Such a man readily accepted the rumour that Catherine intended to disinherit him and pass on the crown to his elder son. She kept him out of affairs, and, although he fancied himself a soldier and, like Peter, brooded over dreams of military reform, she kept him out of the war. He retorted with pungent criticisms of her young lovers; and they insolently repaid him. “Have I said something silly?” Zuboff asked one day when Paul expressed approval of what he had said. It is believed that if Catherine had lived six months longer, Paul would have been excluded from the succession. The Grand Duke Alexander, his eldest son, was now a fine and promising youth of twenty. Catherine had taken minute pains with his education, and even with the choice of a bride for him. Eleven German princesses were invited to St. Petersburg, and sent away disappointed, before the young Princess of Baden-Durlach was selected. The parents were not consulted. Everybody expected that Alexander would succeed his grandmother; indeed it was rumoured that the decree was already composed and would be published on January 1st, 1797. And on November 17th, 1796, Catherine died suddenly of apoplexy. There seems little doubt that the cynical sensuality of her seventh decade of life destroyed her strong constitution. I say cynical, not that she was ordinarily cynical, but because there seems to be in her later conduct a somewhat cynical defiance of moral and religious traditions. This was weakness rather than strength; the same weakness which squandered forty million dollars upon lovers when the national treasury had to be replenished by extortion. Her mind was greater than her character; her achievements were greater than both. Russia--the mighty Russian people--was still chained in the dungeon of mediævalism. But Catherine, the German who divested herself of Germanism--“Take out the last drop of German blood from my veins,” she said to her physician--the pupil of the French humanitarians, impressed the fact upon the Romanoffs that they ruled a semi-civilised world. CHAPTER XII IN THE DAYS OF NAPOLEON