ruler of Russia--"_mon petit ménage_," as she would call it, with her touch of lightness--and she desired to be the first amateur of "_la grande politique_" in Europe. "_Elle brillait surtout par le caractère_," says Waliszewski, whose volumes, collecting most of what is known about Catharine, I have freely consulted. It is only natural that her biographer should regard her as a strikingly complex and exceptional being. _Nous sommes tous des exceptions._ Yet she is not essentially different from the "woman of character" you may meet in every street. Given her splendid physical constitution there is nothing prodigious about her except her good-fortune in every crisis and important action of her career. In one of his Napoleonic fits of incoherence, Patiomkin said vividly enough that the Empress and himself were "the spoilt children of God." For herself, she says in that introductory page, which Sainte-Beuve has well compared with Machiavelli, that what commonly passes for good-fortune is in reality the result of natural qualities and conduct. If that satisfies, it is so much to her credit. Certainly, "the stars connived" with her from the day in 1762 when she galloped in her cuirassier's uniform through the streets of St. Petersburg. "_Toute la politique_," she said, "_est fondée sur trois mots circonstances, conjectures et conjonctures_;" and like many leaders of action she was in her moments a fatalist, for then she saw how little after all, the greatest, as Bismarck says, can control events. FOOTNOTES: [44] _Macbeth_, ii, 3. That is, the nearer in relationship the heirs of power to the source of their inheritance, the greater their danger at the hands of bloody usurpers (like Macbeth).--ED. CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC A.D. 1763 E.O. RANDALL With the fall of Quebec and De Vaudreuil's capitulation of Montreal, Canada passed from the dominion of France to Britain, and for a time came under military rule. In the West, around the shores of the Great Lakes and the country watered by the Ohio, though small English garrisons occupied the forts of the region, the French still held posts on the Wabash and the Mississippi, and had a considerable settlement at New Orleans. About the Lakes and in the Ohio Valley discontent smouldered among the Indians, many of whom bewailed the fate of their old allies, the French, while they feared the English, whom they dreaded as likely to drive them from their hunting-grounds and treat them with injustice or neglect.