One day Mr. Jefferson, now America’s Minister to Versailles, and greatly the friend of our two love birds, walks in upon them in that little vine-embowered cottage in the Rue Vivienne. He has big news. The Empress Catherine asks Commodore Paul Jones to become an admiral in the Russian navy. The Turks are troubling her; she wants him to sweep these turbaned pests from the Black Sea. The cheek of Commodore Paul Jones flushes, his eye lights up. Between love and war his heart was formed to swing like a pendulum. Now he has loved for a season, he would like nothing better than another game with those “iron dice of destiny,” _vide licet_ cannon balls; and where should be found a fitter table than the Black Sea, or a more eligible adversary than the Turk? Thus it befalls that his Aimee goes to court with Madam Campan, the noble daughter of the noble Genet, and translates English plays into French for the amusement of Versailles; while be, hot of heart and high of head, as one who snuffeth the battle afar off, makes a straight wake for St. Petersburg. Commodore Paul Jones meets the Empress Catherine in her Palace of Czarsko-Selo. Outside the snow lies thick; for it is April, and winter is ever reluctant to quit St. Petersburg. He is pricked of curiosity concerning this Russian Empress, for whom he is to draw his sword. He hopes--somewhat against hope, it is true, when he recalls her sixty years--that she will prove beautiful. For he is so much the knight of romance that he fights with more pleasure for a pretty face than for a plain one. The Empress is before him; he can now put his hopes to the test. His eyes fall upon a thick, gross figure--a woman the antithesis of romance. Her mouth is coarse, her nose high and hawkish, her forehead full, her gaze hard and level, her whole face harsh--having been so often burned and swept of passion. And yet he feels the power of this white, fire-eyed savage, with her heart of a Phryne and her brain of a Henry the Eighth. There is so much that is palpable and brutish about her, however, that he stands off from her contact and remembers with regret his delicate Aimee of the red-gold locks. Commodore Paul Jones has been too well trained as a courtier to let fall the polite mask which he wears, and nothing could be more elaborately suave than are the manners he assumes. The ferocious Catherine gets some glimmer of his inward thought for all that. Every inch the Empress, she is even more the woman. To the day of her death the unpardonable offence in any male of her species is a failure to fall in love with her. She receives some chilling touch of her new Admiral’s aversion, and it turns her into angry ice. Still, if he will not sigh for her, he shall serve her: so she says to herself. He remains in St. Petersburg a fortnight; the Empress sees him more than once. When they are together, they talk of Potemkin, Suwarrow, the Turks, and the Black Sea. CHAPTER XXVI--AN ADMIRAL OF RUSSIA