Terrible tsarinas

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Elizabethan Russia extravagant whims. He began playing his violin ceaselessly, scraping away for hours, tormenting his wife. His rhetoric became so bizarre that sometimes Catherine thought he’d gone mad; she wanted to flee. Whenever he saw her reading, he would rip the book from her hands and order her to join him in playing with his collection of wooden soldiers. Having recently developed a passion for dogs, he moved ten barbet spaniels into the marital bedroom, over Catherine’s protests. When she complained about their barking and their odor, he insulted her and refused to sacrifice his pack for her.

Isolated, Catherine sought in vain for a friend or, at least, a confidant. She finally turned Lestocq, the empress’s doctor, secure in his tenure, who showed some interest and even sympathy for Catherine. She hoped to make him an ally against the “Prussian clique” as well as against Her Majesty, who was still reproaching her for the sterility that was beyond her control. Unable to correspond freely with her mother, she asked the doctor to see her letters on their way, more privately. However Bestuzhev, who hated Lestocq and saw him as a potential rival, was delighted to hear from his spies that the “quack” was flouting the imperial instructions and rendering services to the grand duchess. Backed by these revelations, he contacted Razumovsky and accused Lestocq of being an agent in the pay of foreign chancelleries; and he said that Lestocq was trying to take the shine off the favorite’s reputation with Her Majesty. This denouncement agreed with denunciations made by a secretary to the doctor, a certain Chapuzot who, under torture, acknowledged everything that he was asked. Confronted with this sheaf of more or less convincing evidence, Elizabeth was put on her guard. For several months already, she had avoided being under Lestocq’s care; if he was no longer reliable, he would have to pay.

In the night of November 11, 1748, Lestocq was yanked from