Terrible tsarinas

«212»

Her Majesty and Their Imperial Highnesses woman. Consumed by sorrow and fear, she took to bed and refused any food, claiming to be sick in heart and body; on the verge of inanition, she adamantly refused to be examined by a doctor.

She begged the obliging Alexander Shuvalov to call a priest to hear her confession. Father Dubiansky, personal chaplain of the tsarina, was alerted. Having received the grand duchess’s confession and contrition, he promised to plead her cause with Her Majesty. In a visit to his Majestic penitent, the priest painted such a picture of her daughter-in-law’s pain (a daughter-in-law, after all, who could only be reproached for a maladroit devotion to the cause of the monarchy), that Elizabeth promised to reflect on the case of this strange parishioner. Catherine did not yet dare to expect a return to grace. However, Father Dubiansky must have been persuasive in his intervention for, on April 13, 1759, Alexander Shuvalov went to see Catherine in the room where she lay, wasting away in anguish, and announced to her that Her Majesty would receive her “this very day, at ten o’clock in the evening.”