"A few days afterwards, the death of my father was announced to me. It greatly afflicted me. For a week I was allowed to weep as much as I pleased; but at the end of that time, Madame Tchoglokoff came to tell me that I had wept enough,--that the Empress ordered me to leave off,--that my father was not a king. I told her, I knew that he was not a king; and she replied, that it was not suitable for a Grand Duchess to mourn for a longer period a father who had not been a king. In fine, it was arranged that I should go out on the following Sunday, and wear mourning for six weeks." It is worthy of especial note that these people, though they led this sensual, selfish, heartless life, trampling on natural affection and doing as they would not be done by, prided themselves very much on the orthodoxy of their faith, were sorely afraid of going to hell, and were consequently very regular and rigid in the performance of their religious duties. Catharine was no whit behind the rest in this respect. Though bred a Lutheran, she was most exemplary in her observance of all the requirements of the Greek Church; and even carried her hypocrisy so far, that, when, on occasion of a dangerous and probably fatal illness, it was proposed that she should see a Lutheran clergyman, she replied by asking for Simon Theodorsky, a prelate of the Greek Church, who came and had an edifying interview with her. And all this was done, as she says, for effect, chiefly with the soldiers and common people, among whom it made a sensation and was much talked of. This, by the way, is the only reference which occurs in the Memoirs to any interest below that of the highest nobility. As for the people of Russia, the right to draw their blood with the knout and make them sweat roubles into the royal treasury was taken as much for granted as the light and the air, by those who, either through fraud or force, could sit in the seat of Peter the Great. They regarded it as no less an appanage or perquisite of that seat than the jewels in the imperial diadem, and would as soon have thought of defending a title to the one as to the other. And the possession of the throne, with the necessary consent of the dominant party of the high nobility, seems to have been, and still to be, the only requisite for the unquestioned exercise of this power; for, as to legitimacy and divine dynastic right, was not Catharine I. a Livoman peasant? Catharine II. a German princess, who dethroned and put to death the grandson of Peter the Great? and does she not confess in these Memoirs that her son, the Emperor Paul, was not the son of Peter's grandson, but of Sergius Soltikoff? so that in the reigning house of Russia there is not a drop of the blood of Romanoff. And Catharine's confession, which M. Herzen emphasizes so strongly, conveys to the Russian nobles no new knowledge on this subject; for an eminent Russian publicist being asked, on the appearance of this book, if it were generally known in Russia that Paul