They were all condemned to death. For ten days Elizabeth lingered over the sentence, but in the end, she observed her own decree. She commuted the sentence to exile, flogging, and mutilation. Natalia Lapukhin, a beautiful woman in the prime of life, was partly stripped before an immense crowd, and brutally knouted. She sank, covered with blood, to the floor of the scaffold, and the executioner roughly finished his work, and, with a brutal laugh, offered to sell her tongue to the highest bidder. Countess Bestuzheva slipped a bribe into the man’s hands. The lash fell less heavily on her white back, and less of her tongue was cut out. The mutilated wretches went the worn way to Siberia and the north. Count Michael Bestuzheff, who was innocent, was despatched on a foreign embassy. Alexis, at whom the French had chiefly aimed, was untouched. He was astute as well as able. At the end of the year Elizabeth transferred the court to Moscow and prepared it for a new sensation. She had chosen a bride, or a girl to be trained as bride, for her wastrel of a nephew. After her weakness for France, which was then a deadly rival of Russia, came a weakness for Frederick the Great, who was far more cynical and crafty in his professions of friendship and determination to sacrifice Russia’s interests to his own. He flattered Elizabeth, and laughed at her. Hearing that there was question of a future Empress, he strongly recommended the daughter of the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of his own generals. A courier sped to the little court where Sophia Augusta Frederika lived quietly with her mother, and that lady, a remarkably ambitious person for her station in life, hurried to St. Petersburg, and on to Moscow. Both Peter and Elizabeth were indecently impatient to see the bride-elect, and they professed themselves entirely satisfied with the quick-eyed, precocious maiden of fourteen who would one day be Catherine the Great.