Elizabeth’s chief rival in good looks was Natalia Lapukhin, a noble lady of equal freedom in manners and morals who had viciously tormented Elizabeth when she was the Cinderella of the court. To her surprise she had been, at the coronation, made a Lady in Waiting. But she remained insolent, and at a ball she appeared in a pink robe and with pink roses in her hair; and pink was understood to be an imperial monopoly at Elizabeth’s court. Elizabeth’s temper was much shorter than her prayers. Many a maid got the heavy imperial slipper across her mouth for talking when the Empress dozed on her couch, and her language at times resembled that of the guards. She had a buffoon cruelly tortured for playing a trick which frightened and upset her. She now fell furiously upon the audacious Lady in Waiting. She sent for scissors, made her kneel while she cut off the roses (and hair along with them), and cuffed her twice across the face. “Serves her right,” she said, when they told her that the countess had fainted. To her bosom friend, the Countess Bestuzheva, wife of the elder Bestuzheff, Natalia often told what she thought of the Empress, and in both families the talk over tea was mildly seditious. Lestocq got his agents to ply Natalia’s son, young Colonel Lapukhin, with drink and learn it. And on July 21st, 1743, the physician rushed to the palace with a report of a conspiracy. Elizabeth lived in daily dread of a conspiracy, knowing how easy such things were in Russia. She cowered behind a hedge of soldiers and let Lestocq arrest whom he would. She had humanely abolished torture and the death-sentence; but this was a different matter. Natalia and her husband and a score of others were imprisoned, and the old torture-chambers rang again with the shrieks of delicate women whose limbs were stretched until they cracked. It is said, but is difficult to believe, that Elizabeth was secretly at hand to hear their confessions. There was, in fact, no conspiracy to confess, but Lestocq was one of the three commissioners appointed to examine the prisoners, and Elizabeth was stung by the table-talk that was wrung from them. One of the women was pregnant, and the Empress was asked to spare her the torture. “She did not spare me,” said the daughter of Peter the Great.