magnificence of her reign. Great projects were in the air. Poland had just been cut into fragments and distributed among the hungry kingdoms around. The same was to be done with Turkey. Joseph II. of Austria was to meet the empress in Kherson to consult upon this partition of the Turkish empire; while Constantine, grand duke of Russia and grandson of the empress, was to reign at Byzantium, or Constantinople, over the new empire carved from the Turkish realm. Such was the paper programme prepared by Potemkin and the empress, the minister doubtless smiling behind his sleeve, his mistress in solid earnest.