Of Elizabeth, who led an eccentric life with her own peculiar intimates, Catharine knew little; but she was the victim of an unrelenting if petty tyranny, which kept jealous watch over every word and movement, deprived her of any attendant of whom she made a friend, and dictated every minute circumstance of her life. It was like nothing so much as a dame school, even to the various tutors and governesses ordered her by the Czarina. When her father died she was allowed a week's mourning; at the end of that time the Empress sent a command to leave off; "she was a grand duchess, and her father was not a king." But Catharine was not of the stuff from which are modelled the monuments of docility. Little by little, as her character develops, she acquires a proud and lonely self-dependence. She awakens to intellectual interests; from the first, indeed, she had flung herself with ardor into the study of Russian history and language. During these early years books are her great distraction; "_dixhuit années d'ennui et de solitude_," we read in a epitaph written by herself, "_lui firent lire bien des livres_." After a trial in the wilderness of third-rate contemporary fiction, Voltaire stirs her intellect. And he leads her, too, spellbound by that incomparable _verve_ and intellectual agility of his; she surrenders herself to the illusion of his brilliant assurances, dancing like some triumphant will-o'-the-wisp over the obscure deeps and perplexities of things. In a hundred ways, evil and good, she will remain the pupil of Voltaire. He has his part in her social test of philosophical speculations; he has his part also, be sure of it, in her long devotion to ideals of monarchy expressed for her in Henri Quatre and Louis Quatorze. After Voltaire and Madame de Sévigné, Montesquieu, Baronius, Tacitus, Bayle, Brantôme, and the early volumes of the _Encyclopædia_. But her gay, expansive nature was not capable, for long, of purely intellectual or stoic consolation. In a moral environment such as that of Elizabeth's court it was too easy for the reader of Brantôme to seek elsewhere the "love" romances had spoken of, but marriage had denied her. She was remarked by all in her day for her gift of fascination. To outward observers she seemed at this time a radiant and happy presence, as Burke saw Marie Antoinette, the morning-star of a pleasure-loving society, "full of life, and splendor, and joy." She says that she never considered herself extremely beautiful, but "she was able to please, _et cela était mon fort_." All contemporary testimony bears out this singular faculty of attracting others, rarest of natural gifts, but to a woman such as Catharine a very perilous one.