After a tragically brief wedded life with a beautiful girl-cousin, who died of consumption, Orloff returned to St Petersburg to spend the last few months of his life, "broken-hearted and mad." And to his last hour his clouded brain was tortured with visions of the "avenging shade of the murdered Peter." CHAPTER XV A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CINDERELLA It was to all seeming a strange whim that caused Cardinal Mazarin, one day in the year 1653, to summon his nieces, daughters of his sister, Hieronyme Mancini, from their obscurity in Italy to bask in the sunshine of his splendours in Paris. At the time of this odd caprice, Richelieu's crafty successor had reached the zenith of his power. His was the most potent and splendid figure in all Europe that did not wear a crown. He was the avowed favourite and lover of Anne of Austria, Queen of France, to whose vanity he had paid such skilful court--indeed it was common rumour that she had actually given him her hand in secret marriage. The boy-King, Louis XIV., was a puppet in his strong hands. He was, in fact, the dictator of France, whose smiles the greatest courtiers tried to win, and before whose frowns they trembled. In contrast to such magnificence, his sister, Madame Mancini, was the wife of a petty Italian baron, who was struggling to bring up her five daughters on a pathetically scanty purse--as far removed from her magnificent brother as a moth from a star. There was, on the face of things, every reason why the great and all-powerful Cardinal should leave his nieces to their genteel poverty; and we can imagine both the astonishment and delight with which Madame Mancini received the summons to Paris which meant such a revolution in life for her and her daughters. If the Mancini girls had no heritage of money, they had at least the dower of beauty. Each of the five gave promise of a rare loveliness--with the solitary exception of Marie, Madame's third daughter, who at fourteen was singularly unattractive even for that awkward age. Tall, thin, and angular, without a vestige of grace either of figure or movement, she had a sallow face out of which two great black eyes looked gloomily, and a mouth wide and thin-lipped. She was, in addition, shy and slow-witted to the verge of stupidity. Marie, in fact, was quite hopeless, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, and for this reason an object of dislike and resentment to her mother. Certainly, said Madame, Marie must be left behind. Her other daughters would be a source of pride to their uncle; he could secure great matches for them, but Marie--pah! she would bring discredit on the whole family. And so it was decided in conclave that the "ugly duckling" should be left in a nunnery--the only fit place for her. But Marie happily had a spirit of her own. She would not be left behind, she declared; and if she must go to a nunnery, why there were nunneries in plenty in France to which they could send her. And Marie had her way.