Not even those set to spy upon her could resist her personal magnetism. She could be beautiful or terrible, playful or majestic, at pleasure. At St. Petersburg there were few wits, and her intellectual superiority to those about her was sufficient to gain her the nickname among her husband's friends of "Madame la Ressource." Despite Peter's difficult relations with her, he would refer to her in most of his perplexities, especially when political, connected with his duchy of Holstein. "I don't understand things very well myself," he would explain to strangers, "but my wife understands everything." We observe in the _Autobiography_ a fixed idea to "gain over" as many people as possible, to attach them to her interests; partly because of the opposition to the Czarina's circle, which gradually came to characterize the "_Jeune Cour_," but specially in the service of those vague, ambitious foreshadowings which from her first years in Russia had possessed her mind. Clear-sighted, with a keen sense of her husband's inadequacy to his position, warned by the implacable hostility of his mistress Elizabeth Vorontsoff and her relations, above all with a passionate thirst to realize her presentiment of greatness, she was instinctively preparing for some emergency, she knew not exactly what. As for the more precise premonitions of the memoirs, they are what would naturally appear to her after the _fait accompli_. Ambition, calculation looking before and after, patience in adversity, quickness to note and use the weakness of those about her, a steady indifference to unessentials, a political intelligence unhampered by the keener sensibilities--these are the master traits of the Catharine of the _Autobiography_. So far, then, of these earlier years, while we have the memoirs with us. We must now pass quickly over many things. The motto of the Romanoffs might be taken from _Macbeth_: "The near in blood, the nearer bloody."[44] But in that sombre history there is no darker page than the conspiracy of 1762.