"As the day of our nuptials approached," she writes, "I became more and more melancholy. My heart predicted but little happiness; ambition alone sustained me. In my inmost soul there was something which led me never to doubt, for a single moment, that sooner or later I should become sovereign empress of Russia in my own right." The marriage was celebrated with much pomp; but a more cold and heartless union was perhaps never solemnized. Catharine very distinctly intimates that her husband, who was as low in his tastes and companionship as he was degraded in his vices, left her at the altar, to return to his more congenial harem. "My beloved spouse," she writes, "did not trouble himself in the slightest degree about me; but was constantly with his valets, playing at soldiers, exercising them in his room, or changing his uniform twenty times a day. I yawned and grew weary, having no one to speak to." Again she writes, "A fortnight after our marriage he confessed to me that he was in love with Mademoiselle Carr, maid of honor to her imperial majesty. He said that there was no comparison between that lady and me. Surely, said I to myself, it would be impossible for me not to be wretched with such a man as this were I to give way to sentiments of tenderness thus requited. I might die of jealousy without benefit to any one. I endeavored to master my feelings so as not to be jealous of the man who did not love me. I was naturally well-disposed, but I should have required a husband who had common sense, which this one had not." For amusement, the grand duke played cruelly with dogs in his room, pretending to train them, whipping them from corner to corner. When tired of this he would scrape execrably on a violin. He had many little puppet soldiers, whom, hour after hour, he would marshal on the floor in mimic war. He would dress his own servants and the maids of Catharine in masks, and set them dancing, while he would dance with them, playing at the same time on the fiddle.