With what a quaint inconsequence her truer self appeared at the Revolution! She, who will foresee Napoleon, was rudely shocked by the fall of the Bastille. The Revolution touched her in her tenderest point. With every year, in spite of her sentiments and cosmopolitan culture, this Princess of Zerbst became more and more fervently autocratic and Russian. She had jestingly asked her doctor to bleed away the last drop of her German blood. No one ever had a more fanatical hero-worship for the Russian himself, or a deeper enthusiasm for the greatness in his history. It was in the political sphere that her convictions play, and she had a vague but passionate belief in what she and Russia might do together. Yet here were these declaimers threatening to overrun Europe, and "Equality setting peoples at the throats of kings!" The cant about fraternity, the catch-words and sentiments, vanish like smoke. No anathemas on the Revolution were fiercer than those of the "_Ame Républicaine_," who had burned to restore the ancient institutions of Athens. The hostess of Diderot breathed fiery indignation against "these Western atheists"; and the nationalization of church property, the very first of her own reforms, becomes, in the men of '89, an "organized brigandage." "There is an economy of truth," said Burke. "Semiramis," like Romeo, "hung up philosophy," and the bust of her "preceptor," Voltaire, accompanied Fox to the basement! "_Enfin tout philosophe est banni de céans, Et nous ne vivons plus qu'avec les honnétes gens._" The advantage of women in affairs of this sort is, that they are natural opportunists, and care nothing for the tyranny of your system. There is a wise inconsequence in their ideas, for the logic of the universe is not professed from an academic chair. "_Moi_," she says, "_je ne suis qu'un composé de batons rompus!_" Voltaire had learned from Bayle, and Catharine tells us she had learned from Voltaire, to distrust "the men of a system." "_Stulti sunt innumerabiles_," said Erasmus, and theirs was but an ingenious foolishness. Diderot, on that adventurous visit of his, was bursting with eagerness to take Russia off the wall, and put it "in the kettle of magicians." Never before now had such projects been seen in a government office! He gesticulated by the hour: she was delighted to listen. He drew up scores of schemes; they were as well ordered, as regular, as his own meals. But presently he realized that no one had taken him seriously! Catharine once remarked herself that she wrote on "sensitive skins, while his material was foolscap." And finally, like Mercier de la Rivière, he departed wiser, and a little hurt. "A wonderful man," she said afterward to Ségur, "but a little too old--and a little too young!" His _Plan of a University for Russia_, which had an appreciable influence on education elsewhere, "has never to this day," says Waliszewski, "been translated into Russian."